Mauss Obligations Of Giving Gifts

A gift can have different and multiple meanings based on your relationships, the setting, and that person’s status. You can receive gifts a many different times in your life: birthdays, holidays, graduations, or any other major event in your life. The gifts can come from your family, friends, or acquaintances. The gift can signify the status of a person. A person to demonstrate their high social status might donate money to TCU to construct a building with their name on it. This would indicate their wealth and status in society. This leads to Mauss’s obligations of giving gifts. The giver is obligated to give so they are perceived generous. The receiver is obligated to show respect and potential in the future give back based on your relationship …show more content…
The gift was to show their wealth and high social status. They had enough money to donate without the need to make money off of it. The town only has a couple thousand people in it, so the opportunities for families to show their status is rare. A family in this case doesn’t need to make money to receive a gain. It might be the pride of actually having enough money to donate, or that a large portion of the town, whose children play baseball, will see your name for a couple months. Name recognition has a lot of value. The gift also shows that the family is close to the team. The family had a son and a coach on the team. If the family had been distant from the team, the gift might have been given to any team. The obligations of the family to donate is related to showing their social status. By giving money for the uniforms, the family appears to be generous to the public. The obligations to appear generous to the public is strong. Many people care a lot about how the public views them. The obligations of the people who received the gift is for us to respect the family by wearing their name on our jerseys. Our obligations are to honor the family publicly for their gift to the team. This gift would probably be balanced reciprocity due to the team receiving uniforms, and the family having their status