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THE GIFT

ESSAI SUR LE DON

in

SOCIOLOGIE ET ANTHROPOLOGIE

Published by

PRESSES UNIVERSITAIRES DE FRANCE

Paris, 1950

THE GIFT

Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies

by

MARCEL MAUSS

Translated by

IAN GUNNISON

With an Introduction by

. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD

Professor of Social Anthropology and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

COHEN & WEST LTD

68-74 Carter Lane, London, E.C.4 1966

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INTRODUCTION

By E. E. Evans-Pritchard

Fellow of All Souls College and Professor of Social Anthropology,

University of Oxford

MARCEL MAUSS (i 872-1 950), Emile Durkheim's nephew and most distinguished pupil, was a man of unusual ability and learning, and also of integrity and strong convictions. After Durkheim's death he was the leading figure in French sociology. His reputation was closely bound up with the fortunes of the Annee Sociologique which he helped his uncle to found and make famous; some of the most stimu- lating and original contributions to its earher numbers were written by him in collaboration with Durkheim and Hubert and Beuchat: Essai sur la nature et la f auction du sacrifice (1899), De quelques formes primitives de classification : contribution a f etude des representations collectives (1903), Esquisse d'une theorie generale de la magie (1904), and Essai sur les variations saisonnieres des societes eskimos : essai de morphologic sociale (1906).

The war of 19 14-18, during which Mauss was on opera- tional service, almost wiped out the team of brilliant younger scholars whom Durkheim had taught, inspired, and gathered around him^ — his son Andre Durkheim, Robert Hertz, Antoine Bianconi, Georges Gelly, Maxime David, Jean Reynier. The Master did not survive them (d. 191 7). Had it not been for *X these disasters Mauss might have given us in ampler measure CK the fruits of his erudition, untiring industry, and mastery of ^2 method. But he not only wrote about social solidarity and ^ collective sentiments. He expressed them in his own life. For . him the group of Durkheim and his pupils and colleagues had ^ a kind of collective mind, the material representation of which ^was its product the Annee. And if one belongs to others and not to oneself, which is one of the themes, perhaps the basic theme,

1539716

VI THE GIFT

of the present book, one expresses one's attachment by sub- ordinating one's own ambitions to the common interest. On the few occasions I met Mauss I received the impression that this was how he thought and felt, and his actions confirmed it. He took over the labours of his dead colleagues. Most un- selfishly, for it meant neglecting his own researches, he under- took the heavy task of editing, completing and publishing the manuscripts left by Durkheim, Hubert (who died in 1927), Hertz and others. He undertook also, in 1923-24, the even heavier task of reviving his beloved Annee^ which had ceased publication after 191 3. This imposed an added burden on him and farther deflected him from the field of his own chief interest. Mauss became a Sanskrit scholar and a historian of religions at the same time as he became a sociologist, and his main interest throughout his life was in Comparative Religion or the Sociology of Religion. But he felt that the new series of the Annie must, like the old one, cover all the many branches of sociological research, and this could only be done if he took over those branches other than his own which would have been the special concern of those who had died. Consequently, though he pubUshed many reviews and review-articles, his only major works after 1906 were the Essai sur le don, forme archaique de rSchange (1925), which Dr. Cunnison now presents in an EngUsh translation. Fragment d'un plan de sociologie generate descrip- tive (1934), and Une categorie de V esprit humain: la notion de per- sonne, celle de 'moi' (1938). His projected works on Prayer, on Money and on the State were never completed. But he was active all the time. The second series of the Annee had to be abandoned, but a third series was started in 1934. Then came the war of 1939-45. Paris was occupied by the Nazis, and Mauss was a Jew. He was not himself injured, but some of his closest colleagues and friends, Maurice Halbwachs and others, were killed. For a second time he saw all around him collapse, and this, combined with other and personal troubles, was too much for him and his mind gave way.

This is not the place to make a critical assessment of Mauss's part in the development of sociological thought in France — it

INTRODUCTION Vll

has been admirably done by Henri Levy-Bruhl and Claude Levi-Strauss.* All that is required are some very brief indica- tions of the importance of Mauss's work and of the Essai sur le don as a particular example of it.

Mauss was in the line of philosophical tradition running from Montesquieu through the philosophers of the Enlighten- ment— Turgot, Condorcet, St. Simon — to Comte and then Durkheim, a tradition in which conclusions were reached by analysis of concepts rather than of factSj_the facts being used as illustrations of formulations reached by other than inductive methods. But while that is true, it is also true that Mauss was far less a philosopher than Durkheim. In all his essays he turns first to the concrete facts and examines them in their entirety and to the last detail. This was the main theme of an excellent lecture on Mauss delivered recently (1952) at Oxford by one of his former pupils, M. Louis Dumont. He pointed out that though Mauss, out of loyalty and affection, studiously avoided any criticism of Durkheim such criticism is nevertheless implicit in his writings, which are so much more empirical than Durk- heim's that it might be said that with Mauss sociology in France reached its experimental stage. Mauss sought only to know a limited range of facts and then to understand them, and what Mauss meant by understanding comes out very clearly in this Essay. Ij^isjo see social phenomena— as, indeed, Durkheim taught that they should be seen-— in their totality. 'Total' is the key word of the Essay. The exchanges of archaic societies which he examines are total social movements or activities. They are atjhejame time economic, juridical^ moral, aesthetic, religious, mythological and socio-morphological phenomena. Their meaning can therefore only be grasped if they are viewed as a complex concrete reality, and if for con- venience we iriafe abstractions in studying some institution we

* H. Ldvy-Bruhl, 'In Memoriam: Marcel Mauss' in UAnrUe Sociologique, Troisieme Serie, 1948-49. C. Levi-Strauss, 'La Sociologie frangaise' in La sociologie au XX" sikle, 1947, Vol. 2 [Twentieth Century Sociology, 1946, ch. xvii) ; 'Introduction a I'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss', in Sociologie et Anthropologie, a collection of some of Mauss's essays published in 1950.

Vlll THE GIFT

must in the end replace what we have taken away if we are to understand it. And the means to be used to reach an under- standing of institutions? They are those employed by the anthropological fieldworker who studies social life from both outside and inside, from the outside as anthropologist and from the inside by identifying himself with the members of the society he is studying. Mauss demonstrated that, given enough well documented material, he could do this without leaving his flat in Paris. He soaked his mind in ethnographical material, including all available linguistic material; but he was successful only because that mind was also a master of sociological method. Mauss did in his study what an anthropologist does in the field, bringing a trained mind to bear on the social life of primitive peoples which he both observes and experiences. We social anthropologists therefore regard him as one of us.

But to understand 'total' phenomena in their totality it is necessary first to know them. One must be a scholar. It is not sufficient to read the writings of others about the thought and customs of ancient India or ancient Rome. One must be able to go straight to the sources, for scholars not trained in socio- logical methods will not have seen in the facts what is of sociological significance. The sociologist who sees them in their totality sees them differently. Mauss was able to go to the sources. Besides having an excellent knowledge of several modern European languages, including Russian, he was a fine Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Celtic and Hebrew scholar, as well as a brilliant sociologist. Perhaps to their surprise, he was able to teach Sanskritists much that they did not know was in their texts and Roman lawyers much that they did not know was in theirs. What he says about the meaning of certain forms of exchange in ancient India and in ancient Rome in the Essai sur le don is an illustration. This was perhaps not so remarkable a feat as that he was able to show from Malinowski's own account of the Trobriand Islanders where he had misunder- stood, or had inadequately understood, their institutions. He could do this because of his vast knowledge, which Mahnowski lacked, of Oceanic languages and of the native societies of

INTRODUCTION IX

Melanesia, Polynesia, America and elsewhere, which enabled him to deduce by a comparative study of primitive institutions what the fieldworker had not himself observed.

The Essai sur le don, apart from its value as an exercise in method, is a precious document in itself. It is of great import- ance for an understanding of Mauss and for an assessment of his significance as a scholar, since most of his other well-known Essays were written in collaboration, but it is also of great intrinsic value. It is the first systematic and comparative study ,, (of the widespread custom of gift exchange and the first under- j standing of its function in the articulation of the social orden)/ Mauss shows in this Essay what is the real nature, and what is the fundamental significance, of such institutions as the potlatch and the kula which at first sight bewilder us or even seem to be pointless and unintelligible. And when he shows us how to understand them he reveals not only the meaning of certain customs of North American Indians and of Melanesians but at the same time the nieaning__Q£-custoifts-4n early phases of ^iU^ — historical civilizatiojis^ and, what is more, the significance of '^ practices^in our own society at the present time. In Mauss's Essays there is always implicit a comparison, or contrast, between the archaic institutions he is writing about and our own. He is asking himself not only how we can understand these archaic institutions but also how an understanding of them helps us the better to understand our own, and perhaps to improve them. Nowhere does this come out more clearly than in the Essai sur le don, where Mauss is telling us, quite pointedly, in case we should not reach the conclusion for our- selves, how much we have lost, whatever we may have other- wise gained, bj^he substitution of a rational economic system for a system in which exchange of goods was riot a mechanical but a moral transaction, bringing about and maintaining human, personal, relationships between individuals and groups.J We take our own social conventions for granted and we seldom think how recent many of them are and how ephemeral they will perhaps prove to be. Men at other times had, and in many parts of the world still have, different ideas, values and customs.

K

X THE GIFT

from a study of which we may learn much that, Mauss believed, may be of value to ourselves.

It is some years since I suggested to Dr. Gunnison that he might translate this Essay of Marcel Mauss. A good knowledge of French is, of course, essential, but it is not in itself sufficient for the translation of a sociological work from French into English. The translator must be also a sociologist, or in the case of Mauss better still a social anthropologist; for to translate the words is one thing, to translate them in the sense of the author is another. Dr. Gunnison has both requirements. He is a French scholar and also an anthropologist. The translation and its publication have been delayed by the need for revision, and it is greatly to Dr. Gunnison's credit that he has found time to complete his task in the midst of his own considerable anthropological researches carried out during the last few years, first among the Luapula peoples of Northern Rhodesia and then, without respite, among the Baggara Arabs of the Anglo- Egyptian Sudan.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

The editing of this translation differs from that of the original French edition in a number of ways which it is hoped will make for easier reading. In the French edition the compendious notes were printed on the text pages. Here they are placed after the text and numbered separately by chapters. Some short notes have been combined for the sake of clarity but each note still refers to a single subject. Bibliographical references have been standardized throughout the notes. The whole text is printed in type of the same size whereas some sections of the original are in smaller type than the main body of the text. Finally, the orthographic refinements of Indian and North- West American words have not been reproduced.

Mauss used the words don and present indifferently, and here similarly 'gift' and 'present' are used for the most part inter- changeably, although 'gift' may have the more formal meaning. There is no convenient English word to translate the French prestation so this word itself is used to mean any thing or series of things given freely or obligatorily as a gift or in exchange ; and includes services, entertainments, etc., as well as material things.

I. C.

CONTENTS

Introductory

CHAPTER

.1 jGifts and

THE Obligation to Return Gifts

1 II ] Distribution

Total prestation, masculine and feminine property

{Samoa) .... The spirit of the thing given ( Maori) The obligation to give and the obligation to receive Gifts to men and gifts to gods

OF the System: Generosity Honour and Money

1 Rules of generosity [Andaman Islands)

2 Principles, motives and intensity of gift exchang [Melanesia) ....

3 Honour and credit [N. W. America) .

4 The three obligations : giving, receiving, repaying

5 The power in objects of exchange

6 ^ Money of Renown' [Renommiergeld)

7 Primary conclusion .... Survivals in Early Literature

1 Personal law and real law [Ancient Rome)

2 Theory of the gift [Hindu Classical period) .

3 Pledge and gift [Germanic societies) Conclusions ....

1 Moral conclusions

2 Political and economic conclusions

3 Sociological and ethical conclusions Bibliographical abbreviations used in the notes Notes .......

Ill

page I

6

6 8

10 12

17

17

31

37 41 43 45 46

47 53 59 63 63 69 76 82

83

I have never found a man so generous and hospitable that he would not receive a present, nor one so liberal with his money that he would dislike a reward if he could get one.

Friends should rejoice each others' hearts with gifts of weapons and raiment, that is clear from one's own experience. That friendship lasts longest — if there is a chance of its being a success — in which friends both give and receive gifts.

A man ought to be a friend to his friend and repay gift with gift. People should meet smiles with smiles and lies with treachery.

Know — if you have a friend in whom you have sure con- fidence and wish to make use of him, you ought to exchange ideas and gifts with him and go to see him often.

If you have another in whom you have no confidence and yet will make use of him, you ought to address him with fair words but crafty heart and repay treachery with lies.

Further, with regard to him in whom you have no con- fidence and of whose motives you are suspicious, you ought to smile upon him and dissemble your feelings. Gifts ought to be repaid in like coin.

Generous and bold men have the best time in life and never foster troubles. But the coward is apprehensive of everything and a miser is always groaning over his gifts.

Better there should be no prayer than excessive offering; a gift always looks for recompense. Better there should be no sacrifice than an excessive slaughter.

Havamal, w. 39, 41-2, 44-6, 48 and 145, from the translation by D. E. Martin Clarke in The Havamal, with Selections from other Poems in the Edda, Cambridge, 1923.

INTRODUCTORY

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS

THE foregoing lines from the Edda outline our subject- matter.^ In Scandinavian and many other civilizations contracts are fulfilled and exchanges of goods are made by means of gifts. In theory such gifts are voluntary but in fact they are given and repaid under obligation.

This work is part of a wider study. For some years our attention has been drawn to the realm of contract and the system of economic prestations between the component sections or sub-groups of 'primitive' and what we might call 'archaic' societies. On this subject there is a great mass of complex data. ^^ For, in these 'early' societies, social phenomena are not dis- crete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed. In these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them, all kinds of institutions find sfmul- taneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic. In addition, the phenomena have their aesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types.

We intend in this book to isolate one important set of phenomena: namely, prestations which are in theory volun- tary, disinterested and spontaneous, but are in fact obligatory and interested. The form usually taken is that of the gift generously offered ; but the accompanying behaviour is formal pretence and social deception, while the transaction itself is based on obligation and economic self-interest. We shall note the various principles behind this necessary form of exchange (which is nothing less than the division of labour itself), but we shall confine our detailed study to the enquiry : In primitive or archaic types of society what is the principle whereby the gift received has to be repaid? What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return? We hope, by presenting enough

2 THE GIFT

data, to be able to answer this question precisely, and also to indicate the direction in which answers to cognate questions might be sought. We shall also pose new problems. Of these, some concern the morality of the contract: for instance, the manner in which today the law of things remains bound up with the law of persons ; and some refer to the forms and ideas which have always been present in exchange and which even now are to be seen in the idea of individual interest.

Thus we have a double aim. We seek a set of more or less archaeological conclusions on the nature of human transactions in the societies which surround us and those which immediately preceded ours, and whose exchange institutions differ frorn our own. We describe their forms of contract and exchange.'ilt has been suggested that these societies lackdie^coH©fflie-«iaEket^_but this is not true ; for the maflcetrTf^aTHuman phenomenon which we believe to be familiar to every known Society ."Markets are found before the development of merchants, and before their most important innovation, currency as we know it. They functioned before they took the modern forms (Semitic, Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman) of contract and sale and capital. We shall take note of the moral and economic features of these institutions.

We contend that the same moraUty and economy are at work, albeit less noticeably, in our own societies, and we believe that in them we have discovered one of the bases of social life ; and thus we may draw conclusions of a moral nature about some of the problems confronting us in our present economic crisis. These pages of social history, theoretical sociology, political economy and morality do no more than lead us to old problems which are constantly turning up under new guises.^

The Method Followted

Our method is one of careful comparison. We confine the study to certain chosen areas, Polynesia, Melanesia, and North- West America, and to certain well-known codes. Again, since we are concerned with words and their meanings, we choose

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS 3

only areas where we have access to the minds of the societies through documentation and philological research. This further Umits our field of comparison. Each particular study has a bearing on the systems we set out to describe and is presented in its logical place. In this way we avoid that method of hap- hazard comparison in which institutions lose their local colour and documents their value.

Prestation, Gift and Potlatgh

This work is part of the wider research carried out by M. Davy and myself upon archaic forms of contract, so we may start by summarizing what we have found so far.^ It appears that there has never existed, either in the past or in modern primitive societies, anything like a 'natural' economy.* By a strange chance the type of that economy was taken to be the one described by Captain Cook when he wrote on exchange and barter among the Polynesians.^ In our study here of these same Polynesians we shall see how far removed they are from a state of nature in these matters.

In the systems of the past we do not find simple exchange of goods, wealth and produce through markets estabUshed among individuals. For it is groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obliga- tions; * the persons represented in the contracts are moral persons — clans, tribes, and families; the groups, or the chiefs as intermediaries for the groups, confront and oppose each other. ' Further, what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of economic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contract, i Finally, although the prestations and counter-prestations take place under a voluntary guise they are in essence strictly obliga- tory, and their sanction is private or open warfare. We propose to call this the system of total prestations. Such institutions

v/

4 THE GIFT

seem to us to be best represented in the alliance of pairs of phratries in Australian and North American tribes, where ritual, marriages, succession to wealth, community of right and interest, military and religious rank and even games ^ all form part of one system and presuppose the collaboration of the two moieties of the tribe. The THngit and Haida of North- West America give a good expression of the nature of these practices when they say that they 'show respect to each other'.'

