A review by nickrs
The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss

The “moral conclusions” that Mauss arrived at when projecting the “total services”/gift logics found in ethnographies of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Pacific Northwest societies (and in archaic law codes) back onto mid-twentieth-century France were distinctly centrist (“the individual must work,” he declares, comparing the impacts of communism to the message of a “malevolent genie” in the same breath). Against the cold calculations of utilitarians and the wildest excesses of ethnographer’s images of potlatch, he dreams of moderation, balance, civility, the Arthurian round table. But there are other openings here, ones which do more to unsettle what are still taken to be a priori bases of any economy, and which let us think of value differently.