ABSTRACT
The sacred elements of gift exchange explored by Marcel Mauss in The Gift point to many possibilities for further investigation. To illustrate, Mauss notes that in archaic societies religious sacrifice is a means for people to maintain reciprocal obligations with the divine. Mauss shows that gifts bind individuals, families, societies, and nations in a perpetual cycle of mutual indebtedness. Mauss’s insights shed light on voluntary gifts of money for business development or personal needs through crowdfunding, and knowledge through open source software, free content, and websites that serve as nodes for technical and creative exchanges. Mauss’s desire to work out how individual autonomy can be reconciled with social embeddedness in mass society—that is, the ways in which economic behavior is constrained by society’s non-economic institutions—has been fulfilled by studies on clubs and volunteer associations. Mauss has taught generations of readers that gifts are both expressive and instrumental.