But with the Tlingit and Haida, and in the whole of that region, total prestations appear in a form which, although quite typical, is yet evolved and relatively rare. We propose, following American authors, to call it the potlatch. This Chinook word has passed into the current language of Whites and Indians from Vancouver to Alaska. Potlatch meant originally 'to nourish' or 'to consume'.^" The Tlingit and Haida inhabit the islands, the coast, and the land between the coast and the Rockies; they are very rich, and pass their winters in continuous festival, in banquets, fairs and markets which at the same time are solemn tribal gatherings. The tribes place themselves hierarchically in their fraternities and secret societies. On these occasions are practised marriages, initiations, shamanistic seances, and the cults of the great gods, totems, and group or individual ancestors. These are all accompanied by ritual and by prestations by whose means political rank within sub-groups, tribes, tribal confederations and nations is settled." But the remarkable thing about these tribes is the spirit of rivalry and antagonism which dominates all their activities. A man is not afraid to challenge an opposing chief or nobleman. Nor does one stop at the purely sumptuous destruction of accumulated wealth in order to eclipse a rival chief (who may be a close relative) .^2 We are here confronted with total prestation in the sense that the whole clan, through the intermediacy of its chiefs, makes contracts involving all its members and every- thing it possesses.^^ But the agonistic character of the prestation is pronounced. Essentially usurious and extravagant, it is above all a struggle among nobles to determine their position in the hierarchy to the ultimate benefit, if they are successful, of their

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS 5

own clans. This agonistic type of total prestation we propose to call the 'potlatch'.

So far in our study Davy and I had found few examples of this institution outside North- West America,^* Melanesia, and Papua.^^ Everywhere else — in Africa, Polynesia, and Malaya, in South America and the rest of North America — the basis of exchange seemed to us to be a simpler type of total prestation. However, further research brings to light a number of forms intermediate between exchanges marked by exaggerated rivalry like those of the American north-west and Melanesia, and others more moderate where the contracting parties rival each other with gifts: for instance, the French compete with each other in their ceremonial gifts, parties, weddings, and invitations, and feel bound, as the Germans say, to revanchieren themselves.^* We find some of these intermediate forms in the Indo-European world, notably in Thrace.^'

Many ideas and principles are to be noted in systems of this type. The most important of these spiritual mechanisms is clearly the one which obliges us to make a return gift for a gift received. The moral and religious reasons for this constraint are nowhere more obvious than in Polynesia ; and in approach- ing the Polynesian data in the following chapter we shall see clearly the power which enforces the repayment of a gift and the fulfilment of contracts of this kind. I

^

CHAPTER I

GIFTS AND THE OBLIGATION TO RETURN GIFTS

I. Total Prestation Masculine and Feminine Property

(Samoa)

IN our earlier researches on the distribution of the system of contractual gifts, we had found no real potlatch in Polynesia. The Polynesian societies whose institutions came nearest to it appeared to have nothing beyond a system of total prestations, that is to say of permanent contracts between clans in which their men, women and children, their ritual, etc., were put on a communal basis. The facts that we had studied, including the remarkable Samoan custom of the exchange of decorated mats between chiefs on their marriages, did not indicate more complex institutions.^ The elements of rivalry, destruction and fighting seemed to be absent, although we found they were present in Melanesia. We now reconsider the matter in the light of new material.

The system of contractual gifts in Samoa is not confined to marriage; it is present also in respect of childbirth, ^ circum- cision,^ sickness,* girls' puberty,^ funeral ceremonies ® and trade.' Moreover, two elements of the potlatch have in fact been attested to: the honour, prestige or mana which wealth confers; ^ and the absolute obligation to make return gifts under the penalty of losing the mana, authority and wealth.'

Turner tells us that on birth ceremonies, after receiving the oloa and the tonga, the 'masculine' and 'feminine' property, 'the husband and wife were left no richer than they were. Still, they had the satisfaction of seeing what they considered to be a great honour, namely, the heaps of property collected

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS 7

on the occasion of the birth of their child.' ^" These gifts are probably of an obligatory and permanent nature, and returns are made only through the system of rights which compels them. In this society, where cross-cousin marriage is the rule, a man gives his child to his sister and brother-in-law to bring up; and the brother-in-law, who is the child's maternal uncle, calls the child a tonga^ a piece of feminine property.^^ It is then a 'channel through which native property ^^ or tonga, continues to flow to that family from the parents of the child. On the other hand, the child is to its parents a source of foreign property or oloa, coming from the parties who adopt it, as long as the child lives.' 'This sacrifice of natural ties creates a systematic facility in native and foreign property.' In short, the child (feminine property) is the means whereby the maternal family's property is exchanged for that of the paternal family. Since the child in fact lives with his maternal uncle he clearly has a right to live there and thus has a general right over his uncle's property. This system of fosterage is much akin to the generally recognized right of the sister's son over his uncle's property in Melanesia.^^ We need only the elements of rivalry, fighting and destruction for the complete potlatch.

Now let us consider the terms oloa and more particularly tonga. The latter means indestructible property, especially the marriage mats ^* inherited by the daughters of a marriage, and the trinkets and talismans which, on condition of repayment, come through the wife into the newly founded family; these constitute real property.^* The oloa designates all the things which are particularly the husband's personal property.^* This term is also applied today to things obtained from Europeans, clearly a recent extension.^' We may disregard as inexact and insufficient the translation suggested by Turner of oloa as foreign and tonga as native; yet it is not without significance, since it suggests that certain property called tonga is more closely bound up with the land, the clan and the family than certain other property called oloa.^^

But if we extend our field of observation we immediately find a wider meaning of the notion tonga. In the Maori,

8 THE GIFT

Tahitian, Tongan and Mangarevan languages it denotes everything which may be rightly considered property, which makes a man rich, powerful or influential, and which can be exchanged or used as compensation: that is to say, such objects of value as emblems, charms, mats and sacred idols, and per- haps even traditions, magic and ritual.^' Here we meet that notion of magical property which we believe to be widely spread in the Malayo-Polynesian world and right over the Pacific.2o

2. The Spirit of the Thing Given

(Maori)

This last remark leads to a contention of some importance. The taonga are, at any rate with the Maori, closely attached to the individual, the clan and the land; they are the vehicle of their mana — magical, religious and spiritual power. In a proverb collected by Sir G. Grey " and C, O. Davis, ^^ taonga are asked to destroy the person who receives them; and they have the power to do this if the law, or rather the obligation, about making a return gift is not observed.

Our late friend Hertz saw the significance of this; disin- terestedly he had written 'for Davy and Mauss' on the card containing the following note by Colenso : 'They had a kind of system of exchange, or rather of giving presents which had later to be exchanged or repaid.' ^^ For example, they exchange dried fish for pickled birds and mats.^* The exchange is carried out between tribes or acquainted families without any kind of stipulation.

But Hertz had also found — I discovered it amongst his papers — a text whose significance we had both missed, for I had been unaware of it myself. Speaking of the hau, the spirit of things and particularly of the forest and forest game, Tamati Ranaipiri, one of Mr. Elsdon Best's most useful informants, gives quite by chance the key to the whole problem. ^^ 'I shall tell you about hau. Hau is not the wind. Not at all. Suppose you have some particular object, taonga, and you give it to me; you

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS 9

give it to me without a price. ^^ We do not bargain over it. Now I give this thing to a third person who after a time decides to give me something in repayment for it (utu),^'' and he makes me a present of something [taonga] . Now this taonga I received from him is the spirit {hau) of the taonga I received from you and which I passed on to him. The taonga which I receive on account of the taonga that came from you, I must return to you. It would not be right on my part to keep these taonga whether they were desirable or not. I must give them to you since they are the hau ^^ of the taonga which you gave me. If I were to keep this second taonga for myself I might become ill or even die. Such is hau, the hau of personal property, the hau of the taonga, the hau of the forest. Enough on that subject.'

This capital text deserves comment. It is characteristic of the indefinite legal and religious atmosphere of the Maori and their doctrine of the 'house of secrets' ; it is surprisingly clear in places and offers only one obscurity: the intervention of a third person. But to be able to understand this Maori lawyer we need only say: 'The taonga and all strictly personal posses- sions have a hau, a spiritual power. You give me taonga, I give it to another, the latter gives me taonga back, since he is forced to do so by the hau of my gift ; and I am obliged to give this one to you since I must return to you what is in fact the product of the hau of your taonga.''

Interpreted thus not only does the meaning become clear, but it is found to emerge as one of the leitmotifs of Maori custom. The obligation attached to a gift itself is not inert. Even when abandoned by the giver, it still forms a part of him. Through it he has a hold over the recipient, just as he had, while its owner, a hold over anyone who stole it.^* For the taonga is animated with the hau of its forest, its soil, its homeland, and the hau pursues him who holds it.^"

It pursues not only the first recipient of it or the second or the third, but every individual to whom the taonga is trans- mitted.^^ The hau wants to return to the place of its birth, to its sanctuary of forest and clan and to its owner. The taonga or its hau — itself a kind of individual '^ — constrains a series of users

10 THE GIFT

to return some kind of taonga of their own, some property or merchandise or labour, by means of feasts, entertainments or gifts of equivalent or superior value. Such a return will give its donor authority and power over the original donor, who now becomes the latest recipient. That seems to be the motivating force behind the obligatory circulation of wealth, tribute and gifts in Samoa and New Zealand.

This or something parallel helps to explain two sets of important social phenomena in Polynesia and elsewhere. We can see the nature of the bond created by the transfer of a possession. We shall return shortly to this point and show how our facts contribute to a general theory of obligation. But for the moment it is clear that in Maori custom this bond created by things is in fact a bond between persons, since the thing itself is a person or pertains to a person. Hence it follows that to give something is to give a part of oneself Secondly, we are led to a better understanding of gift exchange and total presta- tion, including the potlatch. It follows clearly from what we have seen that in this system of ideas one gives away what is in reality a part of one's nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual essence. To keep this thing is dangerous, not only because it is illicit to do so, but also because it comes morally, physically and spiritually from a person. Whatever it is, food,^^ possessions, women, children or ritual, it retains a magical and religious hold over the recipient. The thing given is not inert. It is alive and often personified, and strives to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.

3. The Obligation to Give and the Obligation to

Receive

To appreciate fully the institutions of total prestation and the potlatch we must seek to explain two complementary factors. Total prestation not only carries with it the obligation to repay gifts received, but it implies two others equally important: the obligation to give presents and the obligation

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS

I I

to receive them. A complete theory of the three obHgations would include a satisfactory fundamental explanation of this form of contract among Polynesian clans. For the moment we simply indicate the manner in which the subject might be treated.

It is easy to find a large number of facts on the obligation to receive. A clan, household, association or guest are con- strained to demand hospitality,^* to receive presents, to barter^^ or to make blood and marriage alliances. The Dayaks have even developed a whole set of customs based on the obligation to partake of any meal at which one is present or which one has seen in preparation.^^

The obligation to give is no less important. If we under- stood this, we should also know how men came to exchange things with each other. We merely point out a few facts. To refuse to give, or to fail to invite, is — like refusing to accept — the equivalent of a declaration of war; it is a refusal of friend- ship and intercourse.^' Again, one gives because one is forced to do so, because the recipient has a sort of proprietary right over everything which belongs to the donor.^^ This right is expressed and conceived as a sort of spiritual bond. Thus in Australia the man who owes all the game he kills to his father- and mother-in-law may eat nothing in their presence for fear that their very breath should poison his food.^* We have seen above that the taonga sister's son has customs of this kind in Samoa, which are comparable with those of the sister's son {vasu) in Fiji.*"

In all these instances there is a series of rights and duties about consuming and repaying existing side by side with rights and duties about giving and receiving. The pattern of sym- metrical and reciprocal rights is not difficult to understand if we realize that it is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons, and persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they i were things. '

All these institutions reveal the same kind of social and! psychological pattern. Food, women, children, possessions,!

^^

\)\^^

12 THE GIFT

charms, land, labour, services, religious offices, rank — every- thing is stuff to be given away and repaid. In perpetual interchange of what we may call spiritual matter, comprising men and things, these elements pass and repass between clans ^and individuals, ranks, sexes and generations.

4. Gifts to Men and Gifts to Gods

Another theme plays its part in the economy and morality of the gift: that of the gift made to men in the sight of gods or nature. We have not undertaken the wider study necessary to reveal its real import; for the facts at our disposal do not all come from the areas to which we have limited ourselves; and a strongly marked mythological element which we do not yet fully understand prevents us from advancing a theory. We simply give some indications of the theme.

In the societies of North-East Siberia '"■ and amongst the Eskimo of West Alaska ^^ and the Asiatic coast of the Behring Straits, the potlatch concerns not only men who rival each other in generosity, and the objects they transmit or destroy, and the spirits of the dead which take part in the transactions and whose names the men bear; it concerns nature as well. Exchanges between namesakes — people named after the same spirits — incite the spirits of the dead, of gods, animals and natural objects to be generous towards them.*^ Men say that gift-exchange brings abundance of wealth. Nelson and Porter have given us good descriptions of these ceremonies and the effect they have on the dead, on the game, the fish and shell- fish of the Eskimo. They are expressively called, in the language of British trappers, the 'Asking Festival' or the 'Inviting-in Festival'.** Ordinarily they are not confined within the hmits of winter settlements. The effect upon nature has been well shown in a recent work on the Eskimo.*^

The Yuit have a mechanism, a wheel decorated with all manner of provisions, carried on a greasy pole surmounted with the head of a walrus. The top of the pole protrudes above the tent of which it forms the centre. Inside the tent it is

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS I3

manoeuvred by means of another wheel and is made to turn clockwise like the sun. It would be hard to find a better expression of this mode of thought.*^

The theme is also to be found with the Koryak and Ghuk- chee of the extreme north-west of Siberia.*' Both have the potlatch. But it is the maritime Chukchee who, like their Yuit neighbours, practise most the obligatory-voluntary gift- exchanges in the course of protracted thanksgiving ceremonies which follow one after the other in every house throughout the winter. The remains of the festival sacrifice are thrown into the sea or cast to the winds; they return to their original home, taking with them all the game killed that year, ready to return again in the next. Jochelsen mentions festivals of the same kind among the Koryak, although he was present only at the whale festival. The system of sacrifice seems there to be very highly developed.*^

Bogoras rightly compares these with the Russian koliada customs in which masked children go from house to house begging eggs and flour and none dare refuse them. This is a European custom.*^

The connection of exchange contracts among men with those between men and gods explains a whole aspect of the theory of sacrifice. It is best seen in those societies where contractual and economic ritual is practised between men. Where the men are masked incarnations, often shamanistic, being possessed by the spirit whose name they bear, they act as representatives of the spirits.^" In that case the exchanges and contracts concern not only men and things but also the sacred beings that are associated with them.^^ This is very evident in Eskimo, Tlingit, and one of the two kinds of Haida potlatch.

There has been a natural evolution. Among the first groups of beings with whom men must have made contracts were the spirits of the dead and the gods. They in fact are the real owners of the world's wealth. ^^ With them it was particularly necessary to exchange and particularly dangerous not to; but, on the other hand, with them exchange was easiest and safest.

14 THE GIFT

Sacrificial destruction implies giving something that is to be repaid. All forms of North-West American and North-East Asian potlatch contain this element of destruction. ^^ It is not simply to show power and wealth and unselfishness that a man puts his slaves to death, burns his precious oil, throws coppers into the sea, and sets his house on fire. In doing this he is also sacrificing to the gods and spirits, who appear incarnate in the men who are at once their namesakes and ritual allies.

But another theme appears which does not require this human support, and which may be as old as the potlatch itself: the belief that one has to buy from the gods and that the gods know how to repay the price. This is expressed typically by the Toradja of the Celebes. Kruyt tells us that the 'owner' can 'buy' from the spirits the right to do certain things with his or rather 'their' property. Before he cuts his wood or digs his garden or stakes out his house he must make a payment to the gods. Thus although the notion of purchase seems to be little developed in the personal economic life of the Toradja, never- theless, the idea of purchase from gods and spirits is universally understood.^*

With regard to certain forms of exchange which we describe later Malinowski remarks on facts of the same order from the Trobriands. A malignant spirit is evoked — a tauvau whose body has been found in a snake or a land crab — by means of giving it vaygu'a (a precious object used in kula exchanges, at once ornament, charm and valuable). This gift has a direct effect on the spirit of the tauvau.^^ Again at the mila-mila festival,^® a potlatch in honour of the dead, the two kinds of vaygxCa — the kula ones and those which Malinowski now describes for the first time as 'permanent' vaygu'a ^' — are exposed and offered up to the spirits, who take the shades of them away to the country of the dead; ^^ there the spirits rival each other in wealth as men do on their return from a solemn kula.^^

Van Ossenbruggen, who is both a theorist and a distin- guished observer, and who lives on the spot, has noted another point about these institutions.®" Gifts to men and to gods have/ the further aim of buying peace. In this way evil influences are

GIFTS AND RETURN GIFTS I5

kept at bay, even when not personified; for a human curse will allow these jealous spirits to enter and kill you and permit evil influences to act, and if you commit a fault towards another man you become powerless against them. Van Ossenbruggen interprets in this way not only the throwing of money over the wedding procession in China, but even bridewealth itself. This is an interesting suggestion which raises a series of points.®^

We see how it might be possible to embark upon a theory and history of contractual sacnHce. Now this sacrifice pre- supposes institutions of the type we are describing, and con- versely it realizes them to the full, for the gods who give and repay are there to give something great in exchange for something small. Perhaps then it is not the result of pure chance ^^ that the two solemn formulas of contract, the Latin do ut des and the Sanskrit dadami se, dehi me have come down to us through religious texts.*^

A further note: on Alms

Later in legal and religious evolution man appears once more as representative of the gods and the dead, if indeed he had ever ceased to be so. For instance among the Hausa there is often a fever epidemic when the guinea-corn is ripe, and the only way to prevent it is to give presents of wheat to the poor.*^ Again, among the Hausa of Tripolitania, at the time of the great prayer {Baban Salld), the children go round the huts saying: 'Shall I enter?' The reply is: 'Oh prick-eared hare, for a bone one gets service' (the poor man is happy to work for the rich). These gifts to children and poor people are pleasing to the dead.** These customs may be Islamic in origin,** or Islamic, Negro, European and Berber at the same time.

