A commentary on “THE GIFT: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies" By Marcel Mauss

A commentary on

“THE GIFT”

The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies

By Marcel Mauss

‘Gift is an object that is born to be returned’

 

                                     Generally, a gift is an item given to someone without the expectation of payment or anything in return. As we know an item is not a gift if that item is already owned by the one to whom it is given. Although gift-giving might involve an expectation of reciprocity a gift is meant to be free. In many countries, the act of mutually exchanging money, goods etc. may sustain social relations and contribute to social cohesion but are gifts only given for emotional satisfaction? Are they free? Is there no expectation for its return value? All these questions have been answered by this book and those can be illustrated below,

                                     The Gift is a grand exercise in positivist research, combining ethnology, history, and sociology. It is a system that includes personal emotions and religion. Following Durkheim, Mauss thought of the gift as a theory of human solidarity which flourished through his accounts of gifts in this book.

                                     According to Mauss, the idea of commerce and gift are not the same the first is based on exact recompense and the second is spontaneous, pure of ulterior motive. There are no gifts in a particular place and it should not be so. Gift cycles engage persons in permanent commitments that articulate the dominant institutions. So the gift is assumed as a pure motive of the giver but to Mauss, even the small gift that a Trobriand husband regularly gave his wife could not be counted as free as it is recompensing his wife for sexual services.

                                    As Mauss represents here,  potlach consists of a festival where goods and services of all kinds are exchanged. Gifts are made and reciprocated with the interest of the dominant idea of rivalry and competition between the tribe or tribes assembled for the festival or couples occasionally for conspicuous consumption. According to Mauss the French term presentations or total services means the actual act of exchange of gifts and rendering of services and contre-presentations or total counter-services means the reciprocating or the return of these gifts and services. Before he begins his comparative study on 3 different archaic societies, he summarizes some of the conclusions of a greater study that he did with Davy.  

                        The book starts by describing the North American potlatch as an extreme form of an institution that is found in every region of the world. The word Potlach comes from the Tsinuk which means feed or consume. The potlach is an example of a total system of giving.  Each gift is part of a system of reciprocity in which the honour of the giver and recipient are engaged.  It is a total system in which every item of status or spiritual or material possession is implicated for everyone in the whole community. The system is quite simple; just the rule that every gift has to be returned in some specified way sets up a perpetual cycle of exchanges within and between generations. In some cases the specified return is of equal value, producing a stable system of statuses; in others, it must exceed the value of the earlier gift, producing an escalating contest for honour, regarding this the example that has been provided by Mauss that the potlach among the Haida and Tlingit of the Northwest coast is the extreme rivalry expressed by the rule always to return more than was received, failure to return means losing the competition for the honour. Marcel Mauss has designed this book with a comparative study of the institution of the gift in different primitive and archaic cultures.  The book is important for its notes on the existence of the logically structured communication system as well as for flourishing the concept of the total social phenomenon which is at the same time economical, judicial, moral, religious, mythological and esthetical.

The book is divided into 4 chapters with the following parts:

1.      The exchange of gifts and the obligation to reciprocate

2.      The extension of this system

3.      Survivals and roles of these principles in ancient systems of law and ancient economies

4.      Conclusion

                   According to Mauss, the gift is only a part of the social whole. In archaic societies, a gift must be paid back, otherwise, this whole is broken. The chain of giving and taking remains to stop. The question that Mauss put at the beginning is according to which legal principle in archaic societies must the gift be obligatory reciprocated?  And which power exists in the gift that makes it to pay it back?  To answer these questions Mauss made a comparative study on the regions like Polynesia, Melanesia and North West America.  

                  Mauss denies the existence of a natural economy through the earlier western legal and economical systems where the exchanges took place between collectives and not individuals. These exchanges were not only goods but rituals, services, women, dances, children, festivals and so on many more like this. Which he called Total services and an example was given of potlach. Mauss defines the term potlatch as total services of an agonistic type. He gave some insights through the different archaic societies like,

·         In Samoa gifts accompany the events of marriage, birth, circumcision, sickness, a daughter’s arrival at puberty, funeral rites, and trade. The essential elements are those of honour, prestige and mana conferred by wealth. Gifts should be reciprocated if one does not want to lose that mana, the authority and the source of wealth.  

·         There are two terms used in Polynesia: tonga for the items of fixed property and those are inherited by the daughter of a family when she gets married with an obligation to be returned and the OLOA are movable goods which belong to the husband and these are valid for the Maori law and Religion.

·         In New Caledonia there is a system called pillow-pillow which is a system of festivals, gifts and services resembling potlach. It is a legal tie which makes things return. Similarly, the system of Kula has been described as an economic and ceremonial gift exchanging system.

     So, it can be concluded that when someone gives and returns things, he or she is giving and returning respects or courtesies. By giving, he is giving himself and that is because he owns himself.  It can be concluded on the moral level that not everything is wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling. And according to the works of art things have souls in a way which is followed by their former owner and much more by their producer. Mauss suggests that “we should return to archaic society and the elements like the joy of public giving, the pleasure of generous expenditure on the arts, maintenance of peace, harmonizing of joint and private work, gathered and distributed wealth and mutual respect and mutual generosity, which can be own through education. The rich must come back to considering themselves- freely and also by obligation as the financial guardians of their fellow citizens”. Thus, he wants to see society moving to the king system of total services.