ABSTRACT
The nature of gifts and gift giving has intrigued thinkers since the beginning of Western civilization. We can see the outlines of modern ideas about generosity, gratitude and obligation forming in both the Old Testament and The 04Jssry. More recently, thinkers as different as Adam Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Friedrich Nietzsche have explored the meanings of gifts. In the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss's landmark 1925 anthropological study-cum-historical romance Essai sur Ie don prompted scholars from a variety of disciplines to reopen the question of the gift. Yet despite Mauss's thesis that gifts are complex social practices governed by particular norms and obligations (Mauss 1990: 76), in recent years they have usually been either explained away as disguised selfinterest or sentimentalized as a remnant of a golden age of pure generosity. This volume seeks to transcend these trite polarities by posing new questions and offering new paradigms regarding gifts and the discourses surrounding them. If, as Jacques T. Godbout argues, "the implicit and the unsaid reign supreme" in the realm of the gift (1998: 4-5), this collection aims to unseat that reign and hold those implicit norms up to the light of critical analysis.
