ABSTRACT
The analysis of gifts that I put forward in Outline of a Theory of Practice and The Logic of Practice (which, to avoid repetitions, I will assume to be known) departs from previous theories, in particular the phenomenological and structuralist ones, on three fundamental points: it makes room for time, or more precisely, for the time lag between gift and counter-gift, and for uncertainty; it brings in a theory of the agent and of action that makes the dispositions constituting the habitus, rather than consciousness or intention, the basis of practices; and it relates gift exchange to a quite specific logic, that of the economy of symbolic goods and the specific belief (illusio) that underlies it.
