The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  I should now state directly a limitation that has been implicit for some time, that is, that gift exchange is an economy of small groups. When emotional ties are the glue that holds a community together, its size has an upper limit. The kinship network Carol Stack describes in the Flats numbered about a hundred people. A group formed on ties of affection could, perhaps, be as large as a thousand people, but one thousand must begin to approach the limit. Our feelings close down when the numbers get too big. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other’s eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact. When we speak of communities developed and maintained through an emotional commerce like that of gifts, we are therefore speaking of something of limited size.* It remains an unsolved dilemma of the modern world, one to which anarchists have repeatedly addressed themselves, as to how we are to preserve true community in a mass society, one whose dominant value is exchange value and whose morality has been codified into law.

  By the time that anarchism emerged as a political philosophy, the idea of contract had been significantly enlarged. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theorists of “social contract” had extrapolated from the atomic unit of individual bond to that urcontract in which individuals join together to form the state. In Thomas Hobbes’s version—to take the most striking example and the strongest opposite pole to anarchist theory—before there was “society” there was a “state of nature” in which separate persons knocked about like flies in a hot room—only worse, as they tended to kill one another. In Hobbes’s natural history, man was driven by egocentric desires (chiefly, ambition, avarice, pride, and the fear of death—any apparent altruism being quickly traced back to self-interest). Luckily, these disparate individuals found a shared value in their fear of death, and reason led them away from the state of nature toward the securities of social life. Unluckily, reason was not as strong as human passion, and because the passions were antisocial, the social life that reason suggested had to include an absolute authority with sufficient power to keep men “in awe.” Hobbes set his state on these four legs: selfishness and the fear of death, reason and the awe inspired by authority.

  A recurrent feature of social contract theory was an imagined gap between the primitive and the civilized man. Hobbes’s primitive isn’t someone you’d want to live with. Dominated by brutish aggression and the “perpetual and restless desire of Power after power,” he lives in a condition of constant war, knowing no orderly social life and neither shared nor private property, only theft. He is different in kind from the civilized man, and that difference leaves a mark on Hobbes’s politics because it simultaneously requires contract to join men together and dictates the form of that contract. Hobbes begins his politics with a fantasy about history in which a chaotic aboriginal past is replaced by civilization, the shift being marked by an imaginary moment in which men agree to give up their right to exercise private force in favor of instituting public power. Through this essential clause, social contract brings man out of nature and into civilization. But note that the contract is required precisely because man cannot be trusted to behave without it. So there is always, at least in Hobbes, this mixture of distrust and law which leads, as Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, to a paradoxical politics in which “the laws of nature cannot succeed outside the frame of contrived organization … Natural law is established only by artificial Power, and Reason enfranchised only by Authority.”

  The anarchist begins his politics on a different note and comes to a different resolution. Anarchism did not become articulated as a political philosophy until the modern state had become a political reality in the nineteenth century. Even then anarchism was not a politics per se but more of an application of ethics to political thought. Anarchist theory is like an aqua regia applied to the state and its machinery to see how much might be stripped away before people begin to suffer more than they do under law and authority. The anarchist begins with the assumption of man’s good nature, contending that law itself is a “cause” of crime. He feels a kinship, not a gap, between the modern man and his predecessor “in nature.” The Russian Peter Kropotkin makes a good example here because he had actually visited tribal groups. Born into a noble family and educated at military schools, Kropotkin was a confirmed rationalist and serious scientist, recognized as a geographer in scientific circles. In his early twenties he had participated in an expedition to Central Asia. James Joll’s remarks on the trip touch the same points we are addressing here:

  The primitive tribes he observed seemed to have customs and instincts which regulated their social life without the need of government or laws. For Kropotkin, primitive society, so far from providing an example of Hobbesian conflict and of the war of all against all, showed rather that cooperation and “mutual aid” were the natural state of man if left uncorrupted by government and by laws which result from the “desire of the ruling class to give permanence to customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage,” whereas all that is necessary for harmonious living are “those customs useful for society … which have no need of law to insure respect.”

  We need not decide whether it is Hobbes or Kropotkin who sees the real primitive. Kropotkin is arguably closer, if only because he’d actually been in the field (while Hobbes never got farther than France), but his reports do give off a slightly romantic air. A fully shaded view of tribal life had to wait for the emergence of ethnography as an empirical science.* These early pictures of primitives are better described as expressions of temperament rather than political science or ethnology. One temperament feels kinship with the aborigine while the other feels distance; one temperament assumes generosity while the other assumes a lust for power; for one our passions are social, for the other they are selfish (by the nineteenth century the Hobbesian temperament was reading Darwin for his accounts of conflict, while what Kropotkin remembered out of Darwin was the story of the blind pelican whose comrades kept him supplied with fish). One temperament assumes that goodwill underlies social life, while the other assumes egotism (and so must add reason and authority to derive society).

