Abstract
Marcel Mauss’s influential work on gifting outlines a system of exchange, of giving and taking, which depends upon a strong notion of human selfhood.1 Mauss’s gifting is concerned both with what traffics between people (human and nonhuman animals, objects, souls and identities) and the structure of this trafficking (its largely implicit social norms). Mauss argues that gifting is a way of forming and maintaining community identity, and through this process, individual identity. The system of gifting, and the relationship between ‘self and ‘nonself, is understood as a closed economy in which gifts are given and received — calculated in a complex system of exchange predicated on a paradox: gifting requires that ‘exchangers’ be individuated selves capable of giving ‘freely’; at the same time, individual autonomy is necessarily compromised through the obligatory structure of giving.
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Notes
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© 2009 Myra J. Hird
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Hird, M.J. (2009). Microontologies of Self. In: The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230242210_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230242210_4
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