Abstract
Supposedly, a gift is the free act of willingly donating to someone something that was yours without expecting anything in exchange. It is a thus doubly a free act for it is up to the giver to decide whether he wants to make a gift or not and the receiver has no obligation to reciprocate. The fact that is done willingly is of course essential, if one gives something to someone else reluctantly, then this act becomes extortion. A gift may be any object at all, and can even be something intangible: for example, you can give your time to somebody, meaning that you spend willingly your time helping someone without being paid for it. The act of giving is thus a complex act, and it seems that it has been a human tradition for a very long period: the French writer Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) quotes a poem from the Eddas in the beginning of his work, The Gift.
This poem is all about the act of giving, and, in opposition to the definition of a gift, evokes the fact that we have to reciprocate the gift. This is the main paradox of the gift, which is at the heart of Mauss' work: we do not have in theory the obligation of giving back, yet we feel implied to do so. Mauss asks the simple question of "why" and studies "primitive" people in Polynesia to give an answer. We can thus first wonder what a gift is really, and follow Mauss' lead in thinking about the need to reciprocate. Moreover, seeing that gifts are used in all aspects of life, whether they are political, economic or social, we can wonder what its implications in these aspects of life are.
First of all, it is necessary to try and go beyond the traditional definition of the gift and analyze the behaviors that imply a reciprocation of the gift. This can be seen in the fact that charity is considered as an act of pity (or compassion? The frontier is most of the times blurred) and that thus, the person asking for charity and receiving it is inferior to the charitable person. This is described by Mauss in his conclusion, citing Emerson, On Gifts and Presents.