Here at any rate is the beginning of a theory of alms. Alms \ are the result on the one hand of a moral idea about gifts and wealth ** and on the other of an idea about sacrifice. Generos- ity is necessary because otherwise Nemesis will take vengeance upon the excessive wealth and happiness of the rich by giving to the poor and the gods. It is the old gift morality raised to the position of a principle of justice; the gods and spirits

l6 THE GIFT

consent that the portion reserved for them and destroyed in useless sacrifice should go to the poor and the children. Origin- ally the Arabic sadaka meant, like the Hebrew zedaqa, exclusively justice, and it later came to mean alms. We can say that the Mishnic era, the time of the victory of the Paupers at Jerusalem, begot the doctrine of charity and alms which later went round the world with Christianity and Islam. It was at this time that the word zedaqa changed its meaning, since it does not mean alms in The Bible ^''

The value of the documents and commentaries we have quoted in this chapter is not merely local. Comparison takes us farther afield. For we can say that the basic elements of the potlatch are found in Polynesia even if the complete institution is not found there; ^® in any event gift-exchange is the rule. But to emphasize this theme would simply be a show of erudition if it did not extend beyond Polynesia. Let us now shift the subject and demonstrate that at least the obligation to give has a much wider distribution. Then we shall show the distribution of the other types of obligation and demonstrate that our interpretation is valid for several other groups of societies.

CHAPTER II

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM: GENEROSITY, HONOUR AND MONEY

THE facts here presented are drawn from various ethno- graphic areas, whose connecting links it is not our business to follow. From the ethnological point of view the existence of common potlatch traits in the Pacific, in North America and even in North Asia may be readily explained. But the existence of a form of potlatch among pygmies is strange, and no less puzzling are the traces of an Indo-European potlatch. We abstain from all considerations of the method by which the institution has spread. It would be naive and dangerous to talk of borrowing or independent invention. Moreover, the maps which have been drawn for the sake of such arguments represent no more than our present knowledge or ignorance. Let us then for the moment content ourselves with demonstrating the nature and wide distribution of a single theme. It is for others to reconstruct its history if they can. n^j^^

I. Rules of Generosity (Andaman Islands)

Customs of the kind we are discussing are found with the

pygmies who, according to Pater Schmidt,^ are the most

primitive of men. In 1906 Radcliffe-Brown observed facts of

this order in North Andaman, and described them admirably

with reference to inter-group hospitality, visits, festivals and

fairs, which present the opportunity for voluntary-obligatory

exchanges — in this case ofpchre and n;iaritime produce against

the produce of the chasfi^ 'Despite the importance of these

exchanges, 'as each local group and indeed each family was

able to provide itself with everything that it needed in the way

17

l8 THE GIFT

of weapons and utensils . . , the exchange of presents did not serve the same purpose as trade or barter in more developed communities. The purpose that it did serve was a moral one. The object of the exchange was to produce a friendly feeling between the two persons concerned, and unless it did this it failed of its purpose. . . .''No one was free to refuse a present

offered to him. Each man and woman tried to outdo the others

" "^ .

in generosity. There was a sort of amiable rivalry as to who'could give away the greatest nunlber of most valuable presents.' ^ The gifts put a seal to marriage, forming a friendly relationship between the two sets of relatives. They give the two sides an identity which is revealed in the taboo which from then on prevents them from visiting or addressing each other, and in the obhgation upon them thereafter to make perpetual gift-exchange.* The taboo expresses both the intimacy and the fear which arise from this reciprocal creditor-debtor relation- ship. This is clearly the principle involved since the same taboo, implying simultaneous intimacy and distance, exists between young people of both sexes who have passed through the turtle- and pig-eating ceremonies together,^ and who are Hkewise obliged to exchange presents for the rest of their lives. Australia also provides facts of this kind.* Radcliffe-Brown mentions rites of reunion — embracing and weeping — and shows how the exchange of presents is the equivalent of this,' and how sentiments and persons are mingled.^ This confusion of personalities and things is precisely the mark of exchange contracts^ "

2. Principles, Motives and Intensity of Gift Exchange

(Melanesia)

We saw that the^s^Ielanesian^^have preserved the potlatch better or developed it more highly than th^ Polynesians^^The same is true throughout the whole field of gift-exchange. In Melanesia also the notion of money appears more clearly," and while the system is more complex it is easier to understand.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM ig

New Caledonia

In Leenhardt's documents from New Caledonia can be seen the ideas and modes of expression to which we have been drawing attention. His prehminary description of the pilu-pilu and the system of feasts, gifts and prestations of all kinds, including money,^" clearly qualifies them as potlatch. The statements on custom in the formal discourses of the heralds are quite typical. Thus at the start of the ceremonial presenta- tion of yams ^^ the herald says: Tf there is some old pilu which we have not seen in the country of the Wi . . . this yam will speed there just as formerly such a yam came from thence to us.' ^2 Later in the same speech the spirits of the ancestors are said to make the effects of their action and power felt upon the food. 'Today appears the result of the act which you have accomplished. All the generations have appeared in its mouth.' There is another no less graphic way of expressing the link: 'Our feasts are the movement of the needle which sews together the parts of our reed roofs, making of them a single roof, one single word.' ^^ The same things (the same thread) return.^* Other authors have mentioned facts of this kind.^^

Trobriand Islands

At the other side of the Melanesian world there is a highly evolved system like that of New Caledonia. The Trobrianders are among the most advanced of these peoples. Today as prosperous pearl fishers, and before the arrival of Europeans as flourishing potters and stone workers, they have always been good business men and sturdy sailors. Malinowski compares them with the companions of Jason and names them well the (Argonauts of the Western Pacific'. In his book of this name, which stands among the best works of descriptive sociology, he treats the subject with which we are concerned, describing the whole system of inter-tribal and intra-tribal commerce known as the kula}^ We stilT await a full description of their most important institutions, of marriage, funeral ceremonies, initiation, etc., and hence our present remarks are only provisional. But already we have some definite facts of capital importance.^' 3

20 THE GIFT

The kula is a kind of grand potlatch; it is the vehicle of a

great inter-tribal trade extending over all the TroSriands, part

of the d'Entrecasteaux group and part of the Amphletts. It

has indirect influence on all the tribes and immediate influence

on some: Dobu in the Amphletts; Kiriwina, Sinaketa and

Kitava in the Trobriands; and Vakuta on Woodlark Island.

I Malinowski does not translate the word, which probably,

however, means 'ring' ; and in fact it seems as if all these tribes,

i the sea journeys, the precious objects, the food and feasts, the

1 economic, ritual and sexual services, the men and the women,

jwere caught in a ring around which they kept up a regular

'movement in time and space.

Kula trade is. aristocratic. It seems to be reserved for the chiefs, who are cmHs oftlie kula fleet and canoes, traders for their vassals (children and brothers-in-law) and, apparently, chiefs over a number of vassal villages. The trade is carried out in noble fashion, disinterestedly and modestly.^' It is dis- tinguished from the ' straightforward exchange of useful goods known as the giThwati7^^T\^s\'& carried~oiras~well as the kula in the great~~pnmitive fairs which mark inter-tribal kula gatherings and in the little kula markets of the interior; gimwali, however, is distinguished by most tenacious bargaining on both sides, a procedure unworthy of the kula. It is said of the indi- vidual who does not behave in his kula with proper magnani- mity that he is conducting it 'as a gimwalV. In appearance at any rate, thtkuJta, hkejhe American podatch, consists in giving and receiyingj^" the donors on one qccasioiL being the recipients on the next. Even in the largest, most solemn and highly com- petitive form of kula,^^ that of the great maritime expeditions (uvalaku), the rule is to set out with nothing to exchange or even to give in return for food (for which of course it is improper to ask). On these visits one is recipient only, and it is when the, visiting tribes the following year become the hosts that gifts are/ repaid with interest. 1

With the lesser kula^^ however, the sea voyage also serves as an opportunity for exchange of cargoes ; the nobles them- selves do business; numerous objects are solicitcd,^^ demanded

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 21

and exchanged, and many relationships are established in addition to kula ones; but the kula remains the most important reason for the expeditions and the relationships set up.

The ceremony of transfer is done with k^lemnity. The object given is disdained or suspect; ft is not accepted until it is thrown on the ground. The donor affects an exaggerated modesty. Solemnly bearing his gift, accompanied by the blowing of a conch-shell, he apologizes for bringing only his leavings and ~tllfows~lhc object at his partner's feet.*^ Meanwhile the gonclL> and the (herald -proclaim to one and all the dignity of the occasion. Pains are taken to show one's freedom and autonomy as well as one'<§ magnaniniity,'^* yet all the time one is actuated by the mechanisms of obligation which are resident in the gifts themselves.

The most important things exchanged are vaygu'a, a kind of currency. 2^ * These are of two sorts: mwali, the finely cut and polished armshells worn on great occasions by their owners or relatives, and the soulava, necklaces worked by the skilful turners of Sinaketa in handsome red spondylus shell. These are worn by women, 2* and only rarely by men, for example, during sickness. Normally they are hoarded and kept for the joy of having. The manufacture of the one, and the gathering of the other, and the trading of these objects of prestige and exchange form, along with other more common and vulgar pursuits, the source of Trobriand wealth. , ,^^ ;,, , ,

According to Malinowski these vaygu'a go in a sort of circular movement, the armshells passing regularly from west to east, and the necklaces from east to west.^' These two opposite movements take place between the d'Entrecasteaux group, the Amphletts, and the isolated islands of Woodlark, Marshall Bennett and Tubetube, and finally the extreme south-east coast of New Guinea, where the unpolished armshells come from. There this trade meets the great expeditions of the same nature from South Massim described by Seligman.'^^

* See page 93 for the important note on the principle adopted in discussing the idea of money.

22 THE GIFT

In theory these valuables never stop circulating. It is wrong to keep them too long or to be 'slow' and 'hard' with them; they are passed on only to predetermined partners in the arm- shell or necklace direction.^® They may be kept from one kula to the next while the community gloats over the vaygu'a which its chief has obtained. Although there are occasions, such as the preparation of funeral feasts, when it is permitted to receive and to pay nothing,^" these are no more than a prelude to the feast at which everything is repaid.

The gift received is in fact owned, but the ownership is of

a particular kind. One might say that it includes many legal

principles which we moderns have isolated from one another.

! It is at the same time property and a possession, a pledge and

a loan, an object sold and an object bought, a deposit, a

jniandate, a trust; for it is given only on condition that it will be

jused on behalf of, or transmitted to, a third person, the remote

jpartner {murimuri) .^^ Such is the economic, legal and moral

complex, of quite a typical kind, that Malinowski discovered

I and described.

This institution also has its mythical, religious and magical aspects. Vaygu'a are not indifferent things; they are mor^^an mere coins. All of them, at least the most valuable and most coveted, ^^ have a name,^^ a personality, a past, and even a legend attached to them, to such an extent that people may be named after them. One cannot say that they are actually the object of a cult, for the Trobrianders are t^ositivists in their way. But it is impossible not to recognize their superior and sacred .nature. To possess one is 'exhilarating, comforting, soothing in itself'.^* Their owners handle them and gaze at them for hours. Mere contact with them is enough to make them transmit their virtues.^^ You place a vaygu'a on the brow or the chest of a sick man, or dangle it before his face. It is his supreme balm.

But more than that, the contract itself partakes of the nature of the vaygu'a. Not only armshells and necklaces, but also goods, ornaments, weapons, and everything belonging to the partner, are so alive with feeling, if not with personality, that they have

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 23

their part in the contract as well.^^ A fine formula, the 'spell of the conch-shellV is used after invoking them to charm or attract towards the partner the things he means to ask and receive.^^ '[A state of excitement ^^ seizes my partner.] *" A state of excitement seizes his dog, his belt, his gwara [taboo on cocoanuts and betelnuts],^ his bagidou necklace, his bagiriku necklace, his bagidudu necklace. . . .' ^^

Another more mythical spell expresses the same idea. The kula partner is an animal, a crocodile which he invokes to bring him necklaces. ^^

'Crocodile, fall down, take thy man, push him down under the gebobbo [part of the canoe where the cargo is stowed]

'Crocodile, bring me the necklace, bring me the bagidou, the bagiriku. . . .' A previous spell in the same ritual invokes a bird of prey.**

The last spell of the partners in Dobu or Kitava, by the people of Kiriwina, contains a couplet of which two interpre- tations are given. *^ The ritual is very long and is repeated many times; its purpose is to enumerate everything forbidden in the kula, everything to do with hatred and war which must be conjured away so that trade can take place between friends. 'Thy fury, the dog sniffs. Thy warpaint, the dog sniffs. . . .' Other versions say :

'Thy fury, the dog is docile. . . .' or:

'Thy fury ebbs, it ebbs away, the dog plays about, Thy anger ebbs. . . .' This means: 'Thy fury becomes like the dog that plays about.' The point is the metaphor of the dog that rises and Ucks its master's hand. The Dobuan and his wife should then act in this way. The second interpretation — according to Malinowski somewhat sophisticated and academic, but indigenous all the same — gives a commentary which is more in keeping with what we know already: 'The dogs play nose to nose. When you mention the word dog, the precious objects also come to play.

24 THE GIFT

We have given armshells, and necklaces will come, and they will meet, like dogs which come to sniff.' The expression and metaphor are neat. All the sentiments are seen at once: the I possible hatred of the partners, the vaygu'a being charmed j from their hiding-places; men and precious objects gathering/ together like dogs that play and run about at the sound of a man's voice. ~ ~

Another symbolic expression is that of the marriage of armshells, female symbols, with necklaces, male symbols, attracted towards each other like male and female.** These various metaphors mean exactly what Maori customary beliefs denote in other terms. Once again it is the confusion of objects, [ values, contracts and men which finds expression.*'

Unfortunately we know very little about the sanction behind these transactions. Either it was badly formulated by the people of Kiriwina, Malinowski's informants, or else it is quite clear to the Trobrianders and only needs further research. We have only a few details. The first gift of a vaygvUa has the name of i/a^flj,.ppening^gift.*^ It definitely binds the recipient to make a J"eturn gift, the^o/f/^, well translated by Malinowski as the ' clinch iog, gift J-. * ° Another name for this \s kudu, the tooth which bites, severs and liberates. *° It is obligatory; it is expected and must be equivalent to the first gift; it may be taken by force or surprise. ^^ One can avenge non-payment by magic ^^ or a show of resentment if the yotile does not come up to expectations. If one is unable to repay, one may, if necessary, offer a basi^ a tooth which does not bite right through but only piercesTheTkin and leaves the transaction unfinished. It is a temporary affair, the interest on an overdue payment, and although it appeases the creditor it does not absolve the debtor.^^ These details are interesting and the expressions are clear, but the sanction is not at all evident. Is it only mystical and moral ? ^* Is the man who is 'hard' in the kula only scorned and bewitched ? Does not the unfaithful partner lose something else — his rank or at least his position among chiefs? This is something we are not told.

From another angle the institution is typical. Except in old

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 25

Germanic custom we have found no system of gift exchange i more clear or complete and also better understood both by participants and observer than that described by Malinowski 1 for the Trobrianders.^^

The kula in its essential form is itself only the most solemn part of a vast system of prestations and counter-prestations which seem to embrace the whole social life of the Trobrianders. The kula (particularly the inter-island form) appears to be merely the crowning episode of this life. Although it forms one of the great interests of all Trobrianders, and is one of the main reasons for the great expeditions, it is only chiefs, and maritime chiefs at that, who take part in it.. The kula is the gathering point of many other institutions.

The exchange of vaygu^a is set amidst a series of different kinds of exchange, ranging from barter to wage-payment, from solicitation to courtesy, from hospitality to reticence and shame. In the first place, except for the uvalaku, the great expeditions of a purely ceremonial and competitive nature, all kula trans- actions are an opportunity for ordinary exchange, gimwali, which does not necessarily take place between established partners. ^^ Alongside the established partnerships there is an open market between persons of allied tribes. And then between kula partners there pass supplementary gifts in an unbroken chain. The kula demands them. The association or partnership it sets up and through which it functions starts with a prelimi- nary gift, the vaga, which is strenuously sought after by means of solicitory gifts. To obtain this vaga a man may flatter his future partner, who is still independent, and to whom he is making a preliminary series of presents.^' Although one is certain that the yotile, the cHnching gift, will be returned, one can never say whether the vaga will be given in the first place or whether even the ^olicitory. gifts will be accepted. This manner of soliciting and receiving is the rule. Gifts thus mad^ have a special name, in this case pari.^^ They are laid out before being presented. Others have names signifying the noble and magical nature of the objects offered.^® To receive one of these gifts means that one is desirous of entering into and

^

26 THE GIFT

remaining in partnership. Some gifts of this kind have titles which express the legal implications of their acceptance,*" in which case the affair is considered to be settled. The gift is normally an object of some value, like a large polished stone axe or whalebone knife. To receive it is actually to commit oneself to return the vaga, the first desirable gift. But still one is only Balf a partner. It.is_the solemn handing over of the vaga which finally fixes ^he partnership. The importance of these gifts arises from the extraordinary competition which exists among members of an expedition. They seek out the best possible partner in the other tribe. For the cause is a great one; the association made establishes a kind of clan link between partners.*^ To get your man you have to seduce him and dazzle him.^^ While paying proper regard to rank,^^ you must get in before the others and make exchanges of the most valuable [things — naturally the property of the richest man. The under-/ I lying motives are competition, rivalry, show, and a desire fori ! greatness and wealth.®*

These are the arrival gifts; there are other analogous gifts of departure, called talo'i on Sinaketa,®^ and of leave-taking; they are always superior to the gifts of arrival. Here again the cycle of prestations and counter-prestations with interest is accomplished alongside the kula.

