Abstract

In his critique of modern western culture and economy, Georges Bataille time and again uses ethnographical data and theoretical points of view from French ethnology of thetime, especially Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le don. The present article analyzes and criticizes Bataille's—as it turns out rather one-sided and biased—use ofthat important, still highly topical text in the context of his interpretations of the potlatch (Sections 1 and 2), sacrifice (Section 3), and the gift as such (Section 4), with reference to current issues in ethnology. It is shown how these interpretations draw upon the implausible metaphors of a vitalistic cosmology (Section 5). At the same time, Bataille's idea of a pure gift was a quite obvious response to a disenchanted world, and paradoxically presupposes a new master narrative (Section 6). Many at first sight bizarre and extremeideas and practices in his writings become comprehensible when we compare these to suchtransgressive phenomena (all 'liminal' in the sense of V. van Gennep, M. Douglas and V.Turner) in tribal societies as shamans, ritual clowns, mythical tricksters and rites ofpassage—symptomatic of the paradoxical, ambiguous human predicament (Section 7). This line of approach also throws more light upon a crucial cultural logic of body openings and body margins in the works of Bataille and several other authors (Sections 8 and 9)