Ceci nâest pas un don
âReciprocal gift-exchangeâ sounds innocent enough for anyone with even basic anthropological training because its constituent parts âreciprocityâ and âgift-exchangeâ are the bread and butter of many social science theories and ethnographic descriptions. It is difficult to find any current introduction to anthropology that does not contain these terms, or some derivatives thereof. In economic anthropology, probably within the first thousand words or so of any introductory chapter or article, there will be some reference to reciprocity and gift-exchange. And there are good reasons for this since in many ways these have been productive terms for generating anthropological knowledge. However, as I will try to point out below, in conjunction with phenomena of sharing, the phrase âreciprocal gift-givingâ is not only misplaced or misapplied but it seriously hampers new insights. If we look at it in more detail, âreciprocal gift-givingâ in fact enshrines a forceful coalition of approaches that are in many other ways at loggerheads with one another, namely a scientistic notion of universal and law-like âreciprocityâ and a cultural-relativist notion of âgift givingâ, two sides of a complementary antagonism that I shall discuss in turn in this chapter.
Over the last three decades considerable effort has been spent to clarify that sharing is not adequately represented by the image of reciprocal exchange, or to slightly modify RenĂ© Magritte: This is not a gift (Ceci nâest pas un don). Rather it is a form of transfer sui generis, âan important transactional mode in its own rightâ (Gell 1999: 77). The discussion was first started by specialists working in hunter-gatherer studies (Price 1975, Woodburn 1998, Wenzel et al. 2000) and other small-scale societies (see Gell 1999) who argued that the sharing phenomena observed had to be stretched beyond recognition in order to make them fit the theory of reciprocal exchange. Since then the argument has been picked up in more general accounts (Hunt 2000, Widlok and Tadesse 2005, Ferguson 2015) that show how, in turn, the notion of exchange would have to be stretched beyond recognition if it was to cover sharing as well. The conceptual point in this debate is that reciprocal exchange has mutuality as its defining property, usually combined with some sense of transactions that âeven outâ and that are connected to one another. The binary distinction between one-way and reciprocal transactions may seem simple at first but quickly becomes problematic and blurred since it is often difficult to ascertain whether something is equivalent when the items exchanged are not exactly the same. Similarly it is a matter of debate whether an act of giving and an act of receiving should still be considered connected if the âreturnâ is only received indirectly or after a long time lag, for instance in the next generation. In principle, any unreciprocated transfer may be counted as an instance of incomplete exchange of which we simply have not seen, as yet, the return transaction. However, there are serious doubts as to whether we can or should assume reciprocity across all of these cases. Thus, when Woodburn (1998) underlined that âsharing is not a form of exchangeâ he invoked the ethnography of East African foragers (see Box 1) to voice the emerging critique against the tendency of understanding all transfers in terms of reciprocal gift-exchange. That tendency was, and in some ways still is, prevalent not only in economic anthropology but also in kinship studies and other fields of anthropological enquiry. Woodburn emphasized that sharing is characterized precisely by contexts in which transfer is not based on specific kin obligations and in which it is not about creating specific long-term commitments. It is exactly this ability of exchange to create social continuity and commitments and to maintain social order that became the core of gift theory when it was first formulated and that has since fuelled the anthropological imagination.
The Hadza are a small group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania but they have served as a test case for a number of anthropological theories â including those related to sharing. They have been the focus of much anthropological attention, partly because they live today as foragers in the region where modern humans are thought to have originated. Therefore, it has been argued, they may represent better than any other group the life of early humans. In the spectrum between egalitarianism and sharing on the one hand and hierarchy and exchange on the other hand they mark the egalitarian end of the spectrum that is opposed to the ways of life in most societies, including those of their immediate neighbours. However, it is important to note that the Hadza, as far as we know, have always recognized personal property and have objects that are not shared (for instance, their hunting bows). As Woodburn (1998) has pointed out, it is not the case that material objects in Hadza society would circulate because of collective ownership but rather because of social practices such as continuous gambling and continuous asking and demanding. Gathered food is also considered to be personally owned but with large game meat in particular, less so with gathered food or small animals, there is considerable emphasis put on the sharing of the meat. The initial sharing at the killing site ensures that the larger part of the meat is earmarked for all Hadza who live in a camp (25 to 30 individuals on average). Only a small proportion, the epeme meat, is reserved for initiated men. The second stage of sharing takes place when the meat is transported back to camp where it is cooked by the hearth groups before it then enters a third round of sharing among everyone who is present. Ways of storing meat are known but hoarding is socially unacceptable so that sharing will continue if some still have meat while others are still hungry. Everyone in the camp will get a share but needs to claim it. Correspondingly, those who make weak claims, for instance the old and frail, will receive less than those who can make forceful claims, for instance pregnant women. The amount of meat available for sharing to some extent determines the size of the camp since large kills attract more people who come to acquire shares. Although the sharing ethic is strong, this does not imply generosity. Marlowe (2004: 85) confirmed in experimental settings that Hadza offer less food than members of other groups unless it is claimed from them but at the same time they are much more likely to readily reject small offers just as they would readily split from people whom they consider to be stingy. Woodburn and Marlowe observed frequent attempts to hide and to evade sharing but also noted that chances for this to succeed are slim in small camps. Moreover, the social pressure through demands is such that tolerating others to take from what one has is the most rational and the most common strategy in Hadza everyday life.
