Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea

Join the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation for an insightful online seminar with Professor Grégoire Mallard.

Grégoire Mallard is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva). After earning his PhD at Princeton University in 2008, Professor Mallard was Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University until he joined the Institute.

He is the author of Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture (University of Chicago Press, 2014). Professor Mallard is also the co-editor of Contractual Knowledge: One Hundred Years of Legal Experimentation in Global Markets (Cambridge University Press 2016), and Global Science and National Sovereignty: Studies in Historical Sociology of Science (Routledge 2008). His other publications focus on prediction, the role of knowledge and ignorance in transnational lawmaking and the study of harmonisation as a social process. In 2016, he has been the recipient of an ERC starting grant (2017-2022) for his project titled Bombs, Banks and Sanctions.

Since Marcel Mauss published his foundational essay The Gift in 1925, many anthropologists and specialists of international relations have seen in the exchange of gifts, debts, loans, concessions or reparations the sources of international solidarity and international law. Still, Mauss's reflections were deeply tied to the context of interwar Europe and the French colonial expansion. Their normative dimension has been profoundly questioned after the age of decolonisation.

A century after Mauss, we may ask: what is the relevance of his ideas on gift exchanges and international solidarity? By tracing how Mauss's theoretical and normative ideas inspired prominent thinkers and government officials in France and Algeria, from Pierre Bourdieu to Mohammed Bedjaoui, Grégoire Mallard adds a building block to our comprehension of the role that anthropology, international law, and economics have played in shaping international economic governance from the age of European colonization to the latest European debt crisis.

This seminar is part of an open seminar series, hosted by the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation.