The gift as diplomatic theory

The ambivalence of the gift

Marcel Mauss published the Essai sur le don in 1925. Since then, it has become a classic of anthropological and sociological theory. A century onwards, whoever writes about gift-exchange in whatever discipline of the social sciences or humanities is bound to make reference, whether substantially or ritualistically, to this work. As Harry Liebersohn (2011) has shown, other authors, including canonical figures from the history of political thought, had devoted serious attention to the phenomenon, but none of them occupy the same prominent position in present-day investigations of gift-exchange. Across this multidisciplinary literature, everybody cites Marcel Mauss, but almost nobody cites Edmund Burke, Thomas Hobbes, or Friedrich List. The same observation applies to the discipline of International Relations, where a number of papers have appeared on the subject recently. All of them refer to the Essai sur le don (Heins et al., 2018; HJD, 2021; Kustermans, 2019; Sending et al., 2026; Shilliam, 2013).

One can speculate about the reasons for this situation. Beyond the workings of the Matthew effect in science, a more substantive reason is that Mauss’s text sparkles. Its author’s erudition jumps off the pages – “Mauss knows everything,” said his students (Valeri, 2013: 263) – but he wore his erudition lightly. The Essai never bores. It entertains and enchants. A second reason is that Mauss stated a bold claim. He identified an allegedly universal logic of gift-exchange – summarized by the threefold obligation to give, receive, and return – and maintained that the dynamics of gift-exchange capture something essential about human existence – an existence that is always already coexistence and that depends on the maintenance and celebration of relations of reciprocity (Bloch, 2015: 296; Ricœr, 2004: 376–377). Mauss boldly presented the gift as a paradigm for social life. Other scholars had presented gift-exchange as a paradigm for premodern social life, but nobody before Mauss had claimed it as a paradigm for social life as such, both modern and premodern (but see Nietzsche, 2005: 64–66). ¹ A third reason why the Essai sur le don became the go-to reference for subsequent scholarship on gift-exchange is that it appreciates the ambivalence of the gift. It is keenly attuned to the constitutive tensions of human coexistence: the tension between obligation and freedom, interestedness and disinterestedness, and peace and war (Vandenberghe, 2025: 301). It entertains those tensions without ever quite resolving them. The Essai dwells in that ambiguity and embraces the ambivalence about the gift that it entails. While intellectual sparkle and theoretical boldness secure scholarly authority, dwelling in ambiguity secures continued and substantive engagement. Readers-turned-authors can take and have taken Mauss’s essay in all kinds of directions.

Adding to this rich history of social-scientific and humanistic engagement, I want to develop a distinctly diplomatic interpretation of Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don. This is at once an obvious move and a debatable one. It is an obvious move because Mauss wrote the essay against the background of the devastation of the Great War and ongoing debates about the political prudence of the Treaty of Versailles: whether or not it had installed a legitimate and durable peace (Mallard, 2011). It should therefore not be surprising that the problem of war and peace strongly animates the essay (Vandenberghe, 2025: 301). But in the subsequent literature on Mauss, with the notable exceptions of Marshall Sahlins (1972: 168–181) and Paul Ricœr (2004: 376–377), this aspect of the essay has not been commented on much. The same observation could be said to apply, at least to an extent, to the scholarship in International Relations that argues for the continuing significance of Mauss’s work on gift-exchange. In International Relations, his ideas have been used to rethink the very meaning of foreign aid (Hattori, 2001), to assess giving practices by pharmaceutical companies (Guilbaud, 2018) and the significance of hostage-taking in modern world politics (Colonomos, 2018), and also to clarify the dynamics animating the sometimes hospitable, sometimes hostile reception of refugees in European societies (Heins and Unrau, 2018). The overall concern here is to explain the perpetuation and experience of structural hierarchies with reference to the patterns of gift-exchange within them, typically defined by the structural inability of the recipient to reciprocate and by the refusal on the part of the donors of the prospect of a return gift (Dillon, 2003 [1968]; Ramel, 2018: 175). In these efforts, Mauss’s model of reciprocal gift-exchange functions as an evaluative standard. Contemporary gift-giving practices are measured by it and not seldom found wanting. This work mobilizes the Essai sur le don to get a handle on questions of international order and justice more so than the problem of war and peace, and it certainly does not draw out the distinctly diplomatic conception of peace that I believe Mauss’s text harbors.

But a complication has arisen, and I should not ignore it. The complication concerns what one might call the “coloniality” of Mauss’s Essai sur le don (Mignolo, 2007). In a number of publications, Grégoire Mallard (2018, 2019; Mallard and Terrier, 2021) has examined how Mauss’s (and more broadly Durkheimian) scholarship was embedded in the French colonial field, how it reproduced colonialist concepts and categories, how it naturalized the sheer fact of colonial domination, and how the Essai sur le don in particular served – could all too easily be made to serve – projects intended to relegitimize French colonial rule in response to growing criticism of it. To the extent that the idea of diplomacy enjoys a positive connotation and that of colonialism a negative one, my wish to develop a distinctly diplomatic interpretation of Mauss’s essay may come across as an attempt to paper over the less pleasant aspects of his work. But this is not the purpose. On the contrary, my intuition is that situating Mauss (and Durkheimian sociology more broadly) in the French colonial field helps to characterize the diplomatic character of their thought and then also to tease out the distinctly diplomatic conception of peace embedded in the Essai. This also implies that any rigid distinction between diplomacy and colonialism and between diplomatic and colonial thought will have to be relaxed – not in order to justify the European colonial project but in order to achieve a more subtle understanding of what one might call the diplomatic ethos. The ambivalence of the gift finds its reflection in the more general ambivalence of diplomacy.

In the remainder of this article, I grapple my way toward a diplomatic interpretation of the Essai sur le don in four steps. First, I introduce the figure of Marcel Mauss. The purpose of this part of the article is to determine how Mauss’s scholarly work relates to his career-spanning political involvement. I argue that his political involvement played a minor part in defining the topics and direction of his scholarship, which I believe implies that his political involvement, including his involvement in the colonial field, should not determine our assessments of the meaning of his work. Second, I turn to Mallard’s (2019) interpretation of Mauss’s essay as embodying a form of colonial knowledge. I include this discussion because readers may plausibly assume that the essay’s colonial character invalidates any attempt to appropriate it as a resource for diplomatic theory. There is no doubt that Mauss’s Essai sur le don is a colonial artifact: it is a product of a historical period fundamentally defined by the European colonial project. There is no doubt either that Mauss was an active participant in the metropolitan colonial field and, as a researcher, a beneficiary of the extraction of knowledge from colonial subjects and societies. But, as George Steinmetz (2024, 2025) has forcefully argued, within the French colonial field, Durkheimian sociologists showed themselves highly critical of European colonialism, at least as it actually existed, and, more crucially, were prone to “diplomatize” colonial knowledge. They engaged it in a spirit of what one might call diplomatic reflexivity without, for that matter, necessarily shedding its colonial character. As such, specifying its status as a colonial artifact prepares the ground conceptually for a diplomatic interpretation of the essay and warns against developing this diplomatic interpretation in an idealistic vein. Let me repeat that the distinction is in any case not a rigid one. Third, turning to the substance of the Essai sur le don, I present the two “archaic” practices of gift-exchange that form the ethnographic core of the work: the kula and the potlatch. If I dwell on the detail of how these practices functioned, it is because I believe in the theoretical importance of fine-grained description (Kustermans, 2020: 202–203). To the extent that I wish to advance a diplomatic interpretation of Mauss’s essay, I must first establish that there is sufficient ground for this interpretation, not in the least in Mauss’s description of the two core institutions that lie at its center. Fourth, I explain how the Essai sur le don counts as a resource for diplomatic theory. I show how it exemplifies diplomacy-as-theoria, how it deepens our understanding of diplomacy’s presumed commitment to relationality, and how it harbors a distinctive conception of diplomatic peace. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the ambivalence of diplomacy.

