The Gift

Marcel Mauss
• “Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I
worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was
required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption.
Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like
the giver, however cheerful he be.”
– Mary Douglas

Free gift – a misunderstanding – either in Melanesia or Chicago

Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties
A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.
• Malinowski
• He evidently took with him to his fieldwork the idea that commerce
and gift are two separate kinds of activity, the first based on exact
recompense, the second spontaneous, pure of ulterior motive
• Careful classification showed that nothing was a pure gift
• Only a husband’s gift to his wife
• Compensation for sexual service
• Across time and space gifts have involved a cycle of return gifts
• North American potlatch
• The potlatch is an example of a total system of giving.
• Spelt out it means that each gift is part of a system of reciprocity in which the
honour of giver and recipient are engaged
• every gift has to be returned in some specified way sets up a perpetual cycle
of exchanges within and between generations
• In some cases the specified return is of equal value, producing a stable system
of statuses;
• in others it must exceed the value of the earlier gift, producing an escalating
contest for honour.
• Melanesia
• the totalized giving does not presume rivalry between donor and
recipient. When the paths of Polynesian gifts are traced, a stable,
hierarchical structure is revealed.
• It is not competitive potlatch
• But still a stable system of gifts
• Eskimos
• Australian hunters
• ancient legal systems. Roman, Germanic, and other Indo-European
laws all show signs of the basic principles.
• Theory of gift in classical Hindu law
• first, that it was based on an impoverished concept of the person
seen as an independent individual instead of as a social being;
• second, that it neglected how social relations change with changes in
the mode of production;
• and third, that it had a too negative concept of liberty and so failed to
appreciate the moral role of political participation
Durkheim
• He tried to keep a delicate balance between reproaching
utilitarianism for overlooking that humans are social beings and
reproaching socialism for overlooking the demands of the individual.
 The Gift:
Forms and Functions of
Exchange in Archaic Societies
MARCEL MAUSS
In Scandinavian countries and other civilizations,
• Exchanges and contracts – take place in the form of gifts (voluntary but
obligations)
• Contractual law and economic services operational in simple and
archaic societies
“Total social phenomenon” :
• all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the same time.
• Institutions covered – religious, juridical, moral, politics, family, and
economic ones
• Voluntary character of these total services, apparently free and
disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested.
• There is obligation and economic self-interest
• What rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or
archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be
obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that
causes its recipient to pay it back?
• Exchange and contract in those societies
• They have markets
• But their system of exchange is different
• It existed before traders and invention of money
• It existed before discovery of forms of contract and sale
• This morality and organization still prevalent in our society
• Hidden below the surface
• One of the human foundations
Method : Comparative method
• Polynesia, Melanesia and American North-West
• Systems of law in which we could gain access
• Not mixed up, each type of comparison dealt with independently in
its entirety.
The Rendering of Total Services
(Prestation), The Gift And Potlatch
• ‘Natural’ economy has never existed. (It is when money is not used for
transactions).
• It is groups (clans, tribes, families) that exchange- courtesies,
entertainment, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, feasts, fairs.
• one hardly ever finds a simple exchange of goods, wealth, and
products in transactions concluded by individuals.
• 1. collectivities impose obligations of exchange.
• 2. they do not exchange only property and wealth, movable and immovable
goods, and things economically useful but rather acts of politeness.
• 3. are committed to in a somewhat voluntary form of gift giving although in
the end it is constraint by obligations.
• Cooperation between the phratries(kinship groups) of the tribes.
• In North-west America (Tlingit and Haida), there appears what is
certainly a type of these ‘total services’; rare but a highly developed
potlatch.
• Potlatch – to nourish or to consume
“These tribes, which are very rich, and live on the islands, or on the
coast, or in the area between the Rocky Mountains and the coast,
spend the winter in a continual festival of feasts, fairs, and markets,
which also constitute the solemn assembly of the tribe.”
• In these rituals of prestations, political ranks within the tribes are
settled. (Spirit of rivalry and antagonism is present).
• They go as far as to fight and kill chiefs and nobles. Moreover, they
even go as far as the purely sumptuary destruction of wealth that has
been accumulated in order to outdo the rival chief as well as his
associate (normally a grandfather, father-in-law, or son-in-law)
• This system is seen particularly in the American Northwest,
Melanesia, and Papua
• Everywhere else (Africa, Polynesia and Malaya of South America and
the rest of North America), there exist a simpler type of exchanges.
