[1] The apparent generosity of gift-giving has long troubled anthropologists, for the gifts exchanged in many societies are anything but free. [2] A classic analysis argued that such prestations, though framed as voluntary and disinterested, are in fact obligatory and interested: to give is to assert status, to receive is to incur a debt, and to reciprocate is to discharge it, so that a seemingly spontaneous act is bound by a triple obligation to give, to accept, and to return. [3] The paradox is that the transaction must disguise its own logic; were the calculation made explicit, the gift would collapse into mere barter and forfeit the moral prestige on which its social work depends. [4] Recent commentators have pressed the point further, observing that even the modern ideal of the wholly altruistic gift — the donation that expects nothing in return — may function less as an exception to the rule of reciprocity than as its most refined expression, since the very refusal of return can confer a superiority the ostensibly selfless giver is not always eager to disclaim.
