The Return of the Gift European History of a Global Idea

This book is a history of European interpretations of the gift from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Reciprocal gift exchange, pervasive in traditional European society, disappeared from the discourse
of nineteenth-century social theory only to return as a major theme in twentieth-century anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, and literary studies. Modern anthropologists encountered gift exchange in Oceania and the Pacifi c Northwest and returned the idea to European social thought; Marcel Mauss synthesized their insights with his own readings from remote times and places in his famous 1925 essay on the gift, the starting point for subsequent discussion. The Return of the Gift demonstrates how European intellectual history can gain fresh signifi cance from global contexts.

Harry Liebersohn is a professor of history in the Department of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of several books, including Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1871–1923 (1988); Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacifi c (2006). His article “Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso, and Romantic Travel Writing,” which appeared in the American Historical Review , was awarded the 1995 William Koren, Jr., Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. Professor Liebersohn was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in
1996–1997 and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin) in 2006–2007.

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