ABSTRACT
Based on his fieldwork between 1918–1924, Martin Gusinde spends many pages wrestling with the difficulties that Fuegian exchange presents European political economy. Meticulous in their observation of mine and thine, and in the severe condemnation of theft, the Fuegians were scrupulous in sharing and in the practice of mutual aid no less than of a constant give-and-take of gift-giving among themselves. In contemplating the analogy and the historical fact that here establishes a connection between consummately skillful miming, on the one hand, and the practice of that peculiar noncapitalist economics of exchange which Marcel Mauss called "the spirit of the gift," on the other, that are not justified in assuming that there is more to this than analogy—that there is indeed an intimate bond between the spirit of the gift and the spirit of the mime.
