The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  Such stories declare that the gift does move from plenty to emptiness. It seeks the barren, the arid, the stuck, and the poor. The Lord says, “All that opens the womb is mine,” for it is He who filled the empty womb, having earlier stood as a beggar by the sacrificial fire or at the gates of the palace.

  * This story illustrates almost all the main characteristics of a gift, so I shall be referring back to it. As an aside, therefore, I want to take a stab at its meaning. It says, I think, that if a girl without a father is going to get along in the world, she’d better have a good connection to her mother. The birds are the mother’s spirit, what we’d now call the girls’ psychological mother. The girl who gives the gift back to the spirit-mother has, as a result, her mother-wits about her for the rest of the tale.

  Nothing in the tale links the dead man with the girls’ father, but the mother seems to be a widow, or at any rate the absence of a father at the start of the story is a hint that the problem may have to do with men. It’s not clear, but when the first man she meets is not only dead but difficult, we are permitted to raise our eyebrows.

  The man is dead, but not dead enough. When she hits him with the stick, we see that she is in fact attached to him. So here’s the issue: when a fatherless woman leaves home, she’ll have to deal with the fact that she’s stuck on a dead man. It’s a risky situation—the two elder daughters end up dead.

  Not much happens in the wild run through the forest, except that both parties get bruised. The girl manages to stay awake the whole time, however. This is a power she probably got from the birds, for they are night birds. The connection to the mother cannot spare her the ordeal, but it allows her to survive. When it’s all over she’s unstuck, and we may assume that the problem won’t arise again.

  Though the dilemma of the story is not related to gift, all the psychological work is accomplished through gift exchange.

  * Folk tales are the only proof I shall be able to offer for these assertions. The point is more spiritual than social: in the spiritual world, new life comes to those who give up.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Bones of

  the Dead

  The gift in the folk tale from Bengal which closes the last chapter—the gift that the beggar gives to the queen—brings the queen her fertility and she bears a child. Fertility and growth are common fruits of gift exchange, at least in these stories. In all we have seen so far—the Gaelic tale, the Kula ring, the rites of the first fruit, feeding the forest hau, and so on—fertility is often a concern, and invariably either the bearers of the gift or the gift itself grows as a result of its circulation.

  Living things that we classify as gifts really grow, of course, but even inert gifts, such as the Kula articles, are felt to increase—in worth or in liveliness—as they move from hand to hand. The distinction—alive/inert—is not always useful, in fact, because even when a gift is not alive it is treated as if it were, and whatever we treat as living begins to take on life. Moreover, gifts that have taken on life can bestow it in return. The final gift in the Gaelic tale revives the dead sisters. Even if such miracles are rare, it is still true that lifelessness leaves the soul when a gift comes toward us, for gift property serves an upward force, the goodwill or virtù of nature, the soul, and the collective. (This is one of the senses in which I mean to say that a work of art is a gift. The gifted artist contains the vitality of his gift within the work, and thereby makes it available to others. Furthermore, works we come to treasure are those which transmit that vitality and revive the soul. Such works circulate among us as reservoirs of available life, what Whitman calls “the tasteless water of souls.”)

  Later in this chapter I shall describe a purely cultural artifact which is felt to increase in worth as it circulates, but to begin an analysis of the increase of gifts I want to turn to a gift institution which, like the story of the beggar and the queen, has as its setting a situation in which natural fertility and growth are at issue.

  The American Indian tribes that have become famous for the potlatch—the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Haida, and others—once occupied the Pacific coast of North America from Cape Mendocino in California to Prince William Sound in Alaska. All of these tribes depended upon the ocean to provide their primary sustenance—herring, eulachon (candlefish), whales, and, above all, the salmon that annually enter the coastal rivers to swim inland and spawn. Like the Maori or the Jews of the Old Testament, the North Pacific tribes developed a relationship to the natural abundance of their environment based upon a cycle of gifts. It was the Indian belief that all animals lived as they themselves lived—in tribes—and that the salmon, in particular, dwelt in a huge lodge beneath the sea. According to this mythology, the salmon go about in human form while they are at home in their lodge, but once a year they change their bodies into fish bodies, dress themselves in robes of salmon skin, swim to the mouths of the rivers, and voluntarily sacrifice themselves that their land brothers may have food for the winter.

  The first salmon to appear in the rivers was always given an elaborate welcome. A priest or his assistant would catch the fish, parade it to an altar, and lay it out before the group (its head pointing inland to encourage the rest of the salmon to continue swimming upstream). The first fish was treated as if it were a high-ranking chief making a visit from a neighboring tribe. The priest sprinkled its body with eagle down or red ochre and made a formal speech of welcome, mentioning, as far as politeness permitted, how much the tribe hoped the run would continue and be bountiful. The celebrants then sang the songs that welcome an honored guest. After the ceremony the priest gave everyone present a piece of the fish to eat. Finally—and this is what makes it clearly a gift cycle— the bones of the first salmon were returned to the sea. The belief was that salmon bones placed back into the water would reassemble once they had washed out to sea; the fish would then revive, return to its home, and revert to its human form. The skeleton of the first salmon had to be returned to the water intact; later fish could be cut apart, but all their bones were still put back into the water. If they were not, the salmon would be offended and might not return the following year with their gift of winter food.

