The Pioneer Sociologist Marcel Mauss on Gifts and Exchange
(Essay on the Gift: Forms and Motives of Exchange in Archaic Societies, 1923)
[By investigating the rules and customs surrounding gift-giving, Mauss predicts,] we will attain conclusions that, in a sense, give us an archaeological perspective on the character of human transactions in the societies that surround or have preceded our own. We will describe the phenomena of exchange and contract in societies that are not (as some have inaccurately claimed) deprived of economic markets – for a market is a human phenomenon to which no society is a stranger – but that have a different system of exchanges from our own. We will see the market before the creation of merchants and before the chief invention of merchants, i.e., money in the strict sense; we will see how the market functioned before the modern forms (as we might call them: Semitic, Hellenic, Hellenistic and Roman forms) of contract and sale, as well as of lawful money, were developed. We will see what morality and what economy are at work in these transactions. (p. 148)
In the economic and legal systems that preceded our own, we virtually never observe simple exchanges of goods, of wealth and of products through a bargaining process that involves individuals. First, it is not individuals, but collectivities that mutually agree, exchange and contract; the ‘persons’ involved in a contract are corporate personalities such as clans, tribes, or families, which meet and compete either in groups on a physical terrain, or in the person of their chiefs, or in both ways at once. Moreover, what they exchange is not only goods and wealth, movable and immovable property, or economically useful things. Above all, they exchange ceremonies, feasts, rites, military services, women, children, dances, celebrations, fairs; the bargain is only one moment in these exchanges, and the circulation of wealth is only one term in a contract that goes much farther and lasts well beyond the exchange. And finally, these prestations and counter-prestations are made in a more or less voluntary fashion, through presents and gifts; voluntary in appearance, that is, even though their presentation is really rigorously obligatory, and enforced by the threat of private or public warfare. We propose to call this the system of total prestations. (pp. 150-151)
All these phenomena are simultaneously juridical, economic, religious, esthetic, morphological, and so on. … They are therefore something more than themes, more than institutional components, more than complex institutions, more even than institutional systems that could be analyzed into religion, law, economy, etc. These are “wholes,” complete social systems whose workings we have tried to describe. (pp. 274-75)
From: Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie (Presses universitaires de France, 1950). Translated by HS.
To read more, check out Marcel Mauss, The Gift. Tr. Ian Cunnison.