Arguing With Anthropology

An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift

Karen Sykes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415254441
• eBook ISBN: 9781134523498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Arguing with Anthropology is a fresh and wholly original guide to key elements in anthropology, which teaches the ability to think, write and argue critically. Using the classic 'question of the gift' as a master-issue for discussion, and drawing on a rich variety of Pacific and global ethnography, it provides a unique course in methods, aims, knowledge, and understanding. The book's highly original hypothetical approach takes gift-theory - the science of obligation and reciprocity - as the paradigm for a virtual enquiry which explores how the anthropological discipline has evolved historically, how it is applied in practice and how it can be argued with critically. By asking students to participate in projected situations and dilemmas, and in arguments about the form and nature of enquiry, it offers working practice of dealing with the obstacles and choices involved in anthropological study. * From an expert teacher whose methods are tried and tested
* Comprehensive and fun course ideal for intermediate-level students
* Clearly defines the functions of anthropology, and its key theories and arguments
* Effectively teaches core study skills for exam success and progressive learning.

1
A SCEPTICAL INTRODUCTION TO THEORIES OF GIFT EXCHANGE

Anthropology is the study of social life as humans make it. In many ways it is an argument about how people do live and how to live. Exploring the history of the discipline itself is an excellent way of understanding this argument and that is one of the main aims of this book. Unlike other social sciences such as economics or politics, which aim to understand particular aspects of human life, anthropology approaches the study of social life as a totality. Anthropologists address the totality of social life because people live their lives out wholly and embrace the spiritual, political, economic and environmental as one. The earliest anthropologists took this total approach very seriously. For example, Boas founded a discipline that was a composite of studies into the material, intellectual and social life of men and women across the world. He argued that the totality could be encompassed in the idea of culture, which had different and particular emphasis around the globe. Similarly, Rivers, with Haddon’s inspiration, examined the ways in which people claimed each other as kin, making this habit of social life the core of social anthropology for many decades. If the grasping of the totality of experience seemed and seems a somewhat daunting or fuzzy task, then it was probably right to proceed also with some inspiration from Durkheim and Mauss because they aimed to elaborate a social science that systematically theorized the totality of human experience. In this book about the many kinds of arguments that anthropologists make, I take up anthropology’s claim to study the total picture of what it means to be human by examining a practice common to people around the world; that is the practice of giving and receiving gifts.

The gift can seem a small thing, but the habit of giving and receiving gifts resonates through human lives because the gift is more than the material object. It establishes or confirms a relationship between people and in this way has been described as a kind of cornerstone of society. The observation that some goods can be given to others as ‘gifts’ asks that anthropologists think more clearly about what kinds of relationships can be made in a material world and beyond it. For anthropologists, just as for many people, there is nothing self-evident about ownership or non-ownership of gifts. When I receive a gift, it opens more possibilities in my social life than it closes. I puzzle through what to do next. Why should I receive a gift with the understanding that it is the thought that counts, except to acknowledge that I do not necessarily like or need what I receive in order to be glad for it? The conventions of giving gifts remain both eminently reasonable and good mannered, and sometimes enigmatic because receiving a gift can acknowledge that more than one kind of relationship exists between giver and receiver.

Today many anthropologists undertake their work in capitalist societies (although not all do). It is something of an enigma that people give gifts, either small and intimate or grand and global, because the habit of giving and its associated ideas of generosity seem to run at odds with ideologies sustaining capital accumulation. At the very least, making a gift is an altruistic way of making a relationship when conventions and dominant modes of relating within capitalist societies suggest that calculated or rational self-interest should dominate decisions about human relationships. I am writing this in 2003 in Manchester, on the eve of the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancun, Mexico. I have been reading the Guardian newspaper supplement on ‘Trade’. Many of the articles discuss the benefits and difficulties in forgiving the debt of the developing to the developed world, of regulating obligations rather than freeing international trade, of making (for example) pharmaceuticals and other medicines freely available at no cost in poorest nations, and of creating a fair trade organization. Some authors argued that free market capitalists could not lose sight of human hopes for equality, without risking the best aims of the work of trade. More so, the unnamed authors of the pamphlet argue for reforms to the practice of world trade that include a reconsideration of alternative forms of distribution, using and sharing of wealth. Rethinking fair or free trade in terms of obligatory relationships would entail hefty and complex arguments for any anthropologist to make, if not for journalists to advance. Fortunately, there is a tradition of thinking about gift exchange in anthropology.

