Review on the Gift by Marcel Mauss

   This week I've finished reading the book the Gift by Marcel Mauss, who seems to have worked with Durkheim, a sociologist whom we've spoken of before in this blog (look at: Definitions of Religion, 04/05/2020, and Changes Brought by Industrialisation, 15/06/2020). The book looks into the institution of gift giving, primarily in indigenous cultures of North West America, Alaska and Siberia and Melanesia, an archipelago near Australia, but it further comments on how these practices are still vacant today (by today he means the 1920s and 30s). I must say that I enjoyed this book and found many of its concepts fascinating, so if you decide to read it, I hope it will have the same effect.

   Mauss focuses on the obligations to give and to receive, which, he explains, are masked selfless generosity. For example, in the Hindu tradition, of which, due to the limited availability of sources, only the culture of the cast of the Brahmins is commented, he explains that objects are seen to have in their nature the tendency to be shared, so that if someone keeps food, for example, for themselves, s/he "kills its essence for others and for himself", and this, following a doctrine of magic, can lead to death. Similarly, in a myth of the Melanesians, in one tribe a princess gives birth to an otter who makes them rich in food (as he is a better hunter than any human), and they invite all surrounding tribes, except one which they forget about, to taste their food. This sharing of their riches gives them immense status, but the tribe which has not been invited kills the otter and assaults the village. Indeed, Mauss notes that refusing to give or refusing to receive is equivalent to a declaration of war, because gift exchange reinforces commercial links and alliances between tribes. In most cultures, there is an idea of debt, where every gift had to be reciprocated with interest, and this was frequently accompanied by magic: for example, the Trobriands have the concept of hau, which is the spirit of the thing given that is always attached to the primary owner. It works thus: I give a gift to my neighbour, and thus he is burdened with the hau of the object; then my neighbour gives my gift to his cousin, and she, burdened with my neighbour's hau, reciprocates this gift. Now that my neighbour has been paid back, he can't keep the gift because he is still burdened with my gift's hau, so he must give it over to me. In this way, Mauss notes, many Germanic languages use the same word for gift than for poison. This institution of gifting and reciprocating he calls system of total prestation.

   In Melanesia, the author describes an economy of gifts where vaygu'a, which he describes as types of money or standardised trading goods, circulate the islands. There are two types of vaygu'a: the mwali are armshells, and they are crafted in the islands of the west and are gifted from tribe to tribe toward the east; the soulava are necklaces, and their motion has the opposite direction. These exchanges happen in intertribal meetings called kula, in which, each year, there is a host tribe in whose village all tribes congregate. The host tribe will be the giver of gifts, but the next year, when it is invited by the next hosting tribe, it will receive reciprocation with interest. Mauss notes how there is a sense of legitimacy of contract within the public exchange: since there is no writing, he says, a contract can only be validated by making it public. In this way, any tribe could negate that they had received a gift from another tribe and not reciprocate, but by having other witnesses in theory unbiased they ensure this doesn't happen. The North American peoples have an institution similar to the kula called potlatch, and he stresses the obligation to accept gifts in relation to status; a clan who does not want to accept a gift is seen as being afraid to having to reciprocate and thus losses status and power within the tribe. In a similar way, when one fives a gift away, one must give the impression that one does not wisher care to have it reciprocated, even though it is known by all members that it must. Mauss explains that this custom is still vacant today (first publication of the book in 1923). In my experience, in XXI century Europe it is no longer an important thing, probably due, I speculate, to anomie (see last post: 15/06/2020), but I have evidence that it was for my own grand- and great grandparents: the other day, commenting the book to my grandmother, she recalled her mother say "why are they [other people in town] giving me gifts? Like I have enough [money and resources] to give any back!" Although not taken with pleasure, this view proves that there was until then an obligation to reciprocate. Moreover, I myself experienced the obligation to accept: when I was a child, my other grandma gifted me, out of the blue, a black jacket with purple straps; it was the ugliest jacket you could imagine, and I believe it had belonged to an older cousin, so I, a naïve kid unknowledgeable of cultural customs, rejected it. "One never rejects a gift", my grandma said. Similarly, there is a traditional saying in Spanish, which further illustrates this point: a caballo regalado no le mires la dentadura – "don't check the teeth of a gifted horse".

   Thanks for reading, if you liked it share it with friends and family, and tell me in the comments any personal anecdote where you experienced the system of total prestation.