Seasonality is still with us – even if it is a pale, contracted shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter ‘holiday season’ in which values and forms of organization do, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what’s really important, and that to give is better than to receive. (And in enlightened countries like Mauss’s France, there’s also the summer grandes vacances in which everybody downs tools
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