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JACQUES T GODBOUT in collaboration with ALAIN CAILLE, The World of the Gift. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998, viii + 250 p., $29.95 cloth. Donald Winkler trans.
The thrust of The World of the Gift is compelling: continue the Mauss project (The Gift, 1925) and explore the place and meaning of the gift in the modern world. In 14 chapters the authors reaffirm the functionalist position that the "gift is nothing less than the embodiment of the system of interpersonal social relations" (18). The World of the Gift is more of a social-philosophical work than a sociological or anthropological study.
In Part One, "The Sites of the Gift," we learn that there are three spheres of society, namely the mercantile, political and primary relationships (familial). The place of the modern gift, however, is among strangers, a fourth sphere (64). Donorship of blood and that of organs typify the modern gift: the state is the intermediary-neither the giver nor the receiver necessarily know each other-and the gift is not reciprocated equally, if at all.
Part Two, "From the Archaic to the Modern Gift," traces how archaic societies place strict limits on structured relationships with strangers in order to maintain their collective autonomy, where the gift is a "concrete operant for concrete relationships between people" (143). In contrast, modern society is one of ruptured relations, where utilitarianism has taken away meaning from social relations; it is also the place where the "modern gift creates networks that are sheltered from this pervasive alienation by objects, that give things back their meaning. . ." (148).
In Part Three, "The Strange Loop of the Gift," maintains that the gift is a counterpoint to the equality, competition and rivalry as embodied in the state and the economic system (194). "We can exit the market, and we do so daily, every time we introduce a [social] bonding value into the circulation of objects . . ." (e.g., an applause, etc.) (195). The gift is a "boomerang"-it traces a circle (196). However, the gift interrupts the circle of economic exchange (because it has no utilitarian,...