The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  And playing by their rules, too, we gather. To succeed in the marketplace one must, it seems, be willing to sacrifice attachment to advancement, affection to calculation. This ability to act without regard to relationship has traditionally been a mark of the male gender. The man who wants to make money does not spend a lot of emotional time abandoning his—how did Miss Post put it?—unwitting attitudes in favor of those of his in-laws. He is self-possessed, not self-effacing. He is willing to shun the “turkeys” who were his pals in college, willing to evict deadbeats from his apartment buildings (and wary, therefore, of renting to friends and relations), willing to put people out of work if one of his ventures isn’t paying its way, willing to close the operation down completely if some other property needs a shot of capital, and so forth and so on.

  In fine, when anyone, male or female, sets out to make money in the marketplace, he reckons his actions by the calculus of comparative value and allows that value, rather than the home life of his clients and friends, to guide him. I say “male or female,” but of course this ability is still considered to be a mark of the masculine, a decade of advice columns notwithstanding. The men’s pages of the newspapers need no articles earnestly asserting that dumping your friends is not disloyalty. “Men have known this for years.” In a modern, industrial nation, the ability to act without relationship is still a mark of the masculine gender; boys can still become men, and men become more manly, by entering the marketplace and dealing in commodities. A woman can do the same thing if she wants to, of course, but it will not make her feminine.

  These divisions of commerce by gender are most easily seen in those “boundary” situations in which a man or a woman is caught between two spheres—where, as in this last example, women would enter the market (and feel they must be “men” to do so), or where, in the examples that follow, men are denied access to the market and feel as a result that they are not manly. The great blues singer Big Bill Broonzy once wrote a song about the Jim Crow fact that white people call black men “boys,” regardless of their age (“I wonder when I’ll get to be called a man, / D’I have to wait’ll I be ninety-three?” goes the refrain). In a society in which black men cannot enter the market as equals with white men, and in which being an actor in the market is associated with masculinity, a black man is always a “boy” (unless he’s a thief: theft will make him a “bad man,” but a man nonetheless). Think back for a moment to Carol Stack’s story of the kinship network in the Flats, the black ghetto near Chicago. Magnolia Waters and her husband, Calvin, disburse an inheritance among their kin. But as anyone who reads the story cannot help noticing, Magnolia is the main actor. Why? Because she is able to respond to need and strengthen the ties of kinship through gifts without any challenge to her gender. So long as gift exchange is a “female” commerce, her activity actually affirms her gender; through it she becomes a Big Woman in her community.

  Calvin has no such luxury. In tribal situations, in an extended family, even in the community of science, a man may become a Big Man through the bestowal of his gifts. But where exchange trade is the only male commerce, generosity makes no one manly. I recently heard a story about an American Indian living on a reservation in North Dakota who, in the late 1960s, received $10,000 from the government, a lot of money in a place where many people lived on $2,000 a year. What did the man do with his windfall? He threw a party for the whole tribe, a party that lasted for days. Now, the interesting thing is that on the reservation there are two distinct versions of this event: the “Indian version,” in which the party-giver appears as a hero, a true Indian; and the “white version,” which takes the “wasted” money as proof of the inherently infantile nature of the Indians, thus justifying the continued management of Indian wealth by the white-dominated Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The story is the same as the one about the Flats—the fate of an influx of capital into a gift community. So long as gifts carry female worth in the white culture, for a black man to emerge from the ghetto or for an Indian to leave the reservation involves a crisis of gender: to make the transition he must adopt what is at home an unmanly individualism.)

  To close this discussion of gender and commerce, I want to return one last time to Emily Post. In the section of her Etiquette devoted to “showers,” a woman’s gift-giving institution if there ever was one, Miss Post lists three different persons for whom these “friendly gatherings” are given: a bride-to-be, an expectant mother, and the new clergyman. What is this solitary gentleman doing among nubile and pregnant ladies?

  Miss Post suggests that the women of the town bring food to fill the cleric’s empty larder. It seems a sensible enough suggestion, but still, the ladies are not urged to give food to the new vice president for marketing at the local manufacturing plant. The clergyman is grouped with the pregnant and the betrothed as the object of a gift ceremony because he performs a “female” role in the community. I earlier distinguished between “labor” and “work,” saying that there are gift labors that cannot, by their nature, be undertaken in the willed, time-conscious, quantitative style of the market. A clergyman does such labors. Not only is he charged with the cure of souls, that interior task which cannot be accomplished in any market, but nowadays he must also be a social worker, visiting nurse, marriage counselor, and psychotherapist. And by our current notions of gender all these duties place him closer to Magnolia Waters than to any salesman.

  To make the wider point here, what we take to be the female professions—child care, social work, nursing, the creation and care of culture, the ministry, teaching (these last, when done by men, being done by effete men, as Vice President Spiro Agnew told us)—all contain a greater admixture of gift labor than male professions—banking, law, management, sales, and so on. Furthermore, the female professions do not pay as well as the male professions. The disparity is partly a consequence of a stratified gender system: women are still not paid on a par with men for equal work, a discrimination therefore clearly unrelated to the content of that work.

