About a hundred years ago, a French social scientist who had lost several close colleagues to the first world war sat down to write an essay titled “The Gift”. Marcel Mauss wanted to understand how most societies in the past had managed to avoid mass slaughter. In a preface, he honours each fallen friend in turn: “Robert Hertz was killed in the useless attack of Marcheville, April 13, 1915, at the age of 33, leading his section out of the trench.” Mauss discusses the work they would have done had they lived. And then he delivers an essay that remains so influential that some social scientists have their own favourite footnote. He decodes, among other things, this week’s Christmas gift-buying frenzy.
Mauss argues that reciprocal gift-giving is the basis for all society. It’s a visible system that still exists today, alongside the market’s “invisible hand”. It is the ritual that mostly allows us to live together in harmony.
The bulk of his essay is a bewilderingly erudite study of giving practices in what Mauss calls “archaic” societies, from native Alaskans to ancient Germanic tribes. These people gave useful objects, but also women, children, banquets — anything. Today still, a gift is magical when it contains something of the person who gives it. A piece of the giver’s soul.