To Capture a Bride, or: Mauss in the Sahara

Abstract ‘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 article asks why it is that our anthropological tools are quite so blunt when we move onto the shifting grounds of what we could call stable or even institutionalized forms of capture: predatory relations that aim at the creation of lasting social ties and that make kinship's ‘mutuality of being’ appear as parasitism and predation. Much of this is due to implicit assumptions of reciprocity, which have long been unjustly associated with Mauss. These assumptions have created blind spots in anthropological analysis that bride capture might help bring into focus.