 THE EXCHANGE OF GIFTS
AND THE OBLIGATION TO
RECIPROCATE (POLYNESIA)
Chapter 1
Polynesia
• Potlatch did not exist in Polynesia
• Had ‘total services’
• Permanent contracts between clans
• Exchange of emblazoned mattings between chiefs on the occasion of marriage
• elements of rivalry, destruction, and combat appeared to be lacking
Samoa
• First, this system of contractual gifts in Samoa extends far beyond
marriage.
• Next, two essential elements in potlatch proper can be clearly
distinguished here: the honour, prestige, and mana conferred by
wealth; and the absolute obligation to reciprocate these gifts under
pain of losing that mana, that authority—the talisman and source of
wealth that is authority itself.
• Only the theme of rivalry, combat, and destruction is lacking, for there
to be potlatch.
In Birth Ceremonies,
• Oloa (masculine goods) and Tonga (maternal goods)
• Tonga – permanent paraphernalia received through the wife on the
occasion of marriage; Indestructible- can make a man rich, powerful or
influential.
• Oloa – the objects or tools that belong to the husband
• They are movable
Tonga
• In Maori, Tahitian, Tongan, and Mangarevan (Gambier), it connotes
everything that may properly be termed possessions, everything that
makes one rich, powerful, and influential, and everything that can be
exchanged, and used as an object for compensating others.
THE SPIRIT OF THE THING GIVEN-
HAU (MAORI)
• The taonga are strongly linked to the person, the clan, and the earth,
at least in the theory of Maori law and religion
• They are the vehicle for its mana, its magical, religious, and spiritual
force.
• The taonga are implored to destroy the individual who has accepted
them.
• Thus they contain within them that force, in cases where the law,
particularly the obligation to reciprocate, may fail to be observed.
• ‘They had a kind of exchange system, or rather one of giving presents
that must ultimately either be reciprocated or given back.’
For example, dried fish is exchanged for jellied birds or matting. All
these are exchanged between tribes or ‘friendly families without any
kind of stipulation or agreement’.
Hau
• “I will speak to you about the hau…The hau is not the wind that blows—not at all.
Let us suppose that you possess a certain article (taonga) and that you give me
this article. You give it me without setting a price on it. We strike no bargain about
it. Now, I give this article to a third person who, after a certain lapse of time,
decides to give me something as payment in return (utu). He makes a present to
me of something (taonga). Now, this taonga that he gives me is the spirit (hau) of
the taonga that I had received from you and that I had given to him. The taonga
that I received for these taonga (which came from you) must be returned to you.
It would not be fair (tika) on my part to keep these taonga for myself, whether
they were desirable (rawe) or undesirable (kino). I must give them to you because
they are a hau of the taonga that you gave me. If I kept this other taonga for
myself, serious harm might befall me, even death. This is the nature of the hau,
the hau of personal property, the hau of the taonga, the hau of the forest”.
• What imposes obligation in the present received and exchanged, is
the fact that the thing received is not inactive. Even when it has been
abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of him.
• The hau follows anyone possessing the thing.
• The taonga or its hau—which itself moreover possesses a kind of
individuality —is attached to this chain of users until these give back
from their own property, their taonga, their goods, or from their
labour or trading, by way of feasts, festivals and presents, the
equivalent or something of even greater value.
• This will give the donors authority and power over the first donor,
who has become the last recipient.
• This is the key idea that seems to dominate the obligatory circulation
of wealth, tribute, and gifts in Samoa and New Zealand.
Two important systems of social
phenomena
1. The nature of the legal tie (bond) that arises through the passing on of a
thing.
• to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part
of oneself.
• in this way we can better account for the very nature of exchange through
gifts, of everything that we call ‘total services’, and among these, potlatch.
2. One must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of
his nature and substance.
• To receive something is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence.
• all exert a magical or religious hold over you.
THE OBLIGATION TO GIVE, THE
OBLIGATION TO RECEIVE
• The two obligations other than reciprocity
• To give
• To receive
Obligation to receive
• For a clan, a household, a group of people, a guest, have no option
but to ask for hospitality, to receive presents, to enter into trading, to
contract alliances, through wives or blood kinship.
• Dayaks
• one has not to fail to share in the meal at which one is present or that one has
seen in preparation.
