1Everyone knows—or thinks they know—what a gift is, because everyone has at one time given or received something. This is therefore common knowledge, yet it is difficult to formulate and one only has to try and define a gift to realize this. For the uninvolved observer, it is the act of one person transferring an object to another person through a gesture. Yet for the individual giving or receiving, things are far from that simple. The gesture of the giver must be more or less discreet, or on the contrary, must be ostentatious; in its value or its quality the object being transferred reflects the greater or lesser interest of the giver for the receiver. In theory, the latter was not expecting this object; they had no particular right to it, otherwise it would not be a gift. However, they may have coveted it or hoped for it, or even, in certain circumstances, expected it. Sometimes they may even have made it known that they desired it, but they must never have demanded it. Receiving the gift gives rise to a feeling of gratitude, more or less free or constrained, which always extends beyond simple material interest. In order to explore the psychological and sociological complexity of the gift and to adequately define it, we must bring into play the various intentions and expectations, as well as the opportunities and situations, which are in principle directly represented by the presiding gesture, and the nature and value of the object being transferred. In social life, a gift does not necessarily require an explanation, nor does it necessarily lead to an obligation. However, it does result in a relationship with the other. These characteristics, which can be observed in all societies at any moment in time, are at the heart of what Maurice Godelier called the “enigma” of the gift. [1]

2François Athané proposes to resolve this enigma, following on from many authors—mostly ethnologists and social anthropologists along with a few philosophers. He adds no case study to their work; judging the existing discourses on the gift to be sufficiently abundant, he takes a philosophical approach, applying internal criticism to a selection of them. These authors proceed indirectly and in two different ways: either they seek to define the gift by default, by comparing it to other notions such as exchange or debt, or they describe the various forms it has taken in different periods and in different societies. Only an encyclopedic study of these books and articles would enable (if it did not raise other obstacles) the verification of their common denominator: the universal self-evidence of the gift. But would such an approach reveal its reasons? Athané believes this would by no means be the case and therefore chooses a different approach. He postulates that human institutions are imprinted with a minimal amount of rationality that provides relative coherence to their normative principles. Starting from this point, and armed with the principle of the necessary unity of definition of these institutions and of these principles, he outlines the purpose of his book as “the first exhaustive characterization of the principal forms of the transfer of goods and services among humans,” [2] in which the gift takes pride of place.

3An admirable goal and one which probably only a philosopher would dare take on, but for which the necessary inventory of forms appears to lead to the same difficulty as the encyclopedic approach already mentioned. To avoid this pitfall, Athané suggests the analytic usage of the most neutral generic terms possible, preferring “transfer,” which can apply to all kinds of movement of goods, to “prestation,” which equally applies to services, and is therefore more commonly used. The historian would object that these words have not always had the “neutrality” invoked here to justify their choice, and that the terms “economy” and “economic,” which Athané uses to designate the “material conditions of human existence,” have never fulfilled this criterion. For his part, Thomas Aquinas included these “material conditions,” and that which exceeded them, under the term “wealth.” The old term “commodités,” used in studies of these same material conditions of existence which predate the French Revolution, would thus be more appropriate but its use in French has faded since the emergence of modern economic thought in the eighteenth century. [3] The definition of “economy” has radically changed over the course of history; its various meanings were inseparable from moral thought before economic thought was emancipated from it, yet even there its definition does not match the one proposed here, today anymore than it did in the past. [4]

The Gift: An Ambiguous Analysis of an Ambiguous Phenomenon

4Marcel Mauss’s essay, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies is one of those fundamental (because foundational) texts that are often quoted without critical reappraisal, despite having paved the way for countless new avenues of research—perhaps precisely because of this abundance of heirs and commentators. This lengthy article is a programmatic text, even extending beyond the program intended by the author, despite its relatively small size and essay form, which clearly do not attempt an exhaustive treatment of the question. Athané does not point out this characteristic, even though it is implied in his very approach and is precisely what justifies his radical and detailed critical analysis. The gift is presented by Mauss as a “total social phenomenon,” because it includes religious, moral, political, economic, legal, and esthetic elements. In its multiple forms, it integrates both the free gesture of generosity without any prospect of return, as well as the advantage, in terms of power, that results from the more or less obligatory gratitude on the part of the recipient. Depending on the case, it extends from the impasse of fictional generosity concealing a very real self-interest to the emergence of the institutions that enable society to function. Athané seeks to erase all the ambiguities implied, by definition, in the notion of “total social phenomenon.” His approach is to discuss, point by point, the conceptions—and preconceptions—which direct both Mauss’s program, and subsequently that of the social sciences in their entirety. In so doing, he aims to underline the inconsistencies in this famous text, but he also lessens its merits to say the least.

