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The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies

Marcel Mauss

3.93 · Rating details · 2,909 ratings · 121 reviews

A brilliant example of the comparative method,The Gift presents the first systematic study of the custom—widespread in primitive societies from ancient Rome to present-day Melanesia—of exchanging gifts. The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a total social phenomenon, since it involves legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. He sees t ...more

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Paperback, 184 pages

Published August 17th 2000 by W. W. Norton Company (first published 1923)

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Aug 21, 2010 Anthony Buckley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: anthropology, useful

I have found myself re-reading Marcel Mauss’s classic treatise on The Gift. It was first published in the 1920s as a series of articles in L’Année Sociologique the journal founded by Mauss’s uncle, Émile Durkheim. And indeed, its spirit is firmly Durkheimian, for it sees the prime role of the gift and the act of giving to be the cementing of the bonds of society.

Mauss argues that gifts are a type of exchange. As he nearly says, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The idea that gifts are vol ...more

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Nov 30, 2019 muthuvel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: anthropology-cultural_studies, economics, myths-fairytales, french-stuffs

First thing first. There's no such thing as free gift. Its literally an oxymoron. Every gift has to be returned in some specific ways, set up a perpetual cycle of exchanges within and between generations, at least in the simple societies.

This is my first time reading an explosive book at the foundation level of what economics really is and the role it plays in the lowest base functional unit in society. I've become too lazy these days to type it all out probably I'll save some of this for my pap First thing first. There's no such thing as free gift. Its literally an oxymoron. Every gift has to be returned in some specific ways, set up a perpetual cycle of exchanges within and between generations, at least in the simple societies.

This is my first time reading an explosive book at the foundation level of what economics really is and the role it plays in the lowest base functional unit in society. I've become too lazy these days to type it all out probably I'll save some of this for my paper works. Here some of the fragments of my understanding of the work.

This work is also one of the books that share a subtle philosophy of returning to the practices and culture of the so called, but mostly misunderstood, Primitive.

French Anthropologist Marcel Mauss did an extensive study on the gift economies of tribal communities spread over Polynesian, Melanesian, Andamanese, Australian, North Western American landscapes. The Gift economy is similar to the economy of capitalism in principle at the least where people as clans, tribes, work and toil followed by contributing giving way as gift, kula ring of redistribution, general reciprocity without negotiation or by means of ritual exchange. The common principle involved here is the idea of Adam Smith's self-interest but it also indicates some sort of disinterestedness in the communities that prevent them from accumulating more surplus for their own good. These exchanges were rather done as festivals, potlatches showcasing the simpler versions of conspicuous consumption and destruction (in case of sacrifices). The author sort of gives a general hypothesis backed by positivist approach the prehistorical times were marked by gift economy and its common influence were being observed in ancient Semitic norms, older and old roman laws, Vedas, Celtics, Gauls, Germanians et al.

In practical reality, the concept of gift economy is more than prevalent especially in Mainstream Cultures where it is an obligatory norm to socialise and give gift through means of money, material goods during family functions which would be reciprocated when the other's turn arrives.

In the way the work is approached in terms of critiquing the modern economy (despite the book being published in 1954), nothing felt more urgent than this following quote from the conclusions "We must not desire the citizen to be either too good or too individualistic nor too insensitive or too realist. Man must have a keen sense of awareness of himself, but also of others, and of the social reality and in moral matters, is there any other kind of reality?.. this moralitynis eternal; it is common to the most advanced societies to those of the immediate future and to the lowest imaginable forms of society."

Overview study also rejects the economic rationalism (way ahead of its time) also sets aside the theories of Marxism because of the very reason. "Homo Oeconomicus is not behind us but lies ahead, as does man of morality and duty, the man of science and reason."

Ko Maru kai atu; Ko Maru kai mai; ka ngohe ngohe meaning ‘Give as much as you take, all shall be very well' is a Māori proverb.

