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The chapter examines and challenges the assumed necessity of a linkage between remembered series of exchanges, amicable social relations, and prestige found in the work of Marcel Mauss and many subsequent theorists of reciprocity and gift exchange.

The chapter uses the nearly 500 year history of the giving and taking of the Koh-i-noor Diamond by rulers of South and Central Asia, commencing with Babur, the first Mughal emperor, and ending with Queen Victoria, which includes some gift giving and much taking by force, to explore what happens when only two of the three elements Mauss assumed central to understanding gift exchange are present.

Based on a review of the historical material, the chapter demonstrates that though historical narratives or memories of exchanges were central to enhancing the prestige of the parties to the exchange and the diamond itself, that process could and did occur in the absence of any on-going amicable social relations, including in situations in which exchange or transfer of the diamond were coerced and nothing was given in return to the dispossessed former owner of the gem.

By suggesting an alternative configuration of the factors necessary for the association of exchange and prestige, the chapter provides the opportunity to reconsider assumptions common in the literature on gift exchange and further enhance our understanding of this central element of social theory.

This paper aims to analyze corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices from the epistemological position advocated by the MAUSS. The latter, beyond paying tribute to Marcel Mauss, refers to the project of combating all utilitarian and economistic reductionism.

This paper discusses the question of the definition of CSR practices by basing the analysis on the definition proposed by Etogo, which considers CSR practices as all forms of key-giving transactions, material or immaterial, which update the primary and secondary links between the company and its human and non-human environment.

The sociology of CSR practices is seeking the notion of gift in companies which are places of profit and utilitarian calculus. This research emphasizes that the triple duty of giving-receiving-returning structures CSR practices. The approach extends the perspective of Godbout’s gift, which recalls how Homo donator, along with Crozier and Friedberg’s Homo strategus, is at the center of CSR practices.

The proposed approach comes up against a particular limit. Despite its sociological fruitfulness, the gift paradigm is not immediately operational from a managerial point of view.

This reflection suggests to consider that CSR practices participate in a form of reconfiguration of the efficiency of the company insofar as they call into question the partial analysis of the efficiency of the company for the benefit of the shareholders. For CSR practices to be effective, managers must understand the interdependence between society and business: the well-being of society and business development cannot be opposed. Managers therefore need to integrate CSR practices into the company's strategy.

This reflection can have interesting implications in terms of building citizen identity. Specifically, it is a question of rebalancing the link between social and economic logics, by legitimizing the social utility of companies as well as their involvement in the organization and functioning of the city.

This note seeks to emphasize the fecundity of the epistemological position advocated by the MAUSS to reconstruct the role of CSR practices by adopting a balanced approach.

This essay uses Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and Mauss’s description of the hau as the spirit that connects the giver to the gift to examine notions of production, value, and collectivity in the Santa Fe silver mining Cooperative in Guanajuato, Mexico. This case allows us to look at how fetishism on the one hand, and “hauism” on the other, can work together to form a hybrid form of value wherein silver participates in both commodified and giftlike processes. More broadly, it helps us to examine the relationship between the production of value and the production and legitimation of social groups.

Current theoretical frameworks within economics have so far been unable to adequately explain why people tip. This chapter synthesizes anthropological method and theory into a symbolic interactionist approach, attempting to access, through ethnography, the negotiated meanings underlying and actuating tip payment in Vancouver restaurants. Customers tip for a variety of reasons, including (1) for good service, (2) to follow a social norm, (3) out of sympathetic feelings, (4) to demonstrate or enhance social standing, and (5) to secure a specific preference. The disconnect between common rationalizations for tipping, which are often reflections of formalist economic canon, and how customers actually tip, that is, according to social, cultural, and moral factors, suggests that the popular distinction between “economic” and “non-economic” exchanges is ideologically maintained. Tipping illustrates the existence and contours of what Hart (2005) refers to as the two circuits of social life – but also that these two circuits are ideological constructs.

This study contends that the various forms of archaic trade that anthropologists have reconstructed on the Northwest Coast of America are explanatory of plot-construction and characterization in Conrad's South-American novel. My thesis is that Nostromo is a figure defined by the practice of potlatch, and that his key presence in the plot entails the representation of a culturally dislocating transition from archaic transactions to modern commerce. The theoretical framework of this chapter hinges on the insights of Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Polanyi, and Georges Bataille.