Levi-Srauss doubts Mauss’ spiritualization of the gift that Mauss draws from the Maori concept of “hau,” the power that is communicated in, with, and under the gift. Rather, hau is “the conscious form whereby men of a given society . . . apprehended an unconscious necessity whose explanation lies elsewhere.” There are, as Paul Ricoeur summarizes, “rules of symbolic thought” underlying and expressed by, but also concealed by, the notion of hau. But Levi-Strauss misses a key point by reducing... Read more

Thanks to NSA librarian Ed Iverson for providing references to Mark Twain’s “Letters from Earth,” where he assaults Christianity, and in several places mocks Christian gratitude to God. For instance: “Just so with diseases. If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years... Read more

Andrew Galloway traces the development of explicit discussions of gratitude in a 1994 article from the Journal of the History of Ideas. A few highlights: 1) Though he admits that gratitude was not “‘invented’ at some moment in human culture,” and that it was “the basis for social and religious ties in much of the ‘gift economy’ of the early Middle Ages.” Yet, “gratitude only slowly emerges as an explicit concern. By the late fourteenth century . . . it... Read more

1) Methodologically, Mauss is particularly interested in investigating what he calls the “total social fact,” a social reality that gives expression to all sorts of institutions simultaneously. Gift-exchange events such as the potlatch are “religious, juridical, and moral” and “relate to both politics and the family”; they are “economic” events having to do with “production and consumption, or rather, of performing total services of distribution.” There is even an “aesthetic” dimension to gift-giving (p. 3). He claims that these total... Read more