Obligation to give
• To refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept, is tantamount
to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality
• One gives because one is compelled to do so,
• because the recipient possesses some kind of right of property over anything that
belongs to the donor
• Thus in Australia the son-in-law who owes all the spoils of the hunt to his parents-
in-law may not eat anything in their presence for fear that their mere breath will
poison what he consumes
• Everything—food, women, children, property, talismans, land, labour
services, priestly functions, and ranks—is there for passing on, and for
balancing accounts.
THE PRESENT MADE TO HUMANS,
AND THE PRESENT MADE TO THE
GODS
Societies of North-East Siberia and Eskimos of West Alaska and Asian side
of the Behring strait:
• Exchanges produces an effect
• upon men, who vie with one another in generosity,
• upon the things they pass on to one another or consume at it,
• upon the souls of the dead who are present and take part in it, and whose names
have been assumed by men,
• but even upon nature.
• The exchange of presents between men,
• incite the spirits of the dead, the gods, things, animals, and nature to be ‘generous
towards them’ (Asking festival, or Inviting-in festival of the Asian Eskimos).
• Chuckchee of North-East Siberia
• Elaborate thanksgiving ceremonies (obligatory-voluntary gift exchange).
• Occur frequently in winter and that follow one after another in each of the
houses.
• The remains of the banqueting sacrifice are cast into the sea or scattered to
the winds; they return to their land of origin, taking with them the wild
animals killed during the year, who will return the next year
Chuckchees of North-East Siberia
• Koryaks of Northeast Siberia
• Whale festival
• Russian Koliada
• Children wearing masks go from house to house begging eggs and flour.
• No one can refuse the children.
Koryaks of North-Eastern Siberia
Theory of sacrifice
• The relationship that exists between contracts and exchanges among
men and those between men and the gods
• It is not only in order to display power, wealth, and lack of self-interest
that
• slaves are put to death,
• precious oils burnt,
• copper objects cast into the sea,
• and even the houses of princes set on fire.
• It is also in order to sacrifice to the spirits and the gods,
indistinguishable from their living embodiments, who bear their titles
and are their initiates and allies.
• Toradja of the Celebs Island
• Purchase of the right to use land, forests etc from the gods
• Whereas the idea of purchase even seems very little developed in the civil
and commercial usage of the Toradja, on the contrary this idea of purchase
from the spirits and the gods is utterly constant.
Trobriand islands
• An evil spirit, a tauvau whose corpse has been found (that of a snake or land
crab) may be exorcised by presenting to it one of the vaygu’a, a precious
object that is both an ornament or talisman and an object of wealth used in
the exchanges of the kula. This gift has an immediate effect upon the mind
of this spirit.
• Moreover, at the festival of the mila-mila, a potlatch to honour the dead, the
two kinds of vaygu’a, those of the kula and those that Malinowski for the
first time calls ‘permanent’ vaygu’a, are displayed and offered to the spirits
on a platform identical to that of the chief. This makes their spirits
benevolent. They carry off to the land of the dead the shades of these
precious objects, where they vie with one another in their wealth just as
living men do upon returning from a solemn kula.
Theory of alms
• Alms are the fruits of a moral notion of the gift and of fortune on the
one hand, and of a notion of sacrifice, on the other.
• Gifts to children and poor people: Pleasing to the dead.
• Gods and spirits consent that the portion reserved for them and
destroyed in rituals and sacrifices should go to the poor and the
children.
• The basic elements of the potlatch - found in Polynesia, even if the
institution in its entirety is not to be found there.
• ‘exchange-through-gift’ is the rule there.
 The Distribution of the
System: Generosity, Honour
and Money
Chapter 2
Andaman Islanders: Rules of
Generosity
• To hospitality between local groups and visitors to festivals and fairs
that serve as occasions for voluntary and obligatory exchanges (a trade
in ochre and sea products against the products of the forest, etc.):
These presents do not serve the same purpose as commerce and exchange
in more developed societies. The goal is above all a moral one, the object
being to foster friendly feelings between the two persons in question, and
if the exercise failed to do so, everything had failed.
Nobody is free to refuse the present that is offered. Everyone, men and
women, tries to outdo one another in generosity. A kind of rivalry existed
to see who could give the greatest number of objects of the greatest
value. (Brown 1906: 83)
Principles, Reasons, and The
Intensity of Exchange of Gifts
(MELANESIA)
• Melanesians- Potlatch; notion of money more clear.
Trobriand islanders
• Kula is a grand potlatch- system of inter and intra tribal commerce.
