Mauss's theory of the gift is highly topical. To understand why, it is necessary to explain what the gift is for Mauss and what his theory consists of. For Mauss, the gift encompasses innumerable phenomena, but, more than a phenomenon, he considers it a relation. They are goods, words, people, visits, parties, music, gestures, violence, signs, among other significant realities, which may or may not circulate as commodities, from which, once given, emanate some forms of retribution; they are "obligations," says Mauss.

Retribution can be a gift of the same type or not, immediate or not, in equivalent form or not. A good day can be reciprocated with another good day or with a smile, but for it to be a gift it must be received. Giving, when it exists, is already receiving, as indicated in the epigraph of the Essay on the gift. In this sense, receiving is already giving back. By definition, then, a gift generates some kind of retribution, which may not be material, but moral. In all cases, this implies reciprocity, but also debt - sometimes this debt acquires a radical political meaning, servitude, although there is always some kind of asymmetrical, hierarchical link.

The "good morning" that is given, even if it is reciprocated with another "good morning", differs from the one that is received next because of the position between the one who takes the initiative to give (issue) the message and the one who receives it. It is no coincidence that in court etiquette it is the superior who takes the initiative of the greeting. Mauss points out that something of the giver always goes with what is given; this inalienability of the giver in the transmission of the gift to a given recipient may be greater or lesser, depending on the context, but it means that the good that is given is linked to the figure of the giver. For example, a surname usually circulates less than a first name and carries something else, distinct from the second, something linked to the family of the giver. Anthropology has observed that many inalienable goods, which circulate little, are valuable because they are insignia, metonymies of power, such as a crown.

In addition to the difference between the positions of the exchangers, a second form of difference inherent in the gift is that which resides in the substance of what is given and what is received; in the example above, a good morning may be reciprocated not with the same words, but with a smile. A third form of difference lies in the time between what is given and what is reciprocated, not what is received, but what is reciprocated. This is the case of retribution because, if it is a matter of receiving, the gift also circulates unilaterally. Therefore, I do not see how to dissociate a gift from a debt, nor reciprocity from hierarchy; and the study of these debts (personal, national, collective) is absolutely fundamental for the human sciences.

In countless cases. From the mobilization of a population to make solidarity donations (food, medicine, shelter) in the event of a climatic catastrophe, to a tax reform, anywhere on the planet. Mauss, following Bronisław Malinowski - and later Karl Polanyi - called payments to Melanesian chiefs (among others) "tributes". Any study of public spending, including intragovernmental (from ministries to parliamentarians, for example) is a study of gifts and, in all of them, Mauss teaches us that reciprocity is present, ordering them. My book A dívida divina (The divine debt) (Lanna, 1995) describes a municipality in northeastern Brazil based on an ethnography of exchange, in which the mayor functions as the centralizer of reciprocities. Here I emphasize the concept of hierarchical reciprocity. Gender relations are also permeated by gifts and counter-gifts that constitute domestic spheres. Mauss demonstrated that the units that Lévi-Strauss came to call "households," whether Polynesian or Northwestern American, and even the royal households of Europe, are constituted by gifts.

Of course it is. There are several theories, each one proposing different updates, but among them I would highlight the one I consider the most important one, the Mythological of Lévi-Strauss,1 recognized as one of the fundamental scientific works of the 20th century. xx.

In The elementary structures of kinship,2 of 1949, Lévi-Strauss makes reciprocity a "principle" and proposes that the prohibition of incest is a (unique) passage from nature to culture; some of the matrimonial exchanges derived from it, between cross-cousins, could constitute - in certain contexts - a type of language. Lévi-Strauss never disavowed this theory, which he accepted as the most important development of Mauss's theory of gift, but it was criticized for its functionalism by Louis Dumont in 1971, by David Schneider and James Boon in 1974 and, even later, by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. If this functionalism exists - moreover, the 1949 book shows that certain forms of marriage become language - it thus founds structuralism and makes it possible to understand language no longer as a mere superstructure, but with a generative capacity for social life, like that of gifts. After all, language is made of gifts, of the circulation of messages.

Beginning in 1964, in Mythologies, Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that, in addition to the prohibition of incest, there are other passages from "nature" to "culture"; these cease to be analytical terms and come to be understood as native categories. These multiple passages are no longer necessarily linked only to the exchange of persons (spouses) conceived as signs, as in 1949, but now include exchanges of signs of other kinds. Far from denying the 1949 theory that a language of marriage exists in some parts of the planet (especially in Oceania and Southeast Asia), in volume 1 Lévi-Strauss analyzes Amerindian myths as a language close to musical, and in volumes 2 (1966) and 3 (1967) he writes about how cooking can be constructed as a language. In all four volumes, Amerindian myths and worldviews are understood as composed of "codes," structured as a language. Thus, Lévi-Strauss' work is always about exchanges, messages and communication. If there are several and no longer a single passage from nature to culture, language remains the foundation of all of them. In this sense, marriage is close to myth and can be understood as language and even as narration. Infrastructures are also superstructures, both in the analyses of kinship and of myths.

On page 713 of the "Postface" of issue 154-155 of the journal L’Homme 2000, Lévi-Strauss states:

I am surprised by the uneasiness that arises today around the subject of exchange. Either the exchange of women appears as a self-evident truth, and the expression implies no comment, to the point that it seems to belong to the common language of the profession, or this notion is rejected, sometimes vehemently. Curious thing: it happens that the same article oscillates between these two positions. From one page to another, alliances are described in terms of exchange, as if it were self-evident, and the notion just used is rejected.

Lévi-Strauss takes the opportunity to clarify his thinking on the exchange of gifts and to defend the theses of his 1949 book. He explains that the cases in which marriage is defined by prohibitions, or by abduction, do not exclude exchange; in others, it takes the form of association and in others the existence of exchange units would not even be necessary. He also points out that the terms that constituted the "atom of kinship" (such as "father" or "maternal uncle") may no longer be present in practice, but never virtually cease to exist; and that among the "types" of exchange analyzed in 1949 there would be relations of transformation. In other words, in their conscious models, some anthropologists deny exchange, but this would only be possible rhetorically and at the expense of the quality of anthropology on the planet.

The reflections on kinship, beyond the one I mentioned in 2000, such as the notion of "domestic societies" coined in his courses offered between 1976 and 1982 under the title "cognatic societies", as well as the mythologies themselves, show that the study of cosmologies and cosmopolitics does not exclude, but rather presupposes, that of exchanges. The "Postface" also makes it clear that exchange is not necessarily of women, men or persons, but of signs. As we have seen, it is not even just a matter of "exchange" as such, but, as Mauss demonstrated, of the circulation of gifts.