As every well-educated Englishman knows, the French can be tricky blighters.[i] Take Marcel Mauss: a French sociologist, perhaps better described as a social anthropologist, he wrote and researched in the first half of the 20th Century. When I began my undergraduate studies in social anthropology, his recently translated book, The Gift, was one of my early purchases.[ii] Just eighty pages long, I was told it was a foundational work for the structural anthropologists whose approach was becoming so popular. Tricky? No, not at all. I found it was a subtle, complex, and thoughtful book, one which grabbed my attention at the time, and to which I return every so often, each time finding another fascinating insight or nuance.
At the simplest level, Mauss argued that gifts are never free: to accept a gift is to accept it is accompanied by an obligation to respond. Gifts imply reciprocity. More than that, the receipt of a gift acknowledges that a link has been established, between the giver and the receiver. Mauss was writing about what he called ‘archaic societies’. Today, we would be more likely to call them ‘pre-industrial’. Moreover, a significant part of his analysis is focussed on the institutions of gift giving, societal rituals like the famous ‘Kula’ ring described by Malinowski in his major ethnographic study of the Trobriand Islanders.
However, he was quick to extend his thinking to modern societies, where he was concerned to observe gift giving has become focussed on individuals and is especially self-interested and utilitarian. “However, we contend that the best economic procedure is not to be found in the calculation of individual needs. I believe that we must become, in proportion as we would develop our wealth, something more than better financiers, accountants and administrators. The mere pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and peace of the whole, to the rhythm of its work and pleasures, and hence in the end to the individual.” [iii] No Margaret Thatcher, he asserted the importance of society as something real, much more than the sum of individuals.
Why do we give gifts? There are certain times in the calendar when gift giving is expected: birthdays, Christmas, wedding anniversaries, Mother’s Day, even Easter. On these occasions, the relationship between the gift giver and the recipient already exists, and the gift is given in recognition of an obligation which is already in place. The recipient has a claim on us, and as such we are acknowledging that claim and that relationship.
There’s a delicate dance involved in this of course, in trying to work out the limits of when the obligation diminishes. Do we buy children gifts when they are older? How old? Is it different if the child is yours, or the child of a friend? Or a relative? You buy a gift to celebrate an anniversary with your partner. Every year? Does that create an obligation for them to respond, and buy you a gift in return? Your partner buys you a present after ten years of marriage. You hadn’t thought to get something for the same celebration. “It doesn’t matter”, you’re told. “It’s not the gift, it’s the thought that matters, and you made a lovely dinner!” ‘It’s the thought that counts’: that use of that phrase is enough to give anyone an uncomfortable feeling. The moral demands of reciprocity run deep!
Then there’s the unexpected gift. Now the mental questioning begins. Why? Is this reciprocating something forgotten? Or is the giver trying to hide a flaw in our relationship? Perhaps he bought a gift for someone else, and now feels guilty. Or is this an invitation to ‘step up’ the level of a relationship? Gifts in exchange for other favours. If this sounds very transactional, that is exactly where contemporary society leaves us. Every gift has a value, which can be expressed in dollar terms, and as such it requires a payment back, something to be done or something given of similar value. When we give a gift, what are we buying? The people of Mali have a saying: “one does not give a gift without a motive.” I also read there’s a German saying: “I give a present to the mother, but I think of the daughter”!
Marcel Mauss was particularly interested in the feasting and destruction of property seen in the ‘potlatch’, a traditional, strange and escalating process once found among the North American Indians of the northwest coast. Chiefs competed with one another to offer ever more grandiose feasts, where gifts and property were given, and possessions destroyed. It was seen as a way of demonstrating wealth and prestige, each feast confronting guests with a challenge: could they respond and demonstrate even greater wealth? The process was continuous, the responses getting bigger and bigger until one chief could no longer to do more than the last. Then the chief who failed lost face, lost status, and now had a diminished place in the hierarchy.
