ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contribution of Marcel Mauss to social theory and a theory of cooperation. It shows that Mauss's essay 'The Gift' can be seen as a classic of a pragmatist, interactionist and anti-utilitarian sociology. According to Mauss, in all previous societies there were things like stones, shells, and precious metals, which also functioned as means of payment, but exhibited other properties they had a magical nature and were primarily talismans: they do indeed have very general circulation within a society and even between societies. For Mauss, today's money is thus preceded by a form of money in which certain things were precious and furnished with a magic value which then circulated within groups. In contrast, Malinowski takes as a basis the modern definition of money for his anthropological search for forms of money, and thus overlooks the personalized forms of money described by Mauss.