5The presentation of the mechanism of the gift that Mauss outlines from the beginning of his essay assimilates it to a rule of law. According to him, if there is an obligation to give a gift in return, it is not simply moral, nor purely based on gratitude, because it has another kind of force, that of an obligation as defined by the law. Those discussing this text have all found what Athané labels this “juridical” way of analyzing the gift—conditioned and reinforced by the notions of constraint and contract—to be a stumbling block. Indeed, this strange way of accounting for the gift from a legal perspective and in legal language is problematic; it almost seems to incorporate the gift into the law itself, although most of their respective characteristics do not allow for this. Athané considers the “rule of law” alongside the “rule of interest,” and the latter conditions his analysis as much as the former, even though it is much less present in the text of The Gift. Bringing these two concepts together surprisingly allows him to make the legal and the economic into a whole, and to bridge the gap between the sphere of law and that of ethics, whilst underlining the contradictory aspects of linking this ensemble and the gift.

6Let us step aside for a moment from Athané’s reading of The Gift, in order to examine how an author of Mauss’s stature could have attempted to develop such a paradoxical analysis—running the risk of creating the confusion that Athané rightly underlines. One possible explanation lies in the strange pan-juridicism manifested by the ethnologists whose work Mauss drew upon. Mauss, like most of the anthropologists of his time, was interested in societies that, in our eyes, were without law but not without obligation. The notion of obligation was omnipresent in so-called primitive or early societies, as it is in the past and present of modern societies, and this led him to use legal terms to represent it. However, obligation does not necessarily mean legal obligation, even if, in the wake of the French Revolution and the legal revolution it also—and perhaps above all—entailed, it is difficult to imagine that a society could base economic exchange or the social relations by which it is daily renewed on any other type of obligation than that defined by the law. In academic circles, this confusion has been propagated by the development of legal anthropology, which is more often the domain of legal scholars than ethnologists. However, certain philosophers, jurists, and legal historians have long insisted on the need for an “intervention of the disinterested third,” to use Alexandre Kojève’s expression, [5] so that the existence of a right may be proved in society; an intervention which in principle excludes the gift. [6]

7However, Mauss may have had another reason for grounding the gift in law. According to him, without it the primary human condition is the state of all-out war, without regulation of the use of force, and thus a source of perpetual misery. Could this idea—similar to the one governing Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy, which had more influence among the Durkheimians than was long believed [7]—simply be a way of placing emphasis on the role of the gift, as the social operator that enables peace? This is what Athané believes. According to him, for Mauss violence occurs only if one of the parties fails to respect their obligations by not providing the services they were committed to give to the other party. Marshall Sahlins analyses Mauss in much the same way, as substituting the gift for war as the basis of a stable society. [8] But Athané adds that, in light of the militant political texts Mauss wrote in the wake of the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, [9] The Gift reveals the author’s ambition to provide the anthropological foundations of (very noble) political and diplomatic principles which could then only be defined in terms of international law. This gift of peace reflects the gift in its most simple form. The gift may take another form, however, which fosters competition and rivalry through the interplay of obligations and services, thus feeding aggression that may even lead to war. This agonistic gift, of which the potlatch is the most famous example, contains the seed of the very things the simple gift tends to reduce. We are therefore back to the irreducible ambiguity of the gift, underlined by François Athané’s close critique.

The Social Sciences Face the Question: What is a Gift?

