Finding Melanesia in Ancient Rome: Mauss’ Anthropology of nexum

Abstract

Marcel Mauss’ The Gift is an original and unique anthropology of law. Law is the object and medium of the analysis, and the conceptual and political strategies of the text are closely adapted to the symptomatic tensions that Mauss elicits from law. And for Mauss these tensions were concentrated in one particular legal institution – the archaic Roman institution of nexum. As I argue in this chapter, the technicalities of the legal institution of nexum – however they are now recollected – should be seen as largely subordinate to the social-structural and economic forces that shaped ancient Roman society. And this approach might in turn lead to a set of questions that Mauss would have found entirely pertinent, as to what nexum might tell us about the genealogy or deep infrastructure of debt and precarity in contemporary societies.