The Analysis of the Mystery of Gift in Human Society—A Case Study of the Flow of Gift in the Modern Yi People’s Marriage

Abstract

Since the study of gift exchange by Malinowski and Marcel Mauss, anthropologists have made unremitting exploration on the gift exchange behavior in human society. Mauss made an incisive judgment on the exchange behavior in “Gift”, and analyzed the gift exchange behavior in ancient society from the perspectives of politics, economy, law, morality and society, which laid the theoretical foundation for studying other social gift exchange phenomena. Based on the theoretical results of “Gift”, it is found that gift exchange exists in many aspects of human society, such as the marriage concerned in this paper. Marriage and family has always been an important research field of anthropology. Anthropologists believe that the emergence of marriage system is accompanied by exchange behavior, which is influenced by economic and political factors as well as social and emotional factors. This paper aims to sort out the theoretical results of anthropologists in the study of gift exchange behavior, and further understand the gift research of anthropology by combining the gift flow in contemporary Yi marriage. Keywords—Marcel Mauss, “Gift”, the marriage of Yi people,