8René Maunier’s important article on exchange rituals in Kabylia critically paved the way for the ethnological and anthropological study of the gift. [10] Unlike Mauss, Maunier did not aim to reduce the ambiguity of the gift but rather to understand it. From this perspective his study is a very important first step in the posterity of The Gift: Mauss’s generalizations become working hypotheses, tested against ethnographical fieldwork for the first time. Maunier thus set out to verify that the gift did in fact precede barter, that its free nature was fictitious, and that it was indeed a factor of social peace, favoring alliances between groups, but at the price of what Mauss called “social deception.” In Kabyle society, the exchange ritual is based on a tacit pact of non-explanation: its language is purely ceremonial. It is a clear and transparent fiction well known to all, a fiction that regulates exchange and remains necessarily unavowed. For Maunier, there is indeed an operation that we would qualify as credit in the gifts made during these rites, with an expectation of increased reimbursement. He refuses, however, to reduce these ritual practices to the simple economic functions that they hold. On the contrary, he insists on the coherence of the various aspects—economic, esthetic, and religious—of these gifts, of what therefore remains a total social fact.

9Comparing the Kabyle celebration of the tawsa, described by Maunier, with the potlatch, [11] Athané draws attention to the fact that they function in opposite ways, but also to everything that clearly separates the gift from the contract. In the position of the beneficiary, the inviter and initiator of the tawsa is the person who decides on which date they will receive the gifts of their guests. The latter, as donors, are not in control of the timeline of the event; it is imposed on them. This configuration is precisely the opposite of the potlatch, where the person who organizes the celebration is the donor; they will provide their guests with gifts and therefore they decide the date of the ceremony. Depending on the case, either the beneficiary or the donor has the advantage of choosing the moment that is the most favorable to them. This is the fundamental difference between the gift and the contract, which are both sources of reciprocal obligation to exchange. The contract is founded on mutual control of the timeline, with an agreement about the time of the exchange and the dates of transfers in the opposite direction. For the gift, on the other hand, only one party has control over the moment of the exchange and not the other. This control should not be exaggerated, however: the dates of the celebrations depend on elements that are specific to the host (such as birth) or the community (such as the end of the harvest). Seeking prestige by redistributing wealth runs counter to individual interest taken in its narrowest sense; simple egotistical economic calculation is thus subverted, to the benefit of the group. Athané links the alienation of an object with alienation, in the sense that the individual does not fully know what they are doing: “altogether present in the present of the celebration, the donor makes a present of part of his wealth.” [12]

10Among the chapters dissecting the works of the different authors who have dealt with the gift, the chapter discussing Claude Lévi-Strauss is disappointing. Firstly, because it does not give due importance to something that it acknowledges in passing: the only text taken into account—Lévi-Strauss’s forty-three page introduction to a volume republishing a collection of Mauss’s work, including The Gift—is the text that has most contributed to the interest in Mauss’s work and the question of the gift in France, both in the social sciences and philosophy. [13] The continuity between the two works was quickly recognized. [14] Secondly, the disappointment stems from the fact that Athané does not underline the critical aspect of this continuity. The commentary on Lévi-Strauss is in fact only dealt with from the perspective of Claude Lefort’s analysis—this much is clear from the title of the chapter, which is overly short in comparison with those devoted to other commentators of The Gift. As a result, certain things are neglected, such as the opening of Chapter 5 of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, dedicated to the “principle of reciprocity,” [15] which clearly shows that The Gift was a source of inspiration for the entire book. Consequently, in spite of the handful of mentions of marriage made in reference to Maunier’s book, Athané completely neglects the exchange of women that Lévi-Strauss links precisely to the notion of the gift as Mauss understood it. [16]

11For Lévi-Strauss, the “admirable” Gift is an attempt to understand social life as a system of relations, made up of cycles of reciprocity. [17] Its only failings are its hesitations, which occasionally lead to certain errors; for example in failing to see that exchange is primary and does not result from the “three obligations: giving, receiving, returning” which characterize the gift in Mauss’s words but which are, in fact, only its most elementary forms. [18] Henceforth the problem lies in explaining the reasons for the primacy of exchange. For Lévi-Strauss, it is the result of man’s spontaneously exchange-oriented nature. This supposes the existence of unconscious mental structures that lead individuals to exchange. The model used is that of structural linguistics. Athané contests its relevance for social relations and refuses the idea of the exchange-based nature of man. He thus does not follow Lévi-Strauss either, when, in distinguishing what Émile Durkheim called “the thing” from its representation as social fact, he claims to be able to identify subjective experiences beyond objectively established realities. In his work, Athané brings this representation back to the “norm” which alone combines the three operations of the gift according to Mauss.

