Speaking of the main task of his Essai sur le don (1925), Marcel Mauss says that he intends ‘to catch the fleeting moment when a society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others’. In the wake of recent structuralist complexities Mauss's words appear forthright and endowed with a kind of naive authority. Of particular interest is his emphasis on emotions and feelings as pre-eminent objects of analysis. In The Gift, Mauss rebuilt an instance of social being which was significant in that it seemed to be total and, in spite of its aberrant display of excess and waste, practical. He saw the act of gift-exchange, or total presentation, as that juncture in time and space where structure and event intercept each other. As an object of story-telling, the group becomes, it begins at such a moment: social reality originates as kairos, as an occasion overruled by its own disclosures.