For example, he recognized that it couldn’t explain rule-governed action, a phenomenon rife in every culture.

While Durkheim believed in the individual and the potential for individual action, he was a vocal critic of individualism per se. In fact, if you can’t read the book, Douglas’ introduction stands by itself as a wonderful summary of Mauss’ ideas.For those interested in the history of anthropology and its development over time, Mauss was one of Durkheim’s greatest students (Durkheim was also Mauss’ uncle) and his influence can be seen quite a bit in this work. This specific edition, with an introduction by Mary Douglas (a magnificent anthropologist in her own right), is especially recommended, and sheds a tremendous amount of light on Mauss’ sometimes unclear conclusions. It explores the economies of pre-capitalist cultures and peoples from several different parts of the world, including Melanesia, Polynesia, and the Pacific Northwest. Marcel Mauss’ “The Gift” (1925) is one of the most influential pieces of anthropology written in the twentieth century. The result sets the scene for a whole new generation of readers to study this essay alongside pieces that exhibit the erudition, political commitment, and generous collegial exchange that first nourished the essay into life. Read in the context of these additional pieces, the “Essay on the Gift” is revealed as a complementary whole, a gesture of both personal and political generosity: Mauss’ honor for his fallen colleagues his aspiration for modern society’s recuperation of the gift as a mode of repair and his own careful, yet critical, reading of his intellectual milieu. Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others.

Included alongside the “Essay on the Gift” are Mauss’ memorial accounts of the work of Émile Durkheim and his colleagues who were lost during World War I, as well as his scholarly reviews of influential contemporaries such as Franz Boas, J. With a critical foreword by Bill Maurer and a new introduction by translator Jane Guyer, this expanded edition is certain to become the standard English version of the essay-a gift that keeps on giving.

With this new translation, Mauss’ classic essay is returned to its original context, published alongside the works that framed its first publication in the 1923–24 issue of L’Année Sociologique. Scan down a list of essential works in any introduction to anthropology course and you are likely to see Marcel Mauss’ masterpiece, The Gift.

Mauss essay on the gift