Gift Exchange and Social Hierarchy in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury

Abstract

L isting the “theoretics of gift exchange” as one of two areas that have remained underexamined in both economics and economic literary criticism, Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen write, “the problem for gift theorists lies in the relationship between gift exchanges and selfinterest or profit” (28–9). They note that theorists such as Marcel Mauss and Lewis Hyde divide “economic actions into the supposedly incommensurable realms of market and gift,” associating the latter with more “primitive” societies. Writing in the same volume, economists Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio argue that insofar as such theories “establish the gift as the initial social act,” they often elide the question of the distinction between gift exchange and self-interest by simultaneously attempting “to subsume all later economic forms and to create an imagined space for an alternative to an all-pervasive capitalism” (389). Gift exchange thus functions as the absent center of capitalism, both historically determinate of market exchange and structurally alien to it. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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