Abstract

We are still celebrating the one hundred years that have passed since the publication of Marcel Mauss’s most important scholarly intervention, his essay The Gift. We celebrate the timelessness of this text, which has everywhere inspired further ethnographical and anthropological work on the hau, on the potlatch, on the Melanesian barter economy, on the concept of money, on sharing, and much more. The shadow of this text grows ever longer—an unending sunset and, simultaneously, sunrise. It is the classic work of a scholar’s scholar; it remains “Anthropology 101,” both for the uninitiated and for the initiated; it is a text full of nooks and dark corners that still await interrogation. Mauss never published a book during his lifetime—even the ambitious and systematically structured manuscript that he conceived concurrently with The Gift appeared only posthumously under the provisional title The Nation, or the Sense for the Social.1 Not least because it remained unpublished, this manuscript seems today to be above all a commentary on his major work, The Gift.