  The two temperaments diverge at their base over the roles of passion and reason. Hobbes knew no social passions. He speaks of his declaration that life in nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” as an “inference from the passions” against which “reason suggests convenient articles of peace… called the laws of nature.” For this temperament, reason derives law as a check to passion, and social life emerges only as each man is somehow convinced to inhibit a part of himself. So Hobbes is led to base social life on restraint, to separate the governed from their governors, and to rely on law (with all of its functionaries, the police, the courts, the jails) to ensure order.

  It is this double conceit—first, that passion will undo social life and, second, that coercion will preserve it—that anarchist theory and the traditions of gift exchange call into question. The former imagines and the latter stand witness to a social life motivated by feeling and nonetheless marked by structure, durability, and cohesion. There are many connections between anarchist theory and gift exchange as an economy— both assume that man is generous, or at least cooperative, “in nature”; both shun centralized power; both are best fitted to small groups and loose federations; both rely on contracts of the heart over codified contract, and so on. But, above all, it seems correct to speak of the gift as anarchist property because both anarchism and gift exchange share the assumption that it is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears.

  * A third alternative, besides sharing and separation, is deceit. In Mexican peasant communities, which are marked by similar networks of mutual aid, one finds the opposite of “conspicuous consumption”: a family that has become rich will maintain the shabbiest of adobe walls around the house so that their wealth will not be apparent. Magnolia and Calvin could have squirreled away the money, leaving
the rent unpaid, the dead unburied, and the children unclothed.

  * Magnolia could have turned her inheritance into commodity-money by loaning it out at interest. In the long run she would have needed loan collectors, police, and so forth to pull it off, however—the conflicts with the spirit of a kin network should be obvious.

  * A gift economy allows its own form of individualism: to be able to say “I gave that.” After he had lived with the Sioux Indians for a while, Erik Erikson commented about their treatment of children: “A parent … would not touch a child’s possessions, because the value of possessions lay in the owner’s right to let go of them when he was moved to do so—i.e., when it added prestige to himself and to the person in whose name he might decide to give it away.” Individualism in a gift economy inheres in the right to decide when and how to give the gift. The individual controls the flow of property away from him (rather than toward him, a different individualism).

  * A patent differs from a trade secret in a significant way. Historically a guild or trade could keep its secret for as long as it was able to. Some were kept for centuries. But patents are granted for a limited term (seventeen years in the United States), and as such they are a mechanism for rewarding private invention while slowly moving it into the public domain. Patents belong to a group of property rights, including copyright and usufruct, which grant the right to limited exclusive exploitation. Property rights of this kind are a wise middle ground between gift and commodity; they manage to honor the desire for individual enrichment and at the same time recognize the needs of the community.

  * An exception that seems to prove the rule is the case of the “academic” scientist installed in an industrial research facility. “Industrial research organizations whose goals are only in the area of applied research,” Hagstrom notes, “often appoint distinguished men to do basic research, give a small amount of time to other scientists for this purpose, and publicize their research results, solely to make themselves attractive to superior scientists. If they do not permit pure research, their applied research and development efforts suffer.”

  * Weitling adds the abolition of money to the older abolition of contract and debt instruments. The idea became a standard part of the program of European anarchists, who usually, like Weitling, called for cash exchange to be replaced by barter (not gift).

  * The exceptions to this rule are those communities which, like the community of science, are organized around quite specific concerns. The group that does not pretend to support the wider social life of its members—feeding them, healing them, getting them married, and so forth—can be connected through gift exchange and still be quite large.

  * Marcel Mauss’s essay is one of the first syntheses of true ethnography. It follows the established tradition of seeking the roots of the modern in the archaic, and its conclusions are a mixture of Hobbes and Kropotkin. On the one hand, Mauss’s explication of the spirit of the gift (the hau) makes it clear that gift contract requires the spirit, and that the spirit of the gift is not well reproduced in law or derived from reason. On the other hand, like Hobbes, Mauss is not at ease with emotion as a social force, and in a pinch, he will submit it to reason. Thus he can write that “by opposing reason to emotion … peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gift and commerce for war, isolation and stagnation.” Or he will speak of “total presentation”—by which he means constant, large-scale gift exchanges—saying, “although [they] take place under a voluntary guise they are in essence strictly obligatory, and their sanction is private or open warfare.”

