The stress of reciprocal gift giving might be most apparent during the holiday season, but it's present at any exchange. And while we may try to mitigate those responsibilities and obligations with social codes of our own devising, we can't truly escape them. All gifts, no matter how small, carry with them a responsibility and an obligation. But gifts are also symbolic representations of power and relationships. Gifts are tokens of appreciation, of love and friendship, and of remediation. We might set individual rules to manage these stressors-perhaps in your family, only the children get presents, or you host a secret-gift exchange so that you only have to focus on a single individual, or you set a limit on how much can be spent per gift. Some people feel financial pressure to spend elaborately, while others may feel pressured to provide for large networks, and others may be confronted with feelings of inadequacy based on the reception of their gifts or if they are unable to reciprocate. What did you get for Christmas? And what did you give in return? Gift giving is a large part of the holiday season, but for many the exchange of presents can be a stressful exercise. This article posits that something may have also been lost: a much broader concept of giving with unquestionable links to the Durkheimian concept of solidarity, which Mauss conceptualizes not only as an obligation but also as a liberty to give.īiomedical practices Gift relationship Gift-exchange Marcel Mauss Moral sociology Solidarity Émile Durkheim.For those of you with Christmas trees, they probably look a little barren following the unwrapping of presents. Reading Mauss in translation undoubtedly inspired a seminal approach to interpreting medical and research practices based on bodily giving. The fact that these first applications of Mauss's essay should emerge in English- rather than in French-speaking countries raises the question of what the translation of the essay, and notably of the word don as gift, may have to do with this fact. Fox working with historian Judith Swazey in the United States-had the idea of using this concept to highlight the fundamental structure of the biomedical practices they were studying, respectively, blood donation, and hemodialysis and organ transplantation.

At that time, three social scientists-political scientist Richard Titmuss in the United Kingdom and sociologist Renée C. Since the early 1970s, Marcel Mauss's Essai sur le Don (1923), translated into English as The Gift in 1954, has been a standard reference in the social science and bioethical literature on the use of human body parts and substances for medical and research purposes.

Mauss the gift