  The main elements of this ceremony are the same as those of the other first-fruits rites we have seen—part of the gift is eaten and part is returned—and once again the myth declares that the objects of the ritual will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts. It would be difficult, I suppose, to make the case that to abandon the gift ceremony, to treat the salmon as a commodity, would truly “offend” the fish and diminish their abundance. The point is perhaps best put in its positive form: the first salmon ceremony establishes a gift relationship with nature, a formal give-and-take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase. And where we have established such a relationship we tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not as a stranger or alien available for exploitation. Gift exchange brings with it, therefore, a built-in check upon the destruction of its objects; with it we will not destroy nature’s renewable wealth except where we also consciously destroy ourselves. Where we wish to preserve natural increase, therefore, gift exchange is the commerce of choice, for it is a commerce that harmonizes with, or participates in, the process of that increase. And this is the first explanation I offer for the association our tales have made between gift exchange and increased worth, fertility, liveliness: where true, organic increase is at issue, gift exchange preserves that increase; the gift grows because living things grow.*

  Now let us see how far we may go toward widening the point to include the growth of gifts that are not in fact alive. Let us turn to a gift at the level of culture—something clearly inorganic and inedible—and try to explain its increase without recourse to any natural analogy.

  The same North Pacific tribes that welcomed the first salmon circulated among themselves large decorated copper plaques as ceremonial gifts. As the illustration shows, the upper half of a copper plaque was typically engraved wi
th a highly geometric portrait of an animal or spirit, while the lower portion was left unadorned except for two ridges in the shape of a T. Each copper bore a name, sometimes referring to the animal or spirit, sometimes to the great power of the gift (e.g., “Drawing All Property from the House”).

  Coppers were always associated with the property given away at a potlatch. Marcel Mauss, as I indicated in the last chapter, translates “potlatch” in terms of nourishment and satiation; more commonly the word is taken to mean “gift,” “giving,” or, when used as a verb, “to give.” Potlatches were held to mark important events, such as a marriage or, most often, the assumption of rank by a member of a tribe. The oldest and most universal occasion for a potlatch was the death of a chief and the subsequent elevation of his successor to the vacant rank and title. Potlatches were almost always given by one tribe for another, the order and value of the gifts bestowed establishing the rank of each participant, guest and host alike. Status and generosity were always associated: no man could become a man of position without giving away property.

  When American ethnographers first studied the potlatch at the end of the nineteenth century, over a hundred years of trading with the whites had changed it to its roots. We must therefore look upon the literature we have about the potlatch with a wary eye—what is truly aboriginal and what is an accommodation to the new economy? Before the Europeans appeared, for example, a chief was likely to give only one formal potlatch during his lifetime, the one at which he assumed his chieftainship. The tribe would labor a year or more to prepare the ceremony, if only to collect the treasure to be given away, not just coppers, but sea otter and marmot pelts, eulachon oil, tusk shells, skins of albino deer, and nobility blankets woven of mountain-goat wool and cords of yellow cedar bark. When Franz Boas, the first ethnographer to study the potlatch, stayed with the Kwakiutl in the 1890s, however, the gifts were trade items, easy to manufacture and cheap to acquire, and potlatches were held all the time.

  Kwakiutl copper

  It is worth going into the story of this change a little, for the subtleties of gift exchange always become more apparent when set alongside a market in commodities. The North Pacific coast of America was first opened to white traders by Captain Cook around the time of the American Revolution. Trade in animal pelts increased steadily in the following century. The Hudson’s Bay Company established its first outposts in the area in the 183os. Unlike the later missionaries, the company wanted furs, not souls, and left the Indians alone. But their passive presence had its effect, nonetheless, for with them came firearms, sails, and alcohol. The Indians began to winter near the company stores, crowding the land and depending more and more upon a market they did not control. The Hudson’s Bay blanket, machine-made and selling for about a dollar, replaced the traditional nobility robe as an item of commerce. Where formerly a few carefully woven robes would grace a potlatch or feast, now literally thousands of trade blankets might be stacked along a beach to be given in return for a copper.

  Toward the end of the century, whites began to commercialize the salmon fishing. No nation at that time recognized the Indians as full citizens and they were therefore unable to file land claims. But any white man could have 160 acres for the asking, and the entrepreneur who wanted a cannery would simply stake off 80 acres on either side of a river mouth, build his shop, and set to work. When he had more salmon than he needed, he might let the Indians come in and fish, or he might not. It’s an old story: purchased foodstuffs became necessary to supplement the Indian diet, and to buy food they needed cash, and to acquire cash they had to work for wages in the factory. Indians were paid by the day to fish, bought food on credit at the store, became civilized debtors, and returned to work another season.

