The Question of the Gift

Essays Across Disciplines

Mark Osteen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136481437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Question of the Gift is the first collection of new interdisciplinary essays on the gift. Bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, including anthropology, literary criticism, economics, philosophy and classics, it provides new paradigms and poses new questions concerning the theory and practice of gift exchange. In addressing these questions, contributors not only challenge the conventions of their fields, but also combine ideas and methods from both the social sciences and humanities to forge innovative ways of confronting this universal phenomenon.

Part I

Redefining reciprocity

1 A free gift makes no friends

James Laidlaw

The notion of a “pure” or “free” gift has been largely neglected in anthropology. Malinowski employed it in Argonauts (1922: 177–80), but in Crime and Custom (1926: 40–1) he accepted the objections put forward by Mauss in the Essai sur le don (1990: 73–4), and discarded it. Following Mauss, anthropologists have mostly been interested in gift giving as a way in which enduring social relations are established and maintained. It seemed to Mauss, and has seemed to anthropologists since, that a genuinely free gift – one, as we say, with no strings attached – would play no part in the creation of social relations, for it would create no obligations or connections between persons; and therefore, even if such a thing existed, it would be of no serious interest to anthropology.

Accordingly, little attention has been paid to the free gift. The most sustained discussion has been Jonathan Parry’s writings on the gifts in India known as dan.¹ Parry has shown that these are unreciprocated, and has related the pure-gift ideology which governs them to the existence of a developed, commercial economy and an ethicized salvation religion (1986: 466–9).

However, there is a still inadequately explained relation between this and Parry’s other major observation about dan, which is that it brings misfortune (1994: 130–1). From the north-Indian village of Pahansu, for example, Raheja (1988) describes how dan diverts misfortune from donors to recipients. Gujars, described as the dominant caste, specialize in this diversion, and make gifts to hereditary clients, including Brahmin priests, barbers, sweepers, washermen and others. Gifts to wife-taking affines have a similar effect (1988: 153). In Parry’s own ethnography from Banaras, misfortune, illness, and even death among funeral priests and their families are attributed to gifts received from pilgrims and mourners. In contrast to the generally benign profits of commerce, dan brings with it moral and physical corruption, and is likened to a sewer (1989: 69). It is said to carry the donor’s sin (pap, dosh), inauspiciousness (ashubh, amangal), misfortune (kasht), and/or impurity (ashuddh).² What kind of a free gift is that?

The apparent paradox in this ethnography – that pure gifts should be so dramatically harmful – can, I think, be resolved. The first step is to reject the view, whose most influential exponent is G.A. Gregory, that gifts are the logical opposite of commodity exchange, and are necessarily personal, reciprocal, and socially binding. Malinowski’s original intuition deserved a better defense than he realized: a comprehensive conspectus of exchange transactions requires the category of non-reciprocal free gift.

Because the free gift has, as we shall see, a paradoxical and self-negating character, it may be that convincing institutional enactments of it are at best rare; but on the other hand all the major world religions include institutions of great importance that at least aspire to it. I shall consider a particular case of dan that comes remarkably close to being a truly free gift. It enables us to resolve the interpretive puzzle presented by the existing ethnography on dan, and in so doing to shed light on the general character of the free gift: the fact that it does not create obligations or personal connections is precisely where its social importance lies. The dan in question is the giving of alms to Shvetamber Jain renouncers.³

Giving and grazing

The followers of Shvetambar Jainism in India consist of between 2 and 3 million lay people and a few thousand celibate renouncers. The latter have no property, and rely on alms from lay families for their limited personal possessions: clothes, prayer books, and alms bowls. These they carry as they travel between villages and towns, walking barefoot, usually staying in spartan rest houses attached to Jain temples. Justly famed for their asceticism, they follow a daily routine of ritualized confessions, prayer, study and preaching, punctuated by extended fasting and other austerities.

The ultimate goal of the renouncer’s life is spiritual purification and salvation (moksha). As in other Indic religions, the soul is believed to be polluted by karma, the effects of previous actions (also called karma), which Jains tend to talk of as matter attached to and weighing down the immaterial soul. Sinful actions (pap) result in karma that is more harmful and difficult to remove than that resulting from good actions (punya), but although acts of merit are steps towards purification, even good karma must be removed before it can be achieved. Removing karma accumulated over many lives requires the heat of austerity (tap) to burn it from the soul. In these generally sinful times, it is impossible to achieve purification during a single lifetime, but the injunction to ascetic self-sacrifice is powerful for lay Jains as well as for renouncers.

