ABSTRACT
Marcel Mauss’s The Gift has had a lasting effect on the way anthropologists and other scholars approach the analysis of cultures in which economics, politics, technology, and individual motivations are intertwined. Mauss’s academic training in sociology, law, religion, and languages uniquely prepared him for comparative analyses of cultural systems including gift exchange. In comparative analysis, research is conducted by a comparison of different systems, artifacts, or features. The political turmoil of the early twentieth century set the stage for Mauss’s approach to ethnographic material and its implications for industrialized societies. Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies concerns a topic close to everyone’s heart: social relationships. Mauss explores the ways in which gifts and return gifts join people in cycles of exchange that are governed by rules and infused with cultural values. Marcel Mauss was a broadly trained scholar who learned many languages including Russian, Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, and Malayo-Polynesian.
