To Capture a Bride, or: Mauss (Lost) in the Sahara. Keynote address

Bride capture is not something contemporary anthropologists like to talk about. It is, in fact, rather an embarrassment. Starting from my own distress as I was (unwittingly) taken along on an expedition to capture a bride, this paper attempts to unravel what was at stake, for everybody locally (some of whom in fact shared my embarrassment), including the bride-to-be, and for myself. Why is it that our anthropological tools are quite so blunt when we move onto the shifting grounds of what we could call stable or even institutionalised forms of capture – predatory relations, in other words, that aim at the creation of lasting social ties, that make, in this case, the ‘mutuality of being’ of kinship appear as parasitism and predation? I will here, somewhat unfairly, blame it all on Mauss, perhaps the only founding father of the discipline not (yet) dethroned. An interest in capture, and its actual practical implications, might help us bring into focus our implicit infatuation with reciprocity and exchange, indicating its limits and blind spots, and perhaps even pointing towards ways of transcending them.