4.

Mauss and the gift

Andrew Sanchez

One of economic anthropology’s most important contributions lies in understanding the

relationship between sociality and self-interest in different types of societies. This is appar-
ent in studies of affluence and egalitarianism, such as Marshall Sahlins’ (1972) analysis of
hunter-gatherer economies. It also characterised the work of Karl Polanyi (1944), which
questioned whether it was human nature to seek to maximise one’s economic position, and if
it was possible to separate economic processes from social life. This chapter addresses how
sociality and self-interest relate to one another by considering the relationship between people
and things, giving and receiving. It does so by using the work of the French social theorist
Marcel Mauss to explore how anthropologists have approached gift exchange.
In 1925, Mauss published an essay called The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange
in Archaic Societies (Mauss 1990 [1925]). This work used secondary data from a range
of non-European, pre-industrial societies to discuss the social structures and effects of gift
exchange. Mauss’s essay is regarded as a key early work of economic anthropology and has
inspired anthropological studies on topics as varied as charity (Benthall 2016), international
aid (Bornstein 2012; Malkki 2015) and hospice care (Russ 2005). However, it is really in
economic anthropology where the concept has had the greatest influence.
The concept of the gift has provided what is arguably one of the most productive analytic
frameworks that economic anthropology has produced. Thinking carefully about gift exchange
can tell us why we feel the need to give people things, why they feel the need to return them
and why some gifts are valued differently from others. The gift is important because it allows
us to see better where our sociality meets the economy. The chapter explores this topic in four
sections.
The first section outlines three core assumptions about gift giving that were common in
early anthropological readings of Mauss’s work. The first Maussian assumption is that a gift
is characterised by reciprocity, which means that someone who receives a gift must then offer
one in return. The second assumption says that gifts must have ‘spirit’, which means that in
order for them to be meaningful and be returned, they must be imbued with a subjective quality
that embodies something of the giver. The third assumption says that gifts can be clearly dif-
ferentiated from commodities.
The second section of the chapter discusses how anthropologists have gone on to ques-
tion the idea that there is a clear distinction between gifts and commodities. The section
considers whether such a distinction represents only a cultural value for particular sorts of
people, namely those who live in capitalist market societies, in particular those who also
practise salvation religions. In such societies, there tends to be a strong cultural ideal that gifts
and commodities should be distinct from one another. The section closes by showing how
understanding the blurred line between gifts and commodities is important to anthropological
studies of contemporary global economic processes.
The third section explores how anthropologists have critiqued the Maussian assumption of
reciprocity. The section discusses why anthropological studies have suggested that some gifts

35
36 A handbook of economic anthropology

are designed never be reciprocated, and what the implications of this are for the discipline’s
engagement with Mauss.
The fourth section concludes the chapter by describing the broader place of the gift in
anthropological thought.

MAUSS’S IDEA OF THE GIFT

Working in France early in the twentieth century, Mauss was part of a functionalist intellectual
tradition concerned with how society operates organically and is stable over time. As part of
this project, Mauss (1990 [1925]) claimed that certain social institutions and practices could
be understood as ‘total social phenomena’. A total social phenomenon is a social practice that
encapsulates the core values and structures of the society in which it occurs, and has a signif-
icance that is sociological, psychological and biological. This means that such a phenomenon
is important to how people interact with one another, how they think and feel, and how they
sustain and reproduce themselves as biological beings. Mauss regarded gift exchange as
a prime example of such a phenomenon. Accordingly, he believed that studying gift exchange
was one way of revealing the social and economic rules that shape any given society.
Mauss’s essay on gift exchange drew on emerging research conducted in a range of
Melanesian and Polynesian societies (notably among Trobriand Islanders in Melanesia and
Maoris in Aotearoa), as well as older accounts of exchange among Native peoples in the
American Pacific Northwest. One of Mauss’s intentions in this project was to challenge
existing European ideas about economic life in what he called archaic societies, those not per-
meated by money and markets. Early in the twentieth century, European intellectuals widely
believed that those societies (such as those of Native North Americans and Melanesians) were
economically inefficient, localised and non-maximising. This meant that they were assumed
to produce no surpluses, practise no complex trade with external communities and have no
principle of indebtedness. As such, they were held to be a fundamentally different type of
economy, which was called a natural economy. Mauss used new ethnographic research by
Bronislaw Malinowski to question the assumptions in the idea of the natural economy.
Malinowski’s research, conducted in the Trobriand Islands of Melanesia during the First
World War, focused on the traditional institution of kula exchange, which entailed the giving
of shell necklaces and bracelets between people in Trobriand communities living on different
islands (Malinowski 1922). Early in the twentieth century, kula exchange puzzled European
missionaries and researchers, who generally believed that it entailed sending people on costly,
dangerous canoe voyages to exchange seashells of no real use or value. To outside observers,
this did not seem to make practical or economic sense. Malinowski’s research countered this
assumption by showing that kula valuables were important tokens of social relations and that
their exchange bound island communities to one another through relations of reciprocity. He
also showed that the voyages facilitated the trade of surplus goods and the exchange of mar-
riage partners between people living in small, isolated places.
In contradiction to the natural-economy concept, then, Malinowski argued that Trobriand
Islanders did not have a natural economy, for they produced economic surpluses and engaged
in complex trade practices by maintaining social relationships that operated on the basis of
reciprocity. Later research on kula exchange in the 1980s reaffirmed Malinowski’s claim that
the institution was of central importance to Trobriand economic relations (Leach and Leach
 Mauss and the gift 37