Who was Marcel Mauss?

Marcel Mauss was a French scholar. He was born in 1872 in Alsace-Lorraine and he died in Paris in 1950. Historical circumstances led him to experience two major wars – the First World War, from his own accord, on active duty; and the Second World War, at a relatively old age, from a shabby apartment in the French capital. Marcel Mauss was of Jewish descent, and so his former flat had been requisitioned by the German authorities. Probably as a result of intercession by German colleagues, he could stay in Paris, although in more humble lodgings. He suffered the occupation stoically, but he did not come out unscathed. In the 5 years that he would still live until his death at age 77, he suffered from loss of memory and withdrew into a private existence.

These final years contrasted with the vigor with which he had otherwise lived his life. Even though he thought of himself primarily as a researcher and scholar, Mauss engaged in more political action too. As a journalist, for instance, he was involved with such newspapers as L’Humanité and Le Populaire. Both newspapers had an outspoken, left-leaning political profile. L’Humanité had been established in 1904 by Jean Jaurès and had a socialist profile, at least at the outset. Mauss contributed to the newspaper financially and with journalistic writing, mainly on the cooperative movement. When L’Humanité adopted a more radical profile and developed into an official organ of the Parti Communiste Française, Mauss stopped writing for the outlet. In 1918, a new socialist newspaper was established, Le Populaire, which Mauss again contributed to both financially and as a journalist. He wrote on the cooperative movement again but also on the issue of German reparations and, skeptically, on the merits of the Bolshevist experiment in Russia. Other than contributing to these and similar publications, Mauss took the initiative to establish an actual cooperative (a bakery, La Boulangerie, which went bankrupt rather soon) and participated as a delegate in international meetings of the cooperative movement. This was a serious commitment, which he stayed true to for the whole of his adult life.

It is tempting to read these political commitments as an animating force for Mauss’s scholarly work. In his intellectual biography of Marcel Mauss, Marcel Fournier (2006) skillfully weaves his public and scholarly lives into a coherent narrative. Similarly, but more insistently, Grégoire Mallard (2019) argues about the Essai sur le don in particular that it sprang from a wish to demonstrate the advantageous nature of a number of circumscribed political causes – generous welfare policies, reorganizing the repayment of German debt, and saving the French colonial project from itself by way of the institution of a so-called giving colonialism (pp. 43–120). These are good policies, Mallard has Mauss arguing, because they are grounded in solid anthropological facts.

There is merit to this argument, but I think it is important to treat it with care. Mauss the citizen drew on and appropriated, sometimes misappropriated, but he did not determine the work that Mauss the scholar pursued. Rather, the academic trajectory that Mauss traversed suggests a degree of dissociation between his political and academic work. It is significant, in this context, that the policy recommendations that the Essai sur le don ends with and that Mallard assumes to be the key to its interpretation have long baffled readers of the text. Henri Hubert, with whom Mauss (1964) had written a tantalizing early essay on the nature and function of sacrifice, wrote a letter to Mauss in which he questioned the particular combination of anthropological analysis, practical ethics, and considerations of social policy. “Are you really sure,” Hubert put the question to Mauss in a private letter, “that the development of social insurance can be attached to your ‘human bedrock’?” (cited in Fournier 2006: 244). Mary Douglas, in her foreword to the 2002 English edition of The Gift, reached the same conclusion, judging Mauss’s “own attempt to use the theory of the gift to underpin social democracy [to have been] very weak. Social security and health insurance are an expression of solidarity, to be sure, but so are a lot of other things, and there the likeness ends” (in Mauss, 2002: xix). In light of this apparent dissociation between scholarship and political work, it should be useful to briefly characterize his approach to sociological research and social theory.

Mauss’s academic career started in Bordeaux, where his uncle Emile Durkheim was teaching at the time. Mauss studied with his uncle, who had set out on a project to introduce sociology into the university curriculum. Mauss took classes with him that instantiated that project, such as a course on the physiology of law and mores, but he also took classes with Durkheim that had a less obviously sociological bent, such as a course on the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Mauss did not study with Durkheim alone. He had other teachers too, some of whom made a great impression on him. Especially noteworthy is the influence of philosopher Octave Hamelin, who, inspired by Charles Renouvier, introduced Mauss to philosophical reflection on the basic categories of thought, such as “the whole” (which Mauss would later translate sociologically into the notion of the “total social fact” [cf. Gofman, 1998]) and “relation” (which has been argued to be the key concept animating the Essai sur le don [cf. Allen, 1998]). His early training in Bordeaux, then, was as much philosophical in nature as it was sociological, even if the philosophy that he was introduced to was taught in full cognizance of the sociological revolution that was underway. The questions that it pursued had their origin in long-standing philosophical debates, and the answers that it offered insisted on “an uncompromising rationalism” (Fournier, 2006: 24) and a proper reckoning with social facts.

