ABSTRACT
The ritual sequence, or rather, the processual, playful order that Arnold van Gennep detected and named in his study of cultural ceremonies, contains at the centre, in the middle of everything, a phase and space of liminality. This was not something that van Gennep invented or a theory he ‘constructed’. It was something he literally dis-covered; it was already there, and Marcel Mauss could have done better than to ridicule van Gennep’s ground-breaking work for ‘stating the obvious’. If there is one reason that we still read Mauss’ work on gift-giving today, then it is not only for its honest and engaged use of the existing ethnographic record for a comparative purpose: it is precisely this ‘A-ha!’ sensation that it brings to the reader in an almost timeless way. It says something so simple and evident that we simply have to give in and realize that giving, receiving and giving back lies at the heart of meaningful sociability. Everywhere.
