ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to seek a greater universality for the ideas of Marcel Mauss related to gift exchange. His essay, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, is the source of ideas that will be examined in the context of organized technical assistance relationships between groups in two societies of Western industrial civilization, France and the United States. The chapter provides a brief interpretation of Mauss in the history of French sociology. It summarizes three contributions of Mauss' studies of gifts: Mauss' insistence on studies of concrete, observable phenomena as a means to understand a whole system of social life; Mauss' example as a student and practitioner of the comparative method in sociology; and His reminder that old human problems turn up in new guises. By concentrating on both psychic and structural phenomena, Mauss avoided a completely static approach to interpreting social groups.
