The Gift

The Gift is Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay arguing that gift exchange binds people through obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate.

Marcel Mauss: A French sociologist and anthropologist whose work shaped the study of social institutions and exchange. Mauss developed the essay’s account of gifts as binding social acts.
Obligation to give: A social expectation that a person or group provide a gift or contribution. Giving initiates the sequence of duties Mauss identifies.
Essai sur le don: Marcel Mauss’s 1925 French essay on gifts, exchange, and obligations in archaic societies. This is the original work behind the English title The Gift.
Economic anthropology: The study of how people produce, distribute, exchange, and consume goods and services across societies. Mauss’s essay helped establish exchange as a social and cultural subject, not merely a market transaction.
Commodity exchange: The transfer of goods or services through transactions in which prices or equivalent values are specified. Mauss distinguishes socially binding gifts from exchanges settled by explicit equivalence.
Gift exchange: A system of transferring goods or services in which social relationships shape what is given and expected in return. The essay uses gift exchange to show how transfers create durable obligations.
Obligation to receive: A social expectation that an offered gift be accepted rather than refused. Acceptance acknowledges the relationship and its claims.
Émile Durkheim: A French sociologist who helped establish sociology as a discipline and founded the journal L’Année sociologique. Mauss’s uncle and mentor shaped the intellectual setting in which the essay was written.
Claude Lévi-Strauss: A French anthropologist who developed structural anthropology and analyzed kinship, myth, and classification. Lévi-Strauss recast exchange as a central structure of social relationships.
Market economy: An economic system in which prices and voluntary transactions coordinate the exchange of goods and services. The essay challenges the idea that market exchange is the universal model of economic life.

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