Gift (Pocket Classic) -- Forms and Reasons for Exchange in Ancient Societies

Author: (French) Marcel Mauss, translated by Ji Zhe
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: The author of this book, Marcel Mauss, is a renowned early French sociologist and anthropologist, and The Gift is one of his most important works. In Mauss's analysis of "the gift," the fundamental question is to explore how people relate to objects and to each other through objects. By citing a wealth of ethnographic evidence, Mauss proposes the concept of a "gift economy" characterized by "total gift-giving" and compares it with the modern, impersonal system of commodity exchange. He presents a three-stage evolutionary schema and further explores the origins and essence of economic concepts such as property rights and contracts. This book is included in the "Pocket Classics" series of the Century Humanities Series.