The Gift: Expanded Edition

by Marcel Mauss, Jane I. Guyer (Translator)

Overview

Scan down a list of essential works in any introduction to anthropology course and you are likely to see Marcel Mauss’ masterpiece, The Gift. With this new translation, Mauss’ classic essay is returned to its original context, published alongside the works that framed its first publication in the 1923-24 issue of L’Année Sociologique. With a critical foreword by Bill Maurer and a new introduction by translator Jane Guyer, this expanded edition is certain to become the standard English version of the essay—a gift that keeps on giving.

Included alongside the “Essay on the Gift” are Mauss’ memorial accounts of the work of Émile Durkheim and his colleagues who were lost during World War I, as well as his scholarly reviews of influential contemporaries such as Franz Boas, J. G. Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others. Read in the context of these additional pieces, the “Essay on the Gift” is revealed as a complementary whole, a gesture of both personal and political generosity: Mauss’ honor for his fallen colleagues; his aspiration for modern society’s recuperation of the gift as a mode of repair; and his own careful, yet critical, reading of his intellectual milieu. The result sets the scene for a whole new generation of readers to study this essay alongside pieces that exhibit the erudition, political commitment, and generous collegial exchange that first nourished the essay into life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780990505006
Publisher:	HAU
Publication date:	05/15/2016
Edition description:	Expanded
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jane I. Guyer (1943-2024) was professor emerita at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of many books, including Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, Legacies, Logics, Logistics: Essays in the Anthropology of the Platform Economy, and a new translation of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: Expanded Edition.

Table of Contents

Foreword: "Puzzles and Pathways" Bill Maurer ix

Translator's Introduction: "The Gilt that Keeps on Giving" Jane I. Guyer 1

Part I In Memoriam

In Memoriam: The Unpublished Work of Durkheim and his Collaborators 29

I Émile Durkheim 31

a Scientific Courses 33

b Course on the History of Doctrines 37

c Course in Pedagogy 39

II The Collaborators 42

Part II Essay on the Gift: The form and Sense of Exchange in Archaic Societies

Introduction: Of the Gift and in Particular of the Obligation to Return Presents 55

I Epigraph 55

II Program 57

III The Method Followed 59

IV Prestation, Gift, and Potlatch 60

Chapter 1 The Gifts Exchanged and the Obligation to Return Them (Polynesia) 65

I Total Prestation: Maternal Goods against Masculine Goods (Samoa) 65

II The Spirit of the Thing Given (Maori) 69

III Other Themes: The Obligation to Give, the Obligation to Receive 73

IV Note: The Present Made to Men and the Present Made to the Gods 76

V A Note on Alms 81

Chapter 2 The Extent of This System: Liberality, Honor, Money 85

I Rules of Generosity (Andamans) 85

II Principles, Sense, and Intensity of the Exchange of Gifts (Melanesia) 87

a New Caledonia 87

b Trobriand Islands 89

c Other Melanesian Societies 105

III The American Northwest 108

a Honor and Credit 108

b The Three obligations: To Give, to Receive, to Make a Return 121

c The Force of Things 130

d The Money of Renown 138

IV First Conclusion 144

Chapter 3 Survivals of These Principles in Ancient Law and Ancient Economies 145

I Personal Law and Real Law (Very Ancient Roman Law) 146

a Scholium: Explanation 151

b Other Indo-European Laws 157

II Classic Hindu Law 158

a Theory of the Gift 158

III Germanic Law (the Pledge and the Gift) 169

IV Celtic Law 175

V Chinese Law 175

Chapter 4 Conclusion 177

I Moral Conclusions 177

II Conclusions of Economic Sociology and Political Economy 184

III Conclusions on General Sociology and on Ethics 192

Part III Selected Reviews

A Selection of Reviews by Marcel Mauss 201

I Full Translations 201

a Brown, A. R., The methods of ethnology and social anthropology 201

b Malinowski, B., The psychology of sex and the foundation of kinship in primitive societies 202

c Frazer, J. G., The golden bough and Folklore in the Old Testament 204

d Parsons, E, C, American Indian life 205

e Radin, P., The Winnebago tribe 207

f Boas, F., Ethnology of the Kwakiutl 209

g Rattray, R. S., Ashanti 210

h Talbot, P. A., Life in Southern Nigeria 211

i Rivers, W. H., Medicine, magic and religion 213

II Excerpts 214

a Frobenius, L., Dämonen des Sudan, Volksdichtungen aus Ober-Guinea, and Der Kopfals Schichal 214

b Home, G. and Aiston, G., Savage life in Central Australia 215

c Bennett, C. A., A philosophical study of mysticism 217

d Shotwell, J. T., The religious revolution of today 218

e Emmott, F. B., A short history of Quakerism 218

Index of Names 221

What People are Saying About This

Maurice Godelier

"The Gift is like a river that carries an immense mass of facts set in motion by Mauss’ vision. Guyer proves to be a skilled guide in navigating its perilous currents by giving us a nuanced translation that explores the text’s most secluded coves."