1983). Inspired by Malinowski, Mauss went on to show that social institutions of gift giving
could be calculating, sophisticated and productive, and were one of the pillars of economic life
in non-market societies.
Much of Mauss’s essay is concerned with explaining the key principles by which gift
exchange functions and how one might define ‘gift’ in the first place, and the first key
principle of gift exchange that he articulated was reciprocity. This can be understood as the
fulfilment of a type of indebtedness, by which a person who has been given a gift must then
offer one in return. The major contribution of this insight is that gift exchange has the capacity
to tie individuals to each other through their shared obligation to balance their social debts.
For example, imagine that a person on the edge of your friendship group buys you lunch. You
are now obliged to buy that person lunch at a later date in order to settle your debt. He or she
will then be obliged to return the gift by buying you lunch once more, necessitating yet another
meeting so that you can settle the debt all over again. Eventually, that cycle of gift exchange
may well transform that person into a close friend. If so, you might each gain something from
that social relationship as you each become a source of advice, care and support in the future.
This is why one can regard reciprocity as a form of indebtedness, configured in a manner that
would make relationships that are socially beneficial.
The second key principle of gift exchange that Mauss articulated is called the spirit of the
gift. This refers to the fact that the object that we give is seen to contain something of us,
which obliges the recipient to reciprocate, and since it is this spirit that gives an object greater
social significance, it is what makes it more likely that the object will be returned. Mauss’s
work on this topic was based on his understanding of a Maori spiritual force called hau, which
was believed to govern the ritualised exchange of gifts between Maori communities. In these
contexts, a great deal of significance is attached to the fact that hau requires such exchanges to
be of broadly equivalent things (Firth 1959: 412 ff., in Yan 2020: 5).
The third Maussian principle of gift exchange suggests that gifts and commodities are
effectively the opposite of one another. Strictly speaking this idea was not articulated by
Mauss himself, but is rather derived from some anthropological interpretations of his work.
As we shall see later, such interpretations have been widely critiqued since the 1980s. For
now, however, we can explain the distinction as follows: something becomes a commodity
when it is exchanged in a market transaction for something else that has a different use value.
When this happens, the people doing the exchanging might incidentally build a relationship
with one another, but that is not the point of the exchange. The point is rather about building
a relationship between the objects themselves, which involves reckoning their relative worth
and then exchanging them accordingly. In contrast, a gift exchange is not about building
relationships between objects; it is about building relationships between people. This means
that in gift exchange it is not really the quality of the object that is important. It is rather the
quality of the relationship between two people, which is now embodied (as spirit) in an object
that represents them both.
Building on this broad Maussian foundation, Marshall Sahlins explored the inherently social
nature of gift exchanges. In his work on hunter-gatherers, Sahlins (1972: 191–210) suggested
that in order to understand the basic nature of an exchange one would need to reckon with
the three variables of generosity, kinship distance and sociability. Later, early in the 1980s,
Chris Gregory (1982) further elaborated that there is no inherent nature within an object that
makes it a gift or a commodity. Rather, this is defined at the moment of exchange by the types
of relationships that are being built by the transaction. Implicit in this understanding is the
38 A handbook of economic anthropology

assumption that whereas commodities are necessarily alienable things (which is why they can
be freely bought and sold in a marketplace), gifts are inalienable things that contain something
of the people that give and receive them. This assumption is supported by Annette Weiner’s
(1976, 1992) research in Melanesia, which emphasised the inalienability of the gift, while
questioning Malinowski’s and Mauss’s emphasis on Trobriand reciprocity. Later research on
gift giving by Maurice Godelier (1999) and David Graeber (2001) largely supported Weiner’s
assessment.

