Gift Exchange

Grégoire Mallard is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute (Geneva). He is the author of Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture and co-editor of Contractual Knowledge: One Hundred Years of Legal Experimentation in Global Markets. His publications focus on prediction, knowledge and ignorance in global governance.

• 1. The history of a political idea: gifts, trusts, reparations and other fetishes of international solidarity; 2. The cast: Marcel Mauss and his legacy in the French fields of power; 3. The gift and European solidarity: Marcel Mauss and the politics of reparation in interwar Europe; 4. The gift as colonial ideology: Marcel Mauss and French colonial policy before and after the Great War; 5. Mauss's disciples in Algeria: the anthropology of the gift and the shock of decolonization; 6. Decolonizing the gift: nationalization and sovereign debt cancellation in North-South relations; 7. International solidarity and gift exchange in the Eurozone.

'Against the usual view of Marcel Mauss as an armchair anthropologist, secluded in the higher reaches of the academia, Grégoire Mallard explores the many social milieus in which Mauss operated, including early twentieth-century socialist politics, journalism, high finance, and the emerging state technocracy. Mallard shows how Mauss's classic essay, The Gift, offered a complex worldview that had a profound influence on generations of politicians and public intellectuals involved in everything from the debate on German reparations to pre-war colonial politics in France, the North-South conflict post-1960, and current sovereign debt issues. In short, this is a most remarkable book, extremely well researched and elegantly written.' Jerome Sgard, Sciences-Po Paris