The Gift
Expanded Edition
Distributed for HAU
Selected, Annotated, and Translated by Jane I. Guyer
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Translator’s Introduction: The Gift that Keeps on Giving by Jane I. Guyer
Part I: In Memoriam
In Memoriam: The Unpublished Work of Durkheim and His Collaborators
Part II: Essay on the Gift: The Form and Sense of Exchange in Archaic Societies
Introduction: Of the Gift, and in Particular of the Obligation to Return Presents
Chapter 1: The Gifts Exchanged and the Obligation to Return Them (Polynesia)
Chapter 2: The Extent of This System: Liberality, Honor, Money
Chapter 3: Survivals of These Principles in Ancient Law and Ancient Economies
Chapter 4: Conclusion
Part III: Selected Reviews
A Selection of Reviews by Marcel Mauss
Mauss, Guyer argues, was writing out of an urgent need to find inspiration from other parts of the world, that Europeans might learn “to confront one another without massacring each other” (2016: 197). The new translation thus importantly changes the emphasis within the text. What was a round-the-world-ticket collection of notable instances of exchange—the accuracy and veracity of which have already been endlessly debated—emerges as a passionate political treatise written at a poignant moment in European history."
"When is ethnographic theory? At a time at which so much of our theoretical development involves rethinking our disciplinary past, our answer might involve a kind of museum archaeology. Just as the archaeologist understands a museum object as the duration of an idea, so too anthropological knowledge can be conceived as a form of revisitation: a mediated, political and transformative return (Hicks 2016). In 1972, Marshall Sahlins wrote that Mauss’s Essay ‘remains a source of an unending ponderation for the anthropologist du metier, compelled as if by the hau of the thing to come back to it again and again’ (Sahlins 1972: 149). Today, we might use Mauss’s account of archaism to reimagine residuality and reciprocity. Mauss and Guyer show us that the translator is always both donor and recipient. There is a force, just like the force in the gift, in anthropological knowledge. The return of ethnographic theory brings new obligations to our disciplinary past, through the fulfilment of which that past and our present become less stable than we might imagine."
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
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