This is one of the enduring secrets of maintaining wisdom and solidarity in various societies, the author concludes. ...more

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Mar 24, 2014 Simon Hollway rated it it was ok

Shelves: anthropology, 2016

Utterly impenetrable. I read the translation by Ian Cunnison with an introduction by Evans-Pritchard. The first red flag raced to the top of the flagpole in the Translator's Note before the main event: 'In the French edition the compendious notes were printed on the text pages. Here they are placed after the text and numbered separately by chapters.' Brilliant.

Endnotes are detestable things that demand an awkward and arthritic kung-fu hand grip in order to balance the blasted book between your ...more

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Jan 11, 2020 Doris rated it it was amazing

It is a good study of how exchanging gifts among individuals of s society succeeds in making their place in this very society , how this fact of exchanges responds in creating certain links that create landcape in the horizon of the given society. Because gift exchange becomes a norm and throws light on relations with these individuals and their acceptance and life among this group and yjeir future prosperity. Interesting. Highly recommended for ancient literature and more modern one that puts t ...more

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Oct 13, 2010 John David rated it liked it

Shelves: anthropology

Marcel Mauss’ “The Gift” (1925) is one of the most influential pieces of anthropology written in the twentieth century. It explores the economies of pre-capitalist cultures and peoples from several different parts of the world, including Melanesia, Polynesia, and the Pacific Northwest. This specific edition, with an introduction by Mary Douglas (a magnificent anthropologist in her own right), is especially recommended, and sheds a tremendous amount of light on Mauss’ sometimes unclear conclusion Marcel Mauss’ “The Gift” (1925) is one of the most influential pieces of anthropology written in the twentieth century. It explores the economies of pre-capitalist cultures and peoples from several different parts of the world, including Melanesia, Polynesia, and the Pacific Northwest. This specific edition, with an introduction by Mary Douglas (a magnificent anthropologist in her own right), is especially recommended, and sheds a tremendous amount of light on Mauss’ sometimes unclear conclusions. In fact, if you can’t read the book, Douglas’ introduction stands by itself as a wonderful summary of Mauss’ ideas.

For those interested in the history of anthropology and its development over time, Mauss was one of Durkheim’s greatest students (Durkheim was also Mauss’ uncle) and his influence can be seen quite a bit in this work. While Durkheim believed in the individual and the potential for individual action, he was a vocal critic of individualism per se. For example, he recognized that it couldn’t explain rule-governed action, a phenomenon rife in every culture. Durkheim’s positivism is also on display; Mauss never feels his point is made unless he has shown it several times over with people from different parts of the world.

The main idea here is the centrality of what Mauss calls the “gift.” What is a gift? It is an item given within a complex set of social relations and institutions which at the same time comprises those relations and institutions. Mauss also emphasizes that most all cultures see gifts as obligatory and mutual. “Even the idea of a pure gift is a contradiction. By ignoring the universal custom of compulsory gifts we make our own record incomprehensible to ourselves: right across the globe and as far back as we can go in the history of human civilization, the major transfer of goods has been by cycles of obligatory returns of gifts” (viii). Just as important is the way in which gifts function within an economic system. He even hints at how these “gift economies” softly echo the dynamics of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. “Gift complements market in so far as it operates where the latter is absent” (xiv).

The following quote, again from Douglas’ introduction, is central and important: “Like the market it [the gift] supplies each individual with personal incentives for collaborating in the patter of exchanges. Gifts are given in a context of public drama, with nothing secret about them. In being more directly cued to public esteem, the distribution of honor, and the sanctions of religion, the gift economy is more visible than the market. Just by being visible, the resultant distribution of goods and services is more readily subject to public scrutiny and judgments of fairness than are the results of market exchange. In operating a gift system a people are more aware of what they are doing, as shown by the sacralization for their institutions of giving” (xiv).

As mentioned above, Mauss’ work is exhaustively ethnographic. He talks about the Maori’s concept of the “hau,” or the spirit that inheres in things and that must be passed on. “What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged is the fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him. Through it the giver has a hold over the beneficiary just as, being its owner, through it he has a hold over the thief” (p. 11-12). Mauss again emphasizes the importance of reciprocity: “In this system of ideas one clearly and logically realized that one must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his nature and substance, because to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul. To retain that thing would be dangerous and mortal, not only because it would be against law and morality, but also because that thing coming from the person not only morally, but physically and spiritually, that essence, that food, those goods, whether movable or immovable, those women or those descendants, those rituals or those acts of communion – all exert a magical or religious hold over you” (p. 12).

