Techniques of the Body

The phrase “techniques of the body” first entered anthropological discourse as “les techniques du corps,” the title of a 1934 essay by the French scholar Marcel Mauss (1872–1950). A prominent member of Émile Durkheim's Année Sociologique group, Mauss is widely known for his anthropological contributions to magic, sacrifice, and gift exchange. His largely forgotten attention to the social nature of embodied action was rediscovered during the widespread corporeal turn in the social sciences and humanities during the late 1970s and 1980s as an early contribution to the anthropology of the body, bodily practices, and human movement.