Naturally at the time of these transactions there are prestations of hospitality, of food, and, on Sinaketa, of women. Finally there are continual supplementary gifts, always regularly repaid. It even seems that these kortumna represent a primitive form of the kula since they consist of the exchange of stone axes and boars' teeth.®®

In our view the whole inter-tribal kula is an exaggerated case, the most dignified and dramatic example, of a general system. It takes the whole tribe out of the narrow circle of its own frontiers. The same holds also for the clans and villages within the tribes, which are bound by links of the same sort. In this case it is only the local and domestic group and their chiefs which go out to pay visits, do business, and intermarry. Perhaps it is not proper to call this kula. Malinowski, however,

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 27

rightly speaks, in contrast to the maritime kula, of the kula of the interior and oi kula communities which provide their chiefs with articles for exchange. It is no exaggeration to speak in these cases of the real potlatch. For instance, the visits of the Kiriwina people to Kitava for mortuary ceremonies {s'oi) *' involve more than the exchange oi vaygu'a; there is a feigned attack [youlawada) ,^^ a distribution of food, and a display of pigs and yams.

The vaygu'd are not always acquired,®^ manufactured,'" and exchanged by the chiefs in person. Most of them come to the chiefs as gifts from their vassal relatives of inferior rank, particularly brothers-in-law, or from sons with their own fiefs^ elsewhere.'^ And then on the return of the expedition the vaygu'd are solemnly handed over to the village chiefs, the clan chiefs or even to commoners of the clans concerned : in short, to whomsoever has taken part, however indirectly, in the expedition. '2

Lastly, alongside the internal kula, the system of gift- exchange pervades the whole economic life of the Trobriands. I Social life is a constant give-and-take; " gifts are rendered, received and repaid both obligatorily and in one's own interest, I In magnanimity, for repayment of services, or as challenges or pledges. We here set down a few of the most important forms they take.

A relationship analogous to the kula is that of the wasi. '^ This sets up regular and obligatory exchanges between partners, between agricultural tribes on the one hand and maritime trihes^njthe other. The agricultural partner places produce in front of the house of his fisherman associate. The latter, after a great fishing expedition, makes return with interest, giving his partner in the agricultural village the product of his catch. '^ Here is the same principle of division of labour as we noticed in New Zealand.

Another remarkable form of exchange takes the form of display. !! This is sagali, a great and frequent distribution of food, made at harvests, during the construction of the chief's house, the building of canoes and funeral ceremonies." The

.;,., '^- ' --

28 THE GIFT

distribution is made to groups that have given their services to the chief or to his clan by means of their crops, or house- beams, or the transport of heavy tree-trunks for canoe-building, or else by services rendered at a funeral by the dead man's clan, and so on.'^ These distributions are in every way similar to the Kwakiutl potlatch, even to the elements of combat and rivalry. Clans and phratries and allied families confront one another and the transactions are group affairs, at least so long as the chief restrains himself.

These group rights and collective economic factors are already some way distant from the kula, as are all individual exchange relationships. Some of the latter may be of the order of simple barter. However, since this simple barter takes place only between relatives, close allies or kula or wasi partners, it hardly seems that exchange even here is really free. Moreover, what one receives, no matter by what means, one may not keep for oneself unless it is quite impossible to do without it. Ordinarily it is passed to someone else, a brother-in-law perhaps.'* It may happen that the very things which one has received and given away will be returned on the same day.

Returns of prestations of all kinds, of goods or services, fall into the same categories. Here are some presented in no special order.

The pokala *" and kaributu,^^ solicitory gifts, which we saw in the kula, are species of a much wider genus which corresponds fairly closely to what we know as wages. They are offered to gods and spirits. Another generic name for the same is vakapula or mapula ; ^^ these are tokens of recognition and welcome and they too must be repaid. In this regard Malinowski makes what we believe to be an important discovery which explains econo- mic and legal relationships between the sexes in marriage; ^^ services of all kinds given to the woman by her husband are con- sidered as a gift-payment for the service the woman renders O ^ when she lends him what the Koran calls 'the field'. Cy-v^^A. s^y^^KX

The somewhat immature legal language of the Trobrianders has multiplied the names distinguishing all kinds of prestations and counter-prestations according to the name of the prestation

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 29

repaid,^* the thing given, ^^ the circumstances,®^ and so on. Certain names cover all these considerations: for example, the gift to a magician or for the acquisition of a title is known as laga.^'' It is hard to say just how far the vocabulary has been complicated by a strange incapacity for abstraction, and by odd embellishments in the nomenclature.

Other Melanesian Societies

It is unnecessary to multiply the comparisons from many other Melanesian peoples. However, some details may be taken from here and there to strengthen the case and show that the Trobrianders and New Caledonians are not abnormal in having evolved a principle which is strange to other related peoples.

In the extreme south of Melanesia, in fjFiji, where we have already identified the potlatch, there are other noteworthy institutions belonging to the gift system. There is a season, the kerekere, when it is forbidden to refuse a man anything. ^^ Gifts are exchanged between families at marriages, etc.®^ Moreover Fijian money, cachalot teeth, is the same as that of the Tro- brianders. It is known as tambua. This is supplemented by stones ('mothers' of the teeth), and ornaments, mascots, talismans and lucky charms of the tribe. The sentiments of the Fijians in regard to the tambua are the same as those just described: 'They are regarded by their owners very much as a girl regards her dolls. They like to take them out and admire and talk about their beauty; they have a "mother," who is continually being oiled and polished.' Their presentation is a request, and their acceptance a pledge.*"

The Melanesians of New Guinea and the Papuans influ- enced by them call their money tautau; ^^ it is of the same kind and the object of the same beliefs, as that of the Trobriands.*^ We should compare this name with tahutahu which means a loan of pigs (Motu and Koita).*^ Now this word is famihar to us as the Polynesian term, the root of the word taonga of Samoa and New Zealand — jewels and property incorporated in the

30 THE GIFT

family.^* The words themselves are Polynesian like the objects. ^*

We know that the Melanesians and Papuans of New Guinea have the potlatch.^^

The fine documentation by Thurnwald on the tribes of Buin ^' and the Banaro ^^ have already furnished us with points of comparison. The sacred character of the things exchanged is evident, in particular in the case of money and the way it is given in return for wives, love, songs and services; as in the Trobriands it is a sort of pledge. Thurnwald has analysed too one of the facts which best illustrates this system of reciprocal gifts and the nature of the misnamed 'marriage by purchase'. ^^ In reality, this includes prestations from all sides, including the bride's family, and a wife is sent back if her relatives have not offered sufficient gifts in return.

In short this whole island world, and probably also the parts of South-East Asia related to it, reveal similar institutions. Thus the view which we must adopt regarding these Melan- esian peoples, who are even wealthier and more commercially inclined than the Polynesians, is very different from the view which is normally taken. They have an extra-domestic economy and a highly developed exchange system, and are busier commercially than French peasants and fishermen have been for the past hundred years. They have an extensive economic life and a considerable trade that cuts across geographical and linguistic boundaries. They replace our system of sale and purchase with one of gifts and return gifts.

In this type of economy, and in the Germanic as we shall see, there is an incapacity to abstract and analyse concepts. But this is unnecessary. In these societies groups cannot analyse themselves or their actions, and influential individuals, however comprehending they may be, do not reahze that they have to oppose each other. The chief is confounded with his clan and his clan with him, and individuals feel themselves to act only in one way. Holmes makes the acute observation that the Toaripi and Namau languages, the one Papuan and the other Melanesian, which he knew at the mouth of the Finke, have

/

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 3I

'only a single word to cover buy and sell, borrow and lend'. Antithetical operations are expressed by the same word. 'Strictly speaking, the natives did not borrow and lend in the manner that we do, but something was always in the form of a honorarium for the loan when it was returned.' ^°° These men have neither the notion of selling nor the notion of lending, and yet carry out the legal and economic activities corre- sponding to these words.

Nor is the notion of barter any more natural to the Melan- esians than it is to the Polynesians. Kruyt, one of the better ethnographers, while using the word 'sale', describes exactly this state of mind among the inhabitants of Central Celebes.^"^ And yet these Toradja have long been in contact with the Malays who are well known for their trading.

Thus we see that a part of mankind, wealthy, hard-working and creating large surpluses, exchanges vast amounts in ways and for reasons other thanjjiose with which we are familiar from our own societies.

3. Honour and Credit (North- West America)

From these observations on Melanesian and Polynesian peoples our picture of gift economy is already beginning to take shape. Material and moral life, as exemplified in gift- exchange, functions there in a manner at once interested and obligatory. Furthermore, the obligation is expressed in myth and imagery, symbolically and collectively; it takes the form of interest in the objects exchanged; the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them; the communion and alliance thex establish are well-nigh indis- soluble. The lasting influence of the objects exchanged is a direct expression of the manner in which sub-groups within segmentary societies of an archaic type are constantly embroiled with and feel themselves in debt to each other.

Indian societies of the American North- West have the same institutions, but in a more radical and accentuated form. Barter is unknown there. Even now after long contact with

32 THE GIFT

Europeans it does not appear that any of the considerable and continual transfers of wealth take place otherwise than through the formality of the potlatch.^"^ We now describe this institution as we see it.

First, however, we give a short account of these societies. The tribes in question inhabit the North West American coast — the Tlingit and Haida of Alaska,^°^ and the Tsimshian and Kwakiutl of British Columbia.^°* They live on the sea or on the rivers and depend more on fishing than on hunting for their livelihood; but in contrast to the Melanesians and Polynesians they do not practise agriculture. Yet they are very wealthy, and even at the present day their fishing, hunting and trapping activities yield surpluses which are considerable even when reckoned on the European scale. They have the most substantial houses of all the American tribes, and a highly evolved cedar industry. Their canoes are good; and although they seldom venture out on to the open sea they are skilful in navigating around their islands and in coastal waters. They have a high standard of material culture. In particular, even back in the eighteenth century, they collected, smelted, moulded and beat local copper from Tsimshian and Tlingit country. Some of the copper in the form of decorated shields they used as a kind of currency. Almost certainly another form of currency was the beautifully embellished Chilkat blanket-work still used orna- mentally, some of it being of considerable value.^"^ The peoples are excellent carvers and craftsmen. Their pipes, clubs and sticks are the pride of our ethnological collections. Within broad limits this civilization is remarkably uniform. It is clear that the societies have been in contact with each other from very early days, although their languages suggest that they belong to at least three families of peoples.^"®

Their winter life, even with the southern tribes, is very different frorn_their summer life. The tribes have a two-fold structure: at the end of spring they disperse and go hunting, collect berries from the hillsides and fish the rivers for salmon; while in winter they concentrate in what are known as towns. During this period of concentration they are in a perpetual

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 33

State of effervescence. The social life becomes intense in the extreme, ^ven more so than in the concentrations of tribes that manage to form in the summer. This lite consists of continual movement. There are constant visits of whole tribes to others, of clans to clans and families to families. There is feast upon feast, some of long duration. On the occasion of a marriage, on various ritual occasions, and on social advancement, there is reckless consumption of everything which has been amassed with great industry from some of the richest coasts of the world during the course of summer and autumn. Even private life passes in this manner; clansmen are invited when a seal is killed or a box of roots or berries opened ; you invite everyone when a whale runs aground.

Social organization, too, is fairly constant throughout the area thoiigh itTangeTfrom theTnatrilineal phratry (Tlingit and Haida) to the modified matriltneah clan of-tfae Kwakiutl ; but the general characters of the social organization and particu- larly of totemism >rc repeated in all the tribes. They have associations like those of the Banks Islanders of Melanesia, wrongly called 'secret societies', which are often inter-tribal; and men's and women's societies among the Kwakiutl cut across tribal organization. A part of the gifts and counter- prestations which we shall discuss goes, as in Melanesia,^"' to pay Q^e's way into the successive steps ^"^ of the associations. Clah and association ritual follows the marriage of chiefs, the sale of coppers, initiations, shamanistic seances and funeral ceremonies, the latter being more particularly pronounced among the Tlingit and Haida. These are all accomplished in the course of an indefinitely prolonged series of potlatches. Potlatches are given in all directions, corresponding to other potlatches to which they are the response. As in Melanesia the process is one of constant give-and-take.

The potlatch, so unique as a phenomenon, yet so typical of .^ these tribes, is really nothing other thanj^ft-exchange.^"" The only differences are in the violence, rivalry and antagonism aroused, ia-aJ[a£k_of jural concepls^.andJn a simpler structure. It is less refined than in Melanesia, especially as regards the

34 THE GIFT

northern tribes, the Tlingit and the Haida,^^° but the collective nature of the contract is more pronounced than in Melanesia and Polynesia.^i^ Despite appearances, the institutions here are nearer to what we call shnple total prestations. Thus the legal and economic concepts attached to themTiave less clarity and conscious precision. Nevertheless, in action the principles emerge formally and clearly.

There are two traits more in evidence here than in the Melanesian potlatch or in the more evolved and discrete institutions of Polynesia: the themes of credit and honour.^^^

As we have seen, when gifts circulate in Melanesia and Polynesia the return is assured by the virtue of the things passed on, which are their own guarantees. In any society ^ is in the nature of the gift in the end to being its own reward. By definition, a common meal, a distribution o{ kava, or a charm worn, cannot be repaid at once. Ti«i€Jias_tOL43ass^ before a counter-prestation can be made. Thus the notion of time is logically impHed when one pays a visit, contracts a marriage or an alliance, makes a treaty, goes to organized games, fights or feasts of others, renders ritual and honorific service and 'shows respect', to use the Tlingit term."^ All these are things ex- changed side by side with other material objects, and they are the more numerous as the society is wealthier.

On this point, legal and economic theory is greatly at fault. Imbued with modern ideas, current theory tends towards a priori notions of evolution,^^* and claims to follow a so-called necessary logic; in fact, however, it remains based on old traditions. Nothing could be more dangerous than what Simiand called this 'unconscious sociology'. For instance, Cuq could still say in 1910: 'In primitive societies barter alone is found; in those more advanced, direct sale is practised. Sale on credit characterizes a higher stage of civilization ; it appears first in an indirect manner, a combination of sale and loan.' ^^^ In fact the origin of credit is different. It is to be found in a range of customs neglected by lawyers and economists as uninteresting: namely the gift, which is a complex phenomenon especially in its ancient form of total prestation, which we are

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 35

Studying here. Now a gjft necessarily implies the notion of credit. Economic evolutiorTTrasTTorgone from barter to sale and from cash to credit. Barter arose from the system of gifts given and received on credit, simplified by drawing together the moments of time which had previously been distinct. Likewise purchase and sale^ — both direct sale and credit sale — and the loan, derive from the same source. There is nothing to suggest that any economic system which has passed through the phase we are describing was ignorant of the idea of credit, of which all archaic societies around us are aware. This is a simple and realistic manner of dealing with the problem, which Davy has already studied, of the 'two moments of time' which the contract unites.^^^

No less important is the role whichOionour plays in the transactions of the Indians. Nowhere else is"~tfie prestige of an individual as closely bound up with expenditure, and with the duty of returning with interest gifts received in such a way that the creditor becomes the debtor. Consumption and destruction are virtually unlimited. In some potlatch systems one is con- strained to expend everything one possesses and to keep nothing.^^' The rich man who shows his_w^ealth by spending recklessly is the man who wins prestige. The principles of rivalry and antagonism are basic. Political and individual status in associations and clans, and rank of every kind, are ^determined by the war of property, as well as by armed hostiTiHes, by~charice,Tnheritance, alliance or marriage.^^^ But everything is conceived as if it were a war of wealth. ^^^ Marriage of one's children and one's position at gatherings are deter- mined solely in the course of the potlatch given and returned. Position is also lost as in war, gambling,^'^" hunting and wrestling.^^^ Sometimes there is no question of receiving return; one destroys simply in order to give the appearance that one has no desire to receive anything back.^^^ Whole cases of candle- fish or whale oil,^^^ houses, and blankets by the thousand are burnt; the most valuable coppers are broken and thrown into the sea to level and crush a rival. Progress up the social ladder is made in this way not only for oneself but also for one's

4

7

36 THE GIFT

family. Thus in a system of this kind much wealth is continually

being consumed and transferred. Such transfers may if desired

be called exchange or even commerce or sale; ^^* but it is an

aristacraticjtyp£_af-^^n«iier£&-€4mfaet€riz€d'by" etiquette an3

generosity; moreover^ when it is carried out in a different

spirit, for immediate gain, it is viewed with the greatest disdain.^25

We see, then, that the notion of honour, strong in Polynesia, and present in Melanesia, is exceptionally marked here. On this point the classical writings made a poor estimate of the motives which animate men and of all that we owe to societies that preceded our own. Even as informed a scholar as Huvelin felt obliged to deduce the notion of honour — which is reputedly without efficacy — from the notion of magical efficacy.^'^^ The truth is more complex. The notion of honour is no more foreign to these civilizations than the notion of magic.^^'^ Polynesian mana itself symbolizes not only the magical power of the person but also his honour, and one of the best translations of the word is 'authority' or 'wealth'. ^^^ The Tlingit or Haida potlatch consists in considering mutual services as honours.^^" Even in really primitive societies like the Australian, the 'point of honour' is as ticklish as it is in ours; and it may be satisfied by prestations, offerings of food, by precedence or ritual, as well as by gifts.^^" Men could pledge their honour long before they could sign their names.

