A Preliminary Study On The Ideology Of Gifting In Pre-Qin Period

From the time of primitive society and traditional society, goods-flowingperformed in the form of gifting is one of the most important modes of socialexchange. This kind of exchange mode seems to be voluntary at the first glance, butactually contains a combination of the obligation of gifting and counter-gifting and aseries of complicated contracts plus symbolic meanings. Although these contracts andtheir additional meanings transformed and derived in various ways accompanied withsocial transformation and intricate changes of exchange modes, some of them stillsurvived until modern times. So this article plans to start from the behaviour analysisof gifting to discuss the generating principle of gifting actions and the formation ofconceptual tradition dominating those actions in the pre-Qin period, review thedevelopment of gifting’s ideology, define the concept of “Chinese gifting” andinvestigate the origin of social culture psychology through learnings ofanthropological, sociological and psychological theories combined with ideas ofpre-Qin scholars. At the same time, this article is also aiming at distinguishing ofbribery mixed in gifting performance so that a three-dimensional social model usingthe concept of gifting as its core and including almost every major communities inthat period could be built to achieve a better understanding on the social structure ofthe pre-Qin period.