OSU Gift the Form & Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies Article Discussion develop responses that demonstrate your understanding of the text and prom

OSU Gift the Form & Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies Article Discussion develop responses

that demonstrate your understanding of the text and prompt at hand, making clear your interpretation of

the question while also attending to key details of the arguments, questions and meanings expressed and

conveyed by the text and its author

In his final chapter of The Gift, Mauss turns his attention. significantly to moral, political and economic questions concerning Europe of his day. Try to identify and discuss a major claim from Mauss’ concluding chapter which sheds light both on what is learned from the earlier chapters looking at his so-called archaic cultures and what application it has to culture today (his day or ours).. The Gift
‘The teaching of Marcel Mauss was one to which few can be
compared. No acknowledgment of him can be proportionate
to our debt.’
Claude Lévi-Strauss
‘Marcel Mauss’s famous Essay on the Gift becomes his own
gift to the ages. Apparently completely lucid, with no secrets
even for the novice, it remains a source of an unending
ponderation…’
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
‘One could go so far as to say that a work as monumental as
Marcel Mauss’s The Gift speaks of everything but the gift: It
deals with economy, exchange, contract (do et des), it speaks
of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and countergift—in short,
everything that in the thing itself impels the gift and the
annulment of the gift.’
Jacques Derrida, Given Time
Marcel
Mauss
The Gift
The form and reason for exchange
in archaic societies
With a foreword by Mary Douglas
London and New York
Essai sur le don first published 1950 by Presses
Universitaires de France in Sociologie et
Anthropologie
English edition first published 1954
by Cohen & West
This translation first published 1990 by Routledge
First published in Routledge Classics 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Translation © 1990 W.D.Halls
Foreword © 1990 Mary Douglas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-203-40744-X Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-71568-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–26748–X (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–26749–8 (pbk)
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL NOTE
FOREWORD BY MARY DOUGLAS
1
2
3
4
Introduction
The Exchange of Gifts and the Obligation to
Reciprocate (Polynesia)
The Extension of this System
Liberality, Honour, Money
Survivals of these Principles in Ancient
Systems of Law and Ancient Economies
Conclusion
NOTES
NAME INDEX
SUBJECT INDEX
vii
ix
1
10
24
60
83
108
192
196
EDITORIAL NOTE
The North American Indian term ‘potlatch’ has been
retained in the translation. Various definitions of it are given
in the text: ‘system for the exchange of gifts’, (as a verb)
‘to feed, to consume’, ‘place of being satiated’ [Boas]. As
elaborated by Mauss, it consists of a festival where goods
and services of all kinds are exchanged. Gifts are made and
reciprocated with interest. There is a dominant idea of
r ivalry and competition between the tribe or tribes
assembled for the festival, coupled occasionally with
conspicuous consumption.
The French terms ‘prestations’ and ‘contre-prestations’
have no direct English equivalents. They represent, in the
context in which they are used by Mauss, respectively the
actual act of exchange of gifts and rendering of services,
and the reciprocating or return of these gifts and services.
Normally they have been referred to in the translation for
brevity’s sake, as ‘total services’ and ‘total counterservices’.
viii
E D I TO R I A L N OT E
It has not proved possible to reinstate the original English of
the 170 quotations from English-language works, or presumed
as such, used by Mauss. These works are from British, American,
and Commonwealth sources and are often unidentifiable from
the references given in the footnotes.
FOREWORD
No free gifts
Mary Douglas
Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited
surrender of resources. 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. This book explains the lack of gratitude
by saying that the foundations should not confuse their
donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts
in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is
that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding.
There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the socalled free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return
gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act
of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails
no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived
by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-
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FOREWORD
gift gesture has created, it might just as well never have happened.
According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free
gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a
contradiction.
Mauss says as much in reply to Bronislaw Malinowski who
was surprised to find such precisely calculated return gifts in
Melanesia. 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. Because the valuable things that circulated in the
Trobriand Islands and a vast surrounding region were not in
commercial exchange, he expected the transfers to fall into the
category of gifts in his own culture. So he expended a lot of care
in classifying gifts by the purity of the motives of the giver and
concluded that practically nothing was given freely in this sense,
only the small gift that a Trobriand husband regularly gave his
wife could count. ‘Pure gift? Nonsense!’ declares Mauss: the
Trobriand husband is actually recompensing his wife for sexual
services. He would have said ‘Nonsense!’ just as heartily to Titmus’s
idea that the archetypal pure-gift relationship is the anonymous
gift of blood,1 as if there could be an anonymous relationship.
Even the idea of a pure gift is a contradiction. By ignoring the
universal custom of compulsory gifts we make our own record
incomprehensible to ourselves: right across the globe and as far
back as we can go in the history of human civilization, the major
