ABSTRACT
Until this point I have not discussed the legal aspects of the gift, although at different points throughout this book I have suggested the importance of understanding the jural implications of exchanging gifts. If gift exchange becomes a concern of the legal mechanisms of globalization, as it does for example in the Fair Trade movement, then international law is being assessed against the possibility of the loss of ethical interests. I made the suggestion in the first chapter that the analysis of gift exchange could be brought into contemporary debates about globalization because it made legible the ethical aspects of most interchanges by demanding the assessment of the total human condition. In chapter 3 I discussed the gift exchange between a Trobriand father and his child’s mother’s brother, an exchange that implies that he recognizes the jural authority of the child’s senior clansman. Previous chapters showed the various ways in which gift exchange embraces the domains of the political, economic, social, virtual and spiritual, emphasizing the gift as a total social fact that comprises and condenses all of social life. What then can be circumscribed as the legal domains of gift exchange if it precipitates the outcomes of both international law and family jural authorities? This question can be answered best by anthropological research. I intended that the total effect of that sequence of chapters would make it clearer how anthropological analysis of gift exchange would be a valuable critical tool against the pro-globalization movement’s notion that humans are primarily economic beings. In part, this chapter aims to place a series of question marks over the use of the concept of economic man in globalization debates, and considers other avenues.
