The Dictionary of Human Geography

mediation that is required to explain why
exchange occurs yields equivocal answers: all
we can categorically say is that finite availability
of a thing intimeandspaceand actual or
anticipated social use-value are general under-
lying conditions for exchange.
Gifts are a subset of exchange. They involve
neither mediation by money nor barter. But
like these more conventional forms of transac-
tions, they supply individuals with incentives
to collaborate in a pattern of exchanges that
performatively reproduce society and validate
the status of participants as social beings.
InThe gift: the form and reason for exchange in
archaic societies (1990 [1925]), the French
scholar Marcel Mauss built on the ideas of
Emile Durkheim to show how gifts function
as a mechanism by which individual interests
combine to make a socialsystem– a ‘gift
economy’ – in the absence of market exchange.
Because the gift is embedded in the economic,
moral, religious, political and aesthetic dimen-
sions, Mauss termed it a ‘Total social phe-
nomenon’. Mauss’ essay has been extended
in generative ways by social anthropologists
such as Claude Le ́vi-Strauss, Mary Douglas,
Pierre Bourdieu and Marilyn Strathern in their
efforts to identify non-market logics that
cementsociety. It goes without saying that
the gift economy, far from being an archaic
social mechanism, remains a constitutive force
in contemporary market societies. vg

Suggested reading
Appadurai (1986); Bourdieu (1990); Davis
(1992); Mauss (1990 [1925]); Polanyi (1972).

exclave A small piece of astatethat is phys-
ically separate from its main territorial body
but remains within its political jurisdiction
despite being surrounded by theterritory
of another state. Robinson (1959) identified
five exclave types by degree of separation from
thehomeland:normal, as per the definition
above;pene-, territories barely connected to
the main state in such a way that access must
occur via another state’s territory;quasi-, tech-
nically disconnected but connected in prac-
tical terms; temporary, as the result of an
armistice; andvirtual, areas treated as exclaves
without meeting the strict legal definition.
(See alsoenclave.) cf

Suggested reading
Aalto (2002); Robinson (1959).

existentialism A philosophy that flour-
ished in the middle to late twentieth century

as a radical defence of human freedom. It

emerged partly in reaction toteleological

and deterministic theories of human nature

that saw human beings as determined by their

biology, by the environments in which they

found themselves, or by their social status or

economic position. It also emerged in direct

response to the racialized ideologies andgeo-

politicsof a colonial (seecolonialism) and

cold warworld. Against notions of human

subjects, peoples andculturesdetermined

by their ‘nature’, constrained by their ‘essence’

or being the mere ‘bearers’ of their class func-

tions, existentialism argued that human beings

were free subjects, whose existence defined

who and what they were. For Heidegger (1962

[1927]), the ‘essence’ of this finitesubject,this

‘being-in-the-world’, was that it was thrown

into a world not of its own making and radically

oriented to this world through projects, mood,

will and other dispositions. Theontologyof

finitude was, for the existential subject, a life to

be lived, with ‘no-exit’ but death and along the

way a profound anxiety and, at times, dread in

the face of the individual’s immense responsi-

bility for his or her own life.

Existentialism emerged in human geog-

raphyin the 1970s, as part of a desire to re-

focus geographical enquiry away from the

reductive abstractions of spatial analysis

and structuralmarxism. It focused on the cap-

acities ofhuman agency, and in so doing

sought to be a corrective to the overly essen-

tialist arguments of muchculturalandhis-

torical geography(seeessentialism), to the

structural arguments ofpolitical economy

and to the abstractions ofspatial science.It

focused on how human beings at once live in

and make thespaces, placesandlandscapes

that they inhabit (Samuels, 1978, 1981). Far

from being an abstract science of spatial rela-

tions, existential geographies were concrete

descriptions of everyday lifeworlds, and

were engaged with theethicsandvaluesof

what human beings understand to be the

meaning of their lives and worlds (Entrikin,

1976; Tuan, 1976b; Relph, 1981, pp. 187–91).

Radical geographers have been sceptical of

existentialism, tending to see it as overly

focused on the subjective experiences of indi-

viduals; a kind ofidealismthat treated lived

experience (with its anxieties and feelings of

loss, uncertainty or dread) as indicative of a

universal condition of existence instead of a

concrete situation produced by a historical

and oppressivesociety. In Marcuse’s (1972,

p. 161) view, by hypothesizing determinate

historical conditions of human existence as

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