Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Gift
From the potlatch to the Maori hau: gifts bind people through the obligations to give, to receive and to reciprocate.
Introduction
Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and collaborator, published the Essai sur le don in the first volume of the new series of L’Année sociologique (dated 1923–24, published 1925). He compares ethnographic material from Polynesia, Melanesia and the north-west coast of North America – including the kula exchange described by Bronisław Malinowski and the potlatch, in which chiefs compete by giving away and destroying wealth – with ancient Roman, Hindu and Germanic law. Gifts are “total social facts”, at once economic, legal, religious and aesthetic. The concluding chapter draws moral and political lessons for modern societies, among them support for social insurance. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s introduction to a 1950 collection of Mauss’s writings made the essay a starting point of structural anthropology.
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