ABSTRACT
Anthropology is the study of social life as humans make it. In many ways it is an argument about how people do live and how to live. Exploring the history of the discipline itself is an excellent way of understanding this argument and that is one of the main aims of this book. Unlike other social sciences such as economics or politics, which aim to understand particular aspects of human life, anthropology approaches the study of social life as a totality. Anthropologists address the totality of social life because people live their lives out wholly and embrace the spiritual, political, economic and environmental as one. The earliest anthropologists took this total approach very seriously. For example, Boas founded a discipline that was a composite of studies into the material, intellectual and social life of men and women across the world. He argued that the totality could be encompassed in the idea of culture, which had different and particular emphasis around the globe. Similarly, Rivers, with Haddon’s inspiration, examined the ways in which people claimed each other as kin, making this habit of social life the core of social anthropology for many decades. If the grasping of the totality of experience seemed and seems a somewhat daunting or fuzzy task, then it was probably right to proceed also with some inspiration from Durkheim and Mauss because they aimed to elaborate a social science that systematically theorized the totality of human experience. In this book about the many kinds of arguments that anthropologists make, I take up anthropology’s claim to study the total picture of what it means to be human by examining a practice common to people around the world; that is the practice of giving and receiving gifts.
