ABSTRACT
Marcel Mauss’s analysis of gift exchange as a social institution underpinned by a bundle of collective representations concerning obligation, honor, and, in at least some cases, supernatural forces, has passed the test of time. Mauss argues that the reverse is true: archaic gift cycles persist in modern market economies. Mauss and Emile Durkheim have been criticized for their alleged failure to consider individuals and social change. Mauss’s work was distinctive in its focus on archaic societies across great spans of time and space. Mauss shifted the focus on the social and cultural shaping of economic behavior to transactions that occur in the absence of money and under the guise of gifts. The analysis brings together the ethnographic research of other scholars with Mauss’s own interpretations of ancient laws and literature, which he read in the original languages. Mauss convincingly draws parallels between gifts and commercial transactions in existing and historical archaic societies.