transfer of goods has been by cycles of obligatory returns of gifts.
Though this insight was taken up by archeologists and
historians for reinterpreting antique systems of tax, revenues,
and trade2, a fancy archeological insight was not Mauss’s objective.
The Essay on the Gift was a part of an organized onslaught on
contemporary political theory, a plank in the platform against
utilitarianism.This intention is fully recognized in the new journal,
MAUSS.3 Mauss himself wrote very little about political philosophy
but The Gift does not spring from nowhere; references to Emile
FOREWORD
Durkheim make quite clear where to look for the rest of the
programme. And nor does Durkheim come from nowhere. First,
I will explain the plan of the book, then I will place it in its
context. Finally, I will indicate some of the work that has stemmed
from it, and suggest what is still to be done to implement the
original programme.
In this book the author has produced an idea that he has
probably been mulling over for a long time. Indeed, the idea is
profoundly original. We have seen how it runs against our
established idea of gift. The book starts with describing the North
American potlatch as an extreme form of an institution that is
found in every region of the world. The potlatch is an example of
a total system of giving. Read this too fast and you miss the
meaning. Spelt out it means that each gift is part of a system of
reciprocity in which the honour of giver and recipient are engaged.
It is a total system in that every item of status or of spiritual or
material possession is implicated for everyone in the whole
community. The system is quite simple; just the rule that 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. The whole society
can be described by the catalogue of transfers that map all the
obligations between its members. The cycling gift system is the
society.
The Gift is a grand exercise in positivist research, combining
ethnology, history, and sociology. First Mauss presents the system
as found in working order. This takes him to the ethnography of
North America. What is striking about the potlatch among the
Haïda and Tlingit of the Northwest coast is the extreme rivalry
expressed by the rule always to return more than was received;
failure to return means losing the competition for honour. There
comes a point when there are just not enough valuable things to
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FOREWORD
express the highest degrees of honour, so conspicuous
consumption is succeeded by conspicuous destruction. Then he
turns to Melanesia where, in a less extreme form, there are the
essentials of potlatch, that is, totalized competitive giving that
incorporates in its cycles all things and services and all persons.
He treats Polynesia as a variant, because there 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 the competitive potlatch, but it is
still a total system of gift. Where does the system get its energy?
In each case from individuals who are due to lose from default
heaping obloquy on defaulters and from beliefs that the spirits
would punish them. The system would not be total if it did not
include personal emotions and religion.
After presenting the system of gift functioning among
American Indians and in Oceania, and among Eskimo and
Australian hunters, Mauss then turns to records of ancient legal
systems. Roman, Germanic, and other Indo-European laws all
show signs of the basic principles. There are no free gifts; gift
cycles engage persons in permanent commitments that articulate
the dominant institutions. Only after the full tour of ethnographic
and legal evidence do we finally reach the chapter on the theory
of the gift in classical Hindu law. Now we have definitely moved
away from working social systems to myths, legends, and
fragments of laws: not the system of gift but, as the chapter
heading says, the theory of gift. Mauss’s early book with Henri
Hubert (1889) on Sacrifice4 took for its central theme a Vedic
principle that sacrifice is a gift that compels the deity to make a
return: Do ut des; I give so that you may give. Given the centrality
of India in Max Muller’s philological speculations on mythology,
any book at that time on religion would need to study Hindu law
and epic deeply. It strikes me as likely that Mauss did get the idea
of a morally sanctioned gift cycle upholding the social cycle from
the Vedic literature that he studied in that first major research. I
FOREWORD
am inclined to think that he harboured and developed the great
idea all those years. Certainly there is a close connection of matter
and treatment between the two books.
In some histories of anthropology the main difference
between old-fashioned folklore and modern ethnography has
been identified as the replacement of library research by
fieldwork. But I would suggest that the main important change
came from a new criterion of sound analysis. The Gift was like an
injunction to record the entire credit structure of a community.
What a change that involved from current ideas about how to
do ethnology can be seen by reading any of the earlier books
cited in the voluminous footnotes whose unsystematic accounts
of beliefs and ceremonies provided the uninterpreted bare bones
of the gift system.
Because it starts from Northwest Coast American Indians and
Melanesians and goes on to Polynesia and then to ancient texts,
the book would seem to spring from the fusty debates of library
researchers on comparative religion.Yet it is not about religion. It
is about politics and economics. After the survey of evidence come
the political and moral implications. Following Durkheim, Mauss
also considered that every serious philosophical work should bear
on public policy. The theory of the gift is a theory of human
solidarity. Consequently, a brief reference to contemporary debates
on health and unemployment insurance is in place, with the
argument deduced from the preceding pages that the wage does
not cover society’s obligation to the worker. No obligations are
ever completely covered. Though Mauss here refers approvingly
to some English proposals on social policy, he is writing in a
tradition strongly opposed to English liberal thought. At this point
the Durkheimian context needs to be filled in.
The main strands in Durkheim’s opposition to the English
Utilitarians were already formulated by French political
philosophers.5 As Larry Siedentrop summarizes a tradition that