When facing the analysis of a large problem, anthropologists take responsibility for their ignorance by raising difficult questions. In the early twentieth century, Marcel Mauss began to think about gift exchange as a totally human social act. Then, to put it in colloquial language, he began ‘thinking through things’ as if imitating the commonsense practice of making objects the focus of human thoughts, desires and memories. He framed a lasting question that grasps at the totality of social life: namely, why do people feel obligated to give back when they have received? There have been many answers to that question. By reviewing the kinds of arguments anthropologists make and have made about gifts, I aim to introduce some of the history of the discipline. I begin with those scholars who came before Mauss. In order to embrace examples from many societies, I will discuss most closely the kinds of relationships people make with the things they call gifts.

Mauss’s insights help contemporary anthropologists to raise a warning against assuming that economic reason, especially utilitarian value, dominates human life. In line with his critiques of early twentieth-century economics, anthropologists can draw on the history of research on the gift in order to contribute to wider debates about the global economy. The reason they can do this recalls Mauss’s basic insight, that any analysis of the obligation to give and receive things shows that human relationships cannot be contained wholly within usury forms of exchange. In particular, he argued that the gift contradicts the assumption that human relationships aim towards only utilitarian ends. Mauss’s essay shows that Homo Economicus is a recent development, and perhaps we could add that it has been specific to the trans-Atlantic relationships between America and Western Europe that make many of us Euro-Americans. Its extensions to the Pacific in the period of exploration and settlement of that region presented extraordinary problems to traders and administrators alike. There is no reason to think that the idea of utilitarian humanity bears universal applications now, any more than it did in earlier years. Perhaps a time has come for reassessment of the legacy of anthropological theories of the gift if anthropology is to embrace the study of the totality of human experience. Talking, writing and thinking about gifts draw anthropologists into long conversations about how to examine what it means to be human.

Gift giving: a totally human act

It is possible to study some features, or phenomena, as a ‘total social fact’ in order to illuminate social life in its entirety. Anthropological arguments about exchanges, especially gift exchanges, shaped social theory since the Enlightenment and continue to do so today. I think that speaks to the future success of anthropology, more than its past. The scope of this book will appeal to the history of the discipline in order to generate the terms for future analysis. In this book, I return to the insight given to the discipline by Mauss, that giving gifts concentrates and constitutes a totality of human experience.

In these ‘total’ social phenomena, as we propose calling them, all kinds of institutions are given expression at one and the same time – religious, juridical and moral, which relate to both politics and the family; likewise economic ones, which suppose special forms of production and consumption or rather, of performing total services and of distribution. This is not to take into account the aesthetic phenomena to which these facts lead, and the contours of the phenomena that these institutions manifest.

(Mauss 1990 [1925]: 3)

Gofman underscores Mauss’s words to mean that the totality of social life could be contemplated within a singularly human habit of association known as a total social fact. Total social facts are ‘[p]henomena that penetrate every aspect of the social system, they concentrate it and constitute its focus, they are the constitutive elements and the generators and motors of the system’ (Gofman 1998: 67). Although Mauss did not fully theorize the concept of total social fact, the giving and receiving of gifts was his case in point. In this book I take the case of the gift as illustrative of the concept of the total social fact and explore its uses in anthropological argument.

Mauss’s work is monumental in anthropology because he chose to describe gift exchange, as it constitutes social life or ‘society’ most generally and philosophically. Moreover, a less well-developed theoretical strand of his work remains important to the discipline. Mauss also poses a central question in what it means to be human by asking why a person should feel obligated to give back what he or she had received from another. The problem of ‘the gift’ comprises two kinds of questions: how people keep their social life at the centre of consciousness, and why it should seem meaningful for them to do so.