Alain Caillé

"Not only is Guyer extremely attentive to the wealth of connotations stirred by every word, in every language; she is also attuned to understanding Mauss’ essay in the context in which it was written. This gives the reader the sense that Mauss is finally grasped fully—as an inexhaustible source of inspiration."

Alain Caillé

"Not only is Guyer extremely attentive to the wealth of connotations stirred by every word, in every language; she is also attuned to understanding Mauss’ essay in the context in which it was written. This gives the reader the sense that Mauss is finally grasped fully—as an inexhaustible source of inspiration."

David Graeber

"The Gift is surely the most misunderstood work in the history of anthropology. Marcel Mauss is not entirely without blame for this. It is a work of notoriously scattershot brilliance; but, as a result, the essay has become a kind of screen for the projection of every sort of fantasy. Guyer’s excellent new edition will go a long way towards finally straightening matters out. There are endless riches here. But finally they are also in a form where we can see exactly what we’re being given."

Keith Hart

"Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift to refute the contrast between free gifts and self-interested markets. Yet, the opposition that he attacked—gift economy versus market economy—is often attributed to Mauss himself. Previous English translations were taken out of their historical context. Guyer has restored that context and has made the sociological argument more explicit. This long overdue publication will transform the essay’s reception, and stands to correct a text whose fame far surpasses most readers’ grasp of its meaning."

Editorial Reviews

"When is ethnographic theory? At a time at which so much of our theoretical development involves rethinking our disciplinary past, our answer might involve a kind of museum archaeology. Just as the archaeologist understands a museum object as the duration of an idea, so too anthropological knowledge can be conceived as a form of revisitation: a mediated, political and transformative return (Hicks 2016). In 1972, Marshall Sahlins wrote that Mauss’s Essay ‘remains a source of an unending ponderation for the anthropologist du metier, compelled as if by the hau of the thing to come back to it again and again’ (Sahlins 1972: 149). Today, we might use Mauss’s account of archaism to reimagine residuality and reciprocity. Mauss and Guyer show us that the translator is always both donor and recipient. There is a force, just like the force in the gift, in anthropological knowledge. The return of ethnographic theory brings new obligations to our disciplinary past, through the fulfilment of which that past and our present become less stable than we might imagine."

Anthropology Today - Dan Hicks

"Among the most welcome features of this third English translation of Mauss’s classic is Jane Guyer’s decision to re-embed the Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaiques in its original setting in the journal L’Année Sociologique as published in 1925. Her translation and discussion of some of the original framing materials (twenty pages of moving tributes to deceased colleagues before the Essai, and another twenty pages of book reviews at the end) demonstrate more effectively than the earlier English editions both the significance of the timing of this publication in the aftermath of the Great War and its centrality to the Durkheimian school. It was not possible to include all of the voluminous book reviews, and some of the excerpts are extremely brief, but, with the help of research assistants, Guyer has managed to track down the original English of most of Mauss’s quotations. Unlike previous translators, she contributes a substantial introduction, in which she elaborates on the difficulties of rendering Mauss’s text in English."

Journal of the Royal American Institute - Chris Hann

"Guyer’s decision to produce a new translation arose from a conviction that this contextualization—particularly the memorial and select reviews from Mauss—is critical for understanding The Gift itself.

Mauss, Guyer argues, was writing out of an urgent need to find inspiration from other parts of the world, that Europeans might learn “to confront one another without massacring each other” (2016: 197). The new translation thus importantly changes the emphasis within the text. What was a round-the-world-ticket collection of notable instances of exchange—the accuracy and veracity of which have already been endlessly debated—emerges as a passionate political treatise written at a poignant moment in European history."

Focalblog - Zoë Goodman

"Guyer’s decision to produce a new translation arose from a conviction that this contextualization—particularly the memorial and select reviews from Mauss—is critical for understanding The Gift itself.

Mauss, Guyer argues, was writing out of an urgent need to find inspiration from other parts of the world, that Europeans might learn “to confront one another without massacring each other” (2016: 197). The new translation thus importantly changes the emphasis within the text. What was a round-the-world-ticket collection of notable instances of exchange—the accuracy and veracity of which have already been endlessly debated—emerges as a passionate political treatise written at a poignant moment in European history."

Focalblog - Zoë Goodman