Gambling with the Gift: A preface to Marcel Mauss’ “Wette, wedding”

Abstract

This short preface situates Marcel Mauss’ “Wette, wedding”, a talk that Marcel Mauss gave at the Société d’histoires du droit on May 10, 1928, within Mauss’ wider oeuvre. It does so by analyzing it as a prime example of Mauss’ technique of linking logically incongruent levels for the sake of opening up promising analytical trajectories and thereby puts Mauss’ work at the center of current debates about ethnographic theory.