As is widely known, Mauss's objective with this fine little volume is to aalyse the economic system of echange of 'total services' that lay underneath the pratice of gift giving in many cultures. The practice was intensely reciprocal, and involved not only the parties to the gifting, but also the gods and dead spirits as well. Scarificaial destruction was often arried out to please the gods, and he shows how in some cultures this became the granting of alms, whereby he gods were as content if the material wealth that would have otherwise been offered up for destrution instead went to the poor. Thus he argues that the practice of the gift was related to a concept of justice.

Reading his account, it is impossible to avert the mind form that other great thinker of moral economy, EP Thompson. In his 'The Making of the English Working Class', Thompson looks at the complex system of custom, patronage and commons that bound the British poor to the nobility prior to the advent of the industrial revolution and the vicious ideology of laissez-fire, whose productivist reverie was born in the fire of the enclosures.

But Thompson's work is simultaneously an anatomy of economic exchange and power, and the role of paternalism as social shok absorber and fire extinguisher is never allowed to disappear from sight. Likewise, and some hundreds of years earlier, the first gret English criminologist Hebry Mayhew, was to comment on the function of charity that it was a means to inibit the por frm simply seizing what they wanted and needed - a passage that incidentally was excised from the Penguin abridgement tht has been in circulation in recent times.

Thus an interesting question, it appears to me, is to wha dgree aspects of Mauss and Thompson can be combined? Mauss' blindness to power, and economic formalism (odd though it seems to mention it) appears to preclude the application of his theory as an interpretative aid whilst at the same time appearing stranhgely appropriate for a society subjected to compulsory amnesia.