12For Lefort, Lévi-Strauss failed to perceive the phenomenological nature of Mauss’s thought and as a result presents the gift as an operation occurring without the actors’ knowledge, instead of as free acts through which individuals acquire their own subjectivity whilst establishing a relationship with the other. [19] The propensity to exchange is therefore not innate; it is born of intention, even calculation, in the uncertainty of its relevance and the risks that this uncertainty may lead one to take. The same idea can be found in Pierre Bourdieu’s work on Kabylia, because not only is it possible to be unable to reciprocate a gift, which leads to dishonor, but it is even possible to refuse it. It is, however, difficult to follow Athané when he reproaches Lévi-Strauss for eluding the fact that transfers happen at different moments in time. From the studies that inspired Mauss to the most recent research, including Mauss’s own work and that of his disciples or critics, the spacing of these three operations over time, implied in any gift, has been clearly established; Athané himself casts it as a norm. It is true that this self-evidence leads those modeling the triad to forget to acknowledge the potentialities that this diachronic succession permits at every stage, something which Bourdieu emphasizes more convincingly. [20] From this point of view, the protagonists of the gift remain relatively free.

13But how can this freedom be reconciled with the notion of obligation, which is the common thread linking the three moments of the gift? According to Jacques Derrida, it cannot be, and consequently if there is an obligation of reciprocity, it is no longer a question of a return gift but rather the reimbursement of a debt. [21] The gift is not simply canceled if the other “reciprocates” but becomes nonexistent by virtue of the fact that, before doing so, the other “owes.” Masking such recognition of debt in gratitude changes nothing; nor does the fact that this non-reimbursed debt, which was not asked for, leads simply to recognition. As for the donor, they are gratified by the act of giving and this once again means that the gift loses its meaning. Ultimately, the generous gift, the pure gift that in theory does not engage the recipient in anything, is inconceivable from the moment that one takes into account its unavoidable consequences—both social and psychological. It is therefore impossible. This is reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s impossible ethics, between abstract ethics based on moral certitude and the resistance of the social world to ethics. [22] Athané does not follow Derrida into the territory of an ethics of unconditionality that would condition the possibility of a true gift. But the example of a conditional gift—which he borrows from law to show that a gift subject to certain conditions, other than giving in return, does not enter into Derrida’s reasoning—is unconvincing; an obligation remains between donor and donee. In all its radicalism, the Derridean deconstruction simply reveals once again the enigmatic ambiguity of the gift.

The Gift and the Elementary Structures of Circulation

14To escape from this ambiguity, Athané uses the typology for the transfer of goods and services between humans developed by Alain Testart. [23] For each type of transfer this typology distinguishes between the “kinetic,” which describes the movements of goods and services within societies, and the “deontic,” [24] which describes the rights and responsibilities that are logically and necessarily associated with it—to which, according to Testart, his predecessors paid little attention. Thus the gift (or “t1t” for “transfer of the first type”) is a transfer that is not required and for which no compensation is required. According to this definition, it is incompatible with the notion of exchange (or “t2t”), which is formed by two opposite transfers where each is the required compensation of the other. Finally the “transfers of the third type,” which Athané, borrowing from Testart, only refers to as “t3t,” covers any transfer that can be required and yet for which no compensation can be required—primarily fiscal contributions. Athané notes that to these three types of transfer, which are dominant in peacetime, a fourth must be added (“t4t”), which is specific to war, whether foreign, civil, or social. These transfers cannot be required, in principle, and yet are required and obtained through the illegitimate use of force.

