The Gift, written by Marcel Mauss in 1925, explores why we exchange things and the social rules we follow – and might help explain why gift-giving can be so fraught with worry Exchanging stuff – as ...

"One of us": Marcel Mauss and "English" anthropology / Wendy James -- An intellectual self-portrait / Marcel Mauss -- Mauss's Jewish background: a biographical essay / W.S.F. Pickering -- A vague but ...

In this, his most famous work, Marcel Mauss presented to the world a book which revolutionized our understanding of some of the basic structures of society. By identifying the complex web of exchange ...

The outward lives of great intellectuals do not always make lively reading, even for other intellectuals. For every tragic, monstrous, or heroic thinker whose biography resembles pulp fiction, there ...

Gifts, according to French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), are never truly free. In 1925, Mauss, wrote his landmark “The Gift,” an extended essay that mainly argued that gifts ...

Ahead of a key House of Lords hearing, Sean Carey reflects on the disgraceful way Britain annexed a By Sean Carey Reciprocity – “the obligation to give and the obligation to receive” – as the French ...