In the second chapter, Mauss discusses the Trobriand people (who are perhaps best known from Malinowski’s ethnographic work “Argonauts of the Western Pacific”). Things look remarkably the same. “At the bottom of this system of internal kula [the Trobriand gift economy], the system of gift-through-exchange permeates all the economic, tribal, and moral life of the Trobriand people. It is ‘impregnated’ with it, as Malinowski very neatly expressed it. It is a constant ‘give and take.’ The process is marked by a continuous flow in all directions of presents given, accepted, and reciprocated, obligatorily and out of self-interest, by reason of greatness and for services rendered, through challenges and pledges” (p. 29).

Many western civilizations seem to have some economies in which item exchange obligatory, and others where it isn’t. Mauss recognizes this, and addresses it. He asks rhetorically, “Yet are not such distinctions fairly recent in the legal systems of our great civilizations? Have these not gone through a previous phase in which they did not display such a cold, calculating mentality? Have they not in fact practiced these customs of the gift that is exchanged, in which persons and things merge?” (p. 47-48). He claims that a more detailed analysis of Indo-European legal theory will indeed show that this transition can be located historically. Whether Mauss ever finds this transition point, at least in this essay, is questionable.

In the last chapter, Mauss attempts to tie the gift economy to trends in social democracy, and here he completely fails, as Douglas again points out in the introduction. He says that the concept of a social safety net provided by the mutual sharing of tax dollars is analogous to the gift economy. However, he completely ignores the coercive power of the modern state in making this comparison. Part of the reason why potlatch confers such honor with many of these people is because the person or family of their own accord decide how much to sacrifice in the act of gift-giving. The state, on the other hand, makes laws, which makes this giving non-obligatory. If you don’t “give,” you must pay the punishment. Mauss’ politics shine through here, but unfortunately they have nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Mauss’ style is dry and demonstrative. Much of the book is taken up with etymologies of Indo-European words, sometimes in a convoluted attempt to support his ideas. Even when the ideas are clearly presented, the translator sometimes leaves many words untranslated, which has you paging back and forth to remind you of their meaning. Thankfully, the book is only around eighty pages. It was a huge influence on Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property,” which turns thirty this year, and which looks to be much more interesting. ...more

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Jan 03, 2020 Jan D rated it it was amazing

Shelves: anthropology

An excellent text. Interesting ideas and among the most accessible anthropological writings I know (and a classic, too). The text is a about the reasons, patterns and practices of exchanging gifts in “archaic societies”. The part about this is very interesting, but it gets even more fascinating when the connection to western culture is made: How the classic roman law had elements of modern contracts as well as gift-giving and how the gift-giving culture is still much alive today (I would say mos ...more

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Aug 30, 2014 Sandra rated it it was amazing

Shelves: rituals

Classic study of gifts, exchange, reciprocity, sacrificial gift giving. Detailed examples from ancient cultures around the world demonstrate the universal importance of customs surrounding giving. I read this during graduate school. The fundamental take away for me, nearly 30 years later, is how little each of us still reflects on the importance of giving, even token or symbolic giving, in keeping the social fabric intact. Humans are social animals and we try to forget how much we need other hum ...more

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Dec 30, 2016 Carl Sholin rated it really liked it

Shelves: social-theory

The Gift is a classic of anthropological literature. Mauss describes gift giving in the context of Melanesian, Polynesian, and Northwest Coast Indian contexts. For Mauss, gift-giving is the keystone element of social cohesion in non-capitalist societies. His argument is both economically evolutionary, and functionalist. Mauss attempts to break down an institution that he considers to represent a "total social phenomenon", that is it to say that it affects political, economic, religious, and ethi ...more

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May 24, 2015 Andrew Murano rated it it was amazing