In the early 1920s Marcel Mauss compiled the then available ethnographic sources on phenomena that he collected under the heading of âthe giftâ (Mauss 2002). These include examples from a very broad spectrum, back in time to European antiquity and Roman law and across all continents with many examples from the indigenous groups of North America and of the Pacific. The purpose of this comparative view was not primarily ethnographic, a better understanding of âexoticâ peoples, but instead a critique of the dominant modes of exchange that had come to characterize European modernity at the time. The endeavour was risky because Maussâ appeal to social and economic reform was based on the life of people who were then considered pre-modern and primitive. His main contention was that gifts may appear to be voluntary but that they in fact structure and secure social order because gift-exchange is governed by obligations, the obligation to give, to receive, and to return a gift. These obligations, in his view, are foundational for the social order more generally. In the language of the Maori, a gift had a âhauâ, it contained some of the essence of the giver, which produced a force that would ultimately force recipients to return the gift and to comply with the obligations.
Mauss was subsequently criticized for basing an anthropological theory of society and the social contract on the mythical worldview of pre-modern people. This critique was expressed in very pronounced ways by LĂ©vi-Strauss. LĂ©vi-Strauss took on board the importance of exchange for social order and any form of human culture but tried to purify the theory of mythical contents by placing the driving force not within exchanged objects but instead in ultimately mental and universal structures of duality that saturate all fields of life (LĂ©vi-Strauss 1949, 1965). It therefore took until the end of the twentieth century for Maussâ theory of the gift to gain ground, eventually in an unprecedented and sweeping way.
âThe anthropology of gift-givingâ is more than a rather specific subfield of a subdomain of economic anthropology. I think it is fair to say that the opposite is true since the anthropology of gift-giving has in a way become one of the key theories in anthropology, in some sense even the most dominant theory of the discipline at large that influences anthropological thinking in many fields.1 Its standing may be compared to that of econometrics in economics as a discipline in the sense that although there are many more theories and methods around, this is the one to which much of the discipline boils down to in the âreal lifeâ of teaching it to undergraduates and when applying shared ideas in research. Here are some indicators why this is true for anthropology today. The theory of gift-giving, in particular in the tradition of Marcel Mauss, is found in all subfields of the discipline, far beyond economic anthropology, from the anthropology of religion (e.g. Morris 1987: 266) to the anthropology of kinship (e.g. Fox 1967: 202). It has been picked up by virtually all of anthropologyâs neighbouring disciplines. The Gift is one of the few books that have made it into the general canon of the humanities (see Leggewie et al. 2012). It has now got a key position in most Anthropology 101 course materials. Almost a century after it was written, Marcel Mauss slowly emerges as champion among other âfounding fathersâ of the discipline. Bronislaw Malinowski is usually credited for bringing in participant observation as a methodological innovation but he is disregarded and indeed belittled for his weak theoretical impact. However, the fact that his introduction into ethnographic method was bound up in one volume with his celebrated case study of the Trobriand kula cycle helped to fuel interests in gift-exchange. Franz Boas may be credited for establishing the culture concept in the discipline, but not for a productive and comprehensive theory of culture. Both Malinowskian-type ethnography as a representation of âthe otherâ and the Boasian culture concept have been severely critiqued over the last decades, allowing Marcel Mauss to eventually outrun other contenders from this early generation that helped to establish the discipline of anthropology. This is made quite explicit in some of the introductory textbooks of anthropology which praise Mauss as âthe most importantâ anthropological âancestorâ (Eriksen 2004: 16) and The Gift as âthe single most important text in twentieth-century anthropologyâ (Eriksen 1995: 19). Throughout the anthropological literature of today there are many references to the book (and to Maussâ other work).