15This typology leads to the radical questioning of the place given to the gift in the birth and formation of social ties. “The gift is the transfer of an object that implies renouncing all rights to it as well as any rights that could come from this transfer, in particular the right to demand anything in return,” [25] writes Testart, a definition followed by Athané. Thus redefined, the gift is reduced to its simple kinetic properties. It means nothing more than the single transfer of goods or services between persons. This is the gift in the most common understanding of the word, as it is most often used today; a simple present excluding what ethnologists and anthropologists previously called a “gift.” Indeed, although these gifts and counter-gifts may seem to take the same form as the redefined notion of the gift, reduced to its kinetic form, they are centered on the obligation that the former create and to which the latter respond. Whereas, according to this redefinition, a gift followed by a counter-gift does not constitute an exchange; not in the meaning Mauss gave to it, nor the meaning born from critiques of his work, and not even in the common economic meaning of the word, but only in a kinetic sense. The object that is given, or the service that is rendered, is divested of any meaning other than what materially constitutes it. It therefore represents nothing and creates no lasting link, as the intention of reciprocity is only a possibility, and only in the most basic form of communication. From this perspective, it is difficult to see why Athané reproaches Derrida, as we saw above, for making the lack of compensation analytically integral to the very notion of the gift.

16So what, then, of reciprocity, if we accept that in the case of an exchange there is always reciprocity? It does not imply that the movements of transfers in opposite directions that define an exchange are motivated by obligations, or even intentions, any more than it implies that these transfers are of equivalent value. Sociologically, reciprocity is not an operational concept; it simply describes the kinetic aspect of transfers in an exchange. We might imagine that Testart and Athané agree with Mauss and Lévi-Strauss on this point, since in The Gift Mauss talks about “exchange” and never “reciprocity” and for Lévi-Strauss “exchange” and “reciprocity” are interchangeable. However, this is not the case. Following Testart, Athané suggests only using the word “exchange” in its narrowest economic sense. This obliges him to specify that money is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of this exchange, so that commercial exchange—at the heart of economic thought—remains a subcategory of exchange as an overriding category including everything implying reciprocity. Commercial exchange is different to the extent that its protagonists, unlike those involved in gift-giving, or “exchange between friends,” do not know each other and know nothing about each other, as the market has the specificity of not requiring social connection prior to exchange. Those who participate in the market have already made the decision to sell what they bring to it, or to buy what they are looking for, under these conditions. Accomplishing the exchange of this “merchandise” does not depend on any consideration other than that of the exchange itself, which economists call “the terms of exchange.”

17Testart’s typology is based on whether or not the transfers observed can be required of the two protagonists, whether natural or legal persons. It makes a distinction between free transfers, where a gift is close to an exchange, and compulsory transfers, the “t3t,” a sort of forced payment, of which tax would be the major example. The “t4t” category added by Athané includes theft, racketeering, and looting, and is similar to the previous category; they both constitute forced payment. It differs slightly, however, in the fact that it implies a further distinction between gift, exchange, and taxation, which are all legitimate, and these other kinds of transfers, which are both required and obtained illegitimately. What kind of legitimacy or illegitimacy—moral, social, legal, political—do these transfers have? Athané does not specify, leaving us to suppose that this distinction is self-evident for every society at every moment of its history. Indeed, although taxes can be legitimately demanded, and enforced by a state apparatus, and transfers obtained through theft, racketeering, and looting are illegitimate because extorted through direct violence, they do have something else in common. In both cases, the transfer is made between protagonists who are not equal in terms of the possible use of force or violence, and always occurs in the same direction, from the one who does not have access to this force to the one who does. But beyond the question of whether these transfers are legitimate or can be required at a particular moment in time, they are separated by one key characteristic: the link between what can be required and what is legitimate. This is based on the principle of the common good and social justice governing a rationale of redistribution characteristic of a particular type of state. [26]

18Indeed, the historian is confronted with the shifting of these two boundaries that trace the distinction between what can and cannot be required, between what is and is not legitimate, over the historical long term. Whether they overlap or not, whether they are acknowledged or hidden, clear or vague, these limits are always moving throughout history. This explains the difficulties that historians encounter in dealing with social links in the terms that are both typified and criticized here: the documentation at their disposal constantly changes in nature and in vocabulary depending on its origin and its context, which must both be taken into account. In the case of forced transfers (“t3t” and “t4t”), which characterize both tax and looting/racketeering/theft, these boundaries shift or disappear when what was once considered theft or plunder is transformed into various taxes or levies. Historians are familiar with the many negotiations which aimed to put an end to such acts by making them into legitimate transfers through agreements between plundering barons and the peace-seeking populace. It was these negotiations that introduced the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate transfers proposed here. But what came first in the course of history? Was it not this contract, concluded by force between those with power and those without, which placed bellicose violence center stage and changed “t4t” into “t1t,” and “t3t” into “t2t,” given that gift and exchange are conditional on the peace resulting from the latter in order to exist and construct social ties in peace time? [27] And if, in this way, this depends on the possibility of having a hold over the life or the goods of the other, what separates freedom of initiative from what can be demanded in gift or exchange? And what, then, is the distinction between supply and demand—not dealt with here—of goods and services that is at the source of these transfers?