A guiding principle in the pursuit of purification is non-violence (ahimsa), which includes limitations on diet. Since Jain tradition holds that not only animals but also plants and even bacteria have immortal souls, all eating and preparation of food involves violence, and there are elaborate rules for how to keep this violence to a minimum. Practising Jains are invariably vegetarian, most refrain from a range of vegetables believed to contain many life forms, and many follow more elaborate restrictions about the preparation of food and when it may be consumed. Renouncers follow exacting versions of these restrictions, and so must anyone who wishes to give them alms.

Most days around noon, as Jain families finish preparing lunch, renouncers go out, usually in pairs, to collect alms. They do not ask for food. They make their way along streets where Jain families live – never following the same route on consecutive days – pausing as they go near the doorways of houses and waiting to be invited in. The process is called gocari, or grazing. Like grazing cows, renouncers wander unpredictably and turn up unexpectedly. From each household they take so little that the donors will hardly notice the loss, just as a cow eats only the top of the grass without pulling up the roots and damaging the plant.⁴

Giving dan is the paradigmatic religious good deed (punya), and lay families are actively keen to give alms to renouncers. In practice, people often keep a lookout and call renouncers into their homes. Sometimes they even go to a rest house in advance, hoping to invite them back home. Strictly, this is against the rules, and even if they do end up going where they are asked, renouncers never explicitly agree, because they are supposed to arrive unexpectedly. This norm has two aspects. Accepting an invitation would obligate them and compromise the detachment and autonomy essential to their pursuit of personal spiritual purification. In addition, the renouncer is not only an object of religious veneration, but also, as a by-definition, an uninvited guest (atithi), the paradigmatic test in folklore of someone’s true generosity. Sometimes the right to be first to give alms to a newly ordained renouncer is auctioned to the highest bidder, the money paid (which is also dan) going into religious funds.

On entering a house, renouncers are taken to receive their food directly from the family cooking pots. They will enter the kitchen only if it is clean, with no prohibited foods (butter, onions, garlic, potatoes, etc.) in evidence. Cooking must have finished – the stove not being lit is the accepted sign for this. Family members place food in the renouncers’ alms bowls, generally trying to ensure that they give some of each of the dishes in their meal, and attempting to persuade them to accept as much as possible. The renouncers respond with a litany of refusal: “No! Less of that. Not so much. Stop!” The family emphasizes that all the ingredients are pure and natural, that it has all been prepared at home, and that there is plenty and they ought to take more.

This all generally ends with the renouncers jamming down the lids of their alms bowls. They offer no thanks and make no positive comments on the food. At this point, as a way of emphasizing that enough is enough, they often also call out the benediction, dharm labh. It is ambiguous, meaning both “May you receive the fruit of good conduct,” and “May your adherence to good conduct increase.” They also sometimes say this as they enter the house⁵ and, invariably, as they leave it, and always in a brusque and perfunctory manner. They then move on to another house and go through the same procedure there. They are not allowed to accept an entire meal from just one household, or to accept food from the same families day after day.

The image of grazing is important, but one must not be misled. Jain renouncers are not like the cow that picks its way through an Indian town or village, eating what it finds as it goes. They are not collecting leftovers. That is why they must collect alms before lay families eat. The food they take would have been eaten by the family, who are therefore renouncing (tyag) part of their meal, even if the portion is so small they will not feel the loss of it. And only food which has been purposefully given, carefully and in the prescribed manner, is acceptable. Unlike Buddhists and some Hindus, Jains consistently deny that alms given to their renouncers are bhiksh – that which is given to a beggar. Jain renouncers do not beg, and what they receive is, in theory at least, a spontaneously offered gift.

The food collected is taken back to the rest house and mixed with that brought by other members of the group. It is all combined into a single mass and eaten out of public view. No one should feel hungry and be encouraged to eat as a result of seeing them do so. If they did, then the sin of their eating would be borne by the renouncers. In addition, it is important that no one comment on the type or quality of food that he has received, so that no donor is either praised or criticized because of what he or she has given.

No real gifts in anthropology

Probably the most widely cited recent analysis of the gift in anthropology has been Gregory’s opposition between gift and commodity exchange. He emphasizes that gifts and commodities create different kinds of debt and therefore different kinds of relationships between transactors. Gifts belong to and reproduce “the social conditions of the reproduction of people” within a clan or kinship-based social order; commodities belong to “the social conditions of the reproduction of things” in a class-based division of labor (1980: 641; emphasis in original). These two systems of social relations may coexist in the same society (such as contemporary Melanesia), but they work in logically opposed ways. Gift exchange is “exchange of inalienable objects between people who are in a state of reciprocal dependence that establishes a qualitative relationship between the transactors,” whereas commodity exchange is “exchange of alienable objects between people who are in a state of reciprocal independence that establishes a quantitative relationship between the objects exchanged” (1982: 100–1). Even more symmetrically, gift exchange consists of “relations between non-aliens by means of inalienable things,” whereas commodity exchange consists of “relations between aliens by means of alienable things” (1997: 53).