The North- West American potlatch has been studied enough as to the form of the contract. But we must find a place for the researches of Davy and Adam in the wider framework of our subject. For the potlatch is more than a legal phenomenon; it is one of those phenomena we propose to_call 'totalL It is -j:eligious, mythological and shamanistic because the chiefs taking part are incarnations of gods and ancestors, whose names they bear, whose dances they dance and whose spirits possess them.^^^ It is economic; and one has to assess the value, im- portance, causes and effects of transactions which are enormous even when reckoned by European standards. The potlatch is also a phenomenon of social morphology ; the reunion of tribes,

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 37

clans, families and nations produces great excitement. People fraternize but at the same time remain strangers; community of interest and opposition are revealed constantly in a great whirl of business. ^^^ Finally, from the jural point of view, we have already noted the contractual forms and what we might call the human element of the contract, and the legal status of the contracting parties — as clans or families or with reference to rank or marital condition; and to this we now add that the material objects of the contracts have a virtue of their own which causes them to be given and compels the making of counter-gifts.

It would have been useful, if space had been available, to distinguish four forms of American potlatch: first, potlatch where the phratries and chiefs' families alone take part (Tlin- git) ; second, potlatches in which phratries, clans, families and chiefs take more or less similar roles (Haida) ; third, potlatch with chiefs and their clans confronting each other (Tsimshian) ; and fourth, potlatch of chiefs and fraternities (Kwakiutl). But this would prolong our argument, and in any case three of the four forms (with the exception of the Tsimshian) have already been comparatively described by Davy.^'^ But as far as our study is concerned all the forms are more or less identical as regards the elements of the gift, the obligation to receive and the obligation to make a return,

4. The Three Obligations: GivIng, Receiving, Repaying The Obligation to Give

This is the essence of potlatch. A chief must give a potlatch for himself, his son, his son-in-law or daughter ^^* and for the dead.^^^ He can keep his authority in his tribe, village and family, and maintain his position with the chiefs inside and outside his nation,^^^ only if he can prove that he is favourably regarded by the spirits, that he possesses fortune ^^' and that he is possessed by it.^^^ The only way to demonstrate his fortune is by expending it to the humiliation of others, by putting them

38 THE GIFT

'in the shadow of his name',^^' Kwakiutl and Haida noblemen have the same notion of 'face' as the Chinese mandarin or officer.^*" It is said of one of the great mythical chiefs who gave no feast that he had a 'rotten face'.^*^ The expression is more apt than it is even in China ; for to lose one's face is to lose one's spirit, which is truly the 'face', the dancing mask, the right to incarnate a spirit and wear an emblem or totem. It is the veritable persona which is at stake, and it can be lost in the potlatch ^*2 just as it can be lost in the game of gift-giving,^*' in war,^** or through some error in ritual.^*^ In all these societies one is anxious to give; there is no occasion of importance (even outside the solemn winter gatherings) when one is not obliged to invite friends to share the produce of the chase or the forest which the gods or totems have sent; ^*^ to redistribute every- thing received at a potlatch; or to recognize services^*' from chiefs, vassals or relatives ^*^ by means of gifts. Failing these obligations — at least for the nobles — etiquette is violated and rank is lost.^*'

The obligation to invite is particularly evident between clans or between tribes. It makes sense only if the invitation is given to people other than members of the family, clan or phratry.^^" Everyone who can, will or does attend the potlatch must be invited.^^^ Neglect has fateful results.^^'^ An important Tsimshian myth ^^' shows the state of mind in which the central theme of much European folklore originated: the myth of the bad fairy neglected at a baptism or marriage. Here the institu- tional fabric in which it is sewn appears clearly, and we realize the kind of civilization in which it functioned. A princess of one of the Tsimshian villages conceives in the 'Country of the Otters' and gives birth miraculously to 'Little Otter'. She returns with her child to the village of her father, the chief Little Otter catches halibut with which her father feeds all the tribal chiefs. He introduces Little Otter to everyone and requests them not to kill him if they find him fishing in his animal form: 'Here is my grandson who has brought for you this food with which I serve you, my guests.' Thus the grand- father grows rich with all manner of wealth brought to him by

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 39

the chiefs when they come in the winter hunger to eat whale and seal and the fresh fish caught by Little Otter. But one chief is not invited. And one day when the crew of a canoe of the neglected tribe meets Little Otter at sea the bowman kills him and takes the seal. The grandfather and all the tribes search high and low for Little Otter until they hear about the neglected tribe. The latter offers its excuses ; it has never heard of Little Otter. The princess dies of grief; the involuntarily guilty chief brings the grandfather all sorts of gifts in expiation. The myth ends: 'That is why the people have great feasts when a chief's son is born and gets a name; for none may be ignorant of him.' ^^* The potlatch — the distribution of goods— is the^ fundamental act of public recognition in all spheres, military, legal, economic and religious. The chief or his son is recognized | and acknowledged by the people.^^^

Sometimes the ritual in the feasts of the Kwakiutl and other tribes in the same group expresses this obligation to invite.^^* Part of the ceremonial opens with the 'ceremony of the dogs'. These are represented by masked men who come out of one house and force their way into another. They commemorate the occasion on which the people of the three other tribes of Kwakiutl proper neglected to invite the clan which ranked highest among them, the Guetela who, having no desire to remain outsiders, entered the dancing house and destroyed every thing.^^'

The Obligation to Receive

This is no less constraining. One does not have the right to refuse a gift or a potlatch. ^^^ To do so would show fear qf_ having to_repa^^^^nd of being abased in default. One would "Tose the weight' of one's name by admitting defeat in ad- vance.*^* In certain circumstances, however, a refusal can be an assertion of victory and invincibility.^^" It appears at least with the Kwakiutl that a recognized position in the hierarchy, or a victory through previous potlatches, allows one to refuse an invitation or even a gift without war ensuing. If this is so, then

v/ 40 THE GIFT

a potlatch must be carried out by the man who refuses to accept the invitation. More particularly, he has to contribute to the 'fat festival' in which a ritual of refusal may be observed.^®^ The chief who considers himself superior refuses the spoonful of fat offered him: he fetches his copper and returns with it to 'extinguish the fire' (of the fat) . A series of formalities follow which mark the challenge and oblige the chief who has refused to give another potlatch or fat festival.^^^ In principle, however, gifts are always accepted and praised.^^^ You must speak your appreciation of food prepared for you.^^* But you accept a challenge at the same time.^^^ You receive a gift 'on the back'. You accept the food and you do so because you mean to take up the challenge and prove that you are not unworthy.^®^ When chiefs confront each other in this manner they may find themselves in odd situations and probably they experience them as such. In like manner in ancient Gaul and Germany, as well as nowadays in gatherings of French farmers and students, one is pledged to swallow quantities of hquid to 'do honour' in grotesque fashion to the host. The obligation stands even although one is only heir to the man who bears the challenge.^® ^ Failure to give or receive,^^^ like failure to make return gifts, means a loss of dignity.^® ^

The Obligation to Repay

Outside pure destruction the obligation to repay is the essence of potlatch.^ '° Destruction is very often sacrificial, directed towards the spirits, and apparently does not require a return unconditionally, especially when it is the work of a superior clan chief or of the chief of a clan already recognized as superior.^''' But normally the potlatch must be returned with interest like all other gifts. The interest is generally between 30 and 100 per cent, a year. If a subject receives a blanket from his chief for a service rendered he will return two on the occa- sion of a marriage in the chief's family or on the initiation of the chief's son. But then the chief in his turn redistributes to him whatever he gets from the next potlatch at which rival clans repay the chief's generosity.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 4I

The obligation of worthy return is imperative.^ '2 p^ce is lost for ever if it is not made or if equivalent value is not destroyed. ^'^

The sanction for the obligation to repay is enslavement for debt. This is so at least for the Kwakiutl, Haida and Tsimshian. It is an institution comparable in nature and function to the Roman nexum. The person who cannot return a loan or potlatch loses his rank and even his status of a free man. If among the Kwakiutl a man of poor credit has to borrow he is said to 'sell a slave'. We need not stress the similarity of this expression with the Roman one.^'^ The Haida say, as if they had invented the Latin phrase independently, that a girl's mother who gives a betrothal payment to the mother of a young chief 'puts a thread on him'.

Just as the Trobriand i:zc(^s aJi.^trei»<..case--©^-gifl: ex- change, so the potlatch in North- West America is the monster child of the gift system. In societies of phratries, amongst the Tlingit and Haida, we find important traces of a former total prestation (which is characteristic of the Athabascans, a related group). Presents are exchanged on any pretext for any service, and everything is returned sooner or later for redis- tribution.^'^ The Tsimshian have almost the same rules.^" Among the Kwakiutl these rules, in many cases, function outside the potlatch.^" We shall not press this obvious point; old authors described the potlatch in such a- way as to make it doubtful whether it was or was not a distinct institution."^ We may recall that with the Chinook, one of the least known tribes but one which would repay study, the word 'potlatch' means 'gift'."^

5. The Power in Objects of Exchange

Our analysis can be carried farther to show that in the things exchanged at a potlatch there is a certain power which forces them to circulate, to be given away and repaid.

To begin with, the Kwakiutl and Tsimshian, and perhaps others, make the same distinction between the various types of

42 THE GIFT

property as do the Romans, Trobrianders and Samoans, They have the ordinary articles of consumption and distribution and perhaps also of sale (I have found no trace of barter). They have also the valuable family property^ — -talismans, decorated coppers, skin blankets and embroidered fabrics.^ ^" This class of articles is transmitted with that solemnity with which women are given in marriage, privileges are endowed on sons-in-law, and names and status are given to children and daughters' husbands,^ ^^ It is wrong to speak here of alienation, for these things are loaned rather than sold and ceded. Basically they are sacra which the family parts with, if at all, only with reluctance.

Closer observation reveals similar distinctions among the Haida. This tribe has in fact sacralized, in the manner of Antiquity, the notions of property and wealth. By a religious and mythological effort of a type rare enough in the Americas they have managed to reify an abstraction: the 'Property Woman', of whom we possess myths and a description.^ ^^ g^g is nothing less than the mother, the founding goddess of the dominant phratry, the Eagles. But oddly enough — a fact which recalls the Asiatic world and Antiquity — she appears identical with the 'queen', the principal piece in the game of tip-cat, the piece that wins everything and whose name the Property Woman bears. This goddess is found in Tlingit^^^ country and her myth, if not her cult, among the Tsimshian ^^* and Kwakiutl.185

Together these precious family articles constitute what one might call the magical legacy of the people; they are conceived as such by their owner, by the initiate he gives them to, by the ancestor who endowed the clan with them,' and by the founding hero of the clan to whom the spirits gave them.^*** In any case in all these clans they are spiritual in origin and nature.^*' Further, they are kept in a large ornate box which itself is endowed with a powerful personality, which speaks, is in communion with the owner, contains his soul, and so on.^^^

Each of these precious objects and tokens of wealth has, as amongst the Trobrianders, its name,^®^ quality and power.^*"

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 43

The large abalone shells,^ ^^ the shields covered with them, the decorated blankets with faces, eyes, and animal and human figures embroidered and woven into them, are all personal- ities.^®^ The houses and decorated beams are themselves beings.^ ®^ Everything speaks — roof, fire, carvings and paintings; for the magical house is built not only by the chief and his people and those of the opposing phratry but also by the gods and ancestors; spirits and young initiates are welcomed and cast out by the house in person.^"

Each of these precious things has, moreover, a productive capacity within it.^'^ Each, as well as being a sign and surety of life, is also a sign and surety of wealth, a magico-rehgious guarantee of rank and prosperity.^ ^* Ceremonial dishes and spoons decorated and carved with the clan totem or sign of rank, are animate things.^*' They are replicas of the never- ending supply of tools, the creators of food, which the spirits gave to the ancestors. They are supposedly miraculous. Objects are confounded with the spirits who made them, and eating utensils with food. Thus Kwakiutl dishes and Haida spoons are essential goods with a strict circulation and are carefully shared out between the families and clans of the chiefs.

6. 'Money of Renown' (Renommiergeld) ^®*

Decorated coppers^®* are the most important articles in the potlatch, and beliefs and a cult are attached to them. With all these tribes copper, a living being, is the object of cult and myth. 2°° Copper, with i\it riaida ana Kwakmtl at least, is identified with salmon,,.itself an object of cult. ^"^ But in addition to this mythical element each copper js by itself an object of indjviHuaJ>-J'ii'1irf's'">2 Each principal copper of the families of clan chiefs hasitsname and individuality; *°^ it has also its own value, ^°* in the lull magical and economic sense of the word, which is regulated by the vicissitudes of the potlatches through which it passes and even by its partial or complete destruction. 2"^

44 THE GIFT

Coppers have also a virtue which attracts other ^coppers to them, as wealth attracts wealth and as dignity attracts honours, spirit-possession and good alliances. 2°® In this way they live their own lives and attract other coppers.^"' One of the Kwakiutl coppers is called 'Bringer of Coppers' and the formula describes how the coppers gather around it, while the name of its owner is 'Copper-Flowing-Towards-Me'.^"^ With the Haida and Tlingit, coppers are a 'fortress' for the princess who owns them; elsewhere a chief who owns them is rendered invincible.^"* They are the 'flat divine objects' of the house. 2^° Often the myth identifies together the spirits who gave the coppers, the owners and the coppers themselves. ^^^ It is im- possible to discern what makes the power of the one out of the spirit and the wealth of the other; a copper talks and grunts, demanding to be given away or destroyed ; ^^^ it is covered with blankets to keep it warm just as a chief is smothered in the blankets he is to distribute. ^^^

From another angle we see the transmission of wealth and good fortune. 2^* The spirits and minor spirits of an initiate allow him to own coppers arid" talismans which then enable him to acquire other coppers, greater wealth, higher rank and more spirits (all of these being equivalents). If we consider the coppers with other forms of wealth which are the object of hoarding and potlatch — masks, talismans and so on — we find they are all confounded in their uses and eflTects.^^s Through them rank is obtained; because ,^a_xaarL_ahtains wealth he obtains a spirit which in turn possesses hjuL enabling him to overcomFobstacles heroically. Then later the hero is paid for his shamanistic servicevrituaLdances and~trances. Everything is tied together; things have personality, and^ personalities are in some manner the, pgijn a nenT possession of the clan. Titles, talismans, coppers and spirits of chiefs are homonyms and synonyms, having the same nature and function. ^^^ The circulation of goods follows that of men, women and children, of festival ritual, ceremonies and dances, jokes '^ and injuries. Basically they are the same. If things are given and returned it is precisely because one gives and returns 'respects' and

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SYSTEM 45

'courtesies'. But in addition, in giving them, a man gives himself, and he does so because he owes himself — himself and his possessions — to others.

7. Primary Conclusion

From our study of four important groups of people we find the following: first, in two or three of the groups, we find the potlatch, its leading motive and its typical form. In all groups we see the archaic form_of^xchange — ^the_gift_and_the return gift. Moreover, in these societies we note the circulation of objects side by side with the circulation of persons and rights. We might stop at this point. The amount, distribution and importance of our data authorize us to conceive of a regime embracing a large part of humanity over a long transitional phase, and persisting to this day among peoples other than those described. We may then consider that the spirit of gift- exchange is characteristic of societies which have passed the phase of 'total prestation' (between clan and clan, family and family) but have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market, sale proper, fixed price, and weighed and coined money.

CHAPTER III

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE

THE preceding data come from the domain of ethno- graphy, and are all drawn from societies bordering the Pacific. It is usual for facts of this sort to be treated as curiosities, or to be used to show, by comparison, how far our own institutions approach them or differ from them. Neverthe- less, they have a sociological significance since they lead us towards the understanding of a stage in social evolution. They also have a bearing on social history, for institutions of this type are a step in the development of our own economic forms, and serve as a historical explanation of features of our own society. We may also find that exchange in the societies which im- mediately preceded our own reveals important traces of the moral and economic principles we have just analysed for primitive societies. We believe we can demonstrate that our own economic institutions have arisen from ones of the type we have just reviewed.^

We live in a society where there is a marked distinction (although nowadays the distinction is criticized by lawyers themselves) between real and personal law, between things and persons. This distinction is fundamental; it is the very condition of part of our system of property, alienation and exchange. Yet it is foreign to the customs we have been studying. Likewise Greek, Roman and Semitic civilizations distinguished clearly between obligatory prestations and pure gifts. But are these distinctions not of relatively recent appearance in the codes of the great civilizations ? Did not those civilizations pass through a previous phase in which their thought was less cold and calculating ? Did not they themselves at one time practise these customs of gift-exchange in which persons and things become

indistinguishable? Analysis of some aspects of Indo-European

46

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 47

law shows clearly that usage has in fact changed in this way. We find traces of the transformation in Rome. In India and Germany we see that institutions of this primitive type were functioning at a fairly recent date.