From Bordeaux, Mauss moved on to Paris to do an agrégation in philosophy, the successful completion of which – or at least of an agrégation of some kind; Mauss chose philosophy, as had his uncle before him – was a precondition to teach in secondary or higher education. The curriculum included work by Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Hobbes, Descartes, Bossuet, Berkeley, and Taine. From the perspective of those who championed the budding project of sociology, the curriculum constituted a regress, because it was devoid of what Durkheim called “positive data and definite knowledge” (cited in Fournier, 2006: 28). Still, from a paper that Mauss wrote for his agrégation, on probabilism and skepticism, and in which he outed himself as a “relativist,” it is clear that he had started to think about philosophical matters with reference to precisely such positive data and then particularly with reference to new knowledge culled from ethnographic reports on Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. This was in 1895, 17 years before Durkheim applied that same procedure to the analysis of religion (which is also an analysis of the category of “causation” Warfield Rawls, 1996) and 8 years before they used it in a joint paper to come to terms with practices of classification (Durkheim and Mauss, 1903). In none of this work, I want to insist, did his commitment to particular political causes determine the choice of topic or approach. Although Mauss was politically active at the time – Fournier (2006) calls him a “revolutionary student” – his academic work concerned exclusively scholarly questions. Its political relevance was indirect at most. Mauss tackled philosophical questions, drawing on relatively obscure linguistic and ethnological data (p. 32). This would remain characteristic of his scholarly efforts, starting with a never-completed doctoral thesis on the subject of prayer up until his final essay, published in 1938, on primitive notions of personhood and modern notions of the self. Indicative of this predisposition is the choice to pursue his doctoral studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in the section on religion, which was committed to “separate the history of religion from apologetics or theology” (Fournier 2006: 41). He focused his studies on ancient languages (Indo-European comparative linguistics, Sanskrit, and Hebrew) and on religion (ancient Indian religions, foremost Hinduism and Buddhism, and also primitive religions). During these years, he developed a taste for the “world-historical” (Allen, 2014), which would be reflected in all of his major essays, including the Essai sur le don. If Mauss seemed to “know everything,” it was because from the start he had wanted to know everything, wishing to become familiar with as broad a range of human experience as possible. He teamed up with fellow researchers to expand that horizon even further, especially Henri Hubert, who had studied Semitic languages and Byzantine culture and who would develop a keen interest in Celtic history and religion. About that collaboration, he wrote to another friend that

Together we were discovering the world, humanity – prehistoric, primitive, exotic – the semitic world and the Indian world, in addition to the ancient world and Christian world we already knew. [. . .] It was a constant joy of discovery and novelty. (cited in Fournier, 2006: 50)

One way to summarize Mauss’s approach to his scientific work is to emphasize that he cared about facts – as wide-ranging an array of facts as possible – more than he cared about theory. In this, he differed rather strongly from his uncle. Durkheim devoted a lot of effort to developing a systematic theory of society. Mauss did not, as was also reflected in the courses that he taught, first at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and later at the Collège de France. Mauss saw himself as a researcher training future researchers. He did not see himself as a professor propounding a coherent body of ideas about how society hangs or ought to hang together. This commitment to the collection and interpretation of facts, to the reconstruction of social practices, and the disinclination to elaborate a systematic theoretical edifice may be considered an important explanation of the seeming dissociation between his work as a scholar and his work as an activist, organizer, and journalist (see also Hart, 2010).

Note that this dissociation between Mauss the scholar and Mauss the citizen is not without significance for the remainder of this article. If Henri Hubert and Mary Douglas were right that Mauss’s promotion of a generous system of social insurance could not be attached to the “human bedrock” of reciprocal gift-giving that he had excavated from the ethnographic record, at least not without ideological mediation, this assessment should apply equally to Mauss’s promotion of colonial reform that Mallard (2019) presents as a central reason to interpret the Essai sur le don as a carrier of colonial ideology (pp. 110–118). If Hubert and Douglas were right, that is, then Mauss’s promotion of colonial reform cannot be taken as direct evidence of the coloniality of the essay, let alone that it would exclude the development of a diplomatic reinterpretation of its ideas. However, in view of the sensitivity of these matters and the danger of drawing the distinction between its colonial and diplomatic elements overly rigidly, this issue deserves closer attention.

The Essai sur le don as a colonial artifact

The Essai sur le don is a colonial artifact: it centers on empirical findings about the kula and the potlatch that would not have been available in the absence of Europeans’ colonial projects. Furhtermore, there is no doubt that Mauss did not object to the sheer fact of colonial rule. Finally, it is not disputable either that some French thinkers – most explicitly Alexandre Kojève (2017 [1957]: 36–38) – imagined colonial reform in terms of a movement from a colonialism that takes (colonialisme prédateur) to a colonialism that gives (colonialisme donateur). There are plausible reasons, therefore, to present the Essai sur le don as a carrier of colonial ideology. But we should not draw this conclusion prematurely.

First, concerning the notion of “giving colonialism” (colonialisme donateur), it should be noted that Alexandre Kojève coined it in a 1957 lecture, 7 years after Mauss’s death. Kojève developed the notion in analogy with the redistributive policies that he believed had saved capitalist societies from the revolutionary disruptions that Marxist theory had predicted would befall them. If European states wished to prevent revolutionary violence from disrupting the colonial economic system, it was Kojève’s reasoning, then they would have to practice a form of giving colonialism, by which he meant that they would have to develop a system of redistribution to have the (formerly) colonized societies enjoy the surplus value that the international economy (still) organized along colonial lines generated. In making this argument, Kojève did not refer to Mauss’s essay on gift-exchange. Conversely, Mauss does not refer to European colonialism in the Essai sur le don and its policy-focused conclusions. He did discuss the phenomenon extensively in his posthumously published La nation ou le sens du social (Mauss, 2018), but he neither uses nor entertains the notion of giving colonialism there. Rather, he observed that France had come to “claim [prétend] that it colonizes for the good of the people that it annexes, even though its practice is rather different from its theory” (Mauss, 2018: 188; emphasis added). He took his distance from the French claim. Admittedly, this distance shrank considerably when he subsequently observed that “[. . .] imperialist colonization [. . .] pushed away Barbary, war, slavery, and misery in important parts of the globe” and added that, presumably, “[it] is [. . .] better for a Moroccan to be governed by Frenchmen than by warlords, for the Arab to be under the British rather than Ottoman tutelage” (Mauss, 2018: 189). Notice two things though: first, that the comparison is between European rule and the (alleged) anarchy of competing warlords and between European and Ottoman rule and thus not between European rule and national rule; and second, that these supposed benefits of imperialist colonization are presented as the side effects of clearly “criminal” European rule. As Mauss (2018) prefaced his observations: “A quelque chose malheur est bon” (There is something good in a bad situation.) (p. 189). This is hardly a portrayal of European colonialism as a model, or even an instance, of generous giving.

Second, concerning the fact that Mauss did not object to the principle of colonial rule, it can be noted that he did strongly object to actually existing European rule in colonized societies. He was active in the Indigenous Committee Against the Chartered Companies. These companies were commercial organizations with a privileged right, granted by the metropolitan state, to trade or develop an economic activity in one or more colonies. This was a convenient arrangement, both for the companies themselves, who would make a huge profit as a result of their monopoly position, and for the metropolitan authorities, who could deny responsibility for any wrongdoing or mishap of the Chartered Companies and who were spared the need to impose additional taxes on their populations. However, it was an utterly undesirable arrangement for the colonial subjects. The Chartered Companies, whose only concern was to raise as big a profit as possible, did not shy away from exploiting local populations. Forced labor was commonly imposed, and corporal punishment was inflicted, with or without knowledge of the metropolitan authorities. More generally, the possibility that native people had economic interests of their own, let alone a right to the resources that the Chartered Companies appropriated, was rarely taken into account (Mauss, 2018: 188). Mauss strongly objected to these exploitative practices. He clearly abhorred central aspects of (French, European, and modern) colonial practice and did not hesitate to communicate his opposition to those in charge.