Mauss’s theory of the exchange of gifts as the total social fact shows that the gift is a cornerstone of the whole of society because it encapsulates the concern with what it means to be human. He uses the example of the gift to make new advances over Durkheim’s most philosophically inspired anthropology. Mauss finds in gift exchange an analytical idea that is uniquely ethnographic. Those people who were exchanging gifts also understood obligation to be an abstract idea; that is, an abstract idea that could be enacted in everyday life. This layering of significance, from the analyst’s to the participant’s work, makes the subject of giving and receiving gifts good to study.

In English, Mauss’s The Gift is a short, four-part essay; but the unabridged edition in French is a longer book which was written at a time when he and his colleagues hoped to contribute to a growing debate over the nature of material life and government in their own country. By the 1920s, when The Gift was published, the intellectual community in France was discussing the importance of a social democracy to buffer the elaboration of capitalist investment in social institutions, and to counter the critique from the Bolshevik community that aimed to establish communal property. Recently, those researchers interested in the social history of Mauss’s work (Gane 1992, Godelier 1999, Allen 2001) argued that Mauss carried forward the earlier Durkheimian project of pitching anthropological questions towards problems of the day. At the very least, this was a sceptical project in anthropology.

The essay on the gift: trials of reason

How do anthropologists approach the study of human experience as a totality? One answer might be to approach it sceptically. Mauss does not explicitly say that social anthropology requires a disciplined philosophical scepticism, but he assumes simply that he must work with that form of enquiry into the nature of social life and that the example of gift exchange presses ethnologists to think through things carefully, sceptically and philosophically. For the purposes of this book, it helps to recall that Mauss and other anthropologists inherit the disciplines of scepticism from the legacy of Enlightenment scholarship, and that this is deeply entangled in ideas about the ‘Noble Savage’ and the social grounds for a revolution of political and economic life – key issues in rethinking what it means to be human. Cartesian philosophy raised doubts in order to ascertain truth. Anthropologists argue from scepticism about how to make veritable claims, not from personal or societal beliefs.

Contemporary anthropologists hold an awkward position on the current view that capitalist political economy dominates the whole of human life when they acknowledge that people give and receive gifts. This is a common form of scepticism that challenges accepted conventions, in this case commodityexchange habits, with alternative ones, such as gift exchange. Gregory (1997) discusses the different philosophical traditions of scepticism from South Asia and from the late medieval period in Europe. Holding a sceptical view means that anthropologists raise doubts about orthodoxy of belief by exposing contradictions in analysis, from which they elucidate arguments for more truthful claims about social life. A common example of scepticism arises in everyday acts of intellectual exchange, at a point when a person raises a question to shift the terms of discussion. This is true in fieldwork, as I learned when my acquaintances tested my reasons for living with them by asking for assistance. They changed their relationships to me in measure with my response to them. For example, when I was a student researcher in New Ireland, the elder man in the clan who took responsibility for looking out for me asked me for a plane ticket from Port Moresby to New York City, just to see what I might answer. I hesitated too long, and before I could answer he said that a radio would do just fine as a substitute for the trip, which would in any case tire him too much. From that time when he raised a first doubt about the terms of my residence in his hamlet, I learned to become responsible for his well-being too. Raising a question, a simple way of dissenting, can be a means to change implicit agreements and challenge conventional wisdom. Holding a sceptical point of view can be a matter of dissent, as when anthropologists present alternative interpretations or opposite points of view to more conventional claims.

Scepticism pervades the Enlightenment beginnings of the science of anthropology. Some Enlightenment scholars expressed doubts about how humans did live and could hope to live because they knew of a record of descriptions and stories of other lifestyles. During the ‘age of trade’, in the period preceding the Enlightenment, people began to wonder about the world. Seagoing vessels and overland caravans returned with objects for resale and with gifts from distant princes in Pacific islands or from civilizations to the east of Europe. Even in Shakespeare’s day, the city of London was cosmopolitan, its streets busy with sailors and foreign traders, temporarily resident to sell their spices and goods. London Bridge housed small market stalls and temporary houses for the sellers, until it toppled under the weight of the improvised building and the residents were sent back to other lands. But years go by and the rebuilt bridge falls again. Problems of how to trade fairly and how to create social ties to distant peoples came into full discussion in public life well beyond the elite world of religious or secular scholarship.