The second half of the twentieth century saw many theoretical innovations emerging from Melanesian anthropology where systems of gift-giving are rampant and where neither religion nor politics, nor basically any other aspect of life can easily be described without reference to gift-giving. Consequently, Maussâ theory of gift-giving was used in a variety of productive ways. In fact, one may argue that a good proportion of the recent most celebrated findings and theorems in anthropology can be more or less directly connected to the context of gift-giving. The concepts of âdividualsâ (Strathern 1988), âinalienable objectsâ (Weiner 1992) and âfractalâ person (Wagner 1991), for instance, are direct descendants of theories and ethnographies of the gift. âCargo cultsâ are not only a celebrated phenomenon with which anthropology has made its mark on the social sciences but the notion of cargo itself has been presented as the main contender of an inverse anthropology (Wagner 1975) of the way in which âthe othersâ see âthe Westâ and which challenges Western philosophical ideas (DĂ€rmann 2005). Wagner (1975) pointed out that Europeans use the notion of culture strategically to make sense of the differences that they have confronted since the colonial encounter but that for many non-Europeans the notion of âcargoâ, of eliciting counter-gifts, was the preferred strategy for dealing with this encounter. Thereby, the notion of gift-exchange has become a key template for understanding non-European reactions to the colonial encounter. Ideas surrounding gift-exchange provided the richest source for attempting to create a dialogical or reverse anthropology in which the concepts of non-Western âontologiesâ are brought in as a critique of Western philosophy and the sciences that descended from it. DĂ€rmann (2005) has undertaken an elaborate review of this process, suggesting that basically each and every direction of Western philosophy is being challenged by the theory of the gift as it was initiated by Mauss.2 In this view, the theory of gift-giving questions the major philosophical traditions of the West, including Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, French existentialism and German phenomenology.
The gift has not only been used in relativizing Western thought but also more concretely in outlining alternatives to the capitalist system of commodities. The separation between âusâ and âthemâ, or âthe Westâ and âthe Restâ has been systematically established with reference to two diametrically opposed ways of conceiving the world and of managing social relations in the world, under the labels of âgiftsâ and âcommoditiesâ (Gregory 1982). Notions from gift-exchange permeate anthropological self-images and profiles at all levels, whether as the title of a German student journal (www.cargo-zeitschrift.de), a French social science school of thought (www.revuedumauss.com and www.journaldumauss.net) or one of the most recent successful start-ups among the English disciplinary journals in anthropology (http://www.haujournal.org/) published with a focus on open access. They all orient themselves towards concepts arising from âThe Giftâ, taking theory since Mauss as their dominant intellectual heritage and inspiration.
If this analysis provides a correct image of the sociology of knowledge of modern anthropology, then it no longer comes as a surprise that many phenomena were read, and continue to be read, against a gift-exchange template. This is certainly the case for âsharingâ, a phenomenon that after all is situated in close neighbourhood to gift-giving and in some instances overlaps with it. It also becomes clear why it took such a long time to emancipate research on sharing from gift-exchange, despite the fact that many ethnographic accounts have been insisting on separating the two (see below). At the same time it underlines why it is particularly necessary to show the differences between gift-giving and sharing and to emphasize these distinctions in theoretical rather than only in descriptive terms. In analogy to what I will point out below with regard to the notion of âreciprocityâ, this emphasis is not to denigrate or belittle what has been achieved in and through the theory of the gift and gift-giving. Rather, the goal is to sharpen the view as to what exactly we mean by gift-exchange and what does not fall under that category. I shall do this in the remainder of this chapter, necessarily in an outline manner, with no attempt to cover gift-theory in any sense of completion or with the systematicity that this would deserve. Instead, I will focus on some basic points in which gift theory is misleading the study of sharing, while not underrating the positive contribution that gift-theory has made.
The core of gift-giving theory since Mauss is the tripartite obligation to give a gift, to receive it and to give a return gift, as already mentioned above. The time lapse between receiving and returning a gift is of central theoretical importance and will be discussed at some length below. The inapplicability of the concept and theory of the gift with regard to sharing has been discussed primarily with regar...
