Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, 1925 [trans English 1967] - societies

of the past: group exchanges, not individual ones. Not the individual subject of the European Enlightenment. P. 3 - they exchange objects but not just objects: also services (courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts) - For it is groups, not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations; the persons represented in the contracts are moral personsclans, tribes, and families; the groups, or the chiefs as intermediaries for the groups, confront and oppose each other. Further, what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of econoic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts 3 - oloa vs tonga. Oloa: property come through the wife into the newly formed family also applied today to things obtained rom Europeans, clearly a recent extension. 7 - concern with origin and past societies that reflect our own past very similar to Durkheims something of a fetishization of the origin as almost inherently good. Hau: spiritual power of the gifted taonga. the hau wants to return to the place of its birth, to its sanctuary of frest and clan and to its owner. 9 Hau as a kind of individual see p 97, note 32, for a note on the individuality of the taonga that has to do with the taongas relationship with its owner. Taonga have names to give something is to give a part of oneself. 10 to receive something is to receive a part of someones spiritual essence. 10 the gift retains a magical and religious hold over the recipient. 10 3 obligations: to give, to receive, and to repay. Total prestation 10 The pattern of symmetrical and reciprocal rights is not difficult to understand if we realize that it is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent part of persons, and persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they were things. 11 later in legal and religious evolution 15 The poor as representatives of the gods to whom one must give in order to receive or to buy peace, keeping evil influences at bay. 14-15 Charity and alms (not the same as the system of exchange that creates bonds between people) 14-15 Alms are the result on the one hand of a moral idea about gifts and wealth and on the other of an idea about sacrifice. 15 Concern with generalizability of theories. 16 Kula trade is aristocratic conducted by chiefs. 20 All the sentiments are seen at once: the possible hatred of the partners, the vaygua being charmed from their hiding-places; men and precious objects

gathering like dogs that play and run about at the sound of a mans voice. 24 confusion of objects, values, contracts, and men. 24 Only maritime chiefs take part: exchange and travel Exchange rituals that evoke or mock everything that they are not, or everything that they are serving as substitutes for: mock attacks, fake conflict, competition, rivalry close linkage between generosity and hostility gift economy p. 31 Implicit reference to Durkheim: during this period of concentration [winter] they are in a perpetual state of effervescence. 32-33 Origin of credit is in the gift: a gift necessarily implies the notion of credit. 35 The notion of time and later repayment. Credit. 34 The gift: credit and honor the potlatch is the monster child of the gift system. 41 in these societies we see the circulation of objects side by side with the circulation of persons and rights. 45 the spirit of gift-exchange is characteristic of societies which have passed the phase of total prestation (between clan and clan, family and family) but have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market, sale proper, fixed price, and weighed and coined money. 45