LECTURE 9 GIFTS AND RECIPROCITY: THE IDEAS OF MAUSS AND SAHLINS
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After kinship, one of the most central ideas in anthropology is exchange. In societies without centralised states and systems of social control, exchange was often a key method for maintaining some sort of balance and political neutrality between communities. It was also a key method of ensuring the movement of desired commodities from one place to another and ensuring survival through the generations. In this lecture I look at two central anthropological thinkers in relation to aspects of exchange and we think about how these ideas might have relevance for contemporary urban situations. The first is Marcel Mauss, the nephew of a founding father of sociology and anthropology, Emile Durkheim. Mauss wrote his book The Gift (in French ) in 1925 and it has become a classic. He wrote it before fieldwork had become the central method in anthropology, at a time when scholars compared societies all around the world, ‘he soaked his mind with ethnographic material’ (EP viii) and attempted to make sense of universal patterns and themes. (We have already seen this in the work of Van Gennep on Rites of Passage.) Mauss was not a philosopher and carefully studied facts. ‘Mauss sought only to know a limited range of facts and then to understand them.’ He was able to look at societies more holistically because he read material in the original languages and approached facts with a sociological understanding (Evans-Pritchard, Introduction Mauss, 1969,vii). Mauss’ early work looked at the structure and function of sacrifice in primitive societies, and he attempted to construct a general theory on magic. It is his work The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic life, however, which we remember him for.
Mauss’ book is divided into four parts, the first section looks at Gifts and the Obligation to Return Gifts using Polynesian Pacific Island ethnographic examples. The second part is on Distribution of the System: Generosity, Honour and Money, which draws on customs from the Andaman Islands, Melanesia, and NW America. In part Three he looks at survivals of such patterns of exchange in the classic western writings of Germanic, Hindu and Roman society before presenting the Conclusion.
Mauss looked at the institution of gift giving as a ‘total social phenomena’, as something in which many aspects of society were expressed: religious, legal, moral and economic. He also argued that you could categorise the type of gift giving in terms of the social structure of the societies involved. Certain types of gift giving were associated with certain levels of societal development. (Mauss wrote in a time when evolutionary anthropology was popular. Scholars were more confident then about charting and mapping the progress of human societies and developing schemas to show the different stages of evolution.)
Mauss focused on the behaviour of gift giving that is superficially presented as spontaneous generosity but is actually carefully staged, seen as an obligation and is has a foundation of economic self-interest. He started his book with the guiding questions: In primitive or archaic types of society, what is the principle whereby the gift received has to be repaid? What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return? He was searching for the origin of western systems of transactions, the bases for our own social life. He was contesting the idea that there is a ‘natural economy’, that in the state of nature or in primitive life an individual acts like a self-interested bartering unit (following market forces, as we might say today). He had a social understanding: it was groups not individuals that made exchanges and contracted obligations in traditional societies. The law of things was bound up with the law of persons. And they were exchanging more than material goods. They were exchanging ritual, assistance in warfare, entertainment, women, children, dances and feasts. Mauss called this cluster of motives and aspects around gift exchange a system of total prestation. It might seem voluntary to be part of such as system but failure to take part could mean a quick escalation into individual violence or group war.
A famous example of total prestation that took place among the coastal indigenous Americans was called the potlatch and this word has become part of our language. Let me describe what took place. The tribes were organised in a series of kinship and other groupings that jostled for status every winter when the groups gathered for continuous festivals. To outdo each other they publicly piled up great collections of woven blankets and copper handcrafted plates, emblems of the wealth of that society. Chiefs, on behalf of their whole kinship section, make a contract involving all members and everything they possessed and demonstrate their superiority by piling up and then destroying more than anyone else. This is ‘sumptuous destruction’ (4). Michael Young, writing of the PNGs from Goodenough Island, explained a similar phenomenon in his book Fighting with Food. In this society the competition between clan groups was demonstrated by piling up huge amounts of yams and letting them rot. They were effectively publicly announcing that as a group they were so strong and wealthy they could afford to waste this much wealth. (Meanwhile they were applying a lot of fancy magic to inhibit their own hunger and enhance the hunger of their competing exchange group!). Can you think of any contemporary behaviour that is similar to this competitive display and or destruction of wealth? ( Weddings, Debutante Balls, Sydney versus Melbourne fireworks displays?). Mauss argues that contemporary society does have intermediate examples of parties rivalling each other with gifts. (TV Programme ‘Just Shoot Me’). It is to Polynesia that he looks however to find the spiritual mechanism that obliges people to return gifts.
