The Wedding Present

Domestic Life Beyond Consumption

Louise Purbrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317011736
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this fascinating work, Louise Purbrick offers an alternative analysis of contemporary domestic consumption. She investigates the ritualized presentation of objects upon marriage, and their subsequent cycles of exchange within the domestic sphere. Focusing on gift-giving in Britain from 1945 to the present, comparative context is provided by material from North America and Europe. Presenting new material on the enactment of exchange relationships within everyday domesticity, the book makes significant historical, theoretical and methodological contributions to the analysis of contemporary consumption. It also re-evaluates consumption theory as well as examining the methodology of recent studies in consumption and domesticity, pressing for a more rigorous approach to the use of case studies. By considering how the specific contexts in which consumption occurs, such as married domesticity, can limit possible versions of selfhood, The Wedding Present tests the assumption that consuming creates individual identities. Thus, the book argues, consumption cannot be isolated as an explanation of individual or social formation.

Chapter 1

Objects of Approval

‘Whatever the wisdom of ordinary people may turn out to be, it would seem to be worth listening to them’ (David Cheal, 1988).¹

Defining Gifts

A Mass-Observation correspondent, an unemployed woman from York, describes how giving a gift upon marriage is the forced fulfillment of a duty and desire of her own. She begins:

I always feel embarrassed about the quality of my presents – I’m on a very low income. I usually have to buy something very ordinary like an ovenware dish, but sometimes I’ve gone for “unique” and given the happy couple a piece of my own artwork. Very time-consuming, but at least no-one else will have bought the same thing. When my sister got married in 1997, I spent six months planning and creating a pastels picture to hang in her bedroom. I was very proud of it at the finish, but it was an incredibly arduous task and I was drained by the time I’d completed it. I’d wanted to give her a present which no-one else would give her, something special. In the end, by the time I’d bought the art materials and paid for it to be framed, it was considerably more expensive than the present I would have purchased. Still, they both loved it, which was my main objective (A2801)

Gift giving, as it is described here, is both an obligatory and a voluntary act. This Mass-Observation correspondent had to give when her sister married and she wanted to. Or, perhaps more precisely, since she had to participate in a sibling’s wedding rituals she wanted to give the right kind of gift, ‘something special.’ Giving was an obligation that she wanted to fulfil and do so in the right way. Marcel Mauss, in his famous 1925 essay, defined gifts as ‘in reality’ obligatory against the prevailing assumption that they are freely offered and accepted.² Mauss appears to overturn the meaning of giving as a free and therefore virtuous form of exchange, but in fact he keeps the virtue of the gift intact and recasts the meaning of obligatory. It is ‘the obligation, on the one hand, to give presents, and on the other, to receive them’³ that makes giving a social and even communitarian act. Compulsory presentation and acceptance of objects is initiated by a governing obligation ‘to reciprocate presents received.’⁴ That gifts must be returned creates cycles of exchanges fuelled by continual indebtedness between people who have exchanged gifts, eventually establishing permanent relationships. Importantly, this social, and indeed sociable, character of the gift is an effect of a process of embodiment. Given objects, according to Mauss, ‘still possess something of the giver.’⁵ It is not difficult to see how a gift carries a trace of the person who gave it. For example, the pastel colours of a picture demonstrate the decisions and efforts of a sister; they are signs of her agency, if you like, which ensure that she is present in the picture that hangs on the bedroom of a newly wedded couple. Gifts function as constant reminders of the givers. Thus a gift is inevitably a social thing. What is at stake in every gift exchange is a relationship between people since the object is understood to carry some part of a person with it.

Figure 1.1 An ordinary gift

To give is to be in a social relationship, to recognize and reinforce it. The pastel picture affirmed an old family relationship at the moment when a new one was about to begin. To neglect or even refuse to give would have the opposite effect, announcing the end of a relationship or at least bringing its existence into question. If one sister did not give to another upon marriage their connection could be broken. Receiving carries the same social responsibility as giving. Accepting your sister’s picture into your married household honours the seseurial relationship in exactly the same way as offering the picture in the first place. Furthermore, for Mauss, as an object is accepted as a gift, it calls upon its recipient to acknowledge the giver by giving in return. To take the case of the pastel picture once again, the sister who gave it might expect to follow it into her sister’s married household and be offered a place at the dinner table on special occasions at the very least.