Shelves: anthropology, sociology, post-scarcity

Systematic, concise and well researched, Mauss' treatise on reciprocity is a must read for anyone interested in the anthropology or viability of the non-market economy. He details the methods of exchange in the indigenous societies of Melanesia, Polynesia, and the Pacific Northwest, and concludes with its relation to the sociological study of altruism. Giving, according to Mauss is not a strictly selfless behavior, but rather we give to receive, whether directly from the giftee or the universe/s ...more

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Jul 18, 2007 Lauren rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: anthropology people

Shelves: classics

Informative book that tells you how the concept of money got started. Before Rome, there was trade and an honor code. After Rome, there was money. So much for good faith. It all became about "show me the money, dawg." ...more

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Dec 30, 2010 Grace rated it really liked it

A seasonal reading. Mauss draws on contemporary anthropological data and some historical legal material to conclude there is no such thing as a pure gift, and that this is not a bad thing. Interesting implications for charitable giving.

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Jan 05, 2011 Daniel rated it liked it

Read intro and conclusion, which are excellent, pretty boring in the middle.

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Jan 12, 2011 Adam rated it did not like it

This was really dry. The societies covered were a little TOO archaic for me.

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Aug 13, 2017 Nathan Hatch rated it liked it · review of another edition

What I liked

Mauss is example-based. He backs up the ideas in this book with plentiful evidence from reports written by people on the ground, who actually interacted with the "archaic" societies in question. Such examples clarify his ideas, support his arguments, and, moreover, are quite interesting in themselves.

I was suprised and delighted by Mauss's frequent linguistic arguments. He would argue that some concept or behavior in some society was a distant descendant of another concept or behavio What I liked

Mauss is example-based. He backs up the ideas in this book with plentiful evidence from reports written by people on the ground, who actually interacted with the "archaic" societies in question. Such examples clarify his ideas, support his arguments, and, moreover, are quite interesting in themselves.

I was suprised and delighted by Mauss's frequent linguistic arguments. He would argue that some concept or behavior in some society was a distant descendant of another concept or behavior in an older society, and he would demonstrate this by showing a linguistic connection between the two words. He ackowledges that such arguments are somewhat circumstantial, but nonetheless, I enjoyed imagining how that development could have taken place. It made me appreciate how language and social custom evolve over time.

Towards the end of the essay, Mauss spends a while analyzing what these archaic customs say about modern society. His arguments are gloomy but interesting.

What I did not like

Most of my dissatisfaction is due to the terrible edition that I read. I bought a $1 e-book for Kindle; turns out this was a very poor OCR scan from a heavily marked-up copy of some other edition. So, of course, the most important passages (which, presumably, were particularly generously annotated) were almost completely garbled. I would rate this e-book just two stars: Don't bother.

Another problem is that Mauss does not provide enough context in the text for the reader to be able to understand his examples. For example, he will casually reference a complicated idea of Durkheim, or launch into an extended analysis of some obscure (to me) Roman custom. The book requires extensive endnotes and lots of flipping back and forth. Unfortunately, this e-book did not scan the endnote numbers properly, let alone link between the number and the endnote itself.

Mauss is not always explicit about how the book is organized. I found myself often pausing to ask myself, "How does this fact fit into his overall argument?" To be fair, arguably this forced metacognition is a good thing.

Finally, be advised that The Gift is not a practical guide to modern gift-giving manners. While it will give you an appreciation for and impress upon you the utter importance of receiving gifts, giving gifts, and repaying gifts, it won't tell you how to apply that to your daily life. The former is great anthropology, but the latter is arguably more useful to the modern reader. ...more

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Jul 25, 2018 Bernard M. rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Although short, it is not the easiest read since there are a lot of arcane foreign words to keep track of. The last chapter is highly speculative and as he says he is "just putting forward subjects for inquiry" though still of interest as he sees modern social issues from a very different perspective. In fact, based on quotes like the one below, I've decided to skip the historian Niall Ferguson's account and read about the history of money as seen from an anthropologist's viewpoint.