19Athané’s suggested classification of transfers has the advantage of being clear. However, when their deontic properties are examined, many transfers only appear as subcategories. He provides a table, which shows nonetheless that these subcategories never straddle two or more of the four major types of transfer but always remain within one of them. [28] This is more about demonstrating the relevance of the framework and the basic classification than about questioning it, even if it does nuance it slightly. Its relevance is clear, but is it confirmed by history? Athané dismisses as simple rhetoric discourses where the gift acts as a disguise, concealing well-understood interests. We can accept this for a great many cases, but it is impossible to ignore the works of philanthropy that were historically conducted under the aegis of charitable gifts, or, in modern times, the role of organizations which deal with fundamental human needs and suffering in certain countries. Untangling the mass of discourses that accompany charity and philanthropy is something else entirely, because it means identifying the point at which, beneath what is actually said, the rhetorical becomes ideological. It means distinguishing between the feeling of moral satisfaction of the donors, whether big or small, and the sincerity of those working on the ground, who—with means provided by the former all the same—relieve the daily hardships of their fellow beings.

20Other historical difficulties arise with the state, insufficiently defined here by Max Weber’s concept of the monopoly of violence. Athané forgets the distinction between nation and state mentioned earlier in his text in relation to Mauss, the first democratically conditioning the second through law. [29] In the nation-state, which is still the fundamental political framework of democratic life today, the use of violence and physical constraint is strictly controlled by the law, and only possible when it is broken. The same is true of taxation, and this is not without consequences for identifying the type of transfer it constitutes. It is no longer true to say that taxation does not entitle citizens to returns from the state. On the contrary, in modern democratic society, where social rights are constantly being negotiated, taxation supposes a counterpart. The citizen taxpayer must be informed of what they will receive in return for what they give, and on how the amounts paid are controlled and managed. The success of the annual reports of the Cour des comptes (the French Court of Audit) is evidence that this is how citizens perceive it. The fact that this gives rise to bitter political struggles, where it is common for meanings to be twisted or for attempts to be made at subverting what has been obtained in terms of rights, does not change anything. Could we not say that a new and fundamental type of reciprocity has been established by the historical advent of democracy, combined with a social republic equipped with a state (improperly called a “welfare” state [30])? Indeed, here the state is simply the mediator between taxpayer citizens, who both pay contributions and receive various benefits. This is a state that uses its power of constraint for redistribution, that is, to reduce the inequalities produced by gifts and exchanges over time.

“From the Gift, We Have Received Being” [31]

21In the strict order of human societies, the domain of the gift is radically restricted by Athané’s analysis, which goes against the trend that has developed over the last thirty years around the work of Alain Caillé and his friends in MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales; a trend which is not discussed here). However, this is not the case for his analysis connecting man to nature and in particular to the animal world. The notion of a connection between animal societies and behavior and human societies and behavior can be traced back to the origins of philosophy and resonates from the very origins of sociology in the work of Alfred Espinas, right through to work in ethology, sociobiology and even in law. [32] In the matter of the gift, the only manifestations that can be attributed to animals are almost exclusively in the area of parental altruism. This is always in keeping with natural selection, in the sense that only those who are the most adapted to their environment survive. Athané remains silent on another aspect of natural selection: the same animal mothers who develop this form of altruism towards their young do not hesitate to exclude those who are less able by abandoning, rejecting, or even physically eliminating them. As for the transfer of resources between animals, this derives only from a “kinetic structure” and in no way a “deontic structure”—unless, of course, we come back to the notion of “instinct” where the latter would apply, which would in turn force the question of the relationship between the biological and sociobiological, via the psychological, in humans. How then did this “deontic structure,” the cultural nature of which is not in question, appear in humankind? How and why is it that only the naturally altruistic behavior was retained by culture?

