英文摘要 |
People give and receive gifts in their daily lives, on Christmas, on birthdays, on anniversaries. But, few people think about why people give and take gifts. Do we just take this practice for granted? Or, do we give and take gifts following a moral standard? Is there a theory of gift giving? Is there any principle that guides this pattern of human interaction that could lead to the construction of ethics and moral standards in our society? Marcel Mauss poses his theory of the gift and the relationships maintained in ancient North American Indian and Polynesian tribes by gift giving, receiving and reciprocating. This paper explains why Mauss and critics after him propose an entity of a Maussian model of gift economy. This paper indicates that there are mainly three approaches of critiques on Mauss: the simplified reading that takes the gift and social relationship as homogeneity; the ontological critique on the obligation to reciprocate and a subversion of the essence of Mauss's gift; and the dichotomy of the gift and the commodity. Moreover, this paper offers a critique of Mauss for the inapplicability of his theory of the gift. Consequently, with reflection on the essence of Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu, this paper attempts to depart from Mauss and his theory of the gift and tries to depict a possibility of a dialectical theory of the gift. |