The Gift was ...more

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Jan 13, 2018 Cecilie Baann rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

In this expanded edition of Marcel Mauss seminal work, Jane I. Guyer's translation and annotations provide important contributions to the restoration of Mauss' original framework. Mauss' Essay on the Gift, in this book presented alongside his accounts and reviews of his contemporaries, has been highly influential, but also much misinterpreted, in the social sciences. Guyer's attentiveness to language and context presents this English version in new light. The essay is an exploration of gift exch ...more

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Aug 11, 2019 Yash rated it it was amazing

Mauss produced so many brilliant works, but if you had to choose one as his magnum opus, this would surely be it.

A wonderful book that traces a simple form of sociality -- the exchange of gifts -- across time and space. In doing so, it tells us something about the nature of non-Western, non-industrial societies, and how they really aren't all that different from our own.

The book's conclusion is of value not just for sociologists & anthropologists, but for anyone interested in building better o ...more

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Nov 08, 2020 klaus added it

Shelves: 20th-century, 20s, anthropology, history, politics, sociology, intellectual-history, scholarly, france

The “moral conclusions” that Mauss arrived at when projecting the “total services”/gift logics found in ethnographies of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Pacific Northwest societies (and in archaic law codes) back onto mid-twentieth-century France were distinctly centrist (“the individual must work,” he declares, comparing the impacts of communism to the message of a “malevolent genie” in the same breath). Against the cold calculations of utilitarians and the wildest excesses of ethnographer’s images ...more

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Sep 06, 2020 Riar rated it really liked it · review of another edition

As an anthropologist who had never done any fieldwork (maybe because he was sociologist after all), Mauss analysis on the gift exchange—from potlatch to kula exchange—is sharp and empirically overlaps with the praxis of everyday life. After almost a century ago this essay was published, his critique of political economy is eerily still relevant. Some technical issues: this book requires a sharp concentration due to a large number of footnotes—which annoyingly printed in the back of the essay.

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Sep 12, 2017 Paula Isidora rated it liked it

Finished it in a day. I don't know if it was because I am fascinated by anthropology or because it's a rather easy read. Mauss explains his perspective of the gift thoroughly and it felt as a university lecture. ...more

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Oct 16, 2017 Nicolas Pujol rated it really liked it

A friend recommended this book to me after I published The Mind Share Market. Since ancient societies people have used informal barter systems, highlighting that regardless of the specific culture there is a sense of moral transactions.

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Dec 04, 2017 Daniel B-G rated it liked it

Shelves: socsci, socsci-anthro, dnf, history

I found the premise of this interesting, but ultimately found the style quite oppressive. I may need to return to this as I find the subject of obligatory status based gift exchange extremely interesting, and the potential links into charity are fascinating.

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Feb 20, 2018 Mandla Mokoena rated it did not like it

I had to read this for a PhD discussion seminar, didn't see the point of it. I still don't understand why it is praised as one of the most prolific pieces of anthropological work. Which to be fair is my stance on anthropology as a whole. ...more

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Jan 31, 2018 Diana rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2018

I needed to read this for a religion class, and I definitely marathoned this because I have to have a discussion about it tomorrow, but it was interesting enough.

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Apr 17, 2018 split zalv rated it really liked it

very deep philosophical work written with such lucidity, throwing light at the moral fabric of our societies based the ordinary theme"gift". ...more

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Aug 18, 2019 Gloria rated it it was ok

I loved that the entire novel was really a letter, in a way. There’s a mystery at the center so I can’t say too much more. But this YA book was short and sweet. I really liked it.

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Sep 15, 2019 Giovanni Gregory rated it liked it · review of another edition

Astonishing yet its conclusions are lazy.

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Dec 05, 2019 Aleksandra rated it did not like it

BORING.

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Feb 29, 2020 Jessica Zu rated it really liked it · review of another edition

there's one little thing that seems to revamp our understanding of the emergence of money :) ...more

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Apr 14, 2020 Janice Feng added it

Traffic in women.

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About Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss

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Mauss was born in Épinal, Vosges to a Jewish family, and studied philosophy at Bordeaux, where his uncle Émile Durkheim was teaching at the time and agregated in 1893. Instead of taking the usual route of teaching at a lycée, however, Mauss moved to Paris and took up the study of comparative religion and the Sanskrit language. His first publication in 1896 marked the beginning of a prolific career ...more

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