The project examines the significance and explanatory mileage of Marcel Mauss‘ classic essay The Gift one hundred years after its publication. Written as an answer to World War I during the final phase of colonial modernity, the essay has long been an academic evergreen inspiring many fields. However, with the recognition of the post- and decolonial critique of modernity, the essay seems to have lost its intellectual chlorophyll. The academic public has either ignored the essay’s centennial anniversary or used it to »reintroduce« the essay. Is the silence about The Gift one of those experiences of loss that sociology has recently identified as characteristic of the dynamics of »late modernity?« Or, to put it in the language of the subject matter, has The Gift lost its recipient? The project aims to locate an answer to this question in the context of discussions about migration, museums, and the politics of heritage.

Peter Probst is Professor of Art History with a focus on African art history and visual culture at Tufts University in Boston. He studied anthropology, art history, sociology, and communications in Berlin and Cambridge, England. After completing his doctorate in Berlin and his habilitation at the University of Bayreuth, he accepted an appointment at Tufts University in 2005, where he has since worked at the intersection of art history, ethnology and museum studies. His art historical and anthropological research has taken him to Cameroon, Malawi, and Nigeria. He has been a guest professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the Free University of Berlin and has held fellowships at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, the ifk in Vienna and the Tufts European Center in Talloires. Besides the study of various aspects of African art, his research interests include questions of historiography and the history of ideas.