7/6/2023 0 Comments Mauss essay on the gift![]() ![]() Mauss was not the first to reflect upon this ambivalence. For Mauss the act of giving was inherently ambivalent, at once generous and self-interested. Mauss believed that, in the absence of the state, this practice of gift exchange was a way of binding people together and creating human solidarity though he also showed how in the potlatch, the competitive destruction of goods among the Indians of Northwest America, the practice could take on a more aggressive form. ![]() A strict code of reciprocity imposed a threefold obligation: to give, to receive, and to repay. Those gifts purported to be free and voluntary, but were in fact obligatory. 1 In that brief but pregnant sketch, Mauss showed how the people of the South Seas, the Pacific Northwest, and other “archaic” societies transferred many goods and services to each other by gift, rather than by commercial contracts. ![]() ![]() The idea that human beings are held together by the exchange of gifts is forever associated with the name of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), nephew of Émile Durkheim and author of Essai sur le don, forme archaïque de l’échange (1925). ![]()
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