  As with his phrase “the obligation to return,” the emphasis falls on “oblige” and the motive is fear, not desire. Pure Hobbes. Obviously many gift exchanges in practice are a mixture of fear (or guilt) and desire, but we should at least note that it is just as logical to invert Mauss’s premises and say, “It is by opposing eros to reason … that peoples succeed in substituting gift for war,” or that “wars are undertaken in seemingly voluntary guise … but really out of fear of private or open friendship.” Otherwise the ground emotions are fear and self-interest, the hau is lost, and we are back with reason suggesting law and authority.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Female Property

  I • The Woman Given in Marriage

  As they used to say in our grammar-school workbooks, one of these things is not like the others: “And at the great festival they gave away canoes, whale oil, stone ax blades, women, blankets, and food.” Margaret Mead records an Arapesh aphorism with the same disconcerting note: “Your own mother, your own sister, your own pigs, your own yams that you have piled up, you may not eat. Other people’s mothers, other people’s sisters, other people’s pigs, other people’s yams that they have piled up, you may eat.” And in the Old Testament we read how one tribe hopes to make peace with another: “Let us take their daughters to us for wives and let us give them our daughters.”

  Of all of the cases in which women are treated as gifts, this last, the woman given in marriage, is primary. We still preserve the custom in the Protestant wedding ceremony, the minister asking the gathered families, “Who giveth this woman to be married?” and the father of the bride replying, “I do.” The ceremony is a vestige of the more ancient institution in which marriage is an exchange between tribes or clans, the one giving the bride and the other giving wealth (or service, or a different bride) in return. Typically the initial wedding gifts—the “bridewealth”—are not the end of the matter. The marriage marks only the first of a long series of exchanges that have, as usual, no apparent “economic” function but from which emerges an active and coherent network of cooperating kin.

  We have seen enough of gift exchange to know that it would be too simple to say that the woman given in marriage is treated as property. Or, rather, she is a kind of property, but the “property rights” involved are not those to which the phrase usually refers. She is not a chattel, she is not a commodity; her father may be able to give her away, but he may not sell her.

  This distinction hardly quiets our modern sense of justice, however. If a person can be transferred from one man to another, why is being a gift any better than being a commodity? How did the father get the right to give his daughter away in the first place? Can a mother give her son away? Is the mother consulted in the matter at all? If a marriage must be a gift exchange, why could the couple not give themselves away?

  To answer we shall have to begin at the beginning, not with the day of the daughter’s wedding, but with the day of her birth. And we shall have to clarify our terms a little.

  “Property,” by one old definition, is a “right of action.” To possess, to enjoy, to use, to destroy, to sell, to rent, to give or bequeath, to improve, to pollute—all of these are actions, and a thing (or a person) becomes a “property” whenever someone has “in it” the right of any such action. There is no property without an actor, then, and in this sense property is an expression of the human will in things (and in other people).

  The definition is a broad one, but it allows us to make the distinctions necessary to a discussion of cases in which human beings become property of one kind or another. A rather odd problem that arose with the advent of organ transplants will illustrate the particular distinction we need at the moment. It used to be the case that when a person died the law recognized no property rights in the body. Growing out of a religious sense of the sacredness of the body, this legal formula was intended to make it clear that the executors of an estate could not make the body of the deceased into an item of commerce to be bought, sold, or used to pay debts. It even used to be the case that a man could not direct the manner of his own burial and expect the courts to back him up, because his body, not being property, was not a part of his estate. As soon as it became possible to transplant an organ from the dead to the living, however, it became clear that the sense of “property rights” being used here was too vague. The law justly restrained the right to sell, but what of the right to bestow?

  In re
sponse to just this question, every state in the Union has recently adopted what is known as the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a law that recognizes the right of an adult to bequeath all or part of his body in the event of his death. It vests that right primarily in the person himself, of course, but in special cases it extends the right of bestowal to other people. In the case of minor children the right of bestowal lies with the parents, who may now legally donate the body of a child who has died or been killed.

  Our ability to transplant body organs raises ethical questions—and has therefore required legal clarification— because with it comes the understanding that while the body from which an organ is removed may be dead, the organ itself is not. Transactions that involve life itself seem to constitute the primary case in which we feel called upon to distinguish the right of bestowal from the right of sale. The rules of gift exchange are such that what is treated as a gift retains or even increases its liveliness, and most cultures, when forced to decide, therefore classify human life as a gift (which explains why the most significant work on gift exchange outside of anthropology has focused on matters of medical policy and ethics). If human life itself must become an item of commerce, transferred from person to person or house to house, then it must be gift property and the “rights of action” must be those that appertain to gifts, not to commodities.