The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies

Citation

Mauss, M. (1925). Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques [The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies]. L'Année sociologique, new series, 1 (1923–1924). Free text: https://archive.org/details/marcel-mauss-essai-sur-le-don

Chapter Summary

The essay is a single long article that its author calls "a fragment of larger studies". It has an introduction and four chapters, each divided into numbered sections, and it is written with two kinds of type: the main argument and, in smaller print, notes and detail that Mauss says are "indispensable only to specialists".

Introduction: On the Gift, and in Particular the Obligation to Return Presents

Mauss opens with stanzas of the Old Norse Hávamál on guests, friends and returned gifts, and takes from them his subject: in many societies exchanges and contracts take the form of gifts that are in theory voluntary but in reality obligatory. He proposes the term "total social phenomena" for institutions in which religious, legal, moral, political, family and economic life all find expression at once, and narrows his question to one: what rule makes a gift received obligatorily returned, and what force in the thing given compels the return? He explains his method (precise comparison within chosen areas, Polynesia, Melanesia, north-west America and a few major legal systems, using only societies for which documents and philological work give access to their own concepts), and distinguishes "total prestations" between clans from the agonistic form he proposes to call the potlatch.

Chapter I: Gifts Exchanged and the Obligation to Reciprocate (Polynesia)

Four sections. The first takes Samoa, where gifts accompany birth, circumcision, illness, puberty, funerals and trade, and where chiefs exchange fine mats at marriage. The second, on "the spirit of the thing given" (Maori), centres on a text from the Maori informant Tamati Ranaipiri, recorded by Elsdon Best, about the hau of a gift, from which Mauss argues that the thing received is not inert and carries something of the giver. The third adds the obligations to give and to receive to the obligation to reciprocate, as a three-part system. The fourth, on gifts to men and gifts to the gods, notes gifts made to men with the gods and nature in view, which Mauss says he treats only briefly.

Chapter II: Extension of This System: Liberality, Honour, Money

The comparison widens in three steps. The first section, on the rules of generosity, uses the Andaman Islanders. The second, on Melanesia, treats the Trobriand kula largely through Malinowski's reports, along with New Caledonia and Fiji, and discusses the objects that circulate as treasures and money. The third and longest is on north-west America, where the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl serve as the model of the potlatch. Its subsections cover honour and credit; giving, receiving and returning; and the force of things, ending with a "first conclusion" about the exchange-gift as the form that lies between total prestation and individual contract and market.

Chapter III: Survivals of These Principles in Ancient Law and Ancient Economies

Mauss turns from ethnography to legal history to argue that European and Asian legal traditions emerged from systems like these. Its sections cover personal and real rights (very early Roman law, with the nexum and the pledge), other Indo-European laws, a "theory of the gift" in classical Hindu law, Germanic law (the pledge and the gift), Celtic law and Chinese law, where, he says, a seller retains a right to "weep over" what was sold. He presents the Roman and Greek separation of personal from real rights, and of sale from gift, as a later achievement and treats his reconstruction of earlier phases as a probable hypothesis.

Chapter IV: Conclusion

Three conclusions. The moral conclusion argues that much of modern morality and daily life still lives in the atmosphere of mixed gift, obligation and liberty: invitations must be returned, charity wounds the recipient. The conclusion in economic sociology and political economy argues that these facts fall outside "natural economy" and utilitarianism, and judges Malinowski's ranking of transactions between pure gift and pure barter unworkable. The conclusion in general sociology returns to method: the "total social facts" are a way of studying whole, concrete people, and the essay offers questions to historians and ethnographers rather than a final answer.

Key Concepts

Introduction and Chapter I

• Total prestation / total social phenomenon: exchange between groups that involves every dimension of social life at once.
• Gift that is obligatory: the apparently free and gratuitous gift that is in fact constrained and interested.
• Hau: in the Maori text, the spirit of the thing given that compels return.
• Three obligations: to give, to receive, to reciprocate.

Chapter II

• Potlatch: the agonistic form of total prestation, with rivalry and destruction of wealth among Pacific Northwest chiefs.
• Honour and credit: the stake in giving, receiving and returning.
• The force of things: the quality in treasured objects that makes them circulate.

Chapters III–IV

• Personal and real rights: the later legal separation that Mauss sees as foreign to the older system.
• Danadharma and other legal "theories of the gift": the Indian law of gift, the Germanic pledge, the Chinese right to weep over a sold thing.
• Lessons for modern society: the survival of the gift in morality and economics.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A precise question. Mauss restricts the inquiry to one rule, the obligation to return, and states the method and its limits in the introduction.
• Argument across ethnography and legal history. Chapters I–II move through Polynesia, Melanesia and the North-West Coast, and Chapter III tests the hypothesis against Roman, Hindu, Germanic, Celtic and Chinese law.
• A lasting concept. The "total social phenomenon" and the triad of obligations organise the whole essay and recur in the conclusion.
• Candid about its status. Mauss calls the work a fragment, a set of indications and questions, and says some areas (Micronesia, Indo-China, Berber and Semitic law) remain for others to study.

Limitations

• Second-hand evidence. Mauss draws on reports by others (Boas, Malinowski, Best, Swanton, Leenhardt and more), and the central Maori argument rests on one informant's text as recorded by a European observer, so it should be read with the notes.
• Dated vocabulary. "Archaic", "primitive" and "arriéré" structure the argument and reflect the period; so does the idea in Chapter III that European and Asian law emerged from such systems.
• Hypothetical reconstruction. Mauss himself calls the early Roman and Indo-European reconstruction a plausible hypothesis, resting on thin sources.
• Dense and note-heavy. The footnotes carry much of the evidence, which makes the French original demanding.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the economic and political anthropology course the essay is the short, theoretical text on exchange. Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific is the ethnography behind Mauss's discussion of the kula, and Mauss both uses and corrects it, so reading it beside Chapter II shows how an ethnographic account becomes a comparative argument. The introductory textbooks, Hann and Hart's Economic Anthropology and Wilk and Cliggett's Economies and Cultures, place Mauss in the history of the field; Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer (a study of livelihood and political institutions) and Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything (a reinterpretation of human history) are less directly connected and can follow.

How to Use This Book

Read the introduction and Chapter I slowly, as they set up the whole argument. Chapter II can be read by region, and Chapter III is optional for students more interested in ethnography than in legal history. Always finish with the conclusion. Readers new to French can use an English translation alongside this guide; the chapter numbers and section headings above are those of the original.

Edition and Sources

This guide is based on the French text of the essay as published in L'Année sociologique, new series, vol. 1 (1923–1924), in the electronic edition from the "Classiques des sciences sociales" collection of the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (available through the Internet Archive item above), checked against the Wikisource transcription of the introduction. Mauss died in 1950 and the text is in the public domain in many countries. The sections read include the table of contents, the introduction, the section openings and headings of all four chapters, the Maori hau passage, the Chapter II and III transitions and the three conclusions. The English translations, and their page numbers, were not consulted.