• Kula distinguished from trade (aristocratic)
• Basic economic exchange is called gimwali
• Of an individual who does not proceed in the kula with the necessary
greatness of soul, it is said that he is ‘conducting it like a gimwali.’
• Giving by some and receiving by others
• The recipients of one day become the givers on the next.
• The grand kula- highly competitive
• The not so grand kula
• Exchange of cargoes
• The act of giving itself assumes very solemn forms: the thing received
is disclaimed and mistrusted; it is only taken up for a moment, after it
has been cast at one’s feet. The giver affects an exaggerated modesty:
having solemnly brought on his present, to the sound of a seashell, he
excuses himself for giving only the last of what remains to him, and
throws down the object to be given at the feet of his rival and partner.
• The essential objects in these exchange-gifts are the vaygu’a, a kind of
money.
• It is of two kinds:
• the mwali, which are beautiful bracelets, carved, polished, and placed in a
shell, and worn on great occasions by their owners or relatives;
• and the soulava, necklaces fashioned by the skillful craftsmen of Sinaketa in a
pretty mother-of-pearl made from red spondylus. They are solemnly worn by
the women.
• Normally, however, both kinds are hoarded and treasured. They are kept for
the sheer pleasure of possessing them
• these vaygu’a follow a kind of circular movement: the mwali, the bracelets,
are passed on regularly from west to east, whereas the soulava always travel
from east to west.
mwali
soulava
• In principle, the circulation of these signs of wealth is continuous and
unerring.
• They must not be kept too long a time, nor must one be slow or
difficult in passing them on
Other Melanesian societies
Fiji
• There is a season, termed kere-kere, during which nobody must be refused
anything.
• Gifts are exchanged between the two families on the occasion of a marriage, etc.
• Moreover the money of Fiji, of sperm whale’s teeth (cachalot teeth), is exactly of
the same kind as that of the Trobriands. It bears the name of tambua; it is
decorated with stones (‘mothers of the teeth’) and ornaments that are kinds of
mascots, talismans, and ‘good-luck’ objects of the tribe. The feelings cherished
by the Fijians for their tambua are exactly the same as those we have just
described: ‘they are treated like dolls. They are taken out of the basket and
admired, their beauty is spoken of; they are oiled and polished.’ To present them
constitutes a request; to accept them is to commit oneself.
New Guinea
• Tau-tau – similar to the Trobrianders’ money
• Similar to Taonga of Polynesia
• These peoples possess an extra domestic economy and a very
developed system of exchange that throbs with life more intensely
and more precipitately perhaps than the one that the peasants or the
fishing villages along our coasts were familiar with, maybe not even a
hundred years ago.
• Thus one section of humanity, comparatively rich, hardworking, and
creating considerable surpluses, has known and still does know, how
to exchange things of great value, under different forms and for
reasons different from those with which we are familiar.
Honour and Credit: American North-
West
• The tribes, peoples, or rather groups of tribes reside on the
Northwest coast of America,
• in Alaska: Tlingit and Haïda;
• and in British Columbia, mainly the Haïda, Tsimshian, and Kwakiutl.
• They also live from the sea, or from the rivers, from fishing rather than
hunting. But, unlike the Melanesians and Polynesians, they have no
agriculture.
• However, they are very rich, and even now their fishing grounds, hunting
grounds, and fur-trapping provide them with considerable surpluses,
particularly when reckoned in European terms
• most solidly built houses
• very highly developed cedarwood industry. Their boats are good, and although
they hardly venture out on the open sea, they know how to navigate between
the islands and the coasts.
• Their material arts are of a very high order. In particular, even before the arrival
of iron in the eighteenth century, they knew how to extract, melt down, mould,
and beat out the copper that is to be found in a raw state in the Tsimshian and
Tlingit lands. Certain kinds of this copper, real armorial shields, served as a kind
of money for them.
• Another kind of money was certainly the beautiful, so-called Chilkat, blankets of
wonderfully different colours that still serve as adornment, some of them of
considerable value.
• These peoples have excellent sculptors and professional designers. - pipes,
tomahawks, sticks, spoons carved out of horn, etc., embellish our ethnographic
collections.
• Clearly, these societies mingled with one another from very ancient times,
although they belong, at least in language, to no less than three different
families of peoples.
• Their life in winter, even for the southernmost tribes, is very different from that
in summer.