But it is still true that he did not object to colonial rule as such. This was mainly due, I believe, to Mauss’s world-historical cast of mind (Allen, 2014). From Mauss’s world-historical perspective, the sheer observation of colonial relations – with foreign people settling in and establishing control over sometimes distant lands and the people living there – did not imply, at least not necessarily, a negative moral valuation. Taking a world-historical perspective led Mauss to accept colonization as a historically recurrent enterprise and to present the ensuing political structures and cultural effects as historically common. He explained that “colonization was one of the oldest phenomena of humankind” and that “it held an absolute importance in all political and civilizational history, from the most ancient to the most modern,” insisting that it continued “to play such a role in modern societies, including in the most democratic and the most sensible ones” (Mauss, 2018: 184–185). It was on this world-historical ground, I would contend, that Mauss (and most Durkheimians with him) appears to have “presume[d] empire as a global political system [. . .]” (Kurasawa, 2013: 189).

While his knowledge of and attunement to world history informed his “acceptance” of the sheer fact of colonial rule (Mallard and Terrier, 2021: 17), it also informed some of Mauss’s criticism of it, although this is rarely noted. Grégoire Mallard (2019) focuses on Mauss’s criticism of the exploitative practices engaged in by the Chartered Companies, oftentimes acting with the complicity of the metropolitan state, but in Le nation ou le sens du social, Mauss highlighted another matter (pp. 97–109). He drew attention to Europeans’ refusal to marry local women, a refusal that he knew to be a historical anomaly.

[The] swarms of men who once left a metropolis departed without wives, taking wives from the local population. Generally, there was intermarriage. [. . .] Contempt for people of mixed race is a modern phenomenon [. . .]. The refusal to concubine with the conquered race is one of the principal insults that the white race directs at so-called inferior races, and at those born of interracial relationships. Herein lies, in embryo, and for a long time to come, a source of very serious conflicts, all the more serious because they are purely moral. (Mauss, 2018: 187–188; emphasis added)

He interpreted the refusal to concubine with the colonized other as the expression of a fundamental disrespect, and it was this disrespect that had jeopardized the legitimacy of European colonial rule from the very start. In light of this interpretation of the shortcomings of European colonial rule – not just that it took what it was not entitled to but that it refused to receive, because it failed to acknowledge the shared humanity of the colonized other and hence could not contemplate having legitimate offspring with them ² – it is significant that his main recommendation for colonial reform did not in fact concern the institution of a giving colonialism but rather the establishment of an Institute of Ethnology that would collect ethnological data, develop ethnographic knowledge, and train colonial officers (Mallard, 2019: 10). Colonial rule, in Mauss’s view, would benefit from knowledge about colonial societies, not so much because knowledge facilitates control but rather, it appears, because knowledge fosters familiarity and a degree of identification (for a strong note of caution, see Todorov, 1984). This is not to deny that by partnering with the Ministry of the Colonies, “Mauss was converting ethnological scholarship into a tool for the exercise of imperial power [. . .]” (Kurasawa, 2013: 195–196), but it does serve to indicate that he held the (maybe fantastical) belief, sustained by his reading of world history, that the exercise of imperial power could be put on a fundamentally different footing. To this end, he counseled receptivity as much as generosity.

The final reason that supports the designation of the Essai sur le don as colonial ideology is the fact that it built on the kind of ethnographic data that were only available to Mauss because of Europeans’ expansion into the rest of the world. With the establishment of the Institute of Ethnology, in addition to the ambition to set French colonial rule on a more acceptable path, Mauss also aspired to have French researchers contribute original data to the anthropological discipline. The more data about the most varied human societies, the higher the chance that anthropology could make good on its name and become the science of humankind. There are different ways to appraise this ambition. Raewynn Connell (1997) maintains that this whole endeavor “embodied the imperial gaze on the world” (p. 1524). She finds that it “rested on a one-way flow of information, a capacity to examine a range of societies from the outside, and an ability to move freely from one society to another” and insists that these features mirror and reproduce the relation of colonial domination (Connell, 1997: 1523). To the extent that the Essai sur le don shares these features, which it does, this is probably the strongest sense in which the essay counts as a piece of colonial ideology; this is ideology not as an articulate political program but ideology that has reached the depths of epistemology, ideology that has come to define the very way in which people – in casu, elite Europeans of the high-colonial era, including Durkheimian anthropologists – had come to know the world.

But I want to tread carefully here. Compare the idea of original sin. Ever since the fall, all human beings have been marked by original sin, but while some indulge in sin, others struggle against it. Similarly, all scholarship of the high-colonial era was going to “bear the marks of empire” (Steinmetz, 2024: 275), but not every thinker responded in the same way to the “constraints and spaces of possibility” that the imperial condition imposed on them (Steinmetz, 2025: 93; compare Gomikawa, 2018). Some celebrated those constraints and possibilities; others sought to push beyond them. Some indulged in the coloniality of imperial knowledge; others sought to subvert it. In George Steinmetz’s (2024, 2025) reading, Durkheimian sociology typically operated in this subversive mode. This is also Fuyuki Kurasawa’s (2013: 200; emphasis added) conclusion when he writes that “following Durkheimian thinking, we can straightforwardly arrive at the conclusion that such societies did not require the gifts of a French civilization or Cartesianism, nor did its inhabitants need to be converted into French citizens.” Kurasawa elaborates this claim by showing that Durkheimian sociology developed alternative understandings of some of the key concepts that structured contemporary comparative scholarship and that had long served to justify the imperial projects of European states – civilization (which they pluralized), rationality (which they insisted to be a feature of supposedly primitive forms of thought too), and evolution (which they complicated thoroughly, acknowledging intrasocietal evolution from simpler to more complex but denying the usefulness of the idea of a universal, world-historical evolutionary chain). To this list of concepts, one should also add the idea of race. Mauss denied that races existed in an enduring form. “Human history,” Alice Conklin (2017) summarizes Mauss’s approach to the concept, is a history of “the fusion of the races, determined by social factors, which turns race into a fundamentally unstable biological phenomenon” (p. 39). In 1926, for instance, he elaborated an “Internal Critique of the ‘Legend of Abraham’,” published in the Revue des études juives. In the paper, Mauss introduced the notion of “composite [societies],” which he explained were “composed of several races or social groups all grafted upon another” and which he claimed were “extremely numerous in antiquity” (Mauss, 2016: 63), including in the broader social environment to which the tribes of Israel belonged. In that same article, Mauss noted the similarities between the organization and sociopolitical conduct of biblical Israel and that of a number of African polities of his own time, a comparison from which he concluded that “similar conditions of life produce similar effects.” The English translators of the “Internal Critique” put that statement in its proper historical context when they observe that it “constitute[d] a strong indictment of the prevalent hegemony of the colonial historiographic assumption that the history of a people can best be explained by their racial origins, especially in regard to the colonized” (Hamza and Gannon, 2016: 49). In order to be able to come up with that statement and to substantiate it by way of an unruly comparison (Detienne, 2008), however, Mauss had to take recourse to contemporary ethnographic reports and thus to colonial knowledge. And yet, the way that he used that knowledge had the effect of casting doubt on one of the fundamental conceptual pillars – centered on the notions of biological race, racial difference, and racial hierarchy – of colonial epistemology. A colonial artifact is not per se a carrier of colonial ideology.

