ABSTRACT
The notion of a "pure" or "free" gift has been largely neglected in anthropology. Malinowski employed it in Argonauts (1922: 177-80), but in Crime and Custom (1926: 40-1) he accepted the objections put forward by Mauss in the Essai sur le don (1990: 73-4), and discarded it. Following Mauss, anthropologists have mostly been interested in gift giving as a way in which enduring social relations are established and maintained. It seemed to Mauss, and has seemed to anthropologists since, that a genuinely free gift - one, as we say, with no strings attached - would play no part in the creation of social relations, for it would create no obligations or connections between persons; and therefore, even if such a thing existed, it would be of no serious interest to anthropology.