The social solidarities enforced through gift systems appear as the obvious opposite to the alienation of the capitalist market wherein an exchange can actually be concluded. Exchange through selling and buying ends with the freedom to use the exchanged object in any way, including throwing it away. Every market transaction therefore reproduces the condition of alienation under capitalism: to be without obligation, free but alone and consoled only by exclusive, individual rights in objects. Mauss’s essay has been used to provide anthropological, sociological and philosophical authority for an opposition between gift and commodity.⁶ A comparative analysis of gifts and commodities is not the subject of the essay but its historical trajectory is certainly the erosion of gift-giving societies and moralities through the extension of the market.⁷

A simplistic dualism, which positions gift giving culture as the mirror image of commodity capitalism is one of the many criticisms of Maussian interpretation of the gift. Annette Weiner, in her book Inalienable Possessions (1992), has pointed out that to assume that reciprocity that drives gift exchanges is to invest them with the principles that were ideally supposed to operate within western European market systems.⁸ Reciprocity underpins, or so it was argued in the first writings of political economy, the natural ‘propensity’ to ‘truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’ that ultimately balances out and brings benefits to society as a whole.⁹ Giving and receiving that generates further giving and receiving is an innocent version of commodity exchange and appears as both a prehistory of capitalism and as an always endangered surviving form of exchange within it. According to Weiner, the principle and motivation of giving is in fact its opposite, keeping. She argues that some things are given in order to keep others out of all spheres of exchange. Kept objects, ‘inalienable possessions’, are highly valued because they promise to guard against the losses of time. Weiner states ‘an inalienable possession acts as a stabilizing force against change because its presence authenticates cosmological origins, kinship, and political histories.’¹⁰ Thus gift-exchanges are not explained by gift-exchanges but by stepping outside the virtuous circle of giving (or exchanging since that is the model of giving) to see how they are premised upon the imperative to maintain possession of the most precious forms of material culture.

Maurice Goldier’s re-thinking of anthropological theories of the gift, The Enigma of the Gift (1999), which was, he states, inspired by Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions (1992), also questions, among other orthodoxies of gift theory, the capacity of reciprocity premised upon embodiment to explain the initiation of a gift exchange. ‘Now even if the existence of an in-dwelling spirit in things may seem to explain the obligation to return gifts, it does not’, he states, ‘account for the obligation to give them.’¹¹ Thus, he suggests, ‘in analyzing a gift, whatever it may be, one needs to consider the relationship that existed between the giver and the receiver before the former made a gift to the latter.’¹² Their relationship might be one of equality but is more likely a hierarchy of some kind and ‘if this hierarchy already exists, then the gift expresses and legitimizes it.’¹³

Aafke Komter, who holds onto the notion of reciprocity, also locates gift exchanges within unequal power relationships. Studies of gift giving in contemporary western capitalist cultures demonstrate that women are the ‘greatest givers’ and this creates an ‘alternating asymmetry’ of reciprocity.¹⁴ As she reminds us, to be obliged to reciprocate a gift is far from a sign of equivalence between receiver and giver.¹⁵ Indeed, the failure to return an equal gift, to offer something of lesser or higher worth, is the social dynamic of gift exchange. A gift positions and characterizes people in relation to one another. Whenever gift giving is practiced or avoided it defines and re-defines strong or failed friendships, large, small or close families, bad mothers, good mothers, dutiful or uncaring children, forgetful, cruel or responsible fathers. Komter’s particular concern is how women’s gift giving positions them in relation to men. Women may give much only to receive little in return and, furthermore, all gift transactions may also be assigned less value than market ones, such as payment for work performed by men. Alternatively, women’s gift giving may underpin female social networks and familial, even matrilineal, authority from which men are excluded. Within the Giving and Receiving Presents directive, there is a wealth of evidence relating to gendered patterns of giving. For example, a railway clerk from Birkenhead who stated when he married in 1947 ‘we received gifts from everybody and believe me – I don’t know what they were’ also explained ‘I have never shown any ability in the choosing of gifts for friends and relatives and it is a fact that I have left that particular part of everyday affairs to my wife’ (T2459). Another male correspondent, a heavy goods vehicle driver based in Basildon stated, that ‘my wife did all the present giving and picking.’ However, he does know the ‘household goods’ that he and she received when they married in 1958 and remembers their givers. He writes that the ‘set of Prestige stainless steel kitchen tools and carving knife from my mother-in-law are still in regular daily use’ (R470). Men, in this case husbands, who claim no part in any gift giving may do so because their position within the domestic realm is secured without their direct involvement in work within the sphere of domestic exchange. Women, particularly wives, are therefore able to exert unfettered control of the material culture of the home. A fragment of the HGV driver’s writing is a small record of his respect for his wife’s decisions about which gifts were allowed to circulate within their domestic space:

While clearing out after my wife’s death I found some towels we were given. My wife would never use them because they were white. They were in the back of the airing cupboard, yellow and grey on the fold. They washed up alright so I donated them to a charity (R470).