The ‘age of discovery’ followed upon the age of trade. Explorers made maps of the known world of trade, and then laboured in order to fill in the gaps and discover the places they imagined they found. Explorers and scientists tried to determine what was known about distant places that they had only heard about or imagined from examining the new objects that came from distant islands and kingdoms. A journey up the St Lawrence river in North America took ships to impassable rapids. They were (and still are) named the Lachine rapids by explorers surmising ironically that China, the East, was only a little bit beyond the present horizon. Subsequent westward travel from Europe skirted around the continents and across the Pacific Ocean to circumnavigate the globe on the way to the Far East, to the same distant kingdom of China that earlier European traders had travelled eastward to find across the landmasses of Europe and Asia. Bêche-de-mer, sandalwood, spice, botanic specimens, tulips and orchids, new species of birds and animals – these were collected and catalogued. Stories circulated that needed confirmation. The Chinese told of the bird of paradise that descended from the heavens and never touched the earth, its legs non-existent because it kept its abode in paradise and had no need to rest on tree branches or the ground. Early storytellers of extraordinary things and places moved their listeners – and perhaps the tellers moved themselves in the telling – to rethink what they comfortably could claim to know about the world. Stories of distant places upset habits of thought and the grounds of belief came under scrutiny.

Earliest anthropological arguments recognized that different habits of organizing knowledge and thought, described on the one hand as custom and on the other as natural reason, each proposed different understandings of what it means to be human. Anthropologists recognized that the parameters of the epistemological crisis of the Enlightenment hung between custom and reason. That difference between natural reason and custom marks the terrain of scepticism in Enlightenment social science and its implications for social life in Europe, the ‘New World’ and the colonies. Some proclaimed that both the blur of customary thought and the damages of historical change obscured human natural reason and disabled the human capacity to interrogate and understand what others say. Others believed that only civilized humanity exercised natural reason most fully because civilized people interacted with each other in an intellectually generous manner, learning how to be consciously rational by communicating clearly with each other. Anthropologists posed a new question for themselves: how could they know to trust their sceptical reason if customary knowledge could so easily fog their vision?

Although the discipline of anthropology was yet to be refined, anthropologists used the Enlightenment genre of the essay to their best advantage in early arguments. In the eighteenth century, scholars following the earlier work of Montaigne used the essay as an argumentative form to show how the writer could compare cannibals and kings to criticize the present social conditions, which might be obscured by customary beliefs about the world order. If socalled ‘natives’ exercise reason without the same confusions of customary belief and superstition that peasants suffered, then how could Europeans free their thoughts from the burden of traditional belief? Whatever limits exist in these first assumptions about peasants, natives or custom, what should be remembered is that philosophers argued from idealized concepts of these life conditions and were not social scientists whose researches confirmed the extent of that belief. Thus, ‘native reason’ and ‘custom’ better describe the ways in which people see the world.

Ruth Benedict was inspired by the potential of these arguments for shaping the emergent discipline of anthropology into a critical exercise. She argued that for Montaigne natural reason (sceptical thought) and custom (knowledge embedded in practice) are each like spectacles; they are glasses that stand between people and the world they inhabit, whether that world is thought to be natural or the result of a history of mistakes (Benedict 1946, 1963). This creates a problem for anthropologists because natural reason can be as much the product of history as is custom. The point is that European reason, both now and then, is as much ‘custom’ as the thought of Hawaiians or Amerindians of the eighteenth century. Ruth Benedict, in a later period, defines anthropology as a way of seeing that anthropologists aim to make explicit through fieldwork and writing. She likens the craft of anthropological argument to the work of lens grinding, in so far as the lens grinder knows best just how to grind the spectacles that sit between a person and the world in which he or she lives. In the hands of the early Enlightenment philosophers and in the literary sensibility of Benedict and others of her era, the sceptical essay becomes the ultimate form of anthropology. In the contemporary period when scholars are e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Arguing with Anthropology
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1: A sceptical introduction to theories of gift exchange
• Part I: Modernist nostalgia
• Part II: Postmodern reflections: historical criticism
• Part II: Postmodern reflections: critiques of subjectivity
• Part III: A Present without nostalgia
• References and suggested readings