Volume 47, Number 20 · December 21, 2000
Wrapping It Up
By Keith Thomas
The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France
by Natalie Zemon Davis
University of Wisconsin Press, 185 pp., $21.95 (paper)
The idea that human beings are held together by the exchange of gifts is forever associated with the name of Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), nephew of Émile Durkheim and author of Essai sur le don, forme archaïque de l'échange (1925).[1] In that brief but pregnant sketch, Mauss showed how the people of the South Seas, the Pacific Northwest, and other 'archaic' societies transferred many goods and services to each other by gift, rather than by commercial contracts. Those gifts purported to be free and voluntary, but were in fact obligatory. A strict code of reciprocity imposed a threefold obligation: to give, to receive, and to repay.
Review, 3652 words
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