René Girard and Marcel Mauss, two anthropologists in the bedroom

Girard and Mauss share the common characteristic of not having been field anthropologists. For Mauss, this refers above all to the fact that a “total social fact” is by definition offered for observation from many different points of view, among which, as the Handbook of Ethnography shows, none should be favoured. For Girard, this fact has more to do with the nature of its object, mimicry, which can never be experienced directly, and which is therefore not offered to participant observation. It can only be addressed indirectly through documentation. Beyond this difference, however, Girard and Mauss share the fundamental idea that social science is essentially comparative.