  As if these changes weren’t enough, during the nineteenth century the Indian population was thinned out by war and disease, the system of land tenure was widely altered, and large tribal federations emerged in response to European hegemony, all of which led to endless complications in sorting out the hierarchy of each tribe, one of the original functions of the potlatch. Two of the better-known characteristics of potlatch in the popular literature—the usurious nature of loans and the rivalry or “fighting with property”—while based on traceable aboriginal motifs, are actually post-European elaborations. It really wasn’t possible for Boas to see this when he did his early work; he had the misfortune, in a sense, to work in the area near Fort Rupert (one of the first Hudson’s Bay Company outposts) where the bitterness and antagonism of the “rivalry potlatch” had reached its peak. When Mauss read through Boas’s published field notes, he declared potlatch “the monster child of the gift system.” So it was. As first studied, the potlatch was the progeny of a European capitalism mated to an aboriginal gift economy, and with freakish results: sewing machines thrown into the sea, people embarrassed into sitting in houses set afire with fish oil, Indians dancing with pink silk parasols or stooped under layer after layer of cheap wool blankets, and as the sun set the Canadian Royal Mounted Police riding off with coppers and other ritual property to suppress the potlatch, which their government had declared illegally wasteful.

  With these words of warning, let us turn to one of Franz Boas’s accounts of the ceremonial exchange of a copper, hoping to see in it the smudged image of earlier gift exchange. In Boas’s report, one tribe of the Kwakiutl has a copper whose name is Maxtsolem, “All Other Coppers Are Ashamed to Look at It.” The tribe invites a second tribe to a feast and offers them the gift. The second tribe accepts, putting themselves under the obligation to make a return gift. The exchange takes place the next day on a beach. The first tribe brings the copper, and the leader of the second tribe lays down a thousand trade blankets as a return gift.

  This is only the beginning, however, and in a sense the true gift has not yet appeared. The chiefs who are giving the copper away seem to feel that the return gift is not adequate, for instead of accepting it they slowly retell the entire history of this copper’s previous passages, first one man recalling a time when two hundred more blankets had been given for it, then another man saying that an additional eight hundred would seem appropriate—and all the while the recipient of the copper responds to them, saying, “Yes, it pleases my heart,” or else begging for mercy as he brings out more and more blankets. Five times the chiefs ask for more blankets and five times they are brought out until thirty-seven hundred are stacked in a row along the beach. At each stage the blankets are counted and both sides make elaborate speeches about their traditions and powers, their fathers, grandfathers, and ancestors from the beginning of the world.

  When the history has been told, the talk stops. Now the true return gift appears, these formalities having merely raised the exchange into the general area of this copper’s worth. Now the receiving chief, on his own, announces he would like to “adorn” his guests. He brings out two hundred more blankets and gives them individually to the visitors. Then he adds still another two hundred, saying, “You must think poorly of me,” and telling of his forefathers.

  These four hundred blankets are given without any of the dialogue that marked the first part of the ceremony. It is here that the recipient of the copper shows his generosity, and it is here that the copper increases in worth. The next time it is given away, people will remember how it grew by four hundred blankets in its last passage.

  Before I comment on this exchange, I must describe a second situation in which coppers were felt to increase in value. Several occasions called for the actual destruction of a ceremonial copper. The Tsimshian tribes, for example, would break a copper when they held a potlatch to honor a dead chief and recognize his heir. During this “feast for the dead,” a masked dancer would come forward with a copper and instruct the new chief to break it into pieces and then give these pieces to his guests. The chief would take a chisel and cut the copper apart. Among the Kwakiutl when Boas studied them, a man would sometimes break a copper and give the pieces to a rival, who would then try to find a copper
of equivalent value, break it, and give back the pieces of both. The man who had initiated the exchange was then obliged to hold a potlatch, distributing food and valuables at least equal to the new (and broken) copper he had received. Sometimes the initial recipient of a broken copper would find a second one, break it, and then throw them both into the sea, an action that brought him great prestige. Most coppers did not end up in the water, however; even when broken, the pieces were saved and continued to circulate. And if someone succeeded in gathering up the parts of a dismembered copper, Boas reports, they were “riveted together, and the copper… attained an increased value.”

  It is clear in the literature that coppers increased in worth as they were broken, but I’m not sure it is clear why. To suggest an explanation, I want to introduce an image of dismemberment and increase from a very different culture. There are several ancient gods whose stories involve being broken and then brought back to life—Osiris in Egypt, Dionysos in Crete and Greece, and Bacchus in Rome, to name a few. I shall take Dionysos as my example here.

  Carl Kerényi, the Romanian historian of religion, introduces his book on Dionysos by saying that his first insight into the god of wine came to him in a vineyard—he was looking at the grapevine itself and what he saw was “the image of indestructible life.” The temples are abandoned, but the vine still grows over the fallen walls. To explain the image, Kerényi distinguishes between two terms for “life” in Greek, bios and zoë. Bios is limited life, characterized life, life that dies. Zoë is the life that endures; it is the thread that runs through bios-life and is not broken when the particular perishes. (In this century we call it “the gene pool.”) Dionysos is a god of zoë-life.