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Appropriations of anthropological theory by political radicals are often treated with suspicion by academic practitioners of the discipline, who are particularly wary about ethnographic descriptions of 'pre-capitalist' societies as the radical Other of western capitalist modernity. On first examination, the Situationist International, a revolutionary group active in France in the 1960s would seem to fit this problematic romantic appropriation of anthropological theory. However, on closer examination, the Situationists' use of anthropological theory, and in particular their development of Mauss's theory of the gift as a revolutionary weapon to be directed against 'commodity enslavement', was, despite its rhetorical militancy, more nuanced than many contemporary developments of Maussian theory within the academy. The Situationists' revolutionary engagement with Mauss led them to develop potentially important aspects of Maussian theory decades before they were taken seriously in anthropological theory. First, in contrast with many anthropological uses of the gift–commodity distinction, that have seen entire cultural orders as being structurally determined by a particular kind of exchange, the Situationists stressed the importance of the co-evality of different types of exchange and the potential for objects to move between different types of exchange well before this became a significant theoretical problem in anthropology. Second, the Situationists' revolutionary engagement led them to develop an analysis of the relationship between different types of exchange and processes of 'cultural humiliation'; an issue that has been brought to the forefront of anthropological theorizing of colonialism and social change in recent years by Marshall Sahlins and others.

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