Gifts constitute a critical social role in every culture. Though gifts exist throughout the world, the function, definition, and significance of gift-giving can be radically distinct from culture to culture—even contradictory—such that what we call ‘gift’ may be unrecognizable as gift to another from a different culture. These differences make the topic all the more fascinating to study. Ever since Marcel Mauss’s compressed yet provocative anthropological study, The Gift, the notion of gift has come into focus in other disciplines, including economics, theology, biblical studies, and even phenomenology. As I have read through the literature on the topic, I have been struck by its potential to be pulled in numerous constructive directions. Below are two videos from John Milbank—one who has engaged in gift-theory in the discipline of theology—about why one should study the gift. Below those videos is a brief bibliography to get people started on the topic.
Bibliography:
- Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990 [1925]).
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (trans. Felicity Baker; London, Routledge, 1987 [1950]).
- Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine Atherton, 1972).
- Christopher A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London: Academic Press, 1982).
- Jonathan Parry, ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift, and the “Indian Gift”‘, Man 21 (1986), 453-473.
- Jacques Derrida: Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
- James G. Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700 (Material Cultures; London: Routledge, 1994).
- John Milbank, ‘Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic’, Modern Theology 11 (1995), 119-161.
- Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Trans Jeffrey L. Kosky; Cultural Memory in the Present; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
- John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 138-161.
- Kathryn Tanner, The Economy of Grace (Minneapolis: fortress, 2005).
- Peter J. Leithart, Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014).
- John M.G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015).
- Risto Saarinen, Luther and the Gift (Studies in the Late Middle Ages, Humanism, and the Reformation 100; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
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