The Gift - Annotated by Marcel Mauss (Paperback)

About the Book

Marcel Mauss famous "Essay on the Gift" has now returned to its original context. For the first time, this masterpiece essential reading for every student of anthorpology can be read in an updated and annotated English translation alongside the profound works that framed its first publication in the 1923 24 issue of the journal "L Annee Sociologique." Included here are Mauss memorial account of the work of colleagues lost during World War I, and Mauss scholarly reviews of influential works by his contemporaries (Boas, Frazer, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and others). Now read in the context of its co-publications, the "Essay on the Gift "reveals a complementary whole, a genre of generosity both personal and political: Mauss honor and respect for his fallen colleagues; his aspiration for modern (post-war) society s recuperation of the gift as a mode of repair; and his careful, yet critical, reading of the work of his contemporaries. It was Mauss hope that from this publication, Another seed will fall and germinate. Indeed, there is probably no other work in the history of anthropology that has germinated so great an intellectual flowering. This new translation by anthropologist Jane Guyer, with a critical foreword by anthropologists Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, is certain to become the standard English reference for Marcel Mauss greatest essay setting the scence for a whole new generation of readers to study the gift alongside the erudition, political commitment, and generous collegial exchange that first nourished it into life and growth.

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Book Synopsis

Scan down a list of essential works in any introduction to anthropology course and you are likely to see Marcel Mauss' masterpiece, The Gift. With this new translation, Mauss' classic essay is returned to its original context, published alongside the works that framed its first publication in the 1923-24 issue of L'Année Sociologique. With a critical foreword by Bill Maurer and a new introduction by translator Jane Guyer, this expanded edition is certain to become the standard English version of the essay--a gift that keeps on giving.

Included alongside the "Essay on the Gift" are Mauss' memorial accounts of the work of Émile Durkheim and his colleagues who were lost during World War I, as well as his scholarly reviews of influential contemporaries such as Franz Boas, J. G. Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and others. Read in the context of these additional pieces, the "Essay on the Gift" is revealed as a complementary whole, a gesture of both personal and political generosity: Mauss' honor for his fallen colleagues; his aspiration for modern society's recuperation of the gift as a mode of repair; and his own careful, yet critical, reading of his intellectual milieu. The result sets the scene for a whole new generation of readers to study this essay alongside pieces that exhibit the erudition, political commitment, and generous collegial exchange that first nourished the essay into life.

Review Quotes

"Among the most welcome features of this third English translation of Mauss's classic is Jane Guyer's decision to re-embed the Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaiques in its original setting in the journal L'Année Sociologique as published in 1925. Her translation and discussion of some of the original framing materials (twenty pages of moving tributes to deceased colleagues before the Essai, and another twenty pages of book reviews at the end) demonstrate more effectively than the earlier English editions both the significance of the timing of this publication in the aftermath of the Great War and its centrality to the Durkheimian school. It was not possible to include all of the voluminous book reviews, and some of the excerpts are extremely brief, but, with the help of research assistants, Guyer has managed to track down the original English of most of Mauss's quotations. Unlike previous translators, she contributes a substantial introduction, in which she elaborates on the difficulties of rendering Mauss's text in English."--Chris Hann "Journal of the Royal American Institute"

"When is ethnographic theory? At a time at which so much of our theoretical development involves rethinking our disciplinary past, our answer might involve a kind of museum archaeology. Just as the archaeologist understands a museum object as the duration of an idea, so too anthropological knowledge can be conceived as a form of revisitation: a mediated, political and transformative return (Hicks 2016). In 1972, Marshall Sahlins wrote that Mauss's Essay 'remains a source of an unending ponderation for the anthropologist du metier, compelled as if by the hau of the thing to come back to it again and again' (Sahlins 1972: 149). Today, we might use Mauss's account of archaism to reimagine residuality and reciprocity. Mauss and Guyer show us that the translator is always both donor and recipient. There is a force, just like the force in the gift, in anthropological knowledge. The return of ethnographic theory brings new obligations to our disciplinary past, through the fulfilment of which that past and our present become less stable than we might imagine."

--Dan Hicks "Anthropology Today"

"Guyer's decision to produce a new translation arose from a conviction that this contextualization--particularly the memorial and select reviews from Mauss--is critical for understanding The Gift itself.

Mauss, Guyer argues, was writing out of an urgent need to find inspiration from other parts of the world, that Europeans might learn "to confront one another without massacring each other" (2016: 197). The new translation thus importantly changes the emphasis within the text. What was a round-the-world-ticket collection of notable instances of exchange--the accuracy and veracity of which have already been endlessly debated--emerges as a passionate political treatise written at a poignant moment in European history."

--Zoë Goodman "Focalblog"

About the Author

Marcel Mauss (1870-1950) was a French sociologist and founding figure of twentieth-century anthropology. Jane I. Guyer is the George Armstrong Kelly Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.