The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice

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Edited by Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux and Eric Boynton

Fordham University Press

Due/Published March 2002, 176 pages, paper

ISBN 0823221660

What does it mean to give a "gift"? Is the gift an expenditure without reserve? Is there such a thing as a pure gift? Or does the gift inevitably set off a circle of return the effect of which is to annul the gift and reduce the gift to an economic circle? In this collection of essays, editors Wyschogrod, Goux, and Boynton have brought together a distinguished group of anthropologists--Maurice Godelier, George Marcus, Stephen Tyler--and philosophers--Mark C. Taylor, John D. Caputo, Jean-Joseph Goux and Adriaan Peperzak, who debate these issues. The result is a major contribution to understanding a philosophical enigma that has occupied contemporary philosophers from Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida.