In the service of hau 'the spirit of the gift', this paper traces the exchange of ideas between people and cultures that led to Māori concepts of reciprocity being enshrined by Marcel Mauss (1923-24; 1950) in his seminal work, The Gift, and debated ever since. Most importantly, it identifies an error of transcription and translation that has considerable impact for understandings of the teachings of Tāmati Ranapiri as received by Elsdon Best and utilised by Mauss. By correcting this error we get closer to the meaning of Tāmati Ranapiri's writing and can demonstrate that Mauss's (1923-24; 1950; [1954] 1967; 1990) intuitive explication of the meaning and significance of hau was not an inappropriate conflation of French spirituality with Māori metaphysics. This paper emerges from the author's doctoral work, "The Changing Images of Nineteenth Century Māori Society-From Tribes to Nation", completed in 2003 at Victoria University, Wellington. Tikanga hau, the spirit of gift exchange or the ethic of generosity and its associated values, including mana (understood as 'status, prestige and credibility'), is identified in this study as a principal motivation of Māori leaders or rangatira from ancestral times until today.A focus on the metaphysics of things, in particular the politics and economics of reciprocity in early to mid-19th-century Māori society and the layers of meaning in gift exchange, is instructive for understanding and interpreting the ethic of generosity as practiced by 19th-century Māori leaders and their people. In anthropology, exchange theory and gift exchange are often presented in the form of the following propositions: that exchange is a fundamental social system; that gift exchange is a system prior to capitalism; that a gift economy is animated by the spirit of the gift (hau); that the spirit of the gift creates an indissoluble bond between persons engaged in the exchange; and that Anglo-Western societies were responsible for the separation of persons and things (