Giving gifts to assert superiority. Sounds familiar? Nothing has changed, whether it is post-inauguration balls, post-Oscar events or the never-ending series of dinner parties for the smart set in New York. Wander around any art museum or collection. There on the walls are the name of the donors. In that case, of course, there is an added benefit. When a museum accepts a gift, the donor gets a tax benefit (but they didn’t do it for that reason, now did they?).
Hang on a minute: Marcel Mauss is French, and his stuff is archaic. How about a rather more up-to-date analysis: what insights have emerged from research on interpersonal gift giving? One study observed that “gift-giving motivations may range from altruistic (maximize satisfaction of receiver) to agonistic (maximize personal satisfaction).” The authors went on to note that these “two factors (an obligated and an experiential/positive attitude) are posited to represent two distinct motivations, rather than opposite ends of a spectrum. An experiential/positive attitude towards giving, or giving to show love, is primarily a hedonic motive, while giving out of obligation can reflect both hedonic (giving to avoid guilt) and utilitarian motives (giving to obligate someone else). A third conceptually distinct motivation considered is the orientation towards giving practical gifts. Functional gifts are given in order to provide the receiver with practical assistance, and thus the motivation is primarily utilitarian.” [iv]
Whoa, let me see if I have that straight. Sometimes we give gifts for the benefit of the receiver, and sometimes for our own benefit; moreover, there are times when the gift can be practical. Bet Marcel wishes he had thought of that! However, let’s see where this typology leads: “We have argued and presented evidence that motivations for giving are multifaceted. Furthermore, although there are likely to be situational variables such as occasion and closeness to the receiver which would impact these motivations, we have posited that givers also have general orientations towards giving and that these general orientations may differ between givers.” [v]
Not quite the leap forward I had hoped for. Would it be helpful to move on to some examples? I recently read some extracts from John Saltmarsh’s history of King’s College, Cambridge. [vi] Not so very different from the gift giving analysis in consumer research, it confirms that gifts can carry clear agendas. One part of the history covers familiar ground for Marcel Mauss. Henry VI founded King’s College, Cambridge in 1441. The original intent was to recognise Saint Nicholas, on whose saint’s day Henry had been born. It was to provide a home for a Rector and twelve poor scholars. However, on hearing that William of Wykeham was already planning both a school and college, Winchester College and New College, Oxford, his modest plans were abandoned. Determined to create something better than Wykeham, who was Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor of England, Henry’s first proposal was modified in 1443, and a new charter issued which covered Eton College, and a greatly enhanced King’s College with seventy scholars and fellows, and a Provost as the head. A gift for the poor to study in Cambridge? Certainly not: it was an assertion of superiority, in return for which grateful subjects would recognise his generosity. No way would Henry allow himself to be bettered by the Chancellor!
A familiar story, and yet another example of the ways in which gifts are a demonstration of social position, to be reciprocated by thanks and admiration. However, it can get complicated. Another gift associated with King’s College deserves mention. In 1959 property millionaire Alfred Allnatt bought Ruben’s Adoration of the Magi, for what was then a world record price. Too big for his front room, perhaps, (it is a little over 8 feet wide and 11 feet tall!), he donated it to King’s in 1961, ensuring his prestige and recognition. A gift? At considerable cost, the College had to modify the chapel’s east end in order to have the painting permanently installed as an altarpiece. After a minor attack in 1974, when ‘IRA’ was scratched on the work, it led to continuing expense to cover security and ensure an appropriate temperature and humidity.
I wonder if Alfred gave anyone else a gift? Not exactly. There’s the Allnatt Diamond, just over 100 carats, a striking vivid yellow stone, now to be found in the Smithsonian ‘Splendor of Diamonds’ exhibit. But he didn’t give that to the collection, he sold it, and it was donated by the buyer. Now, there’s a funny thing. It wasn’t given by him, and yet it is attached to his name: he was the first named owner of the gem, which he sold to a diamond trading company. As Marcel Mauss would say, gifts can entail long and complicated chains of connection!
