the passive, depersonalized things that are passed from one person to another; rather, they “had a personality and an inherent power.”20 The very distinction between property and persons, which is basic to Western legal systems at least since Roman times, is, he insists, absent from the archaic societies he is analyzing:21 the gifts not only belong to people, they are invested with the personality of the donor. Mauss thus observed that his analysis requires a mixing, or scrambling, of the categories