Homo donator

This essay draws attention to philosophical revolution involved in the work of Marcel Mauss, especially The Gift. The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (1924/25), which the scholars regard a milestone of the cultural anthropology. Mauss discovers in the social facts a tissue of symbols, wich are “ whole ‘entities’, entire social systems”. This approach opens the way for a new epistemological paradigm, which passes through the encyclopaedia of the human and social sciences. The ethnology and anthropology so assume a philosophical sense, because they outline an hermeneutics of the otherness, based on the variety and the specificity of the cultures