Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and anthropologist, the nephew and close collaborator of Emile Durkheim, whose own work extended Durkheimian sociology into the comparative study of specific social institutions. His most influential work, The Gift (1925), analyzed gift exchange in societies across the Pacific, North America, and antiquity, arguing that apparently voluntary and disinterested gifts are in fact bound up with obligations to give, to receive, and to reciprocate, and that such exchange systems bind together the economic, legal, moral, and religious dimensions of social life as a single total social fact. Mauss's analysis of reciprocity and exchange profoundly influenced later structuralist anthropology, including the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss.