Marcel mauss sketched a pattern of gift giving that was deceptively simple and inexhaustibly rich: By breaking gift exchange down into the steps of giving, receiving, and reciprocating, he avoided the errors of less skilled and schooled predecessors and created a new kind of theoretical concept. Instead of developing the gift historically from ancient to modern examples, as German writers from Grimm to Bücher had done, he presented the different dimensions of a unified social institution. This model could be applied to different times and places, accommodating them and explaining them in ways that made fresh sense. Over the course of the essay, the gift looks ever more complicated as one sees it in new settings. Weddings in Polynesia, the kula in the Massim, and the potlatch in the Pacific Northwest formed a fruitful paradigm. From there Mauss moved with confident expertise to Rome and Germanic Europe and beyond to ancient India; leaving the past he returned to the Europe of his own time with his suggestive remarks about mutual obligation and social democracy. His personal experiences, politics, and contemporaries' scholarship came together in his idea of the gift.

However, as we have emphasized from the beginning, Mauss's essay is only part of a broader history of reflections and possibilities for thinking about gift giving. We can re-immerse the gift in this discourse and expand its historical and conceptual dimensions.