The Maori of NZ have a term hau that means the spirit of things and this spirit goes with a gift and obliges one to return. A physical object is animated by the hau of its forest, of its soil and this spirit pursues those who hold the thing and ultimately wants to return to the place of its birth, its owner. Mauss believed that this was the spirit behind the obligation for exchange to continue. When someone gives they gain authority and power over the recipient and this leads to obligatory circulation of wealth. There is a bond created by the transfer. To give something is to give a part of oneself. When you receive you are receiving part of the giver’s spiritual essence. ‘The thing given is not inert. It is alive and often personified, and strives to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.’ (10) Now this all sounds rather exotic and ‘Other’ but on certain occasions I found myself acting as if a gift contained the spirit of the giver. To me this is most obvious over the issue of death in our society. When you write a will whom do you find yourself giving personal items to? After someone dies and the vulture (?) relatives converge on the deceased’s home and its possessions, which items do they most often claim or which items have they been assigned? (I have found that the bond between giver and recipient persists and the gift symbolises this. I found myself giving back the items I had been given to the giver or their child. I found relatives claiming items that they had given the deceased. Surely, if it were a cut-and-dried gift there would be no further claim on the item?).
There is an obligation to give and an obligation to receive. To refuse a gift is a refusal of friendship. There is a series of rights and duties over gifts. The idea of balance, of symmetry and reciprocal rights is easier for Mauss to understand if he sees it as ‘first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things that are to some extent persons, and persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they were things’ (11). There are also gifts to Gods, or to dead ancestors who are believed to bring abundance, good seasons in return for the gifts offered. This type of sacrifice giving can be seen as exchange between men and gods. Mauss argues that the giving of alms or charity to the poor is also related. There is within the act of charitable giving a moral idea about gifts and an element of sacrifice, making the gods happy and expecting a return.
In his second chapter Mauss further elaborates systems of exchange in other parts of the world. The Andaman Islanders exchange to produce a friendly feeling rather than to acquire something they need.
Most famous now however are the Trobriand Islanders from eastern PNG. They were linked to several other islands in a massive exchange system called by Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, The Kula. I was lucky enough to do anthropology at Monash where they had an example of a kula necklace on the anthropology floor. This exchange was a complex system in which large ground pink coral necklaces were exchanged by Kula partners in a clockwise direction through a group of islands. Mwali white shell armbands were presented as the exchange of the necklaces and travelled in an anticlockwise direction. The items were in constant motion, though the receiver of such a prestigious item would hold it several months before becoming part of a group-wide expedition trading practical as well as ritual goods to take the items to the next village with which they had arranged the exchange. Mauss sees that owing a necklace kula entailed more than simple legal property ownership. ‘It is at the same time property and a possession, a pledge and a loan, an object sold and an object bought, a deposit, a mandate, a trust. . .’ (22). Malinowski presents this kula exchange as almost the reason for being for the Trobriander, an institution for which they all lived, their main excitement. It took strategy, heroism, magic and months of organisation to arrange with partners, to build special canoes, to paddle to the next Island etc. It has been analysed various ways but I see it as an elaborate ceremonial exchange that brought political peace and temporary relations to decentralised communities that enabled them to carry out practical trade as well, (gimwali) with yams, fish, and pottery.
Each kula necklace had a name and a history, times when it was held by famous people, when it was nearly lost overboard etc. It held a spirit of place and origin and of the previous givers. The objects have a personality. Are there any objects that you can think of in western society that are treated in a similar way to the kula in terms of personality, history and reverence? (a winning shield, a famous diamond, a stolen piece of art?) If you get the chance try to read Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Malinowski as this has become an anthropological classic and has brought the name Kula almost as much notoriety as potlatch. It is an exaggerated case of a more general system, one where social life is constant give and take.
