The gift, the unconscious, the violence: dilemmas of the explanation of reciprocity in "The Elementary Structures of Kinship"

Notwithstanding the central place that the Maussian idea of reciprocity has in the definition of sexual and matrimonial rules and of culture in Les Structures Elementaires de la Parente, seldom the major interpreters and rejoinders of that book had considered or critically discussed it. This essay aims to fill that blank, showing the contradictory nature of the definitions of reciprocity used by Levi-Strauss, the impossibility of explain it structurally, and finally how the major explicative device of that book is a social philosophy saturated with a sceptical appreciation of human motives.