GIFTS AND COMMODITIES

From the 1980s, economic anthropologists began to question the idea of a universal distinction
between gifts and commodities. This movement was influenced by Jonathan Parry’s critical
reassessment of how the discipline had understood Mauss for much of the twentieth century.
Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry (1986) claimed to overturn conventional
disciplinary understandings of Mauss. He argued that although people living in market soci-
eties tend to stress a distinction between gifts and commodities, those living in other sorts of
economies (like the ones that concerned Mauss) do not subscribe to the idea that gifts and
commodities are fundamentally different sorts of things. On this basis, Parry suggested that
anthropologists had misunderstood the implications of Mauss’s analysis.
In the 1980s and 1990s economic anthropologists followed Parry’s cue, further exploring
the particular cultural and social values that shape a given gift exchange. For example, James
Carrier (1990) considered how certain societies have a powerful popular ideology that some-
where there must exist a ‘pure gift’. A pure gift is a truly selfless act of sacrifice that desires
no reward or recognition. A core part of this ideology is the belief that this pure gift can be
separated from the market principles, self-interest and economising that potentially define
the rest of society. In cultures that have this ideal there is accordingly a pronounced desire to
maintain a clear distinction between gifts and commodities.
In societies that have such cultural values, a person who gives a gift generally expects to
receive one in return, and usually there are social consequences for not reciprocating, such
as being alienated and excluded by loved ones. However, in those types of societies, people
should not give because they want to receive something back and should certainly not seek
to receive more than they give. As my reference to ‘certain societies’ indicates, these values
are not human universals. Indeed, they vary widely in different cultural contexts. This can be
illustrated by considering the potlatch gift economies that interested Mauss.
The potlatch is a gift-giving feast long practised by several Native North American com-
munities in the Pacific Northwest. Potlatches are complex events that fulfil many important
political and social functions. In the potlatches that Mauss was writing about, powerful rich
individuals host festivals of consumption and gift giving to which they invite many members
of the community. At these events, it is traditional for the host to distribute goods to those
attending, who are then supposed to consume or ceremonially destroy them during the feast
itself. Mauss observed that those potlatches had the effect of binding poor people to rich ones
in long-term relations of dependency and obligation. This is because only wealthy people have
the resources to host a potlatch. Nonetheless, one is socially obliged to attend if invited, and
will therefore end up owing something to the host.
 Mauss and the gift 39

At the time when Mauss was writing, the gifts distributed at potlatches were recorded on an
exact basis by their hosts. The guests would then be obliged to reciprocate those gifts at a later
date, and do so with interest ranging from 30 to 100 per cent per year (Mauss 1990 [1925]:
53–4). In practice, then, the potlatch was an institution tied to structures of hierarchy and
inequality. The reciprocal relations of the potlatch compelled poor attendees to provide labour
and services to their host many years into the future, in an effort to clear the social debts that
they had accrued by attending in the first place. Put more simply, Mauss claimed that the pot-
latch enabled rich people to give gifts to poor people, which they could never reciprocate. As
a result, the poor found themselves in a situation of constant indebtedness and subordination.
This suggests that people hosting potlatches late in the nineteenth century were not worried
about counting the cost of giving or blurring the boundaries between gifts and commodities.
In fact, it was social and economic strategizing that gave the potlatch part of its character.
Thinking more broadly, one might consider that this same logic of controlling people through
giving is also important to structures of contemporary bonded labour, where economic power
meets social values of reciprocity in a manner that perpetuates inequality (Martin 2009).
Economic anthropologists have observed, then, that the strict separation of gift and commod-
ity, sociality and economy, is better understand as a value in certain cultures, rather than any
type of human universal. It is only in certain types of societies that people believe that gift
giving is incompatible with self-interest and that gifts and commodities are different types of
things that should be kept apart from one another. The cultures that hold these beliefs strongly
generally have two characteristics. First, they are market societies. Second, they follow
Judeo-Christian, salvation religions (Parry 1986). I want to explain the meaning of the first
characteristic.
Polanyi theorised that market societies are ones where the economy is disembedded from
social life (Polanyi 1944; Isaac chap. 3, this vol.). This means that the economy is not primar-
ily determined by social obligations. Rather, the economy is a marketplace that measures the
relative value of objects and builds relationships between them. However, this disembedding
allows people to draw a clear line around the economy and delimit it from their personal lives.
If self-interest and cost-counting take place in an ostensibly callous public world of markets,
then this allows for the belief that there can be a private social world motivated by altruism
and selflessness. For Trobriand Islanders living at the time of Mauss this assumption was not
possible in the same way. It could not be so, because the Trobriand economy at that time was
embedded in gift exchange and social relations, and the economy was effectively everywhere,
all of the time. As a result, such societies could have no popular concept of either a pure
commodity or a pure gift. This is why many economic anthropologists have claimed that the
ideological separation of gifts and commodities is historically so prevalent in market societies.
The second characteristic of societies that valorise the separation of gifts and commodities
is that they also tend to practise salvation religions, which include Islam, Christianity and
Judaism. Such religions hold that salvation is found in a distinct heavenly realm that is separate
from earth. In order to enter into this realm, one needs to transcend earthly things. This is done
by good deeds and by actions that renounce one’s attachment to material things. These reli-
gions emphasise charity and sacrifice, which favour one’s spiritual wellbeing over and above
other things. For these types of faiths, pure gifts are the supreme expression of godly sacrifice,
and naked profiteering is morally problematic.
Economic anthropologists are not necessarily concerned with figuring out whether or not
a pure gift really exists. After all, whatever example of a pure gift one puts forward could
40 A handbook of economic anthropology

