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 **Other reading:** Mauss ([1925] 1990)
+===== Reciprocity is a triple obligation =====
+[[:Marcel Mauss]] argues that every society is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The three obligations of reciprocity are symptoms of this:
+  * The obligation to **give**
+  * The obligation to **receive**
+  * The obligation to **reciprocate**, or to give back to one who has given.
+===== Gifts have spirit =====
+For Mauss, the Maori word //hau// means the “spirit of the thing given.” When someone gives a gift, they give part of themselves. “The //hau// wishes to return to its birthplace” (Mauss [1925b] 1990, 12).
+===== Total services =====
+What, then, is society? Mauss says that the essence of society is a “system of total services” in which everything one does is for someone else, and other people do everything for you. It is a state of total interdependence.
+===== Yam gardening in Auhelawa =====
+Auhelawa is a society of people living on the south coast of Duau (Normanby Island), off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea.
+Every family in Auhelawa produces most of their own food grown on their own lands, and the most important of these are
+  * //ʻwateya// (//Dioscorea alata//)
+  * //halutu// (//Dioscorea esculenta//)
+Yet although most of people’s effort and thinking goes into growing these yams, most of the //ʻwateya// are not grown as food for one’s family.
+The best //halutu// are also preserved.
+===== Moka is a competitive system =====
+The Kawelka //moka// (and the //potlatch// ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest) is a system of total services of an agonistic type.
+Agonistic means that the sides in an exchange are competing to give more services to the other, and to raise the stakes of reciprocity.
+Competing for prestige versus gaining profit?
+===== Reciprocity is everywhere =====
+Gift economies are not simply societies in which there’s a lot of gifts. A gift economy is a society in which reciprocity is a “total social phenomenon.”
+Even societies which have created the possibility of individualism still have gifts and still have reciprocity.
 ===== References and further reading =====
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-Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. “Selections from introduction, chapters 1-2, and conclusion.” In //The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies//, translated by W. D. Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
+Mauss, Marcel. (1925a) 1990. “Selections from introduction, chapters 1-2, and conclusion.” In //The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies//, translated by W. D. Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
+———. (1925b) 1990. //The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies//. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.