The Gift (Mauss)

According to Marcel Mauss, the gift is free and obligatory at once. Whoever gives binds the other; whoever accepts owes a return. The gift is thus neither a purchase nor a present without consequences, but a bond between people – and one of the oldest forms in which community takes shape.

This entry deals with Mauss’s analysis of the gift and what it means for altruism, not with his work as a whole.

About the person. Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), French sociologist and ethnologist, nephew and pupil of Émile Durkheim. His Essai sur le don (“The Gift”) appeared in 1925 and is among the most cited texts in the social sciences.

Translator’s note: Where the German original quotes Mauss from the German edition (Suhrkamp 1990), the quotation stays in German and is followed by our own English rendering, marked “our translation”; it is not taken from any published English edition. Terms from the French original (Essai sur le don) remain in French.

What is the gift according to Marcel Mauss?

Mauss examined reports on societies in Polynesia, Melanesia, the Andaman Islands and the Northwest Coast of America, together with old Roman, Indian, Germanic and Celtic law. Everywhere he found the same pattern: services that look like presents are in truth binding – „der Theorie nach freiwillig, in Wirklichkeit verpflichtend gegeben und erwidert“ [our translation: “in theory voluntary, in reality given and returned under obligation”].

Mauss calls such forms of exchange total prestations (prestations totales): they are economic, legal, religious and festive at once. What is exchanged is not only things, but courtesies, feasts, services and marriages. The gift is therefore not a marginal phenomenon but a basic framework of living together.

Is the gift voluntary or a duty?

Both. Mauss describes three obligations:

1. To give. Whoever is rich or can host a feast must give.
2. To receive. In these societies, refusing a gift amounts to an act of hostility.
3. To reciprocate. Whoever does not give back appropriately loses standing and can fall into debt bondage.

The freedom lies in the form, the bond in the substance. Mauss’s concluding formula is that one gives librement et obligatoirement – freely and obligatorily. This obligation is a bond, not a punishment. In the societies studied, feast and fight lay close together; the gift is the means of meeting one another without harming one another – as Mauss puts it, of facing one another without massacring one another, and of giving to one another without sacrificing oneself.

What does the “spirit of the gift” mean?

Mauss draws on the Maori word hau: a gift (taonga) carries something of its giver within it, a force (mana) that strives to return to him. That is why it must be reciprocated. This interpretation is contested in ethnology: Raymond Firth, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins each read the hau differently, and Annette Weiner showed that some things have power precisely because one keeps them while giving (Sahlins 1972; Weiner 1992).

Harald Alke describes the same experience in his books from his own perspective: in the making, the spirit of the maker flows into the thing, and a gift carries the intention of the one who gives it – which is why it also binds. Where Mauss describes the bond as the cement of community, Harald Alke advises mindfulness about which bonds one accepts along with a gift.

Is the gift disinterested?

No – but it is not self-interested either. Mauss calls it „uneigennützig und verpflichtend zugleich“ [our translation: “disinterested and obligatory at once”], something in between. The potlatch on the Northwest Coast of America shows this most clearly: whoever gives away or destroys the most wins the highest rank. Mauss expressly asks whether things are really so different among us – whether wealth here, too, is not above all a means of directing others.

The gift thus lies exactly between the poles that are usually set against each other: it is neither pure altruism nor pure egoism, but both – and it is precisely this that makes it sustainable. Whoever looks for the “pure” gift without consequences is, according to Jonathan Parry, looking for a modern idea that only arose once market and gift were strictly separated (Parry 1986).

Why does a gift that cannot be returned wound?

Because it places the recipient in a debt from which they cannot escape. Mauss writes that charity still wounds the one who accepts it.

Our reading: Here lies the core of good helping. Reciprocity does not begin with the giver who needs recognition, but with the recipient who needs the possibility of giving something back – through thanks, through a contribution of their own, through passing it on to others. Help on an equal footing means recognising the other as someone who has something to give themselves. Research supports both sides: gratitude strengthens the willingness to help (Grant & Gino 2010), and the ceremonial gift can be understood as mutual public recognition (Hénaff 2019).

What has modernity lost?

Mauss writes that homo oeconomicus stands „nicht hinter uns, sondern vor uns“ [our translation: “not behind us, but before us”]: the human being has only recently become a „Rechenmaschine“ [our translation: “calculating machine”], and fortunately we are not quite there yet. He wanted us to remain more than mere financiers, even as we become better accountants.