While Komter suggests that gift giving is embedded in the unequal share of power and advantage between the market and home and within the home itself, her notion of ‘alternating asymmetry’ suggests that relationships between women and men will be differently negotiated as their gift relationships are played out. Or in Komter’s words, ‘It is not clear before hand which genders benefits most from women’s generosity.’¹⁶

It would take another book to detail the critiques of Maussian ideas of the gift and that book has already been written several times.¹⁷ All I have been able to indicate here is some of the current revisions of the gift theories most relevant to this study of domestic consumption. Of course, the role and remit of consumption in the creation of domesticity has also been subject to some revision. In particular, work that has asserted the potential of commodities to be revalued and recreated as the meaningful objects of everyday life has an important bearing on the idea of the gift. Living with objects after they have been bought, that is, making domestic culture, or any other kind of material culture, out of commodities, has been widely interpreted, albeit with differing emphases, as an act of appropriation,¹⁸ as a process of singularization¹⁹ or personalization²⁰ or even as sign of individuality pitched against the authority of the market.²¹ If commodities can achieve such significance, a gift does not seem quite so special. I do appreciate the routine importance of altering commodities into the essential objects of everyday life (not least because, like everyone else, I initiate this kind of material transformation everyday) and I understand that the characterization of the commodity and the gift are to some extent dependent upon each other so that once the meanings of commodities shift and re-shape then those gift also becomes less stable. However, as Mark Osteen, succinctly points out, ‘people do give.’²²

Rather than attempt to refine the category of the gift in anthropological, sociological, political or philosophical theory what this first chapter of The Wedding Present tries to do is set out some of the meanings of gifts contained in the responses to the 1998 Giving and Receiving Presents directive. It should be noted first of all that within Mass-Observation writing gifts are not a single category of object. For example, the unemployed correspondent from York, identified gifts of different types: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘unique’. She gives an affordable ‘oven dish’ as an example of the former and a ‘piece of my own artwork’ as the latter (A2801) (Figure 1.1). Such a distinction between ordinary and unique gifts falls either side of the commodity/gift opposition.²³ In theory, all gifts should be unique because they have a human imprint and all commodities ordinary because they have been reduced to just an object, their connections to people severed through their sale. An ordinary gift seems to be one that cannot be made to overcome its commodity condition. If this is indeed the case, it implies that giving, the act of exchange that is supposed to affirm a relationship between those who are party to the exchange and thereby transform the meaning of the exchanged object, did not entirely manage to lift the thing out of its market context.

One of the ways in which Mass-Observation writers responded to the Giving and Receiving Presents directive was to engage in a discussion about what counts as a gift; they reflected upon which of the objects they received when they wed were their wedding presents. Their writing suggests that not all given things are gifts. Their definitions of gifts do not entirely rest upon giving as a type of exchange, on the fact that giving is not selling, but on the intentions of the object. Those given to keep appear within Mass-Observation writing as proper presents. But this is not, I would hasten to add, a rule of giving a gift but one of its recognized forms. Money was a frequent and much appreciated wedding present and it was given to be spent and spent quite quickly, early on in marriage when it was most needed. Wedding presents are invested with particular purposes, the most striking of which is approval. So many of Mass-Observation correspondents indicate, imply or more explicitly state that the gifts they received upon marriage were materializations of social approval that I want to offer this as the most important but not the only definition of gift received upon marriage. Many of these approving objects were kept and their continued possession is recounted with some pleasure and pride. However, these things could not be described as preferences for they were not objects of choice. Mass-Observation correspondents explain gifts as the effects of a range of existing or emerge...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Making Homes and Worlds: Marriage and Consumption from 1945 to Today
• 1 Objects of Approval
• 2 China and Pyrex: The Practices of Preservation
• 3 Accounting for Change: Forgotten, Neglected and Altered Objects
• 4 The List: Domesticity, Conformity and Class
• 5 Methods: Mass-Observation
• 6 Afterword: Unmarried Households
• Bibliography
• Appendices
• Index