A University of Montreal professor says there is a social necessity of giving and receiving, which escalates during the holidays. Marcel Fournier, a sociology professor at the University of Montreal, is a specialist in the works of anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who studied tribal exchange rituals in the early 20th century.

By Song, Hoon The Bad Multiplicity of Four: The Analytics of "Unwrapping" the Four-Field Bundle Daniel A. Segal and Sylvia J. Yanagisako, eds., Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology. Duke University Press, 2005, 184pp.