‘To obtain from kings,’ the Mahabharata tells us, ‘is at first honey, on the finish, poison.’ Honey as a result of who doesn’t need the present of a king’s riches? Poison as a result of how will we ever repay? Everyone knows, as a result of it’s written by our sages and scripted in our norms, that receiving a present carries with it sure obligations: to say thanks and to reciprocate with a present in return. ‘These individuals invited us for dinner,’ Elaine Benes explains to George Costanza on the TV present Seinfeld. ‘We have now to deliver one thing.’ However why, George asks? ‘I simply don’t like the concept that, each time there’s a dinner invitation, there’s this annoying little chore that goes together with it,’ he complains. ‘The material of society may be very complicated, George,’ Jerry Seinfeld tells him.
The present about nothing is, amongst different issues, a eager examine of the present. In any case, we’ve got Seinfeld (1989-98) to thank for the verb ‘to regift’, coined in episode 98, ‘The Label Maker’, when a free present units in movement a sequence of trades. Tim Whatley, the dentist performed by Bryan Cranston, doesn’t cost Elaine for dental work. To reciprocate, Elaine presents him a label maker. Just a few months later, Jerry offers Tim Tremendous Bowl tickets. Tim reciprocates by regifting the label maker that he acquired from Elaine. Jerry needs the Tremendous Bowl tickets again. ‘If he can regift,’ George asks, ‘why can’t you degift?’
We would ask, with George, why? Why can’t we present as much as dinner empty handed? Why ought to the present of free dental work be repaid within the generosity of a label maker? What hidden legislation directs the label maker in a single course and the Tremendous Bowl tickets in one other? Why can’t Jerry reverse the circulate of site visitors? Why can he regift, however not degift? And why can we faux that every one of that is voluntary when a lot of it’s compulsory? Why do we are saying that we give and reciprocate presents out of kindness and never, the extra seemingly state of affairs, out of worry of censure? The material of society may be very complicated.
Near a century in the past, the French sociologist Marcel Mauss got down to reply simply these questions. In his seminal essay The Reward (1925), a now traditional textual content within the self-discipline of anthropology, he surveyed a variety of gift-giving practices, and puzzled: why can we really feel compelled to reciprocate presents? ‘The Label Maker’ may simply have featured amongst his sources. Mauss was the nephew of Émile Durkheim, the founding father of the trendy self-discipline of sociology. Born in 1872 within the city of Épinal within the northeast of France to a household of rabbis and observant Jews, Mauss himself stopped practising Judaism early on (his mom wrote to him as soon as he had left the home: ‘When you wished to please me, you’d observe Passover the very best you possibly can. It begins tomorrow night’). At 18, he entered college with the intention of learning philosophy. His pursuits quickly gravitated towards the comparative examine of faith, an rising subject fed by the rising physique of colonial, ethnographic sources documenting non-European cultures. Mauss is much much less well-known than his uncle partly as a result of he revealed primarily essays and critiques, moderately than books. However The Reward, one in all his longer essays, has loved a permanent afterlife, inspiring the sub-field of financial anthropology.
The start line for the essay was an remark. Texts from all over the world – the Norse Edda, the Hindu Vedas, stories of potlatches within the Pacific Northwest – pointed to proof of financial practices that resisted simple definition. These have been practices that appeared, from one angle, to be impressed by the generosity and selflessness that we affiliate with present change: a political chief hosts a lavish meal; presents are showered upon a pair forward of their youngster’s delivery; buddies are requested to share within the features of a profitable hunt. And but, not solely may these pleasant exchanges flip hostile – camaraderie giving approach to competitors, alliance to warfare – however no act was singular. Every deed appeared to demand a reciprocal gesture: each present was met, in some unspecified time in the future down the street, with a return present. One gave, it adopted, with some expectation of receiving in return. On this manner, transactions that appeared selfless have been additionally self-interested. Exchanges that appeared voluntary have been additionally, at some degree, compulsory. A mortgage needed to be repaid, an invite reciprocated, a kindness outdone (‘The spherical of drinks,’ Mauss noticed, in W D Halls’s translation, ‘is ever dearer and bigger in dimension’).
Seen this fashion, present giving began to look an terrible lot like an financial transaction. And but – and that is what struck Mauss, because it ought to strike us – all the things in our language and our legal guidelines would have us imagine that the present and the contract are of a distinct species. The one motivated by goodness, the opposite by utility; the primary rooted in ethical legislation, the second in materials curiosity; the burden of a tax as in opposition to the sweetness of charity. The calculated ends of the banker shares little, we wish to suppose, with the hallowed coronary heart of the almsgiver. But, the pressure of ethnographic proof was such that it made this mind-set appear fairly unusual, a historic anomaly with roots within the current European previous.
