아프리카ㆍ중동

Gift is a useful material that creates and maintains social ties among the people. The category of gift is very wide. It covers both material goods and non-material acts of people exchanged at the time of special events or everyday life. Gift also includes one's spontaneous help, care, or hospitality offered to other persons. All these types of gifts share one common character. It have been given out of free will and are not being dictated by any economic rule such as fair exchange or barter. However, driving force behind gift-giving is based on feelings of mutual obligations and reciprocity. People's relations are interwoven by the duties to ‘give’, ‘take’ and ‘return’. These three cyclic duties are the main mechanisms that operate gift-giving activity. Failure to reciprocate means disruption of the relations. Having the nature of the gift-giving in mind, the aim of this study is to explore how gift is used in creating and maintaining people's relations among the Arab Muslims, taking the UAE as a case study.