I. Personal Law and Real Law (Ancient Rome)

A comparison of archaic custom with Roman custom prior to the historic era ^ and Germanic custom of the period when it enters history sheds light upon the law of persons and the law of things. In particular it allows us to reconsider one of the most controversial questions of legal history, the theory of the nexum.^

Huvelin profitably compares nexum with the Germanic wadium and more generally with the other supplementary sureties given during the course of a contract; and then com- pares the sureties with sympathetic magic and the power which a thing, once in contact with a man, gives to his contracting partner.* This explains only some of the data. A magical sanction remains merely a possibility and depends on the nature and character of the object given. The supplementary surety and the Germanic wadium are not simply exchanges of sureties or warrants endowed with some mystical superiority.' The thing pledged is normally of little value — a stick, the Roman stips,^ or the Gtnn.a.nic festuca notata; even the arrhes (earnest) of Semitic origin is something more than an advance payment.' These are live things. Probably they are to be considered as survivals of older obligatory gifts or reciprocal dues. The contracting parties are bound by them. In this respect these supplementary exchanges are fictitious ex- pressions of the movement of personalities and the objects confounded with them. The nexum, the legal bond, derives from things as well as from men.^

The formahty with which they were exchanged is proof of their importance. In quiritary Roman law, property (essential property consisting of slaves and cattle and later of real estate) was never handed over in an easy or informal manner. The

48 THE GIFT

transaction was always a solemn affair, made before five witnesses or friends and the 'weigher'.® It was tied up with all manner of considerations foreign to our modern conceptions with their purely legal and economic elements. The nexum established still involved religious representations (which Huvelin saw but considered to be exclusively magical).

Certainly the oldest form of contract in Roman law, the nexum is already distinct from the collective contract and the old system of binding gifts. The early history of the Roman system of obligations may never be written with any certainty. Nevertheless it is possible to point out how research on this matter might proceed.

We hold that there is a connecting bond in things other than the magical and religious one — a bond created by the words and gestures of legal formalism. This bond is strongly marked in certain very old terms in Roman and Italic law. The etymology of a number of these words is suggestive. What follows here is in the nature of a hypothesis.

Originally, we contend, things had a personality and a virtue of their own. Things are not the inert objects which the laws of Justinian and ourselves imply. They are a part of the family: the Koman familia comprises the/ res as well as the rpersonae}^ It is defined in the Digest, and we note that the farther Naack we go into Antiquity the more the familia denotes the res of which it consists even to the family's food and means of livelihood.^^ The best etymology of the word familia is that which ahgns it with the Sanskrit dhaman, a house.^^

Things were of two kinds. Distinction was made between familia and pecunia, between the things of the house (slaves, horses, mules, donkeys) and the cattle in the fields far from the stables.^^ There was also a distinction between res mancipi and res nee mancipi according to the manner in which they were sold.^* With the former, which constituted objects of value, including children and real estate, ahenation had to follow the form of mancipatio, 'taking into the hands'. ^^ There is still discussion whether the distinction between familia and pecunia coincided with that between res mancipi and res nee mancipi. It seems to us

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 49

that there is not the slightest doubt that at least originally they did coincide. The things that escaped the mancipatio were precisely the cattle and pecunia, money, the idea, name and form of which derived from cattle. One might say that the Roman veteres made the same distinction as the Tsimshian and Kwakiutl do between the permanent and essential goods of the house, and the things that pass on — food, beasts in the distant grazing, and metals — in which the unemancipated son might trade.

Moreover, the res cannot originally have been the brute and tangible thing, the simple and passive object of transaction that it has become. The best etymology seems to be that which compares the word with the Sanskrit rah, ratih, meaning a gift or pleasant thing.^® The res rnustoriginally have meant that which gives a person pleasure.^' Moreover, the thing was always marked with a family seal or property mark. Hence we can understand that with things mancipi the solemn act of mancipatio created a legal bond. For even in the hands of the accipiens it still remained a factor in the family of the original owner; it remained bound to that family and likewise bound to the latest owner until he was freed by the fulfilment of his part of the contract, that is to say by the transmission of the compensating article, price or service which in its turn was binding on the original owner.

In respect of two points of Roman law, theft (furtum) and contracts re, the idea of the power inherent in a thing was always present. As far as theft is concerned, the acts and obligations to which it gave rise were clearly due to this power.^^ It had aeterna auctoritas which made its presence felt if it was stolen.^® In this respect the res of Roman law was no different from Hindu or Haida property. ^^ Contracts re con- sisted of four of the most important contracts in law: loan, deposit, pledge and free loan. A certain number of other contracts, in particular gift and exchange, which we consider with sale to have been the original kinds of contract, were also taken to be contracts re.^^ But in fact, even in our own laws, it is not possible to forget the older forms. ^^^ For a gift to be made.

50 THE GIFT

there must be presupposed an object or service which creates an obligation. It is clear, for instance, that the revocability of a gift as a result of ingratitude, which came late in Roman law ^' but was always present in ours, is a normal, perhaps even natural legal institution.

These facts, though, are not of wide occurrence and we want our study to be general. We believe that in ancient Rome the act of traditio of a res, and not only the words or writing about it, was one of the essential factors. Roman law itself never made this clear. For although it proclaimed that the solemnity of the occasion was essential — just as is the case in the archaic customs we have described — saying nunquam nuda traditio transfert dominium,^*' it maintained at the same time, as late as Diocletian (298 B.C.) : Traditionibus et usucapionibus dominia, non pactis transfer entur.^^ The res, prestation or article is an essential element in the contract. We are ill placed to resolve these much-debated etymological problems of concepts in view of the poverty of the sources.

Up to this point we feel sure of our facts. If we push farther and indicate to lawyers and philologists what might be a fruitful Hne of research, it may be possible to discern a legal system in force before the time of the Twelve Tables. It is not only familia and res which are open to analysis. We put forward a number of hypotheses, each of which taken alone carries little weight, but which, when considered together, may be found to have some significance.

Most expressions of contract and obligation and some of the forms of contract seem to be referable to the system of spiritual bonds created by the act of traditio.

The contracting party is first reus; he is originally the man who has received the res from another and who becomes the reus — that is, bound to him by virtue of the thing alone, or by its spirit.^® Hirn suggested an etymology which has been con- sidered meaningless, although its meaning is clear. As he points out, reus was originally a genitive ending in -os, and replaces rei-jos, the man who is possessed by the thing. 2' It is true that Hirn, and Walde who follows him,^^ translate res by 'legal

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 5I

action', and rei-jos as 'implicated in a legal action'. ^^ But this is arbitrary and presupposes that res means legal action. On the contrary, if our derivation is accepted, every res and every traditio of res being the object of a legal action in public, it becomes clear that 'implicated in a legal action' is merely a derived meaning. Thus the meaning of 'guilty' for reus is even farther derived. Thus we should prefer to say that the word meant first the person possessed by the thing, then the person implicated in the legal action arising out of the traditio of the thing, and finally the guilty and responsible person. From this point of view all the theories of the quasi-delict origin of con- tract, nexum and actio are slightly illuminated. The mere fact of having the thing puts the accipiens in a condition of quasi- culpability {damnatus, nexus, aere obseratus), of spiritual inferiority, moral inequality {magister, minister) vis-d-vis the donor, the tradens.^^

We refer now to a number of very old traits connected with mancipatio,^^ the purchase and sale which became the emptio venditio of very ancient Roman law.^^ We note first that this always implies traditio. ^^ The first holder, tradens, shows his property, detaches himself from it, hands it over and thus buys the accipiens. True mancipatio corresponds to this operation. The person who receives the thing takes it into his hands. He does not merely recognize that he has received it, but realizes that he himself is 'bought' until it is paid for. Normally only one mancipatio is considered, and it is understood to be simply the act of taking into possession, but in the one operation many others of the same nature are included concerning both things and persons.

There is much discussion also on the emptio venditio.^*' Does it correspond to two acts or one? We adduce a reason why two acts should be counted although in a direct sale they may follow right on top of each other. Just as in primitive custom we find the gift followed by the return gift, so in Roman usage there is sale and then payment. In this way there is no difficulty in understanding the whole process, including the stipulation,^^

It is sufficient merely to note the formulae used — that of 5

52 THE GIFT

the mancipatio concerning the piece of bronze, and that of the acceptance of the money of the slave who redeems himself (this money must be '/>wn, probi, profani sui').^^ These two forms are identical. Both also are echoes of the formulae for the older emptio of cattle and slaves preserved for us in the jus civile.^'' The second holder accepts the thing only when it is free of vice; and he accepts it only because he is in a position to return something, to compensate, to pay the price. Note the expres- sions: reddit pretium, reddere, etc., where the root dare still appears.^*

Festus has preserved for us the meaning of the term emere (to buy), and of the form of civil law it implies. He says: 'Abemito signijicat demito vel auferto; emere enim antiqui dicebant pro accipere ;' 2Lnd also: 'Emere quod nunc est mercari antiqui accipiebant pro sumere." This is the meaning of the Indo-European word which is connected with the Latin one. Emere is to take or accept something from a person.^'

The term emptio venditio seems to suggest laws other than Roman, *° for which, in the absence of money and price, there was only barter and gift. Vendere, originally venum dare, is a composite word of an archaic or even prehistoric type.*^ There is no doubt that it contains the element dare, which implies gift and transmission. For the other element we borrow an Indo- European word implying not sale but the price of sale, wvi^, Sanskrit vasnah, which Him compares with a Bulgarian word signifying dowry, the purchase price of a woman. ^^

These hypotheses about very ancient Roman law are of rather a prehistoric order. The law, morality and economy of the Latins must have had these forms, but they were forgotten when the institutions approached the historic era. For it was precisely these Greeks and Romans who, possibly following the Northern and Western Semites, drew the distinction between ritual, law and economic interest.*^ By a venerable revolu- tion they passed beyond that antiquated and dangerous gift economy, encumbered by personal considerations, incom- patible with the development of the market, trade and pro- ductivity— which was in a word uneconomic.

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 53

Our reconstruction is nothing more than a likely hypothesis, but its degree of probability increases with the fact that other trustworthy Indo-European written laws were witness in historic times to a system of the kind already described among Pacific and American societies which, although we call them 'primitive', are at least 'archaic'. Thus we can generalize with some degree of safety. The two Indo-European systems which have best conserved these traces are the Germanic and the Hindu. They also happen to be those on which we have the most complete texts.

2. Theory of the Gift (Hindu Classical Period) **

There is a serious difficulty in the use of Hindu legal documents. The codes, and the epics which equal them in authority, were written by Brahmins, if notjbr themselves at least to their advantage, at tfiF period of their triumph.*^ They give us only theoretical law. Thus we can discover data about the other castes, Ksatriya and Vaicya, only by making recon- structions from the numerous unconnected statements about them in the literature. The theory o( danadharma, the 'law of the( y^'Q^^ii gift', which we shall discuss, applies only to Brahmins; for instance, how they solicit and receive then make return wholly by religious services. It shows also the way in which gifts are due to them. Naturally this duty of giving to the Brahmins is subject to numerous prescriptions. It is probable that entirely different relationships obtained among noblemen, princely families and the numerous castes and races of the common people. It would be a difficult matter to assess them on account of the nature of our Hindu data.

Ancient India immediately after the Aryan invasion was in two respects a land of the potlatch."*^ This was still found among two large groups which had once been more numerous and which now formed the substratum of a great part of the population: the Tibeto-Burmans of Assam and the tribes of Munda stock, the Austro-Asiatics. We may even suppose that the traditions of these tribes have persisted in a Brahminic

54 THE GIFT

setting.'*' For instance, traces may be seen of an iristitutioil, comparable with the Batak indjok and other features of Malayan hospitality, in the rules which forbid eating with an uninvited guest. Institutions of the same genus if not of the same species have left their traces in the oldest Veda, and they are nearly all found again in the Indo-European world. *^ Thus there are reasons for believing that the Aryans also had them in India.** The two currents flowed together at a time which can be fairly accurately assessed, contemporary with the later parts of the Veda and the colonization of the two great river plains of the Indus and Ganges. No doubt the two currents reinforced each other. Thus as soon as we leave the Vedic period of the litera- ture we find the theory strongly developed. The Mahabharata is the story of a tremendous potlatch — there is a game of dice between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and a military festival, while Draupadi, sister and polyandrous wife of the Pandavas, chooses husbands.^" Repetitions of the same cycle of legends are met with in the finest parts of the epics; for instance, the tale of Nala and Damayanyi, like the Mahab- harata, recounts communal house-building, a game of dice and so on.^^ But the whole is disfigured by its literary and theological style.

For our present demonstration it is not necessary to weigh up these multiple origins and make a hypothetical recon- struction of the whole system. ^^ Likewise the number of castes that were concerned and the exact period at which they flourished are irrelevant in a work of comparison. Later, for reasons which need not concern us here, this law disappeared except among the Brahmins; but we can say for sure that it functioned between the eighth century B.C. and the second or third century a.d. That is precise enough for our purpose. The epics and laws of the Brahmins move in the old atmosphere in which gifts are still obligatory and have special virtues and form a part of human persons. We limit ourselves here to a description of these forms of social life and a study of their causes.

The thing given brings return in this life and in the other.

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 55

It may automatically bring the donor an equivalent return — it is not lost to him, but reproductive; or else the donor finds the thing itself again, but with increase. ^^ Food given away means^ that food will return to the donor in this world; it also means food for him in the other world and in his series of reincarna- tions. Water, wells and springs given away are insurance against thirst; the clothes, the sunshades, the gold, the sandals for protection against the burning earth, return to you in this life and in the other.^* The land you give away produces crops' for another person and enhances your own interests in both worlds and in future incarnations. 'As the crescent moon grows from day to day so the gift of land once made increases at every harvest.' Land gives crops, rents and taxes, minerals and cattle. A gift made of it enriches both donor and recipient with the sarne produceT^^ Such economic theology is developed at great length in the roUing periods of the innumerable cantos, and~heither the codes nor the epics ever tire of the subject.^'

Land, food, or whatever one gives away are, moreover, ' <;^|^r^pnified beings that talk and take part in the contract. They state their desire to be given away. The land once spoke to the sun hero Rama, son of Jamadagni, and when he heard its song he gave it over to the rsi Kacyapa. The land said to him, in its no doubt old-fashioned language:

'Receive me [to the recipient] Give me [to the donor] Give me and you shall receive me again'

and it added, in a rather flat Brahminic tongue: 'In this world and in the other what is given is received again.' ^' A very old code states that Anna, food deified, proclaimed the following verse :

'Him who, without giving me to the gods or the

spirits, or to his servants or guests,

prepares and eats [me], and in

his folly thus eats poison, I eat him,

I am his death.

56 THE GIFT

'But for him who offers the angihotra, and then eats — in happiness, purity and faith — whatever remains after he has fed those whom it is his pleasure and duty to feed, for him I become ambrosia and he takes pleasure in me.' ^*

It is in the nature of food to be shared; to fail to give others a part is to 'kill its essence', to destroy it for oneself and for others. Such is the interpretation at once materialistic and idealistic, that Brahminism gav£LtQ chadtx_^d hospitality.^^ Wealth is made tobe_^ven away. Were there no Brahmins to receive it, 'vain wouldbe~tKe wealth of the rich'. 'He who eats without knowledge kills his food, and his food kills him.' ^" Avarice interrupts the action of food which, when properly treated, is always productive of more.

In this game of exchanges, as well as with reference to theft, Brahminism makes a clear recognition of personal property. The property of the Braiimin is the Brahmin himself 'The Brahmin's cow is poison, a venomous snake', says the Veda of the magicians.®^ The old code of Baudhayana proclaims: 'The property of the Brahmin slays [the guilty] through the son and the grandson; the poison is not [poison]; property of the Brahmin is called [real] poison.' ^^ It contains its sanction within itself, since it is in fact that which is terrible about the Brahmin. It is not necessary even that the theft of a Brahmin's property should be conscious and intentional. A section of the Parvan,^^ the part of the Mahabharata which is most relevant, tells how Nrga, king of the Yadus, was transformed into a lizard for having given, through the fault of his people, a cow ,to a Brahmin which was another Brahmin's property. The man who received it would not part with it, even for a hundred thousand others; it was a part of his house and belonged to himself: 'She is used to my ways, she is a good milker, placid and attached to me. Her milk is sweet, and I always keep some in my house. She feeds a little child of mine who is weak and already weaned. I cannot give her away.' Nor did the Brahmin

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 57

from whom she was taken accept another. She was the property of both the Brahmins irrevocably. Caught between the two refusals tHellnKappy king had remained under a spell these thousands of years through the curse which the refusals entailed . ®*~ ~

Nowhere is the connection between the thing given and the donor, or between property and its owner, more clearly apparent than in the rules relating to gifts of cattle.*^ They are weincn6wirrK.ing Dharma (taw), Yudhisthira himself, the principal hero of the epic, lived among cattle, ate barley and cowdung and slept on the ground and thus became 'bull' among kings.®^ For three days and nights the owner of cattle to be given away would imitate him and observe the 'cattle oath'. He lived exclusively on 'cattle juices' — water, dung and urine — for one night out of the three. (Urine is the residence of Cri, Fortune.) For one night out of the three he slept with the cattle on the ground and, adds the commentator, 'without scratching himself or removing his vermin', identified himself with them in spirit.^' "When he went to the stall and called them by their sacred names, ^^ he added : 'The cow is my mother, the bull is my father' and so on. He repeated the first formula during the act of transfer. After praising the cattle the donor said: 'What you are, I am; today I become of your essence, and giving you I give myself ®* And the recipient when he got them (making the pratighrana '") said: 'Transmitted in spirit, received in spirit, glorify us both, you who have the forms of the sun and moon [Soma and Ugra].' '^

Other principles of Brahminic law awaken reminiscences of certain Polynesian, Melanesian and American customs we have described. The manner of receiving the gift is curiously similar. The Brahmin has invincible pride. He refuses to have anything to do with markets. '^ In a national economy with to);vns, markets and money, the Brahmin remains faithful to the economy and morality of the old Indo-Iranian shepherds and other aboriginal peasants of the great plains. He maintains the dignity of a nobleman in taking offence at favours towards him. '^ Two sections of the Mahabharata tell how the seven rsi^

58 THE GIFT

the great prophets and their disciples, as they went in time of famine to eat the body of the son of the king Cibi, refused great gifts and golden figs offered them by the king Caivya Vrsadar- bha, and answered him: 'O King, to receive from kings is honey at first but ends as poison.'

