Vaughan, Genevieve, ed. The Gift, Il Dono: A Feminist Analysis. Rome: Meltemi editore, 2004.

Analyses of the gift have a long and complex history, and precisely which texts are authoritative varies from discipline to discipline. However, in the last two decades there has been interdisciplinary interest in the phenomenon of the gift and gift-giving (see Berking; Komter; Osteen; Schrift; and Wyschogrod). As one of the commentators in The Gift, Il Dono notes (41), this revival can be traced to two primary sources. One of these is anthropological and sociological discussions of the gift. In this body of work, Marcel Mauss's The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies I (1990), is usually cited as the originary source. One feature of Mauss's work is the idea that gifts, which circulate in informal exchange economies, are distinct from commodities circulating in the modern marketplace. Although some of the commentators in Il Dono eschew Mauss's notion of a gift economy as contradictory, they do in fact take up aspects of this perspective. In this view, marketplace transactions operate according to an impersonal logic of equivalent exchange, whereas gift economies operate according to an entirely different logic. And as Genevieve Vaughan herself states, the respective logics of these different economies affect the ways in which masculine and feminine subjectivities are structured (19).