In his book, Pour une histoire naturelle du don, François Athané questions the various anthropological, sociological, and philosophical discourses surrounding the fundamental social role of the gift. Taking as his point of departure the notion of the transfer of goods or services as a basic factor both in the exchange of gifts and of the gift itself, the author proceeds to deconstruct certain theories, beginning with Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (first published in French in 1923, and later published in English in 1954). Since such an approach does not permit considering the “gift—receipt—counter-gift” triad as a whole, it does not take into account the obligation to reciprocate highlighted by Mauss and thus deprives the gift of its constitutive role as a social link. Athané thus proposes a new interpretation of the place the gift occupies in human perception and social behavior. He refers to the universalizing nature of the gift as an expression of parental altruism. However, while this establishes a connection between nature and culture (the gift being the cultural form of this natural parental altruism), Athané makes no reference to the social and biological studies that were previously challenged by the authors he cites. This reconsideration of nature, in which society and its rules are said to originate, should give rise to new debates.

When considering status within early medieval societies, it is necessary to set aside juridical classifications in favor of concepts derived from political sociology—the notion of an “elite” can thus encompass any individual occupying an elevated social position within his or her community, be it through wealth, power, or culture. Using textual and archaeological sources, historians can seek out the processes of distinction and social recognition that were characteristic of elites throughout the early Middle Ages (from the sixth to the eleventh century). The Carolingian period shows signs of increasing hierarchization, which led both individuals and groups to devise strategies for bolstering their position and forestalling the loss of social status. Within the framework of these processes of social mobility, it becomes possible to examine elites at various levels and from different chronological and regional perspectives while avoiding an overly structural analysis.

This article examines the status and the place of such means of interpersonal communication as mail, the telegraph, and the telephone in Soviet society under Stalin. Access to tools of communication created a certain hierarchy in the Soviet Union: the telephone was only accessible in large cities, whereas postal services remained limited across the countryside. As it was being implemented, the Soviet project of a communicating society proved to be full of disparities, ultimately centered on the city-dwelling elite. While the radial scheme of communications networks favored contact between the capital and the provinces, the geographical proximity of the regions did not facilitate communications between their inhabitants. The construction of long-distance networks of sociability was affected by the territorial dimensions of the country, varying access to tools of communication, weak technological development, and bureaucratic malfunctioning.

The colonization of the land that is now Vietnam and the establishment of a French protectorate in Tonkin in the late nineteenth century led to new methods of agricultural production and new means of exploiting natural resources. This article examines this evolution by focusing on the endogenous and spontaneous movement of colonization that developed “illegally” during the first half of the twentieth century and which concerned several villages located in the hills of two districts in Phú Thọ province. A comparison of archival sources produced by the protectorate authorities with the testimonials recorded by former colonist-planters and their descendants reveals how the colonial state manipulated and falsified information in order to subsequently claim ownership of this colonial movement, which transformed the region’s environment, society, and economy.

Participating in the broader history of consumer mobilization for egalitarian regimes of consumption, this article unpacks the shifting meanings of egalitarian moralities of consumption in the specific case of Poland across the twentieth century. It reveals how important the role of social justice would become in attempts to impose state-centered social welfare over profit-oriented self-welfare between the interwar period and the demise of Communism. During this time, the meaning of profiteering changed significantly. While food conflicts during the interwar period and World War II were organized predominantly along ethnic lines, by the beginning of the postwar era, the notion of the profit-oriented middleman relied on the category of class as well as ethnicity to support a vision of Poland as a Communist, ethnically homogenized nation-state. In the 1950s and the 1960s, anti-profiteering rhetoric became increasingly gendered, as the food conflicts moved from an ideological crusade against private trade to everyday confrontations between the consumers and female shop assistants. When the Soviet Bloc ran into deep crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, self-welfare and family-centered resourcefulness resurfaced as legitimate norms of distributive justice, which contributed to dismantling the Socialist welfare state altogether.

André Masson proposes replacing Gary Becker’s “theory” of generational altruism with a structural explanation inspired by Marcel Mauss’s famous essay The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1923), which was rooted in indirect reciprocities between three generations. Masson thereby elaborates a gentle critique of the moral principles often lying beneath the analyses of liberal economists (such as the “demonstration effect,” disen-franchisement, or the theory of homo reciprocans). Accepting the ambitions of economic science, Masson nonetheless maintains a conception of the social sciences that is more competitive than cooperative and provides convincing analysis of the economic and social foundations of current intergenerational transfers. The argument developed in this critical note proposes both a historical reading of the ideology of intergenerational equity, which is only conceivable in the transition from the Trente Glorieuses to the Trente Piteuses, and a structural reading arguing that, for the wealthy classes during the European Old Regime, successful transfers of wealth between generations followed the same formal requirements as those in the twenty-first century.

Venetian society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is generally described in terms of a tripartition between patricians, citizens, and popolo. This article focuses on the popolo and the popolani of Venice, combining a terminological and conceptual study of these categories with a sociological analysis of the individuals who belonged to them. The history of how these social groups developed reveals the complex definition of the popolo in Venice between the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the early modern era. A consideration of the popolani’s “condition” involves analyzing how they established who they were and the framework of their action, according to the associations, spaces, and institutions in which they interacted.

Christophe Duhamelle’s La frontière au village. Une identité catholique allemande au temps des Lumières is part of the rich field of studies devoted to confessionalization in the Holy Roman Empire. The book is, however, innovative on at least three levels. First, it moves away from macrohistorical perspectives favoring an overarching point of view, instead analyzing confessional identity as an interaction and constant tension between attempts at standardization imposed from above and appropriations by communities themselves. Its guiding thread is not the confessional norm, but an exploration of the different ways that individuals establish a sense of membership within a community. Discontinuities and areas of uncertainty persist along the frontiers between Catholics and Lutherans, and confessional identity is characterized by its specular nature, feeding off of what it borrows from its opponents. Second, Duhamelle’s study focuses on the second half of the eighteenth century, in contrast to other studies predominantly dealing with the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Lastly, Eischsfeld, an exclave of the Archbishopric-Electorate of Mainz, was a rural territory, while most studies have essentially been devoted to towns.