Guido Sprenger, A. J. Pickles, Ilana Gershon, J. Robbins, Rebecca Bryant, M. Strathern
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange—giving, taking, and returning—with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconsidering gift exchange in these terms provides a set of analytical terms, like strong and weak expectations, moral horizons of value systems, and the opacity of personhood, that can be applied to sharing and commodity trade as well. This constitutes a dynamic and expansive theory for the analysis and comparison of case studies that understands society as a shared project of expecting the future.
期刊介绍：
Social Analysis is an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to exploring the analytical potentials of anthropological research. It encourages contributions grounded in original empirical research that critically probe established paradigms of social and cultural analysis. The journal expresses the best that anthropology has to offer by exploring in original ways the relationship between ethnographic materials and theoretical insight. By forging creative and critical engagements with cultural, political, and social processes, it also opens new avenues of communication between anthropology and the humanities as well as other social sciences. The journal publishes four issues per year, including regular Special Issues on particular themes. The Editors welcome individual articles that focus on diverse topics and regions, reflect varied theoretical approaches and methods, and aim to appeal widely within anthropology and beyond. Proposals for Special Issues are selected by the Editorial Board through an annual competitive call.
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