22The transfer of nutritive resources from adults to children can also be observed in all human societies. In humankind, as in the animal world, these transfers are necessary for perpetuating the species. According to a long-established theory, the different length of this period in animals and humans is linked to the specific biological constitution of human infants. To make this clear, biologists used to say that, compared to other mammals, human young were “always born before term.” This leads to them being more nutritionally and educationally dependent on their social environment than other species and for longer. It is worth noting that, when life expectancy is taken into account, the same is true for many animals, marsupials being the most commonly discussed example. In any event, these repeated transfers over the long term are “isomorphic to gifts.” [33] In whichever society they occur, they mean that the first relation between humans takes the form of the gift. This is therefore the structure of the universal tendency to transfer goods to others and to receive them from others, building a bridge between nature and culture. Indeed, givers and receivers subsequently learn to give according to the norms and rules of their culture, whereas initially the child just expresses a natural demand, only internalizing this culture little by little, and internalizing it based on the cultural associations of the gift they receive. “The gift is the form of transfer that is the most able, and perhaps the only form that is able, to provide a transition between, on the one hand, the kinetic material transfer of something, and, on the other, the economy of the transfer of rights to objects.” [34]

23Athané draws five conclusions from this new definition of the gift and the resulting evaluation of its place in society: [35]

241. “The gift is universal”: hypothetical in the social sciences up until now, despite strong presumptions, this universality is based on grounding the gift in nature.

252. “Humanity was created by the gift”: today’s humans are all descendants of those who received gifts. This consideration does not imply any particular hypothesis about the distribution of educative responsibilities within societies nor their kinship structures.

263. “As the economically necessary condition of possibility, an exchange requires either the gift or the transfer of the third type, which can be required but for which no compensation can be required (“t3t”)”: for a long time, a child is unable to provide a counterpart, other than through communication, to the person who gives, which means that they cannot engage in exchange in the economic sense of the word. The child is thus dependent on the gifts received, whether they come from the family or from a welfare institution.

274. “In instances where adults fail to provide the gift to children, and in the absence of social mechanisms or other mechanisms of substitution, the child either dies, survives by successfully adopting predatory behavior, or becomes the object of predatory behavior and thereby becomes an object of exchange”: refusing the gift which is indispensable to the child takes place through abandoning, mistreating, or neglecting to care for them, deferred forms of infanticide that are well known to historians and demographers. The consequences for the survivors range from delinquency to slavery.

285. “An institution of substitution for cases where adults do not give to children is appropriate when it allows for the possibility that a personalized relationship of giving may be established between one or several adults and a particular child”: as a result, child protection or child welfare institutions should aim, as much as possible, to reproduce the conditions of a personalized gift relationship, based on the model common in the society under consideration. Adoption, or placement in a host family, is always better than an orphanage, no matter how dedicated the workers in these institutions may be.

29These five conclusions would have benefited from historical support by comparing them with the work of historians of childhood, a field that has flourished since the 1990s. [36] They ground the gift both in the relationship with childhood and in the childhood of humanity. But is the gift a constant in human history because it is a constant in the natural history of humankind? Or does it result only from moral and social obligations towards children, which have been detached from this context to become simply elements of culture? Because if the analytic relevance of the gift is erased from the social realm over the course of Athané’s book, then we must look to nature to explain its strong presence in our mental schemes and social behavior—and this necessitates the different approach adopted at the end of the book. Does this approach avoid the fundamental questions surrounding sociobiology that mobilized the social sciences thirty-odd years ago? Naturalizing the gift requires the explanation, in effect, of this human practice in terms of the theory of evolution by natural selection. By avoiding the pitfalls of anthropomorphic projections, Athané hopes to ward off the traps of sociobiology. But then what are we to make of his call “for a ‘natural history’ of the gift” in the title of his book? A book that, through a determined deconstructivist critique, philosophically destroys the Maussian theory of the gift and its arguments, as well as the ways it has been used since, and the interpretations and corrections to which it has given rise.

