The Gift Marcel Mauss Analysis

Why do we give each other Gifts? Sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote “The Gift” in 1925 to analyze this question. He argued that the ritual of gift giving fulfills several key social obligations. Mauss believed that gift giving is an organising principle of social cohesion and act as social glue. For him gift giving is usually used to establish or strengthen an alliance or to achieve reconciliation. It is therefore a moral transaction connected to the individual or group relationships rather than an economic one.

Mauss looked in detail at the structure of gift giving, outlining three inherent obligations. Firstly Mauss outlined the obligation to give gifts. He argued that we are obliged to give gifts in order to demonstrate our generosity and appear

The anthropologist Raymond Firth, an expert on indigenous New Zealand culture, however, questioned the originality of the analysis and disputed Mauss’s interpretation of Maori customs and concepts. After the author’s death and the book’s publication in English in 1954, The Gift was criticized by a generation of anthropologists who were wary of the search for general laws, the progressive logic of evolutionism, and the method of comparative analysis. They argued that Mauss overemphasized similarities in institutions across cultures and ignored or downplayed differences, possibly as a result of his lack of fieldwork experience. More, they criticized Mauss for disapproving of the English anthropologist J. G. Frazer for presuming the universality of totemism (the practice of infusing a neutral object with sacredness as the symbol for a group of people) without evidence, while extending terms such as potlatch and mana (a spiritual force potentially attached to objects) to the institutions of societies where parallel, local concepts were lacking. Potlatch was a ceremonial feast practiced by Native American populations in Northwest North America that includes gifts to the guests; it was a means for the competitive display of wealth and prestige that even included the destruction of objects.Even though Mauss discussed self-aggrandizement and the desire to belittle rivals, critics argued that he underplayed negative elements because they complicated the larger message that reciprocity is necessary for social cohesion. Walter Goldschmidt noted that his own studies of societies in Mauss’s middle-range category revealed very clearly the greed, unscrupulousness, and “cold reasoning” involved in reciprocal exchange relationships. Finally, the knowledge that the institutions of simple societies are not just precursors to those of complex societies