O papel da dádiva no teatro da economia – o significado antropológico do presente

The starting point of this text is the study of empirical data relative to the gift economy, whether in traditional societies or in the globalized societies of today, in order to look at its present “state-of-the-art compared with the market economy. If, in the former, the reciprocal “return of which Marcel Mauss speaks is very evident, it is not so clear today in the latter. Thus, now more than ever, it can be stated that the gift economy shows a “double-bind in being present (in its meaning as both noun and verb) and being diminished with its dilution in the simultaneous liveliness of the market economy. The anthropological hypothesis that this text formulates is that the contemporization of “time lived today, the instant, should be something more than itself: an indication of an extraordinary, paradoxical and timeless result of the same “double-bind, the (imperceptible) manifestation of the power of eternity in human beings and in their communities.