The Gift and its Paradoxes

Beyond Mauss

Olli Pyyhtinen (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

180 Seiten

2016
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-138-27184-5 (ISBN)

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Bringing social theory and philosophy to bear on popular movies, novels, myths, and fairy tales, The Gift and its Paradoxes explores the ambiguity of the gift: it is at once both a relation and a thing, alienable and inalienable, present and poison. Challenging the nature of giving as reciprocal, the book engages critically with the work of Mauss and develops a new theory of the gift according to which the gift cannot be reduced to a model of exchange, but must instead entail a loss or sacrifice. Ultimately, the gift is examined in the book as the impossible occurrence of gratuitous giving. In addition to exploring the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the gift, the book draws on the thought of figures such as Derrida, Serres, Simmel, Cixous, Irigaray and Heidegger to argue for the relevance of the phenomenon of the gift to broader issues in contemporary social sciences. It takes up questions concerning the constitution of community and the processes by which people are included in or excluded from it, gender relations, materiality, the economy, and the possibility that death itself could be a gift, in the form of euthanasia or self-sacrifice. A rigorous yet accessible examination of the phenomenon of the gift in relation to a range of contemporary concerns, The Gift and its Paradoxes will appeal to scholars and students within sociology, philosophy, anthropology, political theory and film and literature studies.

Olli Pyyhtinen is is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Turku, Finland and author of Simmel and 'the Social'.

Contents: Genesis; The (im)possible gift; The generosity of the given; Parasites’ paradise (aka like hopping on the beach); In/exclusions: the gift of blood and alms for the poor; Gendered economies of the gift; Making a gift of death; The gift is not one; Bibliography; Index.

Erscheinungsdatum	15.02.2017
Reihe/Serie	Classical and Contemporary Social Theory
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	453 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Studium ► 1. Studienabschnitt (Vorklinik) ► Med. Psychologie / Soziologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie ► Volkskunde
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
ISBN-10	1-138-27184-5 / 1138271845
ISBN-13	978-1-138-27184-5 / 9781138271845
Zustand	Neuware