The purpose of this part of the article has been to push back against the idea that Mauss’s Essai sur le don is a piece of colonial ideology without wanting to deny that it is nonetheless a specimen of colonial knowledge. I have wanted to acknowledge and underline the “ambiguities in the Durkheimians’ position with respect to colonialism” (Mallard and Terrier, 2021: 22) and have drawn particular attention to his attempt to situate European colonialism in world history. This move led him simultaneously to normalize European colonialism as an instance of a historically recurrent phenomenon and to criticize it as a pathological form of that more general phenomenon. Crucially, the flaw that he emphasized on the basis of this world-historical comparison was the Europeans’ failure to treat the colonized other as a possible partner for exchange, symbolized by their refusal to take local women in marriage (compare Neumann, 2020: 6). The problem was not primarily one of lacking generosity, as Kojève’s suggestion to develop a giving colonialism implied, but one of lacking receptivity. The problem, one might say, was that Europeans (of the early 20th century) did not appreciate the need, both practical and moral, for diplomacy in the colonial encounter.

Kula and potlatch: A reconstruction

Having explained why Mauss’s political involvement should not determine our interpretation of the Essai sur le don and having argued more particularly that his embeddedness and involvement in the colonial field does not offer enough reason, in and of itself, to classify the work as a piece of colonial ideology or to dismiss the development of a distinctly diplomatic interpretation of it, it is high time to turn to the essay itself and to do so in more positive terms. There are good, substantive reasons, that is, to develop a diplomatic interpretation of Marcel Mauss’s treatment of gift-exchange, the foremost being that the two archaic institutions that lie at its ethnographic core – kula and potlatch – are portrayed by Mauss as fundamentally international practices (Mauss, 2002: 8). Therefore, in preparation for the diplomatic interpretation that follows in the next section, let me briefly reconstruct the dynamics of kula and potlatch.

The kula ring refers to a system of exchange that existed among a number of islands in the archipelago of Melanesian New Guinea. Most of our knowledge of the practice derives from ethnographic observation, first and foremost by Bronislaw Malinowski (2012 [1922]), but it has been much expanded upon since (Dalton, 1984). Among the people who participate in kula exchange, there exists a distinct sense that the practice is a deeply historical one, that it is of all times. It is “rooted in myth, backed by traditional law, and surrounded with magical rites” (Malinowski, 2012: 65). As a matter of fact, archeologists have found evidence, in the form of stone monuments and decorated shells buried at these sites, that kula exchange may trace back as far as 1300 BCE (Bickler, 2006). The practice, it bears noting, continues until today (cf. Campbell, 2002), although Melanesian elders fear that it is falling into disuse and are involved in a project of restoration (Knapp, 2017).

The kula exchange witnesses the circulation of particular objects between the various groups of people living on the islands. The kula ring has delegations of these island communities, headed by their chief or one of their elders, take off on a boat expedition to neighboring islands to exchange gifts. Once arrived on the neighboring island, each participant seeks out his counterpart or kula partner of corresponding rank and status. All of these dyads of partners engage in kula exchange, but the encounter nonetheless focuses on the exchange between the two leaders. Their interaction is at the center of attention and is governed by particular rules of decorum. Haggling is strictly forbidden, and so are overt expressions of excitement. The kula exchange is less a joyous occasion than a solemn one. “[Such exchanges],” wrote Malinowski (2012: 273), “have to be accompanied by the blow of the conch shell, and the present is given ostentatiously and in public.” About the demeanor of the exchange partners, he observed the following:

[. . .] though the valuable has to be handed over by the giver, the receiver hardly takes any notice of it, and seldom receives it actually into his hands. The etiquette of the transaction requires that the gift should be given in an off-hand, abrupt, almost angry manner, and received with equivalent nonchalance and disdain.

It appears that recipients of vaygu’a understand that acceptance of a valuable puts them in a position of indebtedness, which they know they must, and in a certain sense wish to assume, but which they simultaneously feel the burden of. They value the status that being a kula partner endows them with, but they also know that they will have to give back a return gift of equal or superior value.

The kula ring has particular objects circulating in a particular direction. There are two types of vaygu’a: bracelets (mwali, made from conus shell) and necklaces (soulava, made from spondylus shell). The necklaces move around the kula ring in a clockwise direction. The armbands move around it in a counterclockwise direction. Each vaygu’a has a name and a personality and is the subject of endless storytelling. The older the vaygu’a, the more it has circulated along the kula ring and the more it has been in the possession of other – foreign, (in)famous – chiefs, the more it brings fame to its current holder. Its holder will cherish it. Vaygu’a are brought out on important occasions, during communal feasts or in healing ceremonies. But other than that, they are hoarded, carefully stored, and only occasionally brought out, if not at the occasion of a ritual performance, then simply to hold and caress them for a while until they are, as eventually they must be, brought back in circulation and offered to another kula partner.

It must be mentioned, as Mauss also emphasized, that kula exchange – that is to say, the solemn moment of ritual exchange of vaygu’a, primarily among chiefs – was accompanied by other types of exchange. This includes other types of gift-giving, in the form of acts of hosting and hospitality. But it also includes more evidently economic activities in the form of barter (grimwali, “everyday exchange”). And yet, a lot of attention is devoted to ensuring that the exchange of vaygu’a was marked off from the other types of exchange, especially from grimwali. There is not a bigger offense, that is, than to accuse a kula partner of doing (aristocratic, dignified) kula in the (petit-bourgeois, haggling) manner of grimwali. Kula partners give and receive disinterestedly, which is obviously not to deny that giving and giving back serve their interests, not in the least their political interests. The operation of the kula ring, from a structural perspective, the continuous and organized flow of precious objects, ensures solidarity and alliance and thus keeps war at bay. From a personal perspective, however, the temporary possession of precious vaygu’a, as well as the distribution of coveted grimwali items upon return home, ensures status and authority.