Gregory’s emphasis on the way transactions can create obligations and social relations is of course valid and interesting. The most common complaint one sees is that his contrast between gift and commodity is “overdrawn,” but if the contrast is a valid one, it ought to be counted a virtue that he articulates it so clearly. The problem seems to me rather that it is incorrectly formulated. It is a mistake to insist that reciprocity and non-alienation are not just observable features of some relations created through gift transactions, but are defining features of gifts as such. According to Gregory, only transactions that show these features count as gifts (1997: 65). This analysis obscures rather than illuminates the question of how gift giving can create the very effects Gregory is interested in. And what in Mauss is an exploration of the paradoxical character of the gift becomes, in Gregory, a flawed and counter-intuitive definition.

We can see that it is counter-intuitive because it rules out good examples of gifts: the more so the more intuitively prototypical they are. The toy I give to my friend’s child is ruled out if it is not reciprocated (because I have no children of my own, say). My donation to charity is ruled out if I seek no recognition for myself. The drink I buy you becomes more of a gift (rather than less) if I feel entitled to drink some of it myself! Thus the set of processes and relations identified in this definition is not the set denoted by the English word “gift”; and the same is true of its equivalents in other Indo-European languages, including that of Gregory’s own informants in India. It is striking that he makes no use of his analysis, though it is restated and defended at the beginning of Savage Money (1997), when he turns later in that same book to a description of how Jain families in central India extend their kinship and trading networks (1997: 163–210), even though gifts, at marriage and other times, certainly play a part in this process. And Gell (1992) suggests that even for Melanesia the idea that we have only given something when we retain ownership rights over it is distinctly counter-intuitive.⁶

These curious features of Gregory’s analysis follow from the fact that he reads Mauss, and also Melanesian ethnography, in terms derived from Marx. This is quite explicit. He intends to enlist the anthropological tradition into an alliance with Marxist political economy against neoclassical economics (Gregory 1982: x, 1997: 42). But Mauss, as we shall see, is not a suitable recruit for this particular draft. Marx’s notion of surplus value is logically tied to his essentially metaphysical (and also Romantic) view that value is “really” derived exclusively from labor, which the worker is assumed “naturally” to own. The fact that labor is commodified, so that the worker is alienated from his labor, is what makes possible the alienation of the product in commodity exchange. When Gregory claims that the gift is not alienated he is saying that just those ownership rights violated in commodity exchange are preserved and reinforced in the gift: hence the elegant variations and inversions in his definitions.

Mauss is invoked in support of this notion of inalienability, and indeed Mauss does speak of enduring connections between givers and things given. But Mauss’s talk of the intermingling of (previously separate) souls and persons with things (1990: 20) is a quite different line of thought – one that ought to lead us to think, if of anything in Marx, of fetishism. The connections Mauss is talking of are not ultimately derived from labor value, as they are in Marx, and are therefore not restricted to relations between producers and things they have made. And Mauss does not conceptualize them as ownership rights. When Gregory rejects the ethnographic interpretation given by Gell, he does so on the basically a priori grounds that if a gift giver were genuinely to lose what he or she gave, then this would be an alienation “of the type that occurs when Marx’s proletarian walks home without his surplus-value after a hard day’s work in the factory” (1997: 79). Thus the conceptual yoking of the gift to Marx’s analysis of the commodity presents a clear choice. Either there is alienation of ownership, in which case, as Gregory rightly observes, the recipient of a gift would be expropriating the donor, and this (as well as being implausible) would mean that the supposed specificity of capitalist exploitation would evaporate; or else there is no alienation in the gift. It is the latter possibility that Gregory insists upon, even though it implies that in giving a gift you are not really giving anything away.

The effect is that Gregory’s definition attempts to tidy away the basic paradox at the heart of the idea of a gift. I shall next try to describe what that paradox is and how the Jain institution of dan so nearly overcomes it, before showing how a perception of this paradox lies at the heart of Mauss’s essay, and helps to explain why and when we find harmful free gifts in India.

The impossible idea of a gift

What is the basic, irreducible idea of a gift? One party makes over something of his or hers to another. There is no “price,” and there is no recompense. It is given, and that is that. This is such a simple idea that anyone might have it, and there is no reason to suppose that there has ever been a society in which nobody has ever sought to enact it. But if we reflect on what would need to be the case for a pure and incontestable example to occur, then it emerges as deeply paradoxical. This theme is explored in an illuminating way by Derrida in Given Time (1992), and, without any broader philosophical or ontological commitments, I shall d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: questions of the gift
• PART I Redefining reciprocity
• PART II Kinship, generosity and gratitude: ethical foundations
• PART III The gift and artistic commerce
• PART IV Posing new questions
• Index