Film: Kula Ring of Power
Mauss sees that the system of exchange in traditional societies involves three obligations: giving, receiving and repaying. You lose face if you don’t give and to refuse to receive would show fear of having to repay. In this system there is also power or spirit in the objects themselves. Mauss concludes that the archaic form of exchange is the gift and the return gift and within this objects circulate alongside or as part of the circulation of persons and rights. The spirit of gift exchange persists as a transitional type between the total group prestation of clan and clan and the modern pure, individual contract. Gradually the contracts to give, receive and repay have become stabilised and set. In his final comments Mauss introduces the idea of ‘interest’. Ideally when we return a gift in the west we should make it a little bigger and a little more costly. Traditional societies too had notions of value and surplus. It is only recently that the west has turned man into an ‘economic animal’.
Most anthropologists have been able to see parallels with Mauss’ discussion on the gift with contemporary society in relation to balanced Christmas card giving and the embarrassment caused by an unexpected present but Davis (1973) has taken the analogies further and suggested if we look at economic subspheres in our society (market; redistributive tax and welfare; domestic economy and gift economy) we will see the gift economy alive and well. He tried to measure the flow of goods from the market economy to the gift economy, specifically the toy industry, the greeting card and men’s cosmetic industries. It was in the 1970s a significant part of all production in Britain, its seasonality causes some problems to manufacturers. They have responded to this by creating more occasions to give the gift or making the product less gift like and more like a ‘collectable.’ We definitely have a subsystem where there is a notion of appropriate gifts for appropriate times and other rules and expectations surrounding giving. Davis notes the links between the market economy and the gift economy and how commerce has been able to turn the norms of the gift economy to their own advantage in institutions such as the Tuppaware party. (Could someone explains what happens at a Tuppaware party?). Davis says Tuppaware parties ‘ are episodes in the ebb and flow of obligation and trust between acquaintances, friends, kin’ (1973,p 170). Playfulness and prizes replace the normal competition of the market sphere and successfully capture a predictable aspect of human experience. The market economy disguises itself as the gift economy to reap the benefits of the norms of having to give, not being able to refuse a gift and having to repay.
In this part of the lecture I have tried to introduce you to the ideas of Mauss on the obligations entailed in relation to the gift and the idea that the gift is more than an object: it is imbued with the spirit of the giver and its origin. With Mauss and Davis we can see that elements of this gift exchange system operate in contemporary western society and are a significant part of social life. They are particularly important for tribal and peasant people who have congregated in the large cities of the world.
Almost all urban squatters and people surviving on micro businesses like an ice-cream barrow have such a precarious hold on the western monetary economy that they are dependent on gift exchange and reciprocity to survive. Within their own urban settlements they will have kin to turn to in emergency, as Celso and Cora in the Philippines turned to a mother for help at times. Networks of relatives will chip in for occasions like fiestas and end of mourning ceremonies and expect help in kind when their time comes.
If they earn decent amounts, or happen to marry a westerner they will inevitably become part of an exchange system where they send money home for school fees, important ritual celebrations and so on. When they can they send money to their home villages so that they may return there when sick or old and still have rights to land and houses. Relatives from the village will visit and bring agricultural products when they can.
In Papua New Guinea and other places big ceremonial exchanges still take place in the town areas but the special feathers, shells and food may be replaced by cartons of beer and packets of rice in exchanges which resemble potlatches or Young’s Fighting with Food. Let us turn now to another key anthropologist who has set up models with which to analyse traditional exchange patterns.
A major contemporary theorist from the University of Chicago, Marshall Sahlins developed in the 1970s a framework for looking at traditional exchange systems in his book Stone Age Economics. In an essay On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange he set out a model of reciprocity.
At this stage in anthropology there were debates between two schools in economic anthropology: the formalists and the substantivists. The formalists believed that you could use formal economic theory. The unit of analysis was the individual economic man who maximised profits but the anthropologists noted that the individual could maximise status or valuables like shell necklaces etc. The substantivists argued that traditional societies were substantially different to modern societies, different in substance, not able to be analysed in material terms separate from the social context, and that different theory was needed. Sahlins reveals himself as a substantivist. Social relations govern the flow of the economy. In his continuum model of reciprocity there were three main types, altering in a moral way according to how much concern for the self or others was shown. Generalised reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity, altered according to kinship or social distance. As you move away from kin and residents to strangers and enemies your economic exchanges move towards negative reciprocity. Balanced reciprocity extends to the edge of the social field and negative reciprocity is beyond the pale, further afield.