Many of the same observations can be made about potlatch, a practice performed by native tribes in Northwest America, typically at the occasion of a major event (initiation, birth, marriage, death, and shamanistic performances) in the life of the group. Potlatch involves the gathering of various tribes or of various segments of the same tribe (more accurately, kinship groups). They sit together, give elaborate speeches, perform masked dances, and chant myth-laden songs. A great amount of high-quality food will have been prepared and shared among the participants. Crucial to a potlatch, however, is the distribution of gifts, especially emblazoned blankets and coppers. Mauss emphasized that potlatches were marked by a strongly antagonistic mood, and he pointed out the somewhat aggressive posture that the hosting chief would assume. More explicitly than in the kula ring, he explained, potlatch is experienced by hosting chiefs as an opportunity to affirm or enhance their authority (vis-à-vis their own tribe) and standing (among their peers). The more splendid the potlatch, the more food he could offer, the more blankets and coppers he could distribute to his guests, the more his people would recognize the legitimacy of their chief’s position, and the more he would secure his standing – or, if he had given more than anybody else before, his preeminence – among his peers. This desire to impress by way of generosity would sometimes culminate in the destruction of precious goods. Ethnographers have reported on the destruction of mats and coppers; the burning of foodstuffs, cans of oil, and also entire houses; and even the killing of slaves. Potlatch, in summary, is characterized by the competitive pursuit of honor. However, this does not mean that the potlatch does not involve reciprocity. Being a guest at a potlatch, as a chief, implied that one was going to be a host at the next potlatch, at which occasion they would feel a certain pressure to outperform their former host(s) and to distribute more than earlier hosts had. Mauss insisted that reciprocation in the context of potlatch depended on a lapse of time, which led him to interpret the institution in terms of the concept of credit.

Mauss read the ethnographies – on potlatch, mainly the reports of Franz Boas – that he had access to carefully and did not hesitate to include empirical observations that may be argued to fall outside of the basic interpretive framework that he applied to the institution and that centered on the concepts of credit (the obligation to return) and honor (vis-à-vis kinship group and fellow chiefs). Many of these additional observations concern the religious nature of potlatch (Kan, 1986), which finds its most obvious expression in the fact that those who danced, sang, and gave speeches typically wore masks and thus did not act in a private capacity but as a “persona” bearing an ancestral name (cf. Mauss, 1938). It was first and foremost this persona and, with him all of the ancestors that had borne the same name in earlier times that spoke, danced, and sang. And the gifts being offered to the guests at the potlatch were offered to their persona as much as to the guest as an individual person. Taking these observations into account, the acts of destruction, which the concept of honor leads one to interpret as sheer braggadocio, appear in a different light. They are less so acts of destruction than acts of sacrifice. They are gifts offered to the gods, expressions of gratitude for the wealth bestowed in earlier times, with the hope of a return gift in the form of continuing prosperity and abundance for the clan and tribe. Archaic gift-exchange never boiled down to mere interhuman interaction or transaction. They were also always moments of cosmological drama featuring the performance of personae and the participation of ancestral spirits. Archaic gift-exchange pertained to all three: the maintenance of solidarity (as alliance), status (as rank), and authority (as consecration).

This is, in rough summary, what Mauss wrote about kula and potlatch. He wagered that both institutions were variants of the same phenomenon, because both were organized by the threefold obligation to give, receive, and return. The major difference between them, on Mauss’s account, was that the agonistic nature of potlatch had become subdued in the organization of kula. Mauss interpreted these differences in (intrasocietal, not world-historical) evolutionary terms. Once upon a time, it was Mauss’s argument, the Melanesian kula exchange had taken the form of potlatch. With time, however, it had lost its strongly competitive character, probably because status hierarchies had become more stable.

Admittedly, the reconstruction of how kula and potlatch worked makes for the first part of the Essai sur le don only. Mauss included a second part that discussed how an ethos of gift-giving had survived in ancient systems of law and a third part that drew a number of moral and political conclusions. If I leave out a proper discussion of these parts, it is because they took Mauss’s discussion of gift-giving out of the international context in which the kula ring and the potlatch had firmly situated it (as also he himself recognized; cf. Mauss, 2013: 178) and are therefore less important for the development of a diplomatic interpretation of the Essai sur le don, including how it harbors a distinctive conception of peace. This is what I turn to next.

The Essai sur le don as diplomatic theory

The purpose of the previous parts of this article was to prepare the ground for a diplomatic interpretation of the Essai sur le don. The first part did so by introducing its author, arguing that we should not be beholden to Mauss’s own interpretation of the essay as primarily offering theoretical support for domestic policies of redistribution. The second part did so by revisiting the argument that the Essai sur le don makes for a piece of colonial ideology, arguing that Mauss’s acceptance of the principle of colonialism was accompanied by a clear denunciation of the pathological form that it had taken in modern times and a recognition, at least implicitly, of the practical and moral need to infuse colonial rule with a spirit of diplomacy. Interestingly, although Mauss does not seem to have been aware of it, such a spirit of diplomacy had marked the earliest phases of European expansion, especially in Asia. Writing about the 16th and 17th centuries, Indravati Félicité (2019) has shown that European actors participated in regional diplomatic systems on local terms and that the patterns of their participation did neither foreshadow nor necessarily prepare their future domination (pp. 181–185). In a related vein, writing about VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) rule in Indonesia in the 18th century (Niemeijer, 2002) and the Dutch state’s subsequent rule in the same region at the turn of the 19th century (Post, 2021), historians have explained that colonial rule depended on the cooperation of local rulers and that maintaining their cooperation depended, in turn, on the treatment of local rulers as rulers indeed, not in the least through the staging of ritual occasions that communicated respect. Although European colonial rule got to be premised on a rigid hierarchy between colonizer and colonized that entailed, at least conceptually, the refusal of diplomacy, it is also the case that successful colonial rule, at least in Asia in the 18th century, depended on recurrent moments of the “diplomatization” of the colonial relationship (Opondo, 2019: 203; Neumann, 2020: 2–4). Colonial agents, at least in this time and place, acknowledged the practical necessity of “colonial diplomacy” (Post, 2021: 73). In his own reflections on the subject, Mauss added an appreciation of its moral necessity. It would serve to safeguard colonial rule from turning pathological, from drawing up exceedingly strict boundaries and hierarchies.