  But if we could factor out the exploitation, something else would still remain: there are labors that do not pay because they, or the ends to which they are directed, require built-in constraints on profiteering, exploitation, and—more subtly— the application of comparative value with which the market is by nature at ease. There are two points here, one having to do with the nature of the work, the other with the commitment of the worker. “Female” tasks—social work and soul work— cannot be undertaken on a pure cost-benefit basis because their products are not commodities, not things we easily price or willingly alienate. Furthermore, those who assume these labors automatically inhibit their ability to “sell themselves” at the moment they answer their calling. Gift labor requires the kind of emotional or spiritual commitment that precludes its own marketing. Businessmen rightly point out that a man who cannot threaten to quit his job has no leverage when demanding a higher salary. But some tasks cannot be undertaken in such an adversarial spirit. Few jobs are pure gift labors, of course—although a nurse is committed to healing, she is also an actor in the marketplace—but any portion of gift labor in a job will tend to pull it out of the market and make it a less lucrative—and a “female”—profession.

  But, you ask, if we really valued these gift labors, couldn’t we pay them well? Couldn’t we pay social workers as we pay doctors, pay poets as we do bankers, pay the cellist in the orchestra as we pay the advertising executive in the box seat? Yes, we could. We could—we should—reward gift labors where we value them. My point here is simply that where we do so we shall have to recognize that the pay they receive has not been “made” the way fortunes are made in the market, that it is a gift bestowed by the group. The costs and benefits of tasks whose procedures are adversarial and whose ends are easily quantified can be expressed through a market system. The costs and rewards of gift labors cannot. The cleric’s larder will always be filled with gifts; artists will never “make” money.

  We must therefore distinguish the
necessary feminist demand for “equal pay for equal work” from the equally important need to keep some parts of our social, cultural, and spiritual life out of the marketplace. We must not convert all gift labors into market work lest we wake one day to see that universal market in which all our actions earn a wage and all our goods and services bear a price. There is a place for volunteer labor, for mutual aid, for in-house work, for healings that require sympathetic contact or a cohesive support group, for strengthening the bonds of kinship, for intellectual community, for creative idleness, for the slow maturation of talent, for the creation and preservation and dissemination of culture, and so on. To quit the confines of our current system of gender means not to introduce market value into these labors but to recognize that they are not “female” but human tasks. And to break the system that oppresses women, we need not convert all gift labor to cash work; we need, rather, to admit women to the “male,” money-making jobs while at the same time including supposedly “female” tasks and forms of exchange in our sense of possible masculinity.

  Let me close on a historical note. Ann Douglas has written an interesting book on the feminization of American culture during the nineteenth century. In 1838, she tells us, an American Unitarian minister, Charles Follen, had a vision in which he saw a band of singing Sunday school children enter his church and displace a group of stern Pilgrim Fathers. In the course of the nineteenth century, Douglas contends, an old association between masculinity and spiritual power was broken; spiritual life became the province of women, children, and an “unmanly” clergy, who, like the mothers of families, had essentially no social force beyond “influence.”

  The stern Pilgrim Fathers of Follen’s vision founded the nation. Serious religious dissenters from Europe, these men felt no necessary disjunction between their sex and attention to spiritual life. An early diarist like Samuel Sewell worried daily about his relationship to God, never about his manliness. But the nineteenth century saw a decline in faith coincide with the remarkable success of a secular, mercantile, and entrepreneurial spirit. The story has been told many times. By the end of the century, to be “self-made” in the market, or to have successfully exploited the natural gifts of the New World, were the marks of a Big Man, while attention to inner life and the community (and to their subtle fluids—religion, art, and culture) was consigned to the female sphere. This division of commerce by gender still holds. As a character in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift remarks in regard to creative artists, “To be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing.” In a modern, capitalist nation, to labor with gifts (and to treat them as gifts, rather than exploit them) remains a mark of the female gender.

  * In 1980 a New Jersey couple tried to exchange their baby for a secondhand Corvette worth $8,800. The used-car dealer (who had been tempted into the deal after the loss of his own family in a fire) later told the newspapers why he changed his mind: “My first impression was to swap the car for the kid. I knew moments later that it would be wrong—not so much wrong for me or the expense of it, but what would this baby do when he’s not a baby anymore? How could this boy cope with life knowing he was traded for a car?”

  * I assume this historical asymmetry derives from the fact that while both parents contribute to conception, the mother must carry the child, give it birth, and suckle it. Even in a matriarchy her contribution is greater.

  † In the modern world the rights that adults have in their children—male or female—normally pass slowly from parent to child during adolescence and become fully vested in the child when he or she is ready to leave home.