The contract was the answer to an issue distinctive to trendy business society: that we rely on strangers to supply us with life’s requirements. The caricature of self-sufficient Homo economicus obscures this primary characteristic of Adam Smith’s prognosis. We have to commerce as a result of neither our labour nor our endowment alone can provide us with all the things we want. The trendy situation is one in all dependence, not independence. ‘[M]an has nearly fixed event for the assistance of his brethren,’ Smith wrote. A part of the issue, although, is that we are able to hardly be buddies with the nice many on whom we rely. Our time is restricted. The supply chain is lengthy. The contract steps in the place fellow feeling falls brief. We needn’t fear whether or not our commerce associate is reliable, whether or not his phrase is sweet or his motives pure. The legislation of contract, enforced by the state, secures the phrases of change. Issues of the guts – friendship, love, sentiment – needn’t intrude. Higher left to the realm of private relations or the home sphere.
Smith’s guide An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) rationalised this association by insisting that the earliest commerce relations anticipated the logic of the contract. The impact was to make the regime of contract, and the world of market change it enshrined, appear pure moderately than the product of human selection and political will. This was to masks prescription, what we should do, with description, what’s. Earlier than cash or a state to mint it entered the image, the story went, barter was the order of the day. Alternate entailed a strict calculation of curiosity. As Smith would have it: ‘Give me that which I would like, and also you shall have this which you need.’
We’d like issues from others, each religious and materials, simply as they want from us
In Mauss’s time, change practices documented all over the world and within the deeper previous flew within the face of this acquired knowledge. Trades have been inexact, open-ended, and had all the things to do with private and communal relationships. They strengthened friendships, assured allies, maintained custom. The motion of fabric items served a wide range of immaterial functions that the language of cold-hearted utility failed to completely seize. Love and self-interest weren’t so readily distinguished.
As in The Wealth of Nations – certainly, as in any good work of social principle – Mauss’s descriptive mission couched prescriptive ends. Learn on the descriptive degree, his essay merely supplied an account of gift-giving practices. In the end, although, his objective was to encourage readers to rethink financial change – to persuade us, that’s, that we want not be creatures of Smith’s invention. Mauss approached this objective by, in a way, taking us by way of the backdoor. In exhibiting us practices that regarded like present change however turned out to be a type of financial contract, he chipped away on the division between the 2. His level was to not make us cynical about presents, however to counsel that financial change may retain one thing of the spirit of present giving. His level was to not expose charitable giving as a thinly hid tax dodge, honourable language solely giving cowl to crasser motives, however to ask what may occur if we dropped at the yearly ritual of tax fee the jubilance of vacation present change. What would occur if we noticed tax disbursement not as an onerous obligation however as a welcome funding within the life we inevitably share? Would we uncover or rediscover, as Mauss would have it, ‘the enjoyment of public giving; the pleasure in beneficiant expenditure on the humanities, in hospitality, and within the personal and public pageant’?
One impact of the contract-gift break up was that it divorced one thing like care, the sensation we lengthen to our family members and the rationale we enjoyment of sharing with them presents, from the world of day-to-day market change. We outsource any fear over the equity of change to the legislation of the contract the place all that counts, from an ethical perspective, is that the events have consented to the association. And, as soon as we fulfil our finish of the cut price, the contract absolves us of any additional obligation to our buying and selling associate. Strangers we have been, and strangers we stay. Reward change, against this, traffics in no such finality. As soon as caught in a cycle of presents and counter-gifts, our obligations by no means formally expire. Solely demise or a breakup or the slower, much less perceptible fraying of a relation, two buddies grown aside with the years, can put an finish to the transaction. A blessing and a curse.
In dissolving the road separating presents from contracts, Mauss invited us to reimagine the relations governing all the things from the office to home life. On the time he was writing within the Twenties, the French parliament debated the growth of social insurance coverage provisions. To Mauss’s thoughts, the passage of such laws required us to see the logic of the present at work. We needed to see that the employee who had given their life to a job was owed the insurance coverage of life in return – safety in opposition to incapacity, illness and outdated age. Wages alone wouldn’t settle this debt. Had been we to complement labour relations with broader duties of care, we would, conversely, entertain the likelihood that care relations, the duties of parental and reproductive work, should be compensated as labour. On the very least we would agree that the state or employer owed better help to staff with households.