always be subject to refutation, depending on perceptions of human nature and personal

motivation. The trickiness of this problem can be revealed by thinking carefully about the
apparently pure gift of blood and organ donation and asking whether these actions can ever
be proven to be wholly altruistic (Bolt 2012; Copeman 2009; Simpson 2004; Strathern 2012).
Rather, economic anthropologists are interested in figuring out why some societies hold that
pure gifts exist, while others either do not believe in them or place so little emphasis upon them
that they are of only marginal relevance to social life.
In recent years, anthropology has returned to these core questions of altruism and disem-
bedding in exchange, to think critically about how modern capitalism relates to idioms of gift
giving. Studies of corporate social responsibility have questioned Polanyi’s assertion that
modern capitalism is disembedded from social life, by showing how corporations craft their
actions in terms of charity and social care (Rajak 2011; Mauksch chap. 22, this vol.). Other
bodies of work have conceptualised development aid as the giving of gifts from rich places
to poor places. In doing so, anthropologists have considered how people in wealthy societies
construct images of themselves as decent and morally accountable, while also creating images
of the recipients of their gifts as deserving and weak (Dolan 2007; Malkki 2015). In each of
these approaches, there is a marked tendency to think of economic choices in terms of gift
giving, in a manner that is of moral significance to the people in question. However, what this
work reveals is that despite the ideological emphasis placed upon pure gifts in such contexts,
like potlatch gifts they usually are not truly free. The next section of this chapter considers how
anthropologists have engaged with Mauss’s assertion that there is no such thing as a free gift.

RECIPROCITY

For much of the twentieth century, many anthropologists were critical of Mauss’s idea of the
spirit of the gift. As early as the 1950s, Raymond Firth (1959: 419–20) argued that Mauss
had misinterpreted Maori cosmology by conflating the hau of the giver with the hau of the
gift itself. Mauss was also vague on the appropriateness of using information about an actual
Maori spirit to discuss something different, a loosely conceived notion of the meaningful
social content of an exchange. But even if anthropologists were often unsure about ‘spirit’, for
a long time those in the discipline accepted the Maussian idea that all gifts must be reciprocal,
and as such none of them were free.
The notion of a truly free gift is one that has proven difficult to substantiate through ethno-
graphic study. The problem rests on what one means by reciprocity. In the most literal sense,
a gift can not be free if one receives anything in return for giving it, which can include grati-
tude or any subjective feeling of satisfaction. Jacques Derrida suggested that in order for a gift
to be free it must satisfy two seemingly insurmountable criteria: it must entail no reciprocity,
and neither the giver nor the receiver can recognise it as a gift in the first place (Derrida 1992:
14, in Laidlaw 2000: 621). This is paradoxical, since conventional anthropological thinking
suggests that a gift exists because we recognise that it was given as one in the first place, with
a sentiment and intention behind it. If Derrida is correct, then the moment that one recognises
something as a gift by acknowledging who it comes from and what was invested in it, then
the possibility of it being free disappears. Reciprocity then would seem fundamental to the
Maussian understanding of gift giving.
 Mauss and the gift 41

