Marcel Mauss (1870-1950) was a French sociologist and founding figure of twentieth-century anthropology. Jane I. Guyer is the George Armstrong Kelly Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch are both emeritus professors of anthropology at the London School of Economics.
"Among the most welcome features of this third English translation
of Mauss's classic is Jane Guyer's decision to re-embed the Essai
sur le don: forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés
archaiques in its original setting in the journal L'Année
Sociologique as published in 1925. Her translation and discussion
of some of the original framing materials (twenty pages of moving
tributes to deceased colleagues before the Essai, and another
twenty pages of book reviews at the end) demonstrate more
effectively than the earlier English editions both the significance
of the timing of this publication in the aftermath of the Great War
and its centrality to the Durkheimian school. It was not possible
to include all of the voluminous book reviews, and some of the
excerpts are extremely brief, but, with the help of research
assistants, Guyer has managed to track down the original English of
most of Mauss's quotations. Unlike previous translators, she
contributes a substantial introduction, in which she elaborates on
the difficulties of rendering Mauss's text in English."--Chris Hann
"Journal of the Royal American Institute"
"When is ethnographic theory? At a time at which so much of our
theoretical development involves rethinking our disciplinary past,
our answer might involve a kind of museum archaeology. Just as the
archaeologist understands a museum object as the duration of an
idea, so too anthropological knowledge can be conceived as a form
of revisitation: a mediated, political and transformative return
(Hicks 2016). In 1972, Marshall Sahlins wrote that Mauss's Essay
'remains a source of an unending ponderation for the anthropologist
du metier, compelled as if by the hau of the thing to come back to
it again and again' (Sahlins 1972: 149). Today, we might use
Mauss's account of archaism to reimagine residuality and
reciprocity. Mauss and Guyer show us that the translator is always
both donor and recipient. There is a force, just like the force in
the gift, in anthropological knowledge. The return of ethnographic
theory brings new obligations to our disciplinary past, through the
fulfilment of which that past and our present become less stable
than we might imagine."--Dan Hicks "Anthropology Today"
"Guyer's decision to produce a new translation arose from a
conviction that this contextualization--particularly the memorial
and select reviews from Mauss--is critical for understanding The
Gift itself.Mauss, Guyer argues, was writing out of an urgent need
to find inspiration from other parts of the world, that Europeans
might learn "to confront one another without massacring each other"
(2016: 197). The new translation thus importantly changes the
emphasis within the text. What was a round-the-world-ticket
collection of notable instances of exchange--the accuracy and
veracity of which have already been endlessly debated--emerges as a
passionate political treatise written at a poignant moment in
European history."--Zoë Goodman "Focalblog"
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