Mauss and Smith

In an essay on Mauss’ The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies in Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory , Mary Douglas makes an intriguing comparison between Mauss and Adam Smith: Mauss “discovered a mechanism by which individual interests combine to make a social system, without engaging in market exchange. This is an enormous development beyond Durkheim’s ideas of solidarity based on collective representations. The gift cycle echoes Adam Smith’s invisible hand: gift complements market in so far as it operates where the latter is absent. Like the market it supplies each individual with personal incentives for collaborating in the pattern of exchanges. Gifts are given in a context of public drama, with nothing secret about them. In being more directly cued to public esteem, the distribution of honour and the sanctions of religion, the gift economy is more visible than market. Just by being visible, the resultant distribution of goods and services is more readily subject to public scrutiny and judgements of fairness than are the results of market exchange. In operating a gift system a people are more aware of what they are doing, as shown by the sacralization of their institutions of giving. Mauss’s fertile idea was to present the gift cycle as a theoretical counterpart to the invisible hand.”

Douglas thinks that this has significant implications for anthropological theory: “When anthropologists search around for a telling distinction between societies based on primitive and modern technologies, they try out various terms such as pre-literate, simple, traditional. Each has limitations that unfit it for general use. But increasingly we are finding that the idea of the gift economy comprises all the associations, symbolic and interpersonal and economic, that we need for comparing with market economy.”