30In reading the last section of the book, it is difficult not to be reminded of the feminist theses in vogue in the United States. Transmitted by academic research in gender studies and popularized by a certain kind of French feminism, [37] they make altruism an exclusively or principally feminine ability resulting from gestation, raised up as an ethical paradigm and as the origin of the gift. Seeing this as the resurgence of the “illusions of the primitive matriarch” in an anthropological discipline that thought it had demonstrated the inanity of this hypothesis, Lévi-Strauss reaffirmed that the decisive leap from nature to culture could not have its origin in “the deepest part of organic life,” from what he called “genital robinsonades.” [38] Instead, he located it in the development of intellectual faculties, particularly attested by the fabrication of tools and the use of articulate language. He also insisted on the impossibility of confirming such affirmations through precise observation. In reading the anger that he expresses on this occasion, we are reminded of the parallel between his comments and those of Mauss on the relationship between facts, their description and analysis, the theory that is produced from them and its role in the discovery of other facts, their reclassification, and so on. Everything must begin with facts and return to facts and cannot result from a detailed theoretical exploration that does not, or not sufficiently, take the facts into account. Does an analogy between natural facts and social practices constitute proof that the latter are modeled on the former?

31Athané’s thesis simultaneously revisits and contradicts that of Godelier on the foundation of human societies. It revisits it in assuming—whereas Godelier observes—that “humans are ‘naturally’ a social species, that is through the effect of the evolution of nature.” [39] It contradicts it by basing the social relationships that weave the web of society on the different forms that transfers of goods and services take according to their “deontic,” from which, for Athané, any form of the “politico-religious” is absent. Yet Godelier is one of the major authors who is not, or not sufficiently, taken into account in Athané’s critical approach. [40] Mauss drew his information from his established colleagues as well as his collaborators and his students, brought together around their journal, L’année sociologique. These sources for The Gift are not called upon here, and yet they are key. The works posterior to The Gift that Athané chooses for analysis also appear questionable in the eyes of specialists, even if they do adequately cover the major problem that the gift poses to the social sciences as a whole: they all demonstrate the difficulty of constructing a theory of the gift, through the very diverse experiences that they relate, which require stating how this act, which is at the basis of a relationship, constitutes—or does not constitute—society.

32In analyzing Mauss’s assertions one by one, with the guiding principle of establishing the reasons for the gift, Athané analytically demolishes the argumentation of The Gift. In so doing he manages to reestablish, without this being paradoxical, the fundamental ambiguity of the gift, whereas Mauss’s argument sought to escape from it. From this perspective, the fact that Athané comes back to the sequence “giving—receiving—reciprocating,” which he had called into question and dissected in each of its components in the first part of the book, demonstrates the need to return to this inseparable triad in order to understand the problem that it really poses. For the social sciences, the gift is this ensemble of sequential actions that create an obligatory relationship between actors or groups of actors; Athané, on the other hand, sees it as simply a transfer of property between two people. By regularly underlining the interplay of links between the different studies analyzed and Mauss’s work—based on the way the other authors are inspired by this text—Athané seeks a clarification that is not easy to achieve. In so doing, he does not retract, nor contradict himself, nor does he abandon his critical approach. He continues to aim for the same triad, which he describes as “meta-normative,” but does so in a different way. Thus elevated to the rank of norm [41]—the word he subsequently uses—the triad enables him to reintroduce the question of temporality, to reinvest the total social fact as the interplay of reciprocal prestations and to specify their obligatory nature. Envisaged in this way the gift takes on an ambivalent, even unsolvable, nature.

33Through this critical approach, which is based on a clearly specified scientific preconception and which is the first merit of this book, Athané completely renews the question of the gift. At a time when so much research calls upon this notion for anything and everything, with no more than a rapid reference to The Gift (which has become a vulgate, neither critiqued nor genuinely adopted), this book is provocative. It is possible not to share the radicalism of its analysis and even to contest its relevance. However, it must then be subject to analysis in its turn; an analysis which it enables by opening up a necessary debate. From the theoretical difficulties contained in Mauss’s The Gift (which are principally based on what he considers to be a preconception—the obligation to give in return—where he sees “a simple ‘regularity’ of behavior motivated by relatively uniform interest” [42]) Athané arrives at the end of his critical journey having reconceptualized this notion. For him, the gift is the bridge between our social being and our natural being. On it, as he so eloquently says, “depends the decency of the world.” [43]