Between 1931 and 1940, Marcel Mauss held the first sociology chair at the Collège de France. A nephew of Durkheim, Mauss's lectures were as much sociology as anthropology, religion and ethnology.

Marcel Mauss's election to the Collège de France, at the age of 59 , was the consecration of an already immense body of research, teaching and critical work. By 1930, he estimated that he had published 2 500 pages in theAnnée sociologique alone, including theEsquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie (1903) and theEssai sur le don (1923).

In his opening lecture, delivered on February 23 1931, Mauss announced that, in addition to his lectures, he would be editing the unpublished works of Émile Durkheim, Robert Hertz, Henri Hubert and others, which would serve as material for his lectures in 1931-1932, 1932-1933 and 1934-1935 respectively. From 1933 onwards, Mauss's lectures focused on " Sin and atonement in inferior societies ", then, from 1937 to the war, on the relationship between games and cosmogony, while continuing the research on the Germans begun with the work of Henri Hubert in 1934. In 1935, Mauss published one of his most important studies : " Les techniques du corps ", in which he showed that the most trivial uses that human beings make of their bodies are governed by a set of traditions transmitted through imitation and education.

His years at the Collège de France were above all those of a sociology that focused on religious phenomena, and rituals in particular. In his lecture on sin and atonement, presented as a " mise au point des recherches de Robert Hertz ", Mauss highlights the interweaving of ritual and legal domains in the relationship between the violation of a prohibition and its reparation through ritual. This long-standing and constantly renewed interest in religious phenomena earned Mauss his election as President of the Religious Sciences Section of the EPHE in 1938.

Although he did hold a chair in sociology, Mauss's approach was above all what we would call anthropological today. Rather than contemporary society, which Durkheim was primarily interested in, Mauss focused on the study of societies known at the time as " inférieures " or " archaïques ", particularly in the French colonies, with the aim of recording ancient cultures that were bound to evolve rapidly.

These were also the formative years for a whole generation of " de terrain " ethnologists, such as Denise Paulme, Germaine Tillion, Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who recognized him as a master, not without some paradox, since he was what the English call " an armchair anthropologist ".