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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 1999
Is Mauss so original that nobody before him had opened an anthropological way to study the gift? A philosopher of Hungarian Law, Somlò published in 1909 ‘Der Güterverkehr in der Urgesellschaft’ (The circulation of valuables in primitive society). In one of the numerous footnotes of his essay on the gift, Mauss mentions this book, stating that Somlò: ‘inaugurates the path we shall ourselves undertake’. In spite of this remarkable acknowledgment, Somlò seems to have left no trace in a domain where Malinowski, Thurnwald and Mauss himself among many have become classical references. How then to account for Somlò, a possible predecessor of Mauss?
