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Mauss's The Gift, or the necessity of an institutional perspective in economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2019

Mario Aldo Cedrini ,
Angela Ambrosino ,
Roberto Marchionatti  and
Alain Caillé
Mario Aldo Cedrini*
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica “Cognetti de Martiis”, Università di Torino
Angela Ambrosino
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica “Cognetti de Martiis”, Università di Torino
Roberto Marchionatti
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica “Cognetti de Martiis”, Università di Torino
Alain Caillé
Affiliation:
Laboratoire Sophiapol, University of Paris X-Nanterre
*
*Corresponding author. Email: mario.cedrini@unito.it
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Abstract

The article proposes a reading of Marcel Mauss's insights into gift exchange in primitive societies through the lens of the institutional economics approach. It thus tries to demonstrate that the gift as seen by Mauss can be interpreted as an institution arising from the self-transcendence of social relationships that gifts themselves are expressly designed to create and according to which individuals orient their behavior. On this basis, we provide elements to discuss the benefits that might derive from the adoption of the institutionalist approach in economics.

Keywords

GiftinstitutionsMarcel Maussinstitutional economicseconomic anthropology
Type
Symposium on Institutional Analysis and the Gift
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 16 , Issue 5 , October 2020 , pp. 687 - 701
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2019

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