The Reward additionally lent extra elementary classes. We don’t sometimes like to consider private relationships as transactions. To talk this fashion would appear to cheapen our ties, importing the profane language of the contract the place it plainly doesn’t belong – an indication, certainly, of the creeping affect of the market and its mentality, its energy to pervert even probably the most sacred of human interactions. However possibly we’ve obtained it the flawed manner round. What Mauss would say is that it’s the dominance of this one, impoverished mind-set about change that has cheapened what it means to enter into commerce relations. The contract has given change a foul title. In one other context, we might see that social life is nothing aside from an prolonged transaction. This isn’t a foul factor. It’s what makes the load of life’s uncertainties bearable. We’d like issues from others, each religious and materials, simply as they want from us. We spend our time collectively racking up credit and incurring money owed: lending an ear, giving a hand, sharing our blessings, calling in favours. Put in in interlocking networks of obligation, we all know we’re not alone. When catastrophe strikes, the tab is open. The counter-gift is on its manner.
Mauss’s essay has at all times introduced readers with a puzzle. What begins as a comparatively easy declare takes flight into extra mystical reasoning. The primary half is evident: presents will not be not like contracts as a result of they compel a return fee. However Mauss doesn’t finish the story there. Dissolving the road between the present and the contract would appear to require him to elucidate what it’s that enables present giving to tackle the character of the contract. He strikes on to deal with a much less apparent query: in these societies wherein presents look extra like contracts, what’s it precisely in regards to the present that necessitates a return fee? Why should the present acquired be reciprocated?
Within the first occasion, Mauss identifies a solution to this query in Māori philosophy. Presents, he says, are invested with a religious high quality, known as hau in Māori. As a result of an object you give me is invested with this high quality, I’m compelled to flow into the wealth that object bestows, to offer you one thing in return. Hau shouldn’t be simple to translate. It might imply the life pressure animating individuals, objects or locations. On this manner, it’s like a soul, if soul didn’t have the extra restricted affiliation with the human that it does in English (‘In English,’ Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, ‘you’re both a human or a factor’). This has left interpreters to argue over what Mauss was attempting to say. Did he imply to counsel that the present has a soul, a character? And that this thing-person circulates as a result of it needs to return to its authentic proprietor? Or was he saying that the present is animated by the soul of the giver? On this studying, after I provide you with a present, I provide you with part of myself. As a result of that a part of myself must return to me, you are feeling compelled to offer me one thing in return. However this doesn’t totally make sense. If what I gave you was a part of myself, why would one thing else, one thing not a part of me, full the commerce?
To be an individual is to be constituted, partly, by the issues one has given or acquired
Is it the spirit of the present or the spirit of the giver that compels a return fee? Mauss teases each. ‘Issues offered nonetheless have a soul,’ he writes. ‘They’re nonetheless adopted round by their former proprietor, and so they observe him additionally.’ The primary clause means that ‘soul’ refers back to the individual, the previous proprietor. The second clause, against this, locations the company on the issues: they observe him. For probably the most half, students give attention to the latter studying, emphasising that Mauss needs primarily to make us suppose in another way about issues. To think about an object as animate or person-like is to insist, maybe, that objects can by no means be totally or completely owned. Wealth should flow into. However in saying, as Mauss does (in Ian Cunnison’s translation), that ‘issues have character’, Mauss asks us not solely to see issues in a brand new gentle, however to revise how we take into consideration personhood. ‘[T]he factor acquired shouldn’t be inactive,’ he explains (in Halls’s translation). ‘Even when it has been deserted by the giver, it nonetheless possesses one thing of him.’ The factor is animated by the giver, an individual. However this additionally implies that to be an individual is to be constituted, partly, by the issues one has given or acquired, the issues one owes or is owed. The factor given ‘types part of him’ (Cunnison). Mauss cites a Kwakiutl story wherein a chief, upon accepting objects which might be mentioned to draw wealth, sings: ‘My title will likely be “property making its manner in the direction of me”.’ The objects, the title and the property that circulate to him by advantage of his standing kind a part of the identical entity, the identical individual.
On 12 June 2020, the Democratic Republic of Congo-born activist Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza staged a protest on the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. Showing earlier than a smartphone digicam that broadcast the motion stay, Diyabanza introduced: ‘I’ve come right here to recuperate the products that belong to me.’ He then approached an open show case the place he wrested a picket, Nineteenth-century funerary pole free from its stand. For 33 minutes he paraded the article by way of the cavernous halls of the museum as he defined to onlookers: ‘We’re leaving with our property, we’re bringing it dwelling.’ France holds some 90,000 artefacts of sub-Saharan African provenance in its museums. The vast majority of them – 70,000 – are housed within the Musée du quai Branly.