Having said that, Mauss’s meaning for diplomatic theory extends beyond his call for a degree of diplomatic reflexivity in the practice of colonial rule. The Essai sur le don and the three decades of scholarship that led up to it were, in more than one sense, imbued with a spirit of diplomacy. This spirit transpired, for instance, in the desire, on evidence from the very first stages of his career, to acquaint himself with the variety of human experience (Fournier, 2006: 50). He journeyed through world history to sundry spatiotemporal sites – Byzantine, Celtic, Indian, Inuit, Melanesian, Germanic, and Semitic – in search of knowledge about human society. This movement and the consequent encounters, while they remained metaphorical, accomplished through wide-ranging and emphatic reading, resembled, in spirit if not in form, the ancient Greek theoria, a particular kind of “freelance embassy [. . .] sent abroad to see the world with the purpose of finding out the laws and political ways of other peoples [. . .] and bringing back this knowledge to inform and suggest reforms in the polis” (Constantinou, 2006: 353). Theoria “served as missions of problematization and knowledge gathering” (Constantinou, 2013: 148). They served to gather knowledge about the Other in order to problematize and improve the Self, including the Self’s relation to the Other. I would situate the work of Marcel Mauss and Durkheimian sociology more broadly in this particular “diplomatic” tradition of seeking “reflexive knowledge” (Constantinou, 2013: 148) and would suggest that the effort gains in critical edge to the extent that it is pursued, as also the theoria was, among presumed barbarians. It is one thing to adopt good practices from your like-minded peers. It is a rather different and more dangerous endeavor to set out to learn from frowned-upon strangers. The endeavor is dangerous but important, important but dangerous. I would further hypothesize that in most societies, the task will be delegated to a few people only: a freelance embassy of trusted citizens and an intellectual project of faithful scholars. Political communities benefit from diplomacy-as-theoria, but they will be careful to be able to refuse the knowledge that these missions bring back home with them. One notices how the spirit of diplomacy-as-theoria dwells in ambivalence. A society’s ruling elite may understand that it should set out to learn from the barbarians, but, aware of the sense of pride that it cultivated among its own citizens, it insists on plausible deniability.

This would appear to be a more fundamental predicament of diplomacy, not just between the civilized and the barbarian but also equally among peers and the like-minded. It is a predicament, I want to suggest, that is at the heart of Mauss’s Essai sur le don. Readers may remember, in this regard, that Nicholas Allen (2000) interprets the essay as a “preliminary study bearing on the category of relation” (p. 97). In this view, by examining the dynamics of gift-exchange empirically, on the basis of “positive data” (Fournier, 2006: 28), Mauss hoped to gain a more grounded understanding of what relationality amounted to. When Nicholas Allen (2000) attempted to clarify just how the Essai sur le don helps us understand the meaning of relationality, he contended that Mauss took rituals of gift-giving to express human beings’ awareness that we owe our existence and prosperity to our enmeshment in various relations (p. 97).

We, the members of moiety A,” he summarized the idea, “received the gift of life from our parents in moiety B, and we return the gift in the form of our children, who will also belong to moiety B, and will ensure its continuance into the future.

Maurice Bloch (2015), also with reference to Mauss’s essay on gift-exchange, has similarly argued that individual people and societies are dependent on each other for their continued existence, that they are aware of this interdependence, and that they mark and celebrate it in ritual form (p. 296). As he puts it, people know and celebrate that their continued existence and prosperity depend on “people going in and out of each other’s bodies,” on the boundaries between different individuals (and societies) being porous (Bloch 2015: 287).

According to this interpretation, ritual gift-exchange during kula and potlatch reflected the importance of these ongoing exchanges for the participants and the societies that they represented. It reflected their acknowledgment of that importance. In my reading, however, Mauss would push back against these interpretations. He would not push back against attributing theoretical significance to the observation that new human life results from sexual intercourse and that the fact of sexual intercourse lays bare the porousness of individual bodies. Similarly, he would not push back against the significance of the idea that intermarriage sustains healthy societies and that this demonstrates the fundamental dependence of any society on other societies. And neither would he push back against the suggestion that both observations accord, by and large, with the observations that he collected in the Essai sur le don. What Mauss would probably push back against, however, is the suggestion that ritual gift-exchange, in the way that it happened during kula and potlatch, made for a straightforward celebration of the self’s dependence on others. In the case of potlatch, for instance, the agonism inherent in the event always risks developing into antagonism, and the generosity of the host always risks evolving into domination. The prospect of the guests’ failure to reciprocate by hosting an equally generous potlatch at some point in the future is always on the minds of the participants. The potlatch as a celebration of mutual indebtedness is always tainted by a certain fear, whether express or subliminal, of one-sided dependence. In the case of the kula, in spite of its more egalitarian character and its much more explicit codification of interdependence, there is a similar ambivalence: an ambivalence that was not just felt but given ritual expression in the orchestration of the encounter. When kula partners, especially the heads of the delegations, handed each other their precious objects (vaygu’a), they did so with an air of disinterestedness, even haughtiness. At the moment of receiving the gift, they did not express gratitude (pace Ricœr, 2004: 400–401) but reluctance. But still, they would be pleased with the gifts. They would be proud of having the objects in possession, even if only temporarily. Periodically, they took them out of their storage place to hold and caress or put them on public display during communal feasts. Crucially, though, the value of the vaygu’a, the reason to hold them dear, did not derive from the status of the particular donor from whom it was received but from the history of its possession and from how long and broadly it had been circulating. The reluctance about the self’s involvement with anyone else was tempered by situating that particular relation in a wider web of relations. Note, finally, that a similar observation applies to the potlatch. To the extent that the wealth of the host was understood to have been bestowed by the gods (Kan, 1986), the host’s intimidating generosity could be recast as an act of sacrifice and thus situated in a more intricate web of relations.

The relevance of the above observations for diplomatic theory lies in the fact that it has long attempted to come to terms with the ontology of its subject matter. In this context, Rebecca Adler-Nissen (2015) maintains that most of diplomatic theory is out of tune with the intuitive understanding of most diplomatic practitioners (p. 287). Whereas the latter, she argues, spontaneously “subscribe to a folk relationism,” the former struggle to move beyond an “interactional account” of diplomatic practice. Mauss’s discussion of gift-exchange helps us to understand what a properly relational understanding of diplomacy might look like without (1) unduly prioritizing a focus on bilateral relations and without (2) unduly reducing relationism to an analytical perspective. The category of “relation” – in the kula and potlatch – captures a commitment. It expresses an ethos. Mauss’s discussion of gift-exchange also lets us see that (3) this ethos is in many ways an antiromantic one. It is shot through with ambivalence. It suggests that the achievement of a higher Unity should not be the ambition. This accords with some of the more recent conceptualizations of diplomacy: as concerning the maintenance of relations of separateness rather than their dissolution (Sharp, 2009: 81) or as the “mediation of estrangement” rather than its transcendence (Der Derian, 1987: 6). What Mauss’s discussion of gift-exchange adds to these critical conceptualizations is the insistence that ambivalence applies in all directions. It is not just that practical circumstances – increased dynamic density, the need to manage transboundary problems – compel us to abandon our separate existence or to temper our inclination to cultivate a degree of mutual estrangement. It is also the case that we know our very being and continued prosperity to be due to the contributions that other societies make, whether directly to us or the environments in which we operate. More than is typically acknowledged, the practice of diplomacy is marked by a double ambivalence: an ambivalence about both independence and dependence and an ambivalence even about our mutual dependence. The capacity to dwell in that ambivalence is what diplomacy’s conceptual privileging of relationality may be said to seek to foster.

