Realm of the Gift

Since Mauss, gift v . market and state has been homologous with premodern v . modern. Nonsense, Godbout argues. Alongside the state and market systems, more fundamental than either, is the primary sociality of family, neighbors, personal relations – the realm of the gift.

He writes, “before human beings are understood in terms of any economic, political, or administrative functions they fulfill, they must be understood as persons: not just a conglomerate collection of particular roles or functions but autonomous units endowed with at least a measure of coherence, all their own. The transformation of biological individuals into social persons does not occur first in the relatively abstract sphere of the market and the state, even if they make a certain contribution, but in the world of primary sociality , where, within a family, in relations with neighbours, in comradeship and friendship, person-to-person relationships are forged.”

My only complaint here is the whiff (purely theoretical, no doubt) or pre-social biological unit; which does not in fact exist. Otherwise, this is very well-taken, and something that gift theorists, Godbout argues, miss because they still consider the gift system an alternative economic system.

How do people miss the gift system, so obvious once pointed out? Why do people think of themselves as “discrete individuals” instead of as “givers and receivers.” Godbout suggests three reasons:

First, the dominant paradigm of human behavior is utilitarian. People act out of self-interest, and in that context the gift seems impossible, other-worldly, spookily spiritual.

Second, to see the basic character of gift exchange, we have to break with both utilitarian explanations of human behavior, and Nietzschean ones that claim that human beings are interested only in power. Gifts break through the oppositions of both paradigms: there is both freedom/gratuity and obligation, there is both self-interest and interest in others. In the gift, these dimensions cannot be untangled.

Third, earlier societies defined themselves by the gift, but since “modernity defines itself first and foremost by its absolute refusal of tradition, it is not surprising that it thinks it can assert its freedom by ridding itself of a language that seems coextensive with tradition, the language of the gift.” This is allied to a horror of the closed communities that define themselves in terms of the gift and its obligatory freedom.

Godbout suggests that “the market and the modern bureaucratic state [are] machines that destroy traditions and particularity” and are thus “all anti-gift devices.”