Turning commodities into presents

Abstract

Mauss’s intention in writing The Gift was to refute the strong ideological opposition between gifts and market contracts which would have the one free, generous and social, the other obligatory, self-interested and individualistic. The ease and frequency with which purchased commodities in Western societies are converted into presents supports his view that the two forms overlap and are permeable, each combining freedom and obligation, individual personality and social constraint. Mass-produced commodities are used to build up the material culture of a private domestic universe in a social process of appropriation. Presents are compared here with inherited objects, purchased items and immaterial donations such as money, gift vouchers and wedding list subscriptions. In light of this comparison of ethnographic observations made in France and Britain, the distinction between gifts and commodities seems to blur and the boundary between them is easily crossed.

The Material Cultures of the Iranian Home: Cultural Reading

“…This means that the public and private realms cannot be strictly separated, but rather interact concretely via things that enter and circulate within their subject worlds in order to secure its development and reproduction. At the same time, something more abstract is going on: social structure and organization belonging to the public realm insert themselves and are reinterpreted in the private realm in the form of the material cultures of the home (Chevalier, 1999(Chevalier, , 2014Cieraad, 2006). Individuals translate their public or collective experience into an inner arrangement of objects.…”

The politics of value revisited: commodities, assets, and the gifts of nature

“…Drawing on analogies from Maori culture, according to which the spiritual energy of the hau draws the receiver of a gift to return something to the giver on equal terms, the exchange of gifts in any culture is always tied to an obligation, Mauss concluded: the obligation of reciprocating the gift. In this light, Mauss was eager to demonstrate the enduring importance of gift exchange in modern market society, while at the same time refuting what he saw as a merely ideological opposition between gift exchange and formal market contracts (also see Chevalier 2014, Hart 2014.…”

Human life as drama: A Maussian insight

“…The theme of social drama is sustained throughout Mauss’s famous essay on The Gift (1990 [1925]), where it brings to life embodied, staged, and artistically elaborate exchanges such as the potlatch in vivid ways. I do not need to emphasize for present readers how extraordinarily fertile this work is; it is not simply a sketch of how people managed in those traditional days before the invention of money and the emergence of ‘the economy’ as a thing in itself (see articles in this issue: Chevalier, 2014; Graeber, 2014; Hart, 2014; Hyland, 2014).…”