Gift Economy

A gift economy is a system of exchange in which valuables are given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future reward, rather than sold. Marcel Mauss's foundational 1925 study The Gift argued that such prestations are not really between individuals but between representatives of larger collectives, and that gift and prestation exchange served economic, kinship, religious and political functions simultaneously rather than a narrowly economic one; because failing to reciprocate a gift ends the relationship it was meant to sustain, the obligation to return a gift, not individual self-interest, is what Mauss treated as holding a gift economy together. The Kula ring of the Trobriand Islands and the Potlatch of the Pacific Northwest, both already on this atlas, are the discipline's two best-documented examples. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/