  If our lives are gifts to begin with, however, in some sense they are not “ours” even when we become adults. Or perhaps they are, but only until such time as we find a way to bestow them. The belief that life is a gift carries with it the corollary feeling that the gift should not be hoarded. As we mature, and particularly as we come into the isolation of being “on our own,” we begin to feel the desire to give ourselves away—in love, in marriage, to our work, to the gods, to politics, to our children. And adolescence is marked by that restless, erotic, disturbing inquisition: Is this person, this nation, this work, worthy of the life I have to give?

  * The examples of male life given as a gift are usually stories of sacrifice. It may be that so long as no gift institution recognizes the contribution to conception—and as the male body cannot in fact give birth—when male life is treated as a gift, the tendency is to give the body itself. In the chapter on the gift bond I spoke of compassionate deities who give their bodies to join man to a higher spiritual plane. These deities are generally male.

  * For a case illustrating the “stability”side, see Wendy James’s article, “Sister-Exchange Marriage,”Scientific American (December 1975).

  * It would have been interesting to see the results had the government instituted groomwealth or childwealth, for it is really the Uduk husband who gives children to the wife’s kin.

  * Abandoning the bestowal of the bride in favor of her autonomy is one way to rearrange the pattern of this institution. Because the woman given in marriage does assume the functions of the gift, the group loses something even as the woman gains. When someone other than the couple being married is allowed to stand up at a wedding and say “I do,” then marriage is understood to be a social event; the ceremony recognizes that we sometimes have rights in the lives of our friends and relations, and that the union occurs within an “ego” wider than the couple’s “ego-of-two.” For the feminist wary of the father’s right to bestow his daughter, but wary as well of what I earlier called the perfect freedom of strangers—that pure individualism which is corrosive to social life—we might, rather than drop all sense of persons as gifts, extend a “female” submersion in the group to the groom, instead of a “male” indivudualism to the bride. We could, in other words, add the bestowal of the man to the ceremony and—a necessary corollary—recognize that mothers share in the donation of their offspring. In fact, if Freud is right that the most difficult attachment to resolve is the one we have to the parent of the opposite sex, it might be useful for the mother of the groom to stand and declare that she, too, is willing to allow her interest in the life of her son to pass to another woman; that she, like the father of the bride, is letting go of a gift.

  * Gift exchange is not aboriginally, nor yet universally, a “female” commerce. There have always been times and there are still places where both men and women are sensitive to the functions of gift exchange, and where a man in particular may acquire his masculinity, or affirm it, through the bestowal of gifts. For a fascinating discussion of gender and exchange in a tribal group, see Annette Weiner’s recent book on the Trobriand Islands, Women of Value, Men of Renown.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Usury:

  A History of

  Gift Exchange

  Unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury, that the Lord

  thy god may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to.

  DEUTERONOMY 23:20

  What ye put out at usury to increase it with the substance of

  others, shall have no increase from God.

  THE KORAN, SÛRA 30:38

  I • The Law of the Gate

  In an earlier chapter, speaking of gifts that must be refused, I suggested that a young person leaving home might well be wary of that parental largesse which tends to reinforce the bond between parent and child. A look at the same situation in terms of money loans will illustrate what I take to be the ancient meaning of usury, as well as the connection between gift exchange and the old debate over the morality of charging interest on a loan. Wherever there is the potential for wealth to increase over time, an interest-free loan amounts to the gift of the increase. Imagine, then, a young woman recently out of college who approaches her parents for a loan. And imagine these different responses: (1) the family immediately gives her $1,000, nobody says a thing about it, if she ever needs more she should just ask, and so on; (2
) they loan her the money and they insist (or she does) on her signing a note promising to repay the loan at such and such a date, along with an interest payment at the prime rate.

  The first response makes the woman part of the family, which may be good for her or it may be bad. (Maybe it’s a large family where she will be able to give and get support all her life; or maybe if she takes the gift she’ll have to go on being a child and never establish herself in the world. It depends.) Either way, the gift creates a psychic bond to the family and its specific structure, while the interest-bearing loan says to all concerned that though she may be on good terms, she is psychologically separated from the family. Usury and interest are sisters to commodity; they allow or encourage a separation.

  Several senses of “usury” precede the modern one. The term took on its current meaning (an excessive or illegal rate of interest) during the Reformation. Before that it simply meant any interest charged on a loan, and its opposite was a form of gift, the gratuitous loan. A phrase of Marcel Mauss’s first brought me to the connection between “ancient usury,” as I shall call it, and gift exchange. Mauss speaks of how Maori tribesmen insist that the hau of a gift “constrains a series of users” to make a return gift, “some property or merchandise or labor, by means of feasts, entertainments or gifts of equivalent or superior value.” The superior value that the “users” of a gift return or pass along is the “use-ance” or “use-ury” of the gift. In this sense, ancient usury is synonymous with the increase that comes to the gift when it is used up, eaten, and consumed, and by the ethics of a gift society this usance is neither reckoned nor charged, it is passed along as a gift.