ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book commences from the idea that the compound structure of someone giving something to someone else is indispensable for the gift. It suggests that the gift is anything but annulled by the parasite. The book proposes that the gift can only be understood through various paradoxes. It suggests that while the gift is any object and no object, it is possible to think of three more general forms that the gift may take as an object: token of exchange, sacred object and weapon. The book concerns are not the particular, heterogeneous gifts given by people in their complex and messy relations in the reality out there that is often elusive, indefinite and irregular, and not even with the more general systems of gift-relations, but it takes interest above all in the philosophical idea of the gift.