The Maussian model can be summarised broadly by the proposition that gift giving makes
use of reciprocity and spirit to build social relationships through exchange. In non-market
societies, gift exchanges are the foundation of the economy and social bonds of reciprocity
enable the exchange of resources. In market societies, gift exchanges make bonds between
people, but since they take place within a disembedded economy they are judged to be separate
from self-interest. In both instances, the gift must always be reciprocated, or else cease to exist.
This is a fairly clear model of how gift giving works. Unfortunately, ethnography of Hindu
religious offerings suggests that the issue is not quite so simple, and that reciprocity is not in
fact the cornerstone of the gift.
In 1986, Parry published ‘The Gift, the Indian gift and the “Indian gift”’. The title refers to
the fact that Parry discusses three things: Mauss’s essay on the gift, gifts exchanged by people
in India, and the idea of ‘Indian giving’. The last is a phrase that Europeans and non-native
North Americans used to use, to express the belief that Native North Americans never give
gifts without an expectation of a return (just like the potlatch). As suggested earlier in this
chapter, what Parry wrote is important to how anthropologists reassessed the work of Mauss
from the 1980s onwards.
Parry’s article is based on his own field work in the Indian Hindu pilgrimage town of
Varanasi, called Benares when he was in the field, and it describes gifts given by ordinary
Hindus to religious specialists. Parry’s wider body of work (1980, 1994) is interested in the
sorts of gifts that are given to Hindu priests and to holy people called Sadhus. His argument
can be explained most clearly by considering Sadhus. They are a type of wandering ascetic
who are supposed to own almost no material possessions and live off the charity of others.
Sadhus come in many forms, but all have chosen to dedicate their lives to enlightenment,
with the aim of liberating themselves from the cycle of physical reincarnation that is central
to Hindu cosmology. This liberation is called Moksha, the moment when one’s soul finally
leaves the earth and progresses to the next spiritual plane. For this to happen it is necessary
for Sadhus to renounce worldly attachments and desires, and spend their days meditating on
the nature of being and the divine. Sadhus might practise fasting, chanting, ritualised use of
cannabis and forms of self-denial. Some Sadhus never cut their hair or nails, some stand on
one leg for years at a time, including sleeping that way, supported by a harness while one limb
slowly withers. Sadhus are a special class of people set apart from the rest of the world.
However, although Sadhus have seemingly taken themselves out of the world, they still
perform a very important ritual function for all of the ordinary people who remain within it.
That function is to ‘eat’ the sin and ritual pollution of other people and thereby help them
to better themselves in the endless cycle of karmic rebirth. How this works is that ordinary
Hindus will give Sadhus small gifts or money, food and cannabis. If the giver is an ordinary,
sinful person, that person’s bad karma and ritual pollution is embodied in the gift that is given
to the Sadhu. Givers can do nothing themselves with the bad things that they put into that
gift, because they lack the ritual power and knowledge to break it down and make it safe.
The Sadhu, on the other hand, can accept a dangerous, sin-laden gift and digest the spiritual
pollution within it through special rituals. Because they have spent years mastering the secrets
of religious speech, chanting, meditation and self-denial, the Sadhu can do things that nobody
else can. This is why ordinary people will seek out a Sadhu at a pilgrimage site and make offer-
ings in an attempt to rid themselves of sin and ritual pollution. This process is important to our
rethinking of Mauss’s idea of reciprocity. Analysing this case, Parry draws inspiration from
gift-giving logics in other Indian contexts, notably those discussed in Thomas Trautmann’s
42 A handbook of economic anthropology

