The Gift
Book description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Gift as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This is a very short book with a single brilliant insight into the human condition.
It shows how wrong it is to suppose (as Marx and Engels did) that first there were self-sufficient nuclear families who then produced surpluses to exchange with other nuclear families.
Mauss used early fieldwork in the South Pacific and Northwest Coast of Canada, to demonstrate that exchange is the very essence of human social life, inseparable from the incest taboo, marriage rules, and a fully realized highly elaborate symbolic universe based upon principles of animism, sympathetic magic and rites of passage.
From Gillian's list on anthropology to understand women's myths and rites.
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