The world of the gift /

Godbout and Caille explore the gift in the tradition of Marcel Mauss's The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1954). They carefully reassess the nature and role of gift giving in archaic societies and see it at the heart of such societies, binding humans together and to all other "objects" in their environment. This process creates a never-ending ascending spiral involving obligation, reciprocity, spontaneity, inequality, and even "properties of undecidedness." They also take pains to locate the place of the gift in modern societies. Members of these societies are largely blind to the phenomenon of the gift because of their incessant exposure to modern utilitarian ideologies, their involvement in depersonalized mercantile relationships, and their positions at the receiving end of orders issued by bureaucratically organized states. Yet these same moderns pursue gift giving in the archaic sense in their personal lives as family members, friends, neighbors and in any other activity involving a genuine impulse to love. Most of the research derives from French sources, but all translations appear first-rate. A most provocative and engaging book, firmly grounded in the work of Mauss and the later Durkheim. Upper-division undergraduates and above. W. P. Nye; Hollins University