礼物交换作为宗教生活的基本形式

Résumé En Zh

With his study on gift exchange, Mauss not only transcended the dichotomy between the sacred/society and the profane/individual that haunted Durkheim's social theory, but also reconciled the desirability and obligation of moral acts, and revealed the logics of the foundation and durability of social bonds. In this way, he better answered how society/human nature is possible - a question with which Durkheim's sociology of religion was primarily concerned. Furthermore, as contemporary interpretations showed, the gift paradigm gives us a deeper insight into the irreducible specificity of religion, namely, in Durkheim's words religion's “force sui generis”. In a sense, Mauss's The Gift could be read as a response to or a rewriting of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; or briefly, gift exchange is an elementary form of religious life.

通过对礼物交换的研究，莫斯不仅超越了涂尔干理论中神圣-社会与凡俗-个体的二元对立，而且说明了道德行为兼具的可求性与强制性，揭示了社会纽带建构与存续的逻辑，从而进一步回答了涂尔干的宗教社会学所关注的“人性/社会如何可能”的问题。与此同时，当代的研究还表明，礼物范式有助于我们更深入地理解宗教之不可化约的独特属性，即涂尔干所说的宗教所具有的“自成一类的力”。在一定意义上，莫斯的《礼物》是对涂尔干的《宗教生活的基本形式》的答复或重写，而礼物交换就是宗教生活的一种基本形式。