ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how anthropologists have answered charges that gift exchange entails irrational behaviour. Whereas some people argued that largesse is rational because it builds the middle class person’s prestigious reputation (Veblen 1967 [1899]), other scholars (especially Bataille 1967 in Bataille 1994) insisted that some people acted with excessive generosity towards others in order to release fellow humans from the misery of poverty, and thereby return the totality of society to a moral and ethical condition of material and spiritual equality. Although many (especially Wolf 1999) have criticized Bataille because he believed that habitually generous uses of material wealth would create an ideal and utopian social state, I will return to Bataille’s arguments in this chapter because largesse is common to many different places. Largesse is irrational only in so far as generous acts cannot be understood within the terms of self-interested giving. How can an anthropologist explain why some people give too much to other people? One way forward would be to ask what kind of sense other people in other societies make of those parts of social life that seem ambiguous, enigmatic and irrational.
