In this chapter, we return to the theme of ‘the gift’. In an earlier one (Chapter 5), setting out a typology of donors, we drew attention to the similarities and dissimilarities between the blood gift in modern societies and forms and manifestations of giving and gift-exchange in primitive societies. The social and economic aspects of gift-exchange as a universal phenomenon offer material, as Lévi-Strauss has said, for ‘inexhaustible sociological reflection’. No-one has done more to provoke such reflection than Lévi-Strauss himself, especially in his book The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

Both Lévi-Strauss and Mauss, in analysing materials from an immense range of culturally diverse societies, are tempted from time to time to speculate about the relevance of the rules and functions of giving in such societies to present-day institutions in the West. Mauss was eventually led to see modern forms of social security, expressing ‘solicitude or co-operation’, as a renaissance of ‘the theme of the gift’. Had he been born later, he might well have explored comparatively the concept of socialised medical care as exemplified by Britain's National Health Service or the principles underlying systems of voluntary blood donorship. When he was in his seventies, blood transfusion services were in their infancy; today, they are practically universal, and world demand for blood is estimated to be growing at a much faster rate than adult population growth, economic growth and other physical indicators. What seemingly lags far behind this imperative demand from medical science in most countries – and especially in the United States and Japan – is the rate of ‘social growth’ in the form of adequate numbers of voluntary donors. This refusal to give without immediate reward could be interpreted – if translated into the context of the primitive societies studied by Mauss – as a ‘refusal of friendship and intercourse’.

Lévi-Strauss had comparative pictures also in mind in deploying examples of gift transactions in the West. ‘In North American society, which often seems to seek the reintegration into modern society of the very general attitudes and procedures of primitive cultures, these occasions (festivals) assume quite exceptional proportions.