more favorite items among them had higher-quality relationships. Researchers from the fields of sociology, psychology, and anthropology have also been fascinated by gift-giving, a universal phenomenon that holds emotional meaning using material culture. According to Schieffelin, "gift-giving is a vehicle of social obligation and political maneuver." Mauss defines the gift as creating a special bond between the giver and the receiver. According to Mauss, the giver never really leaves the gift but becomes part of the receiver's future by inserting the gift into their life. A gift leads at some point to another gift in response, which creates a special reciprocal bond between people. History Material culture studies as an academic field grew along the field of anthropology and so began by studying non-Western material culture. All too often, it was a way of putting material culture into categories in such a way that marginalized and hierarchized the cultures from which they came. During the "golden age" of museum-going, material cultures were used to show the supposed evolution of society from the simple objects of non-Westerners to the advanced objects of Europeans. It was a way of showing that Europeans were at the end of the evolution of society, with non-Westerners at the beginning. Eventually, scholars left the notion that culture evolved though predictable cycles, and the study of material culture changed to have a more objective view of non-Western material culture. The field of material culture studies as its own distinct discipline dates to the 1990s. The Journal of Material Culture began publishing in 1996. Collecting habits date back hundreds of years. Contributors Leslie White was an American anthropologist, known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. He was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964). He wrote The Science of Culture in 1949 in which he outlined schema of the world as divided into cultural, biological, and physical levels of phenomenon. White believed that the development of culture rested primarily on technology and that the history of human technology could be understood through the study of human-produced materials. American anthropologist James Deetz, known for his work in the field of historical archaeology, wrote the book "In Small Things Forgotten" in 1977 and published a revised and expanded version in 1996. He pioneered there the ideas