On this reading, what has been lost is not some harmony – there was none in the societies studied. What has been lost is the moral character of exchange: that things bind people to one another instead of merely supplying them. This is how the ethnologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard puts it in his introduction to Mauss: there, the exchange of goods was not a mechanical but a moral act that created and maintained personal relationships. The novels of Harald Alke (written under the name Rik van Leeven) tell the same story: peaceful societies know the right of hospitality – and the duties it places on the guest.

Who guarantees reciprocity?

Here we set Mauss and ourselves side by side, without smoothing over the contrast.

• Mauss: He welcomed social insurance as a modern form of the gift: society owes something to those who have worked all their lives, and the state should stand surety for it. He rejected communism just as he rejected mere selfishness; he sought a middle way, carried by cooperatives and mutual-aid funds. Markets were to remain.
• Our reading: A sustainable economy is built on individuals – on many units, many paths, many prices, in which errors remain small and local. A mass economy that attains its size only through regulation escapes the free market. A single body then decides on knowledge that is dispersed among countless people – the knowledge problem described by Friedrich August von Hayek (Hayek 1945). The result becomes more expensive, and the costs fall first on those who have least.
• Where we agree: on voluntary communities of a manageable size – the cooperative and the mutual-aid fund fit an economy of individuals.
• Where we part ways: on the state as guarantor. Care that arrives unasked and allows no return turns the recipient, by Mauss’s own finding, into someone under supervision. The standpoint The space in which the soul breathes explores this structure.

Our view of consumption belongs here too: unbridled mass consumption is a consequence of poor living conditions. Whoever does not lead a fulfilled life tries to fill the gap with consumption. Economies that exploit this are regulated ones, not individualistic ones; where people can develop freely, the problem of consumption is far less widespread. Mauss himself took a friendlier view of the gift-giving of his day: he was glad that not everything is yet absorbed into buying and selling.

What does research say today?

• Reciprocity is a norm. In 1960 the sociologist Alvin Gouldner described it as a rule found in almost all moral codes (Gouldner 1960).
• The gift is at work in working life too. George Akerlof interpreted employment contracts as partial gift exchange: a wage above what is necessary is returned with greater effort (Akerlof 1982). Experiments confirmed this in the laboratory (Fehr, Kirchsteiger & Riedl 1993); in the field the effects are weaker and often short-lived.
• Gifts that are too large are refused. In comparative experiments in 15 small-scale societies, participants in some groups turned down even very generous offers – just as Mauss would lead one to expect: a gift that cannot be returned binds too strongly (Henrich et al. 2005).
• The pure gift is a modern idea. Parry (1986) and others show that the idea of a completely selfless present arose only with the separation of market and morality.

What did Tobias O. R. Alke write about this in 2017?

In Ausgewählte Perspektiven des Altruismus (Selected Perspectives on Altruism, 2017), Mauss is one of the ten central perspectives. There, Tobias O. R. Alke emphasised that Mauss not only calls for wholeness but also argues holistically, that he breaks with the rejection of reciprocity in the context of charity, and that the individual contributes to the community in an “individualistic-solidaristic” way.

Checking against the French original shows that these core points hold – some even better than in 2017, above all reciprocity, which Mauss grounds from the side of the recipient. Three readings from 2017, by contrast, do not hold: the circulation of goods in those societies was not “without coercion” (ohne Zwang) but obligatory; “coercion” (Zwang) and “social lie” (soziale Lüge) describe, in Mauss, the gift itself, not a modern “gift mania” (Geschenkewahn); and Mauss is no witness for the thesis that the modern economy needs collectivism. Collectivism remains the author’s term for the mass economy entangled with the state. The new edition notes this.

What does this mean in practice?

• Allow a return. Whoever helps leaves the other room to give something back – even something small. This protects their dignity.
• Accept thanks. Thanks are not payment but part of the gift; whoever wards them off refuses the return.
• Pass it on rather than keep score. Reciprocity need not flow back to the giver; it can travel on to others (see reciprocity).
• Mind the bond. A gift binds. Consider which bond you enter into with a large present – and which you place on others.
• Celebrate. Mauss expressly recommended the joy of public giving, of hospitality and of the feast – places where community arises.

Related terms

Reciprocity · Solidarity through the division of labour (Durkheim) · Altruism · Egoism · Collectivism & individualism · Community that strengthens us · Loving-kindness & altruism · The prosocial nature of the human being

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By Tobias O. R. Alke