This is a quaint theory. A whole caste which lives by gifts pretends to refuse them,'* then'^compiromises ariH'^cepts only thosd'ivhTch are offered spontaneously.'^ Then it draws up long lists of persons from whom,'^ and circumstances in which, one may accept gifts, and of the things " which one may accept; and finally admits everything in the case of a famine '^ — on condition, to be sure, of some slight purification.'^

The bond that the giftjjeates between the donor and the recipient is too strong for them. As in all systems we have studied so far, as well as in others, the one is bound too closely to the other. The recipient is in a state of dependence upon the donor. ^^ It is for this reason that the Brahmin may not accept and still less solicit from the king. Divinity among divinities, he is superior to the king and would lose his superiority if he did other than simply take from him. On the side of the king his manner of giving is as important as the fact that he gives. ^^

The gift is thus soijiething that jnust be given, that must be received. and that is, at the same time, dangerous to accept. The gift itself constitutes an irrevocable link especially when it is a gift of food. The recipient depends upon the temper of the donor, ^2 in fact each depends upon the other. Thus a man does not eat with his enemy. ^^

All kinds of precautions are taken. The authors of the Codes and Epics spread themselves as only Hindu authors can on the theme that gifts, donors and things given are to be considered in their context, precisely and scrupulously, so that there may be no mistake about the manner of giving and receiving to fit each particular occasion.^* There is etiquette at every step. It is not the same as a market where a man takes a thing objectively for a price. Nothing is casual here.^^ Contracts, alliances, transmission of goods, bonds created by these transfers — each

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 59

Stage in the process is regulated morally and economically. The nature and intention of the contracting parties and the nature of the thing given are indivisible. The lawyer poet expresses perfectly what we want to describe: 'Here is but one wheel turning in one direction.' ^^

3. Pledge and Gift (Germanic Societies)

If Germanic societies have not preserved for us such old and meaningful traces of their theory of the gift as the Indian, they had none the less a clearly developed system of exchange with gifts voluntarily and obligatorily given, received and repaid. Few systems are so typical.^'

Germanic civilization, too, was a long time without markets.®^ It remained essentially feudal and peasant; the notion and even thejterms of price, purchase and sale seem to be of recent origin.^" In earlier times it had developed the potlatch and more particularly the system of gift exchange to an extreme degree. Clans within tribes, great extended families within the clans, tribes between themselves, chiefs and even kings, were not confined morally and economically to the closed circles^f their^ own groups ; and links, alliances and mutual assistance came into being by means of the pledge, the hostage and the feast or other acts of generosity.'" We have already seen thenrfairyrmr^giife^taken-imindie Havamal. There are three other facts to note. _,— - — -

An intensive study of the rich Germai^ vocabulary derived from the words geben and Gaben has never been undertaken.'^ They are extraordinarily numerous: Ausgabe, Abgabe, Hingabe, Liebesgabe, Morgengabe, the curious Trostgabe, vergeben, widergeben and wiedergeben, Gift and Mitgift, etc. The study, too, of the institutions designated by these words has still to be made.'^ On the other hand, the system of gifts, including the obligation to repay, and its importance in tradition and folklore are admirably described by Richard Meyer in one of the best existing works on folklore.'^ We simply mention it and retain for the moment some remarks on the obligatory force of the

6o THE GIFT

bond, the Angebinde, constituted by exchange, the offer, the acceptance of the offer and the obhgation to repay.

There is another institution of great economic significance which persisted until quite recently and which no doubt is still to be found in some German villages. This is the Gaben, the exact equivalent of the Hindu adanam.^* On days of baptism, first communion, betrothal and marriage the guests, comprising often the whole village, giv_e presents whose total value exceeds the cost of the cereinony. In some districts of Germany this Gaben constitutes the bride's dowry, given on the wedding morning, and is known as the Morgengabe. In places the abund- ance of these gifts is said to be a measure of the fertility of the young couple. ^^ The entry into marital relations and the different gifts which the god-parents hand over at various stages of their career to qualify and help their charges are equally important. This theme is still recognized in French customs, tales and forms of invitation, in the curses of people not invited and the blessings and generosity of those who are.

Another institution has the same origin — the_pledge in all Jdnds—of—GeFHiaHie— contracts. *^ The French word gage is connected with wadium (cf wage). Huvelin shows that the Germanic wadium provides a means of understanding the con- tractual bond and compares it with the Roman nexum.^'^ In fact, in the manner in which Huvelin interprets it, the pledge accepted allows the contracting parties in Germanic law to react on each other, because one possesses something of the other who, having once owned it, might well have put a spell on it; or else because the pledge is split in two, a half being kept by each partner. But we can suggest a more direct interpreta- tion. The magical sanction may intervene but it is not the sole bond. The thing given as a pledge must be given._In Germanic law each contract, sale or purchase, loan or deposit, entaiTs a pledge: one partner is given an object, generally something of little value like a glove or a piece of money {Treugeld), a knife,

Or perhaps — as with the French — a pin or two, and this^; -

returne^^jwhen the thing handed over is paid for. Huvelin has already noted that the thing is something ordinary, personal

SURVIVALS IN EARLY LITERATURE 6l

or of little value; and he rightly compares this with the theme of the 'life-token'. The pledge thus given is in fact imbued with the personality of the partner who gave it. The fact that it is in the hands of the recipient moves its donor to fulfil his part of the contract and buy himself back by buying the thing. Thus the nexum is in the thing used as_ajpledge and not only in the magical acts or tlig^jQlenHr-fbrms of the contract, the words, oaths, ritual and handshakes^.£xchanged ; it is present not only in the acts of magical significance, the tallies of which each partner keeps a share, or the joint meals where each partakes of the other's substance; it is present in the thing as well.

Two characteristics of ihewadiatio prove the pxesence of this power ifl—tKFThing. First the pledge not only creates obligations and acts as a binding force but it also engages the honour, authority and mana of the man who hands it over.*^ He remains in an inferior position so long as he is not freed from his 'engagement-wager'. For the words Wette and wetten,^^ translations of wadium, imply wager as much as pledge. It is the price of an agreement and the recognition of a challenge, even more than a means of constraining the debtor. As long as the contract is not terminated it is a wager lost, and thus the contractor loses more than he bargained for — not counting the fact that he is liable to lose the thing received which its owner is at liberty to reclaim so long as the pledge is not honoured. The other characteristic shows the danger of receiving the pfedgerF'of it Is noTolrly^liFpTersoiLwha gives itTtratIs bound, but also the one who receives it. As with the recipient in the Trobriands he distrusts the thing given. Thus it is thrown at his feet; if it is afestuca notata with runic characters, or a tally of which he is to keep a part, he receives it on the ground or in his breast but never in his hands.^°° The whole ritual takes the form of challenge and distrust, and is an expression of them. In English, 'to throw down the gage' is the equivalent of 'to throw down the gauntlet'. The fact is that the pledge as a thing given spells danger for the two parties concerned.

Here^j,s_aJjiird'p6int. The danger represented by the thing given or transmitted is possibly nowhere better expressed than

62 THE GIFT

in very ancient Germanic languages. This explains the double meaning of the word Gift as gift and poison. Elsewhere we have given a semantic history of this word.^"^ The theme of the fateful gift, the present or possession that turns into poison, is ^ fundamental in Germanic folklore. The Rhine Gold is fatal to the man who wins it, the Cup of Hagen is disastrous to the hero who drinks of it; numerous tales and legends of this kind, Germanic and Celtic, still haunt our imaginations. We may quote the stanza in which the hero of the Edda, Hreidmar, replies to the curses of Loki :

'Thou hast given presents

But thou hast not given presents of love.

Thou hast not given of a benevolent heart;

Thou hadst already been deprived of thy life,

Had I but known the danger sooner.' ^^^

Chinese Law

Finally a great civilization, the Chinese, has preserved from archaic times the very legal principle that interests us: it recognize^jiie jndissolubieHscnd-TjfXnthing with its original owner. Even today the man who sells property, even personal property, retains the right during the rest of his life to 'weep over it'.^°^ Father Hoang brought to notice copies of these 'mourning Ucences' as given by the buyer to the vendor.^"* A kind of 'right of pursuit' is established over the thing combined with a right of pursuit over its owner, and the vendor retains this right long after the thing has fallen into other hands and all the terms of the 'irrevocable' contract have been fulfilled. Because of the thing transmitted (and whether it depreciates or not) the alhance contracted is not temporary, and the contracting parties are bound in perpetual interdependence.

As for Annamitc custom Westermarck ^°^ noted that it was dangerous to receive a gift, and perceived some of the signi- ficance of this fact.

Chapter iV

CONCLUSIONS

I. Moral Conclusions

LET us extend our observations to the present day. Much of our everyday moraUty is concerned with the question of obUgation and spontaneity in the gift. It is our good fortune that all is not yet couched in terms of purchase and salc^ Things have values which are emotional as well as material; indeed in some cases the values are entirely emotional. Ou^ mor^ity is not solely commercial. We still have people ana classes who uphold past customs and we bow to them on special occasions and at certain periods of the year.

The gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it, particularly if he did so without thought of return. In recalling Emerson's curious essay On Gifts and Presents wc are not leaving -^ tHeXrermanic field : charity wounds him who receives, and our whole moral effort is directed towards suppressing the un- conscious harmful patronage of the rich almoner.^

Just as a courtesy has to be returned, so must an invitation. Here we find traces of the traditional basis, the aristocratic potlatch; and we see at work also some of the fundamental motives of human activity : emulation between individuak of the same sex, the basic 'imperialism' of men — of origin part social, part animal or psychological no doubt.^ In the dis- tinctive sphere of our social life we can never remain at rest. Wc must always return more than we receive; the return is \ .y always bigger and more costly. A family of my childhood in ' Lorraine, which was forced to a most frugal existence, would face ruin for the sake of its guests on Saints' Days, weddings, first communions and funerals. You had to be a grand seigneur on these occasions. Some of our people behave like this all the

63

64 THE GIFT

time and spend money recklessly on their guests, parties and New Year gifts.

Invitations have to be offered and have to be accepted. This usage still exists in our present-day liberal societies. Scarcely fifty years ago, and perhaps more recently in some parts of France and Germany, the whole village would take part in a wedding feast; if anyone held away it was an indica- tion of jealousy and at the same time a fateful omen. In many districts of France everyone still has a part in the proceedings. In Provence on the birth of a child folk still bring along their egg or some other symbolic present.

Things sold have thejr personality even nowadays. At Cornimont, m a valley in the Vosges, the following custom prevailed a short time ago and may perhaps still be found in some famihes : in order that animals should forget their former masters and not be tempted to go back to them, a cross was made on the lintel of the stable door, the vendor's halter was retained and the animals were hand-fed with salt. At Raon- aux-Bois a small butter-tart was carried thrice round the dairy and offered to the animals with the right hand. Numerous other French customs show how it is necessary to detach the thing sold from the man who sells it: a thing may be slapped, ja sheep may be whipped when sold, and so on.^

It appears that the whole field of industrial and commercial law is in conflict with morality. The economic prejudices of the Deople and producers derive from their strong desire to pursue^^ the thing they have produced once they realize that they|h^V« I given their labour without sharing in the profits, i ^

\ Today the ancient principles are making their influence felt upon the rigours, abstractions and inhumanities of our codes. From this point of view much of our law is in process of reformulation and some of our innovations consist in putting back the clock. This reaction against Roman and Saxon insensibihty in our regime is a good thing. We can interpret in this way some of the more recent developments in our laws and customs. -^ ^ ^ ^^'

It took a long time for artistic, literary or scientific owner-

.f

CONCLUSIONS 65

ship to be recognized beyond the right to sell the manuscript, invention, or work of art. Societies have little interest in admitting that the heirs of an author or inventor — who are, after all, their benefactors — have more than a few paltry rights in the things created. These are readily acclaimed as products of the collective as well as the individual jiiind^jand hence to be public property. However, the scandal of the increment value drpainHngsTscuIptures and objets d'art inspired the French law of September 1923 which gives the artist and his heirs and claimants a 'right_o£^lirsuit^ trver the successive increments of his works. , x

French legislation on ^ocial insurance^ and accomplished state socialism, are inspired by the principle that the worker gives his life and labour partly to the community and partly to his bosses. If the worker has to collaborate in the business of insurance then those who benefit from his services are not square with him simply by paying him a wage. The State, representing the community, owes him and his management and fellow-workers a certain security in his life against unem- ployment, sickness, old age and death.

In the same way some ingenious innovations like the family funds freely and enthusiastically provided by industrialists for workers with families, are an answer to the need for employers to get men attached to them and to realize their responsibilities and the degree of material and moral interest that these responsibilities entail. In Great Britain the long period of unemployment affecting millions of workers gave rise to a movement for compulsory unemployment insurance organized by unions. The cities and the State were slow to support the high cost of paying the workless, whose condition arose from that of industry and the market; but some distinguished economists and captains of industry saw that industries them- selves should organize unemployment savings and make the necessary sacrifices. They wanted the cost of the workers' security against unemployment to form a part of the expenses of the industry concerned.

We believe that such ideas and legislation correspond not

66 THE GIFT

to an upheaval, but to a return to law.* We are seeing the dawn and realization of professional morality and corporate law. The compensation funds and mutual societies which industrial groups are forming in favour of labour have, in the eyes of pure morality, only one flaw : their administration is in the hands of the bosses. But there is also group activity; the State, munici- palities, public assistance establishments, works managements and wage-earners are all associated, for instance, in the social legislation of Germany and Alsace-Lorraine, and will shortly be in France. Thus we are returning to a i group morahty.

On the other hand, it is the individual that the State and the groups within the State want to look after. Society wants to discover the social 'cell'. It seeks the individual in a curious frame of mind in which the sentiments of its own laws are mingled with other, purer sentiments: charity, social service /and solidarity. The theme of the gift, of freedom and obligation m the gift, of generosity and self-interest in giving, reappear in our own society like the resurrection of a dominant motif long forgotten.

But a mere statement of what is taking place is not enough. We should deduce from it some course of action or moral precept. It is not sufficient to say that law is in the process of shedding an abstraction — the distinction between real and personal law — or that it is adding some fresh rules to the ill- made legislation on sale and payment for services. We want to show also that the transformation is a good one.

We are returning, as indeed we must do, to the old theme of 'noble expenditure'. It is essential that, as in Anglo-Saxon couritries and so many contemporary societies, savage and civihzed, the rich should come once more, freely or by obliga- tion, to consider themselves as the treasurers, as it were, of their fellow-citizens. Of the ancient civilizations from which ours has arisen some had the jubilee, others the Hturgy, the choragus, the trierarchy, the syssita or the obligatory expenses of the aedile or consular official. We should return to customs of this sort. Then we need better care of the individual's life, health and education, his family and its future. We need more

CONCLUSIONS 67

good faith, sympathy and generosity in the contracts of hire and service, rents and sale of the necessities of Hfe. And we have to find the means of hmiting the fruits of speculation and usury. Meanwhile the individual must work and be made to rely more upon himself than upon others. From another angle he must defend his group's interest as well as his own. Communism and too much generosity is as harmful to him and society as the selfishness of our contemporaries or the individualism of our laws. In the Mahabharata a malignant wood spirit explains to a Brahmin who has given too much away to the wrong people : 'That is why you are thin and pale.' The life of the monk and the life of Shylock are both to be avoided. This new morality will consist of a happy medium between the ideal and the real.

Hence we should return to the old and elemental. Once again we shall discover those motives of action still remembered by many societies and classes: the joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private feast. Social insurance, solicitude in mutuality or co-operation, in the professional group and all those moral persons called Friendly Societies, are better than the mere personal security guaranteed by the nobleman to his tenant, better than the mean life afforded by' the daily wage handed out by managements, and better even than the uncertainty of capitalist savings.

We can visualize a society in which these principles obtain. In the liberal professions of our great nations such a moral and economic system is to some degree in evidence. For honour, disinterestedness and corporate solidarity are not vain words, nor do they deny the necessity for work. We should humanize the other liberal professions and make all of them more perfect. That would be a great deed, and one which Durkheim already had in view.

In doing this we should, we believe, return to the ever- present bases of law, to its real fundamentals and to the very heart of normal social life. There is no need to wish that the citizen should be too subjective, too insensitive or too realistic. He should be vividly aware of himself, of others and of the

#

68 THE GIFT

social reality (and what other reality is there in these moral matters?). He must act with full Realization of himself, of society and its sub-groups. The basis of moral action is general; it is common to societies of the highest degree of evolution, to those of the future and to societies of the least advancement. Here we touch bedrock. We are talking no longer in terms of law. We are talking of men and groups since it is they, society, and their sentiments that are in action all the time.

Let us demonstrate this point. What we call total prestation — prestation between clan and clan in which individuals and /''T\ groups exchange everything between them — constitutes the V^j^oldest economic system we know. It is the base from which gift-exchange arose. Now it is precisely this same type towards which we are striving to have our own society — on its own scale — directed. The better to visualize these distant epochs we give two examples from widely differing societies.

