ABSTRACT
Marcel Mauss's famous Essay on the Gift becomes his own gift to the ages. Apparently completely lucid, with no secrets even for the novice, it remains a source of an unending ponderation for the anthropologist du métier, compelled as if by the hau of the thing to come back to it again and again, perhaps to discover some new and unsuspected value, perhaps to enter into a dialogue which seems to impute some meaning of the reader's but in fact only renders the due of the original. This chapter is an idiosyncratic venture of the latter kind, unjustified moreover by any special study of the Maori or of the philosophers (Hobbes and Rousseau especially) invoked along the way. Yet in thinking the particular thesis of the Maori hau and the general theme of social contract reiterated throughout the Essay, one appreciates in another light certain fundamental qualities of primitive economy and polity, mention of which may forgive the following overextended commentary.
