Gifts and Commodities

C. A. Gregory’s Gifts and Commodities is one of the undisputed classics of economic anthropology. On its publication in 1982, it spurred intense, ongoing debates about gifts and gifting, value, exchange, and the place of political economy in anthropology.

Gifts and Commodities is, at once, a critique of neoclassical economics and development theory, a critical history of colonial Papua New Guinea, and a comparative ethnography of exchange in Melanesian societies. This new edition includes a new foreword by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern that discusses the ongoing response to the book and the debates it has engendered, debates that have only become more salient in our ever-more-neoliberal and evermore- globalized era.