In his lifetime, Mauss was liable for coaching a era of social scientists to hold out the primary fieldwork expeditions in French colonies. He positioned heavy emphasis on the gathering of ethnographic artefacts. ‘[O]bjects are proof of social information,’ he instructed his class (his pupil Michel Leiris lamented from the sector: ‘The entire day is spent accumulating objects, classifying them, recording them, packing them away. I really feel rather more like an accountant than an adventurer’). Within the decade after he revealed The Reward, a number of thousand African artefacts have been deposited in Paris – and later transferred to the Musée du quai Branly when it opened in 2006. Within the French context, invoking Mauss’s essay in response to questions of restitution is much less the blissful utility of principle to apply than a return to origins.
Arrested on fees of tried theft, Diyabanza stood for trial later that 12 months. His attorneys defended the motion as a political protest moderately than an tried theft. They invoked, as precedent, the 2014 acquittal of a member of a feminist group, who was charged with sexual exhibition for baring her chest and attacking a wax statue of Vladimir Putin. The lawyer representing the Musée du quai Branly conceded that whereas ‘against the law of bodily expression, corresponding to sexual exhibition, may be justified by freedom of expression, it’s neither attainable nor fascinating that freedom of expression can legitimise crimes of this kind of theft.’ A number of weeks later the court docket rendered its judgment: Diyabanza was ordered to pay a 1,000 euro nice.
Social life is nothing aside from an never-ending commerce of products and favours, of meals and feasts and label makers
A person walks right into a museum and removes an object that’s mentioned to have, at one time, belonged to his ancestors. Of all of the methods to call this act – protest, retrieval, theft – ‘crime of bodily expression’ might strike us because the least believable. For one, the physique in query (the person’s) implicates a second physique (the article). The suitable to bodily or self-expression – to talk, write, protest, or worship – certainly ends the place one physique ends and one other begins. We may, although, draw new borders. ‘In its widest attainable sense,’ the thinker William James wrote in 1890, ‘a person’s Self is the sum whole of all that he CAN name his.’ (Italics within the authentic.) For James, this included the person’s physique, his ‘psychic powers’, garments, home, spouse, kids, repute, buddies, land, horses, yacht, checking account, and ancestors. What about ancestral possessions?
If, for James, a person’s self is ‘the sum whole of all that he CAN name his’, Mauss’s reply might need been {that a} man’s self is the steadiness of his social money owed. This was totally different than James’s notion of a self that features one’s checking account. Greater than an evaluation of what a person may declare as his in a strict authorized or financial sense, it required us to see the complete gamut of social, cultural and historic forces liable for shaping us as people. It’s no coincidence that, within the years after he wrote The Reward, Mauss went on to publish a sequence of articles in regards to the building of the self. His essay ‘Strategies of the Physique’ (1935) thought-about the ways in which even probably the most unremarkable and infrequently unconscious particular person behaviours – types of strolling, leaping, sleeping, swimming – have been produced by one’s cultural context. He known as on social scientists to deliver collectively insights from biology, psychology and sociology to review what he known as the ‘whole human being’, the person on the nexus of complicated patterns and drives. ‘[E]verything mingles right here,’ he wrote, ‘physique, soul, and society.’
In The Reward, the declare about personhood, although much less overt, was additionally extra particular. Cycles of giving and receiving, the essay suggests, carve out the self. We’re what we’ve got misplaced and gained. That is the lacking piece within the interpretive puzzle. To maneuver past the contract, Mauss suggests, we want a brand new mannequin of personhood: not the self-contained, autonomous particular person, however the individual as implicated in an online of change. Presents should be repaid not, or a minimum of not solely, due to a religious high quality resident in objects, however as a result of social life is nothing aside from an never-ending commerce of products and favours, of meals and feasts and label makers. Because of this, at any given second, we confront one another, inescapably, below these situations: as creditor or as debtor. We’re givers and takers – bloated by our features, hollowed by our losses, fashioned by our inheritance. Entitlement scripts the motion of our bodies by way of area.
In Atlantics, the 2019 movie by Mati Diop, which gained the Grand Prix on the Cannes movie pageant, a gaggle of younger building staff in Dakar set sail for Europe after being cheated out of their pay. Their boat capsizes, and so they by no means make it. Again in Senegal, the employees’ girlfriends awake for nightly sleepwalks, their our bodies possessed by the spirit of their deceased lovers. Zombie-like, they seem earlier than their boyfriends’ boss to demand the unpaid wages. Whether or not or not money owed may be paid to a ghost, the physique is aware of the rating.