In a corroboree of Pine Mountain (East Central Queens- land) each person enters the sacred place in turn, his spear- thrower in one hand and the other hand behind his back; he lobs his weapon to the far end of the dancing ground, shouting at the same time the name of the place he comes from, like: 'Kunyan is my home'. He stands still for a moment while his friends put gifts, a spear, a boomerang or other weapon, into his other hand. 'Thus a good warrior may get more than his hand can hold, particularly if he has marriageable daughters.' ^ In the Winnebago tribe clan chiefs make speeches to chiefs of other clans; these are characteristic examples of a ceremonial which is widespread among North American Indian civiliza- tions.* At the clan feast each clan cooks food and prepares tobacco for the representatives of other clans. Here by way of illustration are extracts from the speeches given by the Snake Clan chief: T salute you; it is well; how could I say otherwise? I am a poor man of no worth and you have remembered me. You have thought of the spirits and you have come to sit with me. And so your dishes will soon be filled, and I salute you again, you men who take the place of the spirits. . . .' When one of the chiefs has eaten, an offering of tobacco is put in the fire

CONCLUSIONS 69

and the final sentences express the moral significance of the feast and the prestations: 'I thank you for coming to fill my places and I am grateful to you. You have encouraged me. The blessings of your grandfathers [who had revelations and whom you incarnate] are equal to those of the spirits. It is good that you have partaken of my feast. It must be that our grand- fathers have said: "Your life is weak and can be strengthened only by the advice of the warriors." You have helped me and that means life to me.' '

A wise precept has run right through human evolution, and we would be as well to adopt it as a principle of action. We should come out of ourselves and regard the duty of giving as a liberty, for in it there lies no risk. A fine Maori proverb runs:

^Ko maru kai atu

Ko maru kai mai,

Ka ngohe ngohe.^ 'Give as much as you receive and all is for the best.' ^

2. Political and Economic Conclusions

Our facts do more than illumine our morality and point out our ideal; for they help us to analyse economic facts of a more general nature, and our analysis might suggest the way to better administrative procedures for our societies.

We have repeatedly pointed out how this economy of gift- exchange fails to conform to the principles of so-called natural economy or utilitarianism. The phenomena in the economic life of the people we have studied (and they are good repre- sentatives of the great neolithic stage of civilization) and the survivals of these traditions in societies closer to ours and even in our own custom, are disregarded in the schemes adopted by the few economists who have tried to compare the various forms of economic life.*. We add our own observations to those of Malinowski who devoted a whole work to ousting the prevalent doctrines on primitive economics.^"

Here is a chain of jmdoubted fact. The notionof,j^ahiC" exists in these societies. IVery great surpluses, even by European

70 THE GIFT

Standards, are amassed; they are expended often at pure loss with tremendous extravagance and without a trace of mer- cenariness; ^^ among things exchanged are tokens of wealth, a kind of money. All this very rich economy is nevertheless

1 imbued with^religious^elernents ; mojiey^'Still has its magical power and is linked to clan and individual. Diverse_economic

..a£livities= — for example, the market — are impregnated with ritual and myth; they retain a ceremonial character, obligatory

J and efficacious-;^'^ they have their own ritual and etiquettje.J Here is the answer to the question already posed by Durkheim about the. religious ori^iji of the notion of economic value.^^

iThe facts also supply answers to a string of problems about the forms and origins of what is so badly termed exchange — the barter or permutatio of useful articles.^* In the view of cautious Latin authors in the Aristotelian tradition and their a priori economic history, this is the origin of the division of labour .^^J

'^'On the contrary, it is something other than utility which makes goods circulate in these multifarious and fairly enhghtened societies. Clans, age groups and sexes, in view of the many relationships ensuing from contacts between them, are in a state of perpetual ec^onomic effervescence which has little about it that is materialistic; it is much less prosaic than our sale and purchaseT^hire of services and speculations.

We may go farther than this and brealc down, reconsider and redefine the principal notions of which we have already made use. Our terms 'present' and 'gift' do not have precise meanings, but we could find no others. Concepts which we like to put in opposition — freedom and obligation; generosity, hberality, luxury on the one hand and saving, interest, austerity on the other — are not exact and it would be well to put them to the test. We cannot deal very fully with this; but let us take an example from the Trobriands. It is a complex notion that inspires the economic actions we have described, a notion neither of purely free and gratuitous prestations, nor of purely interested and utilitarian production and exchange; it is a

-Jiind of hybrid.

Malinowski made a serious effort to classify all the trans-

CONCLUSIONS 71

actions he witnessed in the Trobriands according to the interest or disinterestedness present in them. He ranges them from pure gift to barter jwith J)argaining, but this classification is unten- aoTe." Thus according to Mahnowski the typical 'pure gift' is that between spouses. Now in our view one of the most im- portant acts noted by the author, and one which throws a strong light on sexual relationships, is the mapula, the sequence of payments by a husband to his wife as a kind of salary for 5£XiiaLservices.^' Likewise the payments to chiefs are tribute; the distributions of food {sagali) are payments for labour or ritual accomplished, such as work done on the eve of a funeral. ^^ Thus basically as these gifts are not^s]X)nt5.neous-SQ_also they are not really disinferestedj They are for the most part counter- prestations made not solely in order to pay for goods or services, but also to maintain a profitable alliance which it would be unwise to reject, as for instance partnership between fishing tribes and tribes of hunters and potters.^^' Now this fact is widespread — we have met it with the Maori, Tsimshian and others.^" Thus it is clear wherein this mystical and practical force resides, which at once binds clans together and keeps them separate, which divides their labour and constrains them to exchange. Even in these societies the individuals and the groups, or rather the sub-groups, have always felt the sovereign right to refuse a contract, and it is this which lends an appear- ance of generosity to the circulation of goods. On the other hand, normally they had neither the right of, nor interest in, such a refusal; and it is that which makes these distant societies seem akin to ours.

The use of /money suggests other considerations. The Tro- briand i'a>'^«'a,' armshells and necklaces, like the North- West American coppers and Iroquois wampum, are at once wealth, tokens of wealth,^! means of exchange and payment, and things to be given away or destroyed. In addition they are pledges, linked to the persons who use them and who in turn are bound by them. Since, however, at other times they serve as tokens of money, there is interest in giving them away, for if they are transformed into services or merchandise that yield money then

72 THE GIFT

one is better off in the end. We may truly say that the Tro- briand or Tsimshian chief behaves somewhat Hke the capitaHst who knovvs_hoi\L-to-speRd-his money at the^Tght time only to build his capital up again. Interest and disinterestedness taken together explain this form of the circulation of wealth and of the circulation of tokens of wealth that follows upon it.

pEven the destruction of wealth does not correspond to the complete disinterestedness which one might expect. These great acts of .^enerogity -arc^no^ free fronr-^^ifjnterest. The extravagant consumption of wealth, particularly in the pot- latch, always exaggerated and often purely destructive, in which goods long stored are all at once given away or destroyed, lends to these institutions the appearance of wasteful expendi- ture and child-like prodigality.^^ Not only are valuable goods thrown away and foodstuffs consumed to excess but there is destruction for its own sake — coppers are thrown into the sea or broken. But the motives of such excessive gifts and reckless consumption, such mad losses and destruction of wealth, especially in these potlatch societies, are in no way disinterested. Between vassals and chiefs, between vassals and their henchmen, the hierarchy is established by means of these gifts. To give is to show one's superiority, to show that one is something more and higher, that one is magister. To accept without returning or repaying more is to face subordination, to become a client and subservient, to become minister..

The magic ritual in the kula known as mwasila contains spells and symbols which show that the man who wants to enter into a contract seeks above all profit in the form of social — one might almost say animal — superiority. Thus he charms the betel-nut to be used with his partners, casts a spell over the chief and his fellows, then over his own pigs, his necklaces, his head and mouth, the opening gifts and whatever else he carries; then he chants, not without exaggeration: T shall kick the mountain, the mountain moves . . . the mountain falls down. . . . My spell shall go to the top of Dobu Mountain. . . . My canoe will sink. . . . My fame is like thunder, my treading is like the roar of flying witches, . . . Tudududu.' ^^ The aim is to

CONCLUSIONS 73

be the first, the finest, luckiest, strongest and richest, and that is how to set about it. (Later the chief confirms his mana when he redistributes to his vassals and relatives what he has just received; he maintains his rank among the chiefs by exchanging armshells for necklaces, hospitality for visits, and so on. In this case wealth is, in every aspect, as much a thing of prestige as a thing of utility. 'But are we certain that our own position is different and that wealth with us is not first and foremost a means of controlling others ?

Let us test now the notion to which we have opposed the ideas of the gift and disinterestedness: that of interest^^nd the individual pursuit of utility. This agrees no better with previous theories. If similar motives animate Trobriand and American chiefs and Andaman clans and once animated generous Hindu or Germanic noblemen in their giving and spending, they are not to be found in the cold reasoning of the business man, banker or capitalist. iTrLthose earlier civiUzatiQiis one had! interests but they differed from those of our time. jThere, if one! hoards, itTs^ only to spend later on, to put people under obliga- tions and to win followers. Exchanges are made as well, but only of luxury objects like clothing and ornaments, or feasts and other things that are consumed at once. Return is made with interest, but that is done in order to humiHate the original donor or exchange partner and not merely to recompense him fortheiossThar the lapse of time causes him. He has an interest but It Is "only analogous to the one which we say is our guiding principle.

Ranged between the relatively amorphous and disinterested economy within the sub-groups of Austrahan and North American (Eastern and Prairie) clans, and the individualistic economy of pure interest which our societies have had to some extent ever since their discovery by Greeks and Semites, there is a great series of institutions and economic events nojL_ ^governed by the rationalism which past theory so readily took

for granted. ^ — -

The word 'interest' is recent in origin and can be traced back to the Latin interest written on account books opposite

74 THE GIFT

rents to be recovered. In the most epicurean of these philoso- phies pleasure and the good were pursued and not material utility. The victory of rationalism and mercantilism was required before the notions of profit and the individual were given currency and raised to the level of principles. One can date roughly^ — after Mandeville and his Fable des Abeilles — the triumph of the notion of individual interest. It is only by awkward paraphrasing that one can render the phrase 'indi- vidual interest' in Latin, Greek or Arabic. Even the men who wrote in classical Sanskrit and used the word artha, which is fairly close to our idea of interest, turned it, as they did with other categories of action, into an idea different from ours. The sacred books of ancient India divide human actions into the categories of law (dharma), interest (artha) and desire (kama). But artha refers particularly to the political interest of king, Brahmins and ministers, or royalty and the various castes. The considerable literature of the Niticastra is not economic in tone.

. It is only our Western societies that quite recently turned nianjntp an economic animal. But we are not yet all animals of the same species. In ,_both lower and upper class.es pure^ irrational expenditure is in current practice: it is still charac- teristic of some French noble houses. Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, but before, like the moral man, the man of duty, the scientific man and the reasonable man. For a long time man was something quite different; and it is not so long now since he became a machine — a calculating_ machine.

In other respects we are stilLJar from frigid utilitarian calculation. Make a thorough statistical analysis, as Halb- wachs did for the working classes, of the consumption and expenditure of our middle classes and how many needs are found satisfied? How many desires are fulfilled that have utility as their end? Does not the rich man's expenditure on luxury, art, servants and extravagances recall the expenditure of the nobleman of former times or the savage chiefs whose customs we have been describing?

It is another question to ask if it is good that this should be

CONCLUSIONS 75

so. It is a good thing possibly that there exist means of expendi- ture and exchange other than economic ones. However, wc contend that the best economic procedure is not to be found in the calculation of individual needs. I believe that we must become, in proportion as we would develop our wealth, something more than better financierSj__accoimtants and administrators. Thejnere pursuit of individual ends Ts HarfnTul ^ to the ends and peace of the whole, to the rhythm of its work and pleasures, and hence in the end to the individual.

We have just seen how important sections and groups of our capital industries are seeking to attach groups of their employees to them. Again all the syndicalist groups, employers' as much as wage-earners', claim that they are defending and representing the general interest with a fervour equal to that of the particular interests of their members, or of the interests of the groups themselves. Their speeches are burnished with many fine metaphors. Nevertheless, one has to admit that not only ethics and philosophy, but also economic opinion and practice, are starting to rise to this 'social' level. The feeling is that there is no better way of making men work than by reassuring them of being paid loyally all their lives for labour which they give loyally not only for their own sakes but for that of others. The producer-exchanger feels now as he has always felt — but this time he feels it more acutely — that he is giving something of himself, his time and his life. Thus he wants recompense, however modest, for this gift. And to refuse him this recompense is to incite him to laziness and lower produc- tion.

We draw now a conclusion both sociological and practical. The famous Sura LXIV, 'Mutual Deception', given at Mecca to Mohammed, says:

15. Your possessions and your children are only a trial and Allah it is with whom is a great reward.

16. Therefore be careful [of your duty to] Allah as much as you can, and hear and obey and spend {sadaqa), it is better for your souls; and whoever is saved from the greediness of his soul, these it is that are the successful.

76 THE GIFT

17. If you set apart from Allah a goodly portion, He will double it for you and forgive you; and Allah is the multiplier of rewards, forbearing.

18. The knower of the unseen and the seen, the mighty, the wise.

Replace the name of Allah by that of the society or professional group, or unite all three; replace the concept of alms by that of co-operation, of a prestation altruistically made ; you will have a fair idea of the practice which is now coming into being. It can be seen at work already in certain economic groups and in the hearts of the masses who often enough know their own interest and the common interest better than their leaders do.

3. Sociological and Ethical Conclusions

We may be permitted another note about the method we have used. We do not set this work up as a model; it simply proffers one or two suggestions. It is incomplete: the analysis could be pushed farther. ^^ We are really posing questions for historians and anthropologists and offering possible lines of research for them rather than resolving a problem and laying down definite answers. It is enough for us to be sure for the moment that we have given sujfficient data for such an end. This being the case, we would point out that there 4s a

ilieuristic_element. in our manner of treatment. The facts we have studied are all 'total', social phenomena. The word 'general' may be preferred although we like it less. Some of the facts presented concern the whole of society and its institutions (as with potlatch, opposing clans, tribes on visit, etc.) ; others, in which exchanges and contracts are the concern of individuals, embrace a large number of institutions.

\ These phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological and so on. They are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and diffuse

I morality; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or disapproval. They are at once pt5litical ^nd domestic,

I being of interest both to classes and to clans and families. They

CONCLUSIONS 77

are religious; they concern true religion, animism, magic andl diffuse religious mentality. They are economic, for the notions'\ of value, utility, interest, luxury, wealth, acquisition, accumula- j tion, consumption and liberal and sumptuous expenditure are all present, although not perhaps in their modern senses. Moreover, these institutions have an important aesthetic side; which we have left unstudied; but the dances performed, the songs and shows, the dramatic representations given between camps or partners, the objects made, used, decorated, polished, amassed and transmitted with affection, received with joy, given away in triumph, the feasts in which everyone partici- pates— all these, the food, objects and services, are the source of aesthetic emotions as well as emotions aroused by interest. ^^ This is true not only of Melanesia but also, and particularly, of the potlatch of North- West America and still more true of the market-festival of the Indo-European world. Lastly, our phenomena are clearly morphological. Everything that happens in the course of gatherings, fairs and markets or in the feasts that replace them, presupposes groups whose duration exceeds the season of social concentration, like the winter potlatch of the Kwakiutl or the few weeks of the Melanesian maritime expeditions. Moreover, in order that these meetings may be carried out in peace, there must be roads or water for transport and tribal, inter-tribal or international alliances — commercium and connubium.^^

We are dealing_then with something more than a set of themes, more than institutional elements, more than institjir tions, more even th^n systems of institutions divisible into legal, economic, religious and other part^. We are concerned with 'wholes', with systems in their entirety. We have not described them as if they were fixed, in a static or skeletal condition, and still less have we dissected them into the rules and myths and values and so on of which they are composed. It is only by considering themjis wholesjthat we have been able to see their essence, their operation and their living aspect, and to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards

78 THE GIFT

Others. Only by making such concrete observation of social life is it possible to come upon facts such as those which our study is beginning to reveal. Nothing in our opinion is more urgent orjjromising than research into 'total' social phenomena. - — -The advantage is twofold. Firstly there is an advantage in generality, for facts of widespread occurrence are more likely to~beniriiversal than local institutions or themes, which are invariably tinged with local colour. But particularly the advantage is in realism. We see social facts in the round, as they really are. In society there are not merely ideas and rules, but also men and groups and their behaviours. We see them in motion as an engineer sees masses and systems, or as we observe octopuses and anemones in the sea. We see groups of men, and active forces, submerged in their environments and sentiments.

Historians believe and justly resent the fact that sociologists make too many abstractions and separate unduly the various elements of society. We should follow their precepts and observe what is given. The tangible fact is Rome or Athens or the average Frenchman or the Melanesian of some island, and not prayer or law as such. Whereas formerly sociologists were obliged to analyse and abstract rather too much, they should now force themselves to reconstitute the whole. This is the way to reach incontestable Tacts. They will also find a way of satis- fying psychologists who have a pronounced viewpoint, and particularly psycho-pathologists, since there is no doubt that the object of their study is concrete. They all observe, or at least ought to, minds as wholes and not minds divided into faculties. We should follow suit.. The study of the concretCj which is the- study of the whole, is made more readily, is more interesting and furnishes more explanations in the sphere of sociology than the study of the abstract. For we observe complete and complex beings. We too describe them in their organisms and psychai as well as in their behaviour as groups, with the attendant psy- choses: sentiments, ideas and desires of the crowd, of organized societies and their sub-groups. We see bