Marcel Mauss The Gift Analysis

Marcel Mauss’s essay titled “The Gift” published in 1925, focused on the way exchange of objects between groups, builds relationships between them. He argued that giving an object creates an inherent obligation on the receiver to reciprocate the gift, thus resulting in a series of exchanges between groups, therefore providing us with one of the earliest forms of social solidarity used by humans. Mauss describes Melanesian and Polynesian peoples, gift economy as one of material and moral life, it is exemplified in gift exchange, the functions there in a manner at once interested and obligatory. Furthermore, the obligation is expressed in myth, symbolically and collectively. Mauss finds within gift exchange an analytical idea that is, uniquely ethnographic. Those peoples who were exchanging gifts also understood obligations to be that of an abstract ideal, one that could be …show more content…
Where purposes reigns, there reigns also more or less wide contingency, for there are no ends, and even fewer means, which necessarily control all men; he furthers this point by stating even when it can be assumed that they are placed in the same circumstances, within the same environment, each individual adapts himself to it according to his own disposition and in his own way, which he prefers to all other ways (57) on the other hand, Durkheim points out when one comes in contact with what he coins ‘social phenomena’, one is surprised with the similarities spread across each society that occur under the same circumstances, for instance; he states, A certain nuptial ceremony. Purely symbolic in appearance, such as the carrying off of the betrothed, is found to be exactly the same wherever a certain family type exists and again this family type is linked to a whole social organization