Modern anthropology began with Mauss’s conceptual analysis, not fieldwork

Evidence

Mary Douglas once proposed that although conventional accounts of the rise of modern anthropology locate it in the shift from armchair theorizing to intensive fieldwork (with invocations of Boas, Rivers, and Malinowski), the real story was very different. The account of modern anthropology that she favors begins with Marcel Mauss, pioneer of the systematic inquiry into cultural concepts (“Foreword” to Marcel Mauss, The Gift, London: Routledge, , p. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 77