ABSTRACT
Since Marcel Mauss's well-known and influential Essai sur le don first appeared in 1924, gifts and gift exchange have been frequent topics of inquiry within the field of anthropology. But for the other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, gifts and gift giving were not a theme able to sustain much attention. Until quite recently, that is. In fact, over the past two decades, the theme of gifts and gift giving has emerged as a central issue within a range of divergent fields. Whether inscribed within a tradition that traces itself to Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le don, to Georges Bataille's articulation of a general economy of expenditure, or to Martin Heidegger's reflections on the "es gibt" of Being, philosophers, literary critics, and literary theorists have with increasing frequency joined anthropologists and sociologists in reflecting upon various economic phenomena in the context of their attempts to theorize gift exchange.
