Review by Choice Review
Marcel Mauss's classic 1925 work The Gift (Essai sur le don) appeared in English in 1954, and again in 1990. Guyer's new translation amplifies the text and places it in historical, cultural, and personal context. She has restored the notes to their original place at page bottoms, and accomplished the complex task of locating and inserting the original texts of English sources that Mauss put into French, and that previous translators put back into English without reference to the originals. The context of Mauss's work included traumatic effects of the Great War and the objective of Mauss and his colleagues to revitalize Durkheimian sociology and its journal, L'année sociologique, in which the Essai first appeared. Guyer (emer., anthropology, Johns Hopkins Univ.) also includes writings that belong with or are relevant to the Essai but had not been previously translated: Mauss's memorial to Durkheim and to colleagues who died in the Great War, and deeply interesting selections from Mauss's English-language reviews of subsequent classics, including works by Radcliffe-Brown, Boas, Radin, Frazer, and Elsie Clews Parsons. Guyer has also explicated the subtleties of Mauss's French. The importance of this book cannot be overstated. For every academic library. Summing Up: Essential. All academic levels/libraries. --Riva Berleant-Schiller, University of Connecticut
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review