On Gifts

Reciprocity, contracts, the Potlatch

The trouble with gifts began in my twenties. Sick of rampant consumerism, my family decided we would only give each other homemade presents (so much jam!). Then came the Secret Santa years. With the grandchildren’s arrival, we decided only kids should receive gifts. But this year, a new rule emerged: a £5 maximum spend for all, including adults.

If this doesn’t sound confusing enough, these rules are endlessly being broken. Gifts have been slipped into bags, or wrapped in disclaimers: ‘This isn’t really a present’ or ‘It’s only from the charity shop’. These breaches are met with teasing and eye-rolling and sometimes frustration. Because – and here’s the trouble with gifts – the reason for these rules in the first place is that gift-giving is potentially fraught.

Is what you have chosen thoughtful enough, appropriate, in proportion? Might you make someone uncomfortable by giving them a present if they haven’t got one for you in return? It seems illogical to worry about such things. Yet we do. So much so that we need rules and prior agreements to make it all run smoothly.

In 1925, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote a now-classic treatise The Essay on The Gift. Drawing on studies of Pacific and North American indigenous societies, Mauss argued that gifts, far from frivolous or mundane, are profoundly significant for creating functioning societies. Some of Mauss’s language and methods are outdated today. But his basic insight holds true. Gifts create networks of trust and kinship. And partly they do this because what seems voluntary and spontaneous is in fact constrained by complex rules about reciprocity.

‘Everyone knows… those who exchange presents with one another

Remain friends the longest…

One must…give present for present’        

So says the Havamal, one of the medieval Old Norse poems of the Scandinavian Edda, which forms part of the epigraph of Mauss’s book.

To make his point about reciprocity, Mauss turned to the Potlatch festivals held by indigenous people such as the Tlingit, Chinook and Dene who live on the Northwest Coast of North America. The Potlatch (from the Nootka word for ‘gift’) involves feasting and dancing and can last for several days. But gift-giving is at its heart.

During the Potlatch, the community’s elder gives away – and sometimes even destroys – their most valued possessions, including food, clothing and blankets. They win prestige and demonstrate their wealth, sometimes setting in motion rivalries and one-up-man-ships that can last generations. But fundamentally, these gifts cement social bonds through reciprocity, or the desire to repay kindness with kindness.

European colonisers fundamentally misunderstood the Potlatch. They were so threatened by the idea of a social system based on giving away wealth that the Potlatch was banned in 1884 (the ban was largely unenforceable, and was eventually overturned in 1951). Late 19^th century Canadian legislators saw the Potlatch as wasteful, reckless, even mad. ‘No Indian can acquire property…while under the influence of this mania’ wrote one official. Another called the Potlatch an ‘insane exuberance of generosity’.

They did not see that the Potlatch was not about loss, but about gain. They did not understand that when Native people gave away their treasured possessions, they created new alliances, new patterns of collaboration, new access to resources such as fishing rights, and new possibilities for creating a better life. For Mauss, what was true of the Potlatch was true of all gifts: gifts create community because of the desire to repay.

Or: ‘There is no such thing as a free gift’.

It sounds so cynical to modern ears. Surely choosing a present for a much-loved Aunt is – or ought to be – a pleasure, free from agendas, or instrumental wanting. Mauss’s idea about reciprocity runs contrary to how many of us talk about gift-giving in the contemporary West. We talk of it as an act of generosity, pure and spontaneous. We decry an ulterior motive.

Yet, in the last couple of years, partly inspired by re-reading Mauss, I have paid more attention than I ever have to the circulation of gifts. Every era has its friendships sustained by the giving and receiving of gifts. I have been moved to discover how gifts – small, often tender offerings – work to create allegiances and small pockets of trust. In a previous post, I wrote about a gift of a handmade doll smuggled out of a prison. Historians studying household account books in 17^th century England have found careful lists of gifts given and received, mostly by female friends and family members: soaps and salves, embroideries, and especially sweets and sugar (in this age in which European household wealth intimately tied to the exploitation of enslaved people in the colonies). The exchange of goods were how women showed themselves to be trustworthy collaborators, in an age where relying on networks of neighbours and friends was essential for the survival of the household.

Not much has changed. A message pings up on my phone from my street’s Whatsapp group. A neighbour needs a cup of lentils, and we are only too happy to oblige, since only a few days ago, we were the ones looking for a favour – some last-minute wrapping paper. Another neighbour offers some bubble bath she no longer wants, and another a magazine her son has grown out of. In these exchanges, instinctive and intentional, we have built something. As Mary Douglass writes, ‘A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.’

So many of the friendships I’ve made in the last decade have been nurtured through gifts. Most are presents of time, attention, care. An offer of help (picking up a friend’s kid from school, or feeding a pet) is a gift. Someone remembering a difficult anniversary and checking in is a gift. This year I had a Christmas card from a friend who wrote beautifully of how much she had appreciated our deepening friendship in a challenging year for her. This is a gift too.

‘those who exchange presents with one another

Remain friends the longest’

One must…give present for present’