Marcel Mauss Jewellery

The context of fine and precious jewellery as a commodity does not fall within water-tight economic categories of ‘utility’ or ‘need’. One needs food, clothing and shelter, but one does not need an expensive, impractical, and economically extravagant commodity like jewellery. Then the question that is raised here is; why jewellery has been such a successful commodity for retail, and continues to have a growing market in Indian. Jewellery as part of the retail segment or chain, like any other product, is sensitive to market in terms of rates of Gold and Diamond, but even in bad years the sale and demand for jewellery does not stop. The ‘want’ for precious jewellery can be understood when perceived in terms of the social and cultural value

Thus in France, Levi-Strauss saw it as pre-figuring in his own structuralism. On the other hand, neo-Marxist French sociologists as Gurvitch, by distorting the key notion of totality, have construed it as an independent and gratifying rediscovery of that anthropological conception (in the philosophical sense) held by Marx in his earlier works. Such a vast difference in interpretations published contemporaneously would in itself suffice to justify coming back to Marcel Mauss when discussing the notion of gift (Mauss 1925, Panoff 1970: 60). Critically The Gift has been engaged with by theorists over the years and it may be questioned as to why then such a classic work, is being re-visited here. Mauss critically looks at the notion of the gift in context of how as a form of exchange it is contextualised in social and cultural practice of society, thus broadly building an understanding exchange in a framework that looks at transactions (that predominately have been viewed in disciplines like economics as purely rational and economic phenomenon) as not isolated from the social and cultural phenomenon (Mauss

This 'utopian elevation of the market principle to the dominant form of economic integration was bound to fail (Hann & Hart 2011). The last of the self-declared substantivists was Marshall Sahlins, whose Stone Age Economics (1972) was a compilation of new essays and others produced in the 1960s. Sahlins presented readers of Stone Age' Economics with a stark dichotomy in his opening remarks:

'Formalism versus substantivism' amounts to the following theoretical option: between the ready-made models of orthodox Economics, taken as universally valid and applicable grosso modo to the primitive societies, and the necessity - supposing this formalist position unfounded – of developing a new analysis more appropriate to the historical societies in question and to the intellectual history of Anthropology.’ (Hann & Hart 2011: