 Gift-giving, he argued, was not altruistic (as it supposedly is in our society) but politically motivated for individual gain.Marcel Mauss theorized the impetus for a return as "the spirit of the gift," an idea that has provoked a long debate in economic anthropology on what motivated the reciprocal exchange.Claude Lévi-Strauss, drawing on Mauss, argued there were three spheres of exchange governed by reciprocity