Classic Quotations from The Mystery of Gifts

This is an anthropological work on the status and importance of gift exchange in various social forms of human beings and its role in the production and reproduction of social relations. The theory of gift and gift is basically to study the exchange of goods with transferable value, whether it is symbolic value or economic value. In this book, Maurice Goodriel, a famous French anthropologist, revisits various views on the importance of gifts in social life and social relations. He pays attention to the sacred things, which are valuable, but never exchanged.

The book begins with a careful analysis of the pioneering work of Marcel Maugham and Claude Levi-Strauss in this field, and then introduces the author's own field investigation in Melanesia. Goodlear believes that those traditional gift theories are flawed because they only consider those exchangeable objects. He himself explained the gift in the field of sacred objects and the granting of authority related to sacred objects, which challenged both contemporary and traditional gift theories and injected exciting vitality into this traditional debate topic.

In the aspect of talent theory, The Mystery of Talent is a great theoretical contribution at present and an indispensable guide to the history of talent theory.