• The tribes have a dual structure:
• from the end of spring they disperse to go hunting, to gather roots and the juicy
mountain berries, and to fish for salmon in the rivers;
• at the onset of winter they concentrate once more in what are called ‘towns’. It is then,
during the period when they are gathered together in this way, that they live in a state
of perpetual excitement.
• Social life becomes extremely intense,
• more than in the assemblies of tribes that can take place in the summer.
• There are constant visits
• from whole tribes to tribes,
• from clans to clans,
• and from families to families.
• There are repeated festivals, continuous and long drawnout.
• At a wedding, or at various kinds of ritual or promotions,
• everything stored up with great industry during the summer and autumn on one of the richest
coasts in the world
• is lavishly expended.
• This even occurs in domestic life.
• The people of one’s clan are invited
• when a seal has been killed or
• when a case of berries or roots that have been preserved is opened up.
• Everyone is invited when a whale is washed up
• The potlatch itself, so typical a phenomenon, and at the same time so
characteristic of these tribes, is none other than the system of gifts
exchanged.
• It differs from that in Melanesia –
• in the violence,
• exaggeration, and
• antagonisms that it arouses,
• and by a certain lack of juridical concepts,
• and a simpler and cruder structure
• Tlingit and Haïda.
• collective nature of the contract is more apparent
• are closer to what we term ‘simple total services’
• Two notions
• These are the notion of credit, of the time limit placed on it,
• and also the notion of honour
• In certain kinds of potlatch one must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back.
• Who is the richest and madly extravagant?
• Based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry
• In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of
destroying so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated
• Whole boxes of olachen (candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands of
blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and thrown into the water, in order to
put down and to ‘flatten’ one’s rival.
• Promotion of one’s family and oneself up in the social scale
• May seem like exchange or trade and sale
• But it marked with etiquette, and generosity
• If it is marked by an expectation of immediate gain it is scorned
• Potlatch
• Juridical – form of contract
• Religious, mythological and shamanist
• Economic phenomenon
• Social structure - the gathering together of tribes, clans, and families, even of
peoples, brings about a remarkable state of nerviness and excitement
The three obligations: to give, to
receive, to reciprocate
• The obligation to give is the essence of the potlatch.
• A chief must give potlatches for himself, his son, his son-in-law, or his daughter and
for his dead.
• It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no potlatch that he had a
‘rotten face’- to lose one’s face is to lose one’s spirit
• The obligation to invite is clearly evident when imposed by clans on clans, or tribes
on tribes. Indeed it only has meaning if it is offered to others outside the family, the
clan, or the phratry. It is essential to invite anyone who can, or wishes to come, or
actually turns up at the festival at the potlatch
• “the wicked fairy who was forgotten at a baptism or a marriage”
• Tsimshian myth of the princess and her otter son
• Potlatch is a basic act of ‘recognition’
• Ceremony of the dogs
• The obligation to receive (accept) – no right to refuse a gift
• Refusing to attend the potlatch
• To act in this way is to show that one is afraid of having to reciprocate, to fear
being ‘flattened’ [i.e. losing one’s name] until one has reciprocated.
• But, by accepting it one knows that one is committing oneself.
• A gift is received ‘with a burden attached’.
• Failure to give or receive means a loss of dignity.
• The obligation to Reciprocate –
• the essence of the potlatch, in so far as it does not consist of pure
destruction (Sacrifice to spirits).
• However, normally,
• the potlatch must be reciprocated with interest, as must indeed every gift.
• The individual unable to repay the loan or reciprocate the potlatch
loses his rank and even his status as a free man.
• Sanction- enslavement for debt.
• Potlatch in NW America- Monster child of the gift system.
The Force Of Things Exchanged (Power)
• Exchangeable things have certain power which forces them to
circulate, to be given away and repaid.
• The objects of consumption and the precious things belonging to the
family- talismans, decorated copper, skin blankets, embroidered
fabrics.
• Each one of the precious things possess quality and power- “magical
legacy of the people”; a sign and surety of Life and wealth; guarantee
of rank and prosperity.
MONEY
• Decorated copper- Object of cult and myth; has its own value.
• Haida and Kwakiutl: Copper is identified with salmon.
• Has a virtue that attracts other coppers (wealth attracts wealth, or
dignity attracts honours).
• Transmission of wealth and good fortune (a copper acquire other
coppers, greater wealth, higher rank and more spirits)
• Things are given and returned because the thing exchanged are
‘respects’ and ‘courtesies’.
• Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The form and reason for exchange in
archaic societies. London: Routledge.