stemmed from the eighteenth century, from Rousseau and
xiii
xiv
FOREWORD
Tocqueville, it made three criticisms of English liberalism: 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. Furthermore, early English empiricist philosophy
did not explain the role of social norms in shaping individual
intentions and in making social action possible; their sensationalist
model of the mind allowed no scope for explaining rule-governed
action. Individualism is the essence of the French critique of
utilitarianism. This is exactly where Durkheim’s life work starts,
as would appear from comparing his writings with the following
paragraph by his biographer, Steven Lukes:6
Benjamin Constant believed that ‘when all are isolated by egoism,
there is nothing but dust, and at the advent of a storm, nothing but
mire’,7 while it was Alexis de Tocqueville who gave individualisme its
most distinctive and influential liberal meaning in France. For
Tocqueville it meant the apathetic withdrawal of individuals from
public life into a private sphere and their isolation from one another,
with a consequent and dangerous weakening of social bonds:
individualism was
a deliberate and peaceful sentiment which disposes each citizen
to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows… [which] at first
saps only the virtues of public life, but, in the long run…attacks
and destroys all others and is eventually absorbed into pure
egoism.8
(Lukes, 1973)
Among French socialists individualism was a bad word, referring
to laissez faire, anarchy, social atomization, and exploitation of the
poor under a regime of industrial capitalism. However,
Durkheim’s position was more complex. He believed that the
FOREWORD
success of a political system would depend on the extent to which
it allowed individual self-awareness to flourish. 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.
If one were to be forgetful of this traditional hostility to English
utilitarianism it would be easy to misunderstand Durkheim’s
language and to fall into the trap of thinking that he really believed
that society is a kind of separate intelligence that determines the
thoughts and actions of its members as the mind does those of
the body it is lodged in. Arguing against the nineteenth-century
forms of utilitarianism, especially against the political philosophy
of Herbert Spencer, it would have seemed hard for the antiutilitarians to overestimate the importance of shared norms. And
as for those whom he attacked, especially those across the Channel
or across the Atlantic, it was evidently easier to misrepresent him
than to disagree with what he was actually saying. Bartlett refers
to Durkheim’s idea of the collective memory as a quasimystic
soul; Herbert Simon dissociates himself from Durkheimian ‘group
mind’ implications; Alfred Schutz disdainfully dismisses
Halbwachs’ theories on the ‘Collective Memory of Musicians’
(which are very much the same as his own) because they are
tainted by Durkheim’s alleged theory of a unitary group
consciousness; see also Bruno Latour on Durkheim’s ‘big animal’.9
All these and many others forget that Durkheim’s work was
actually part of an ongoing research project with close
collaborators who quite clearly did not give it this interpretation.
So the counterattack has travestied versions of ‘group mind’,
‘mystical unit’, ‘group psyche’ that his language occasionally
justifies but his precepts as to method certainly do not. This is
why positivism was such an important plank in his programme.
Positivism represented an attempt at objectivity. This is why it
was necessary for Mauss to set out the plan of his book by
beginning with the survey of functioning social systems, ending
xv
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FOREWORD
with Hindu texts about a vanished system (or one that had perhaps
never existed in that form).
Today the same political debate is still engaged, between the
contemporary utilitarians and those who, like Durkheim, deplore
the effects of unfettered individualism. Some of those working
in learned communities that embrace methodological
individualism may be right to feel threatened by his teaching.
Personally, I think it would be better for them to take it seriously.
Hostility and a sense of threat are a sign that collective
representations are at work. Our problem is how to take our own
and other people’s collective representations into account.
Durkheim expected to do so by setting up sociology as a science,
using positivist methods and looking for social facts. Science was
to be a way of escaping bondage to past and to present loyalties.
It is easy to mock his scientific pretensions, but who would deny
that we really do need to seek for objectivity and to establish a
responsible sociological discourse free of subjective hunches and
concealed political pressure?
From this point of view The Gift rendered on extraordinary
service to Durkheim’s central project by producing a theory that
could be validated by observation. For anthropologists the book
has provided a basic requirement for modern fieldwork. It quickly
became axiomatic that a field report would be below standard
unless a complete account could be given of all transfers, that is,
of all dues, gifts, fines, inheritances and successions, tributes,
fees and payments; when this information is in place one also
knows who gets left at the end of the day without honour or
citizenship and who benefits from the cumulative transfers. With
such a chart in hand the interpreter might be capable of sensing
the meanings of ballads, calypsos, dirges, and litanies; without it
one guess will do as well as any other.
Mauss rendered other inestimable services to Durkheim’s
project of a science of sociology. One is to have demonstrated
that when the members of the Durkheimian school talked of
FOREWORD
society they did not mean an undecomposable unity, as many of
their critics have supposed. If they had thought of society as an
unanalysable, unchanging, sacralized entity, the researches of
Durkheim’s best pupils would never have been undertaken. The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life10 gives snapshot pictures of
Australian aborigines and American Indians worshipping spirits
who sustain the social forms. It all seems very cut and dried.
Durkheim and Mauss in Primitive Classification,11 write …
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