ABSTRACT
In recent years, Marcel Mauss' star has once again begun to shine brightly among the canonical figures in social thought. Mauss was the kind of polymath that hardly exists anymore, mastering both ancient and modern languages, philosophy, religion, history, political science, and sociology. Mauss was a scholar who sought out the materiality of social forms in time and space, as well as the sociology of material forms. Mauss is most famous in anthropology and consumer research for the book The Gift. The Maussian model shows that people, objects and social relations form a whole, already a rather significant accomplishment that is still not widely digested; and this system is created and recreated in different ways when people transact with each other in gift and commodity relations. Evolutionary psychology and neuro-marketing and neuro-consumer research would seem to have it that humans are a product of their bodies, but Mauss took pains to demonstrate that it is the other way around.