If this is indeed the case, one would expect this ethos to find reflection in more specific diplomatic practices or in the way in which participants in the practice incline to approach the more particular problems that they have to deal with. Consider the problem of war and peace, which is to say: the problem of how to move from war to peace and what to expect from this movement. Is there some such thing as a “diplomatic peace” (Kornprobst, 2023)? Does diplomacy – as a social practice allegedly animated by a distinctive ethos – entertain a specific way of both conceptualizing and pursuing peace? It will not be possible to answer this question here, at least not empirically. But it will be possible to identify the theoretical answer that the Essai sur le don proposes. In this context, it is useful to remember that Mauss had participated in the Great War on active duty, that he was involved in the public debate about the fairness of the Versailles Treaty (Mallard, 2011), and that, as a young student, he had studied the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and agreed with Hobbes that securing peace ought to be the ultimate concern of every political community (Sahlins, 1972: 168–181). However, precisely because of his “diplomatic” commitment to relationality, Mauss could not agree with Hobbes about the necessity to install a Leviathan. As Marshall Sahlins (1972) explained:

Reciprocity is a “between” relation. It does not dissolve the separate parties within a higher unity, but on the contrary, in correlating their opposition, perpetuates it. [. . .] Thus the condition of peace as understood by Mauss [. . .] has to differ politically from that envisioned by the classic contract, which is always a structure of submission and sometimes of terror. (p. 170)

In the final pages of the Essai sur le don, Mauss offers two ideas about how the shift from peace to war may come about. First, he proposes that parties to a conflict should “lay aside the spear” and engage in trade instead. In doing so, “people learn how to create mutual interests, giving mutual satisfaction, and, in the end, to defend them without having to resort to arms” (Mauss, 2002: 105–106). Admittedly, this first suggestion begs the question. It makes sense in the long term but appears inadequate in the short term. How does one get people to lay aside the spear in the first instance? Frédéric Vandenberghe (2025: 302–303) suggests that gift-exchange was Mauss’s implicit answer. “In the state of nature,” he writes, “gift-giving is a proposition of peace. It is a first move that unarms the enemies and transforms them into friends, or at least [. . .] into allies” (Vandenberghe, 2025: 302–303). In this view, gift-exchange breaks the deadlock by breeding trust. However, to the extent that ceremonial gift-exchange permits the expression of remaining reluctance, it may also be said to achieve the transition from war to peace by slowing it down, by creating a ritual threshold on which enemies-that-are-becoming-allies can linger, on which trust and mistrust can temporarily coexist. Any peace through trade must be prepared, any laying aside of the spear must be accompanied by a more or less tenuous – and therefore ritualized – diplomatic encounter. The alternative would be decisive defeat and unconditional surrender. The alternative, that is, would be the installation of a Leviathan and the refusal of diplomacy.

As said, Mauss hinted at a second way to transition from war to peace. Toward the end of the essay, he invoked the mythical round table of King Arthur.

[. . .] King Arthur, with the help of a Cornish carpenter, invented that wonder of his court, the miraculous Round Table, seated round which, the knights no longer fought. Formerly, “out of sordid envy”, in stupid struggles, duels and murders stained with blood the finest banquets. The carpenter said to Arthur: “I will make you a very beautiful table, around which sixteen hundred and more can sit, and move around, and from which no-one will be excluded. No knight will be able [to] engage in fighting, for there the highest placed will be on the same level as the lowliest.” There was no longer a “high table”, and consequently no more quarrelling. (Mauss, 2002: 106)

The argument appears to be that achieving a durable peace depends on potlatch-like gatherings giving way to kula-like gatherings and that durable peace depends on recurrent gatherings but that those gatherings need to be orchestrated carefully to accommodate every participant’s desire for recognition (Guzzini, 2024: 10). As with the first suggestion (hinting at a commercial peace premised on continuous exchange), this second suggestion (hinting at a more political peace premised on equal recognition) simplifies the insights that inhere in the ethnographic material. Mauss appears to assume an almost mechanical extension of the pacific effect of the round table from the ritual gathering itself to the time after, to a considerable stretch of time after. This is far from obvious. One could equally read the moment of ritual encounter as a moment of “truce” in what remains a fundamentally conflictual process (Ricœr, 2004: 396). In this alternative reading, when they sit around a round table and when they share food and exchange gifts, people are not being socialized – nearly automatically – into a normative commitment to a peace among equals, but they are either orchestrating a pretense (which, in hostile circumstances, can be a worthy endeavor) or giving embodied expression to a more or less sincere wish for peace. “The festival character of ceremonial gift-exchange,” argues Paul Ricœr (2004), “shares with the singing of hymns that they occur in the optative mode” (pp. 376–377). They express a hope – May there be peace! – but this means precisely that the participants accept that its achievement beyond the moment of ritual encounter cannot be guaranteed. Such are the limits of a diplomatic peace (cf. Guzzini, 2024: 10).

The ambivalence of diplomacy

Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don was published in 1925, now 100 years ago. Depending on whether one shares Mauss’s world-historical perspective, one may consider it a text of contemporary or antiquarian interest. It will be clear from the above that I consider the essay of continuing theoretical interest, not in the least for students of diplomacy. More than as a token reference in empirical studies on diplomatic gift-exchange, Mauss’s account of gift-exchange could serve to reinvigorate ontological reflection on the very character and ethos of diplomacy. Both as an exercise in world-historical comparison, as a sociological study of the category of relation, and as an attempt to grapple with that most crucial problem of how to get from a condition of war to a condition of peace, The Gift gives. Its basic gift to diplomatic studies, I would say, is a deep appreciation of the ambivalence of diplomacy. Scholarship on diplomacy is continuously prey to the temptation to idealize diplomacy, to have diplomacy side with peace against war. We know that this position is not tenable on empirical grounds (Barkawi, 2015; Neumann, 2020: 2–5), and yet we struggle to resist the temptation at the conceptual level. Even the fiercest critics of actually existing diplomacy agree that there is a certain “promise of diplomacy” (Opondo, 2019: 203). Mauss’s Essai sur le don, I would submit, by insisting on the ambivalence inherent in all relationality and by qualifying severely what one may hope for from a diplomatic peace, helps us to define that promise while insisting on its inherent limits. The status of the Essai sur le don as a colonial artifact, as well as Mauss’s particular involvement in the colonial field, for their part, exemplifies that promise and its limits. In my understanding, these more troubling elements underscore the essay’s relevance for diplomatic theory. It is ambivalence all the way up and down.