Marcel Mauss produced his first major work together with his friend and colleague Henri Hubert (1872–1927), titled "Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice" (1899) [Essay on the nature and function of sacrifice]. The essay appeared in L'Année sociologique, which Durkheim had just founded in 1898. In charge of the section on religious sociology, Mauss was one of its leading contributors. At the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he succeeded Léon Marillier in 1901, Mauss was responsible for teaching the history of the religion of primitive peoples. Frequently comparative and backed up with detailed evidence, the research undertaken by Mauss was set out as part of a program that had as its subject the ritual expressions of religious life and as its purpose the development of a theory of the sacred. His work quickly went beyond the boundaries of the sociology of religion to deal with the theory of knowledge, as can be seen from the essay written with Durkheim, titled "Quelques formes primitives de classification" (1903) [Some primitive forms of classification]. Concerning sociology, the supporters of Durkheim were quick to point out that it was a collective psychology with the purpose of studying collective representation.
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