(1981) analysis of Dravidian kinship systems and Gloria Raheja’s (1988) consideration of
ritual inter-caste Hindu gifts.
The Indian gift that Parry considers tells us that spirit can be embodied in such exchanges,
which is after all what the sin is and what makes it your gift and not somebody else’s. But
Parry qualifies the Maussian model by holding that not all types of spirit are the same. As such,
not all gifts necessarily create reciprocity. To think this through, imagine that you give a close
friend a gift. Hopefully that gift carries the good feelings that you have for that person. If so,
it makes sense that you should want that person to reciprocate, because what comes back will
also carry something good. If, on the other hand, you give somebody a gift that carries sin and
bad karma, then of course you do not want it to be reciprocated with a similar item. In the hands
of an ordinary person such a gift is like a curse. The only hope that one has is to find a way of
somehow purifying that gift. The Hindu gift that Parry writes about is just such a spirit-laden
thing that should not be reciprocated. It is the Sadhus’ job to take all of the badness out of it
and keep it with themselves where it can no longer cause anybody any trouble.
By the middle of the 1990s anthropologists of China had begun to concur with Parry’s
assessment that certain types of gift exchanges entailed immediate consumption on the part
of the receiver, with no expectation of a direct and equivalent return (Yan 1996). In the case
of Yunxiang Yan’s (2020: 7) analysis of gift giving in a Chinese village, ‘to return the same
gift would be considered a gesture of insult and rejection.’ After several decades of debate, by
the 1990s anthropology had largely settled on a critical assessment of Maussian reciprocity.

CONCLUSION: THE PLACE OF THE GIFT IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Mauss was working at the very birth of modern social anthropology, when extensive and
reliable information on different societies was in short supply. A century later, anthropology
has produced a wealth of research about societies around the world. That body of collective
work suggests that the Maussian principle of reciprocity is not a universal feature of gift
giving. At the time of writing, the general anthropological consensus is that Mauss was wrong
about universal reciprocity, but was correct that the universal characteristic of gifts is spirit.
An exchange without spirit is one that is entirely unrecognised by giver or receiver and has no
expectation or occurrence of reciprocity. If you try to think of a real example that fully meets
these criteria you will see that it is very difficult to do so. Some anthropologists have described
contexts where both giver and receiver certainly strive to create free gifts (Laidlaw 2000), but
that is not the same as saying that they actually exist in an objective sense. Like the distinction
between gifts and commodities, this is better understood as a cultural ideal that matters more
in some societies than in others.
However, despite being refuted as a social universal, Mauss’s idea of reciprocity remains
important to the development of the discipline This is because he was able to demonstrate that
in embedded, non-market societies, the social obligations of reciprocity are a core principle of
economic life. The originality of Mauss’s thinking was to conceptualise reciprocity as a form
of indebtedness that not only brings people together but also enables them to create relations
of hierarchy and dependency. In the case of the potlatch, gift exchange can enable people to
accumulate resources and maximise their positions. This means that gift economies can be
economies in the formal sense, despite the fact that they initially appear so dissimilar to the
market societies where most of the world’s anthropologists live.
 Mauss and the gift 43

Few anthropological works have had as much impact on the discipline as Mauss’s essay,
which has inspired studies of organ donation, weddings, development, bribery and countless
other things. Interest in the essay was revived once again in the 2010s, when Mauss’s work
became fashionable among academic anthropologists largely based in Europe and North
America, marked by the appearance in 2011 of an anthropology journal titled Hau and the
publication in 2016 of a new translation of The Gift, by Jane Guyer. However, despite the fact
that The Gift is so widely read, many anthropologists regard the essay as a limiting and some-
times problematic piece of work (e.g. Goodman 2016). Even Parry has argued that Mauss’s
work should not be canonised by the discipline, since it ignores many of the inequalities
that characterise life in almost all societies (Sanchez et al. 2017: 583). This is especially the
case with respect to gender, on which Mauss is largely silent. As early as the 1970s, Weiner
(1976) argued that numerous Maussian studies ignored the experience of women, by choosing
to focus on ritualised exchange institutions that tend to be controlled by men. In the 1980s,
Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) study of Melanesian societies sought to correct this imbalance, by
thinking about gift exchanges in gendered terms that also considered cultural differences in
understandings of personhood. In doing so, Strathern’s work was intellectually distinct from
the Maussian debates that occupied so many other theorists at the time.
Certainly there are many anthropological studies that have drawn inspiration from Mauss
to explore issues of gender, personhood and how reciprocity may be experienced as social
danger. For example, Ann Russ’s (2005) study of hospices uses Mauss to explore whether
care itself is best understood as a gift or a commodity. Ana Gutiérrez-Garza’s (2019) research
among London sex workers considers the many pitfalls of accepting allegedly free gifts
from one’s clients. Elsewhere, the anthropology of aid has made productive use of Mauss to
consider relations of international power and post-colonialism (Dolan 2007; Malkki 2015).
However, despite the potential that Mauss’s work holds, it should be borne in mind that his is
not the only way that economic anthropologists think about exchange. As this chapter outlines,
his contributions are the subject of disagreement, which means that the exact nature of his
legacy is contested and still evolving.

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