So far, I have focussed on expensive gifts. When I travel, I often think of buying something, a gift for my wife. I saw a small dark brown tea bowl from the Song Dynasty in the Shanghai Museum on one visit. [vii] Possibly, four inches across, it looked like a small rice bowl. I thought it was lovely. I saw a reproduction in a glass case in the museum shop and asked how much it was. As I recall, the answer was over $200. It was an exact reproduction of the tea bowl I had seen in the ceramics display: a fuzhipin. Not a fangzhipin: those are copies, imitations, and a cheap copy of this bowl would be $5 at the most. The one for sale was seen to have comparable valuable to the original upstairs, essentially no different. At the time, I asked my friend, Meigu Guan, what this was about. He explained that an exact reproduction is a testimony to the piece, to the original artist, and equally precious. But if I were to give this reproduction to someone as a gift, they would read about the original and consider what I was offering was a cheap copy, even if I explained the logic! [viii] There’s the issue: gifts shouldn’t be assessed by dollar value, but in our culture, they often are. In Chinese culture the view is “gifts reflect those who give them”.
Is it possible to just give something, a true ‘gift’ without engendering any sense of obligation? You can make an anonymous gift. Only the giver knows, and the act is one that gives them pleasure, but without any sense that the recipient has to respond. They can’t. But on the other side, it’s not so easy. To receive a gift and be left unable to thank the sender? It’s frustrating, less satisfying. An unconsummated obligation: who was it and why? Do I deserve this gift?
Is it possible to receive a gift without thinking about its value? Perhaps. There are certainly cases where ‘value’ can’t be measured in dollars. One of the biggest gifts in the last week was on Saturday 24 March when young people in America protested about gun violence. Their gift: to stand up and say in public what needed to be said. Is it our obligation to reciprocate, to stand alongside them, and vote out every NRA supported politician, whatever the party they represent?
Yes, but not just that. We also need to step aside. Our generation has done what it can, from the heady excitement of the 1960s, through jobs, money, divorce and settling down, to the overweight, over-rich complacency of today. Yes, we achieved some things, but then the wave of technological progress swept us along and allowed many other opportunities to slip by. We should pass on responsibility (and still remembered hopes) to a new generation: we may not share all their views, we may not agree with all their values, but it is their time. For sure, we don’t want another President in his or her 70s, or another Congress stuffed full of representatives bought with gifts from the NRA and many other corporations seeking a ‘conducive’ legislature.
Do I sound angry? I am. Back in the early 1970s, when the world was still booming, we took the opportunities we saw. We looked a ‘gift horse’ in the mouth, and we chose positions, incomes, security. We missed some other opportunities, not the self-serving ones but those to make changes for the benefit of everyone. Generations Y and Z can do what we should have done and reanimate the path to a better world. Is our gift to give them room, to stand back?
No, that’s too easy. We still have our responsibilities to society, not just to ourselves. I think this takes us to another Frenchman, [ix] Lt Col Arnaud Beltrane, who swapped places with a young female hostage during a terrorist incident in Carcassonne on Friday 23 March. He died, giving his life for another, calmly and deliberately making that choice. He is the latest in a long line of people who gave their lives for the sake of others. His gift cannot be repaid; there can be none greater. How to respond? Remembered, may he, and all the others before him, rest in peace.
[i] Englishwomen are far more sensible, of course!
[ii] The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, the English translation by Ian Cunnison was published in 1954, Cohen and West. It was first published in a French journal, and later republished as a book in 1950. It has been translated twice since then, first in 1990 and then in 2016.
[iii] Ibid, page 75.
[iv] M F Wolfinbarger and L J Yale, Three Motivations for Interpersonal Gift Giving, Advances in Consumer Research Volume 20, 1993 Pages 520-526
[v] Ibid, p 524
[vi] John Saltmarsh, King’s College Chapel: a History and Commentary, Edited by Peter Monteith and Bert Vaux, Jarrold Publishing, 2015. Saltmarsh had worked on this history for 40 years, living in the college during all that time. He died in 1974, and it was 40 years later his heavily annotated and incomplete manuscript was published.
[vii] http://www.shanghaimuseum.net/museum/frontend/en/articles/CI00004029.html
[viii] A fuller explanation of all this can be found in Byung-Chul Han, The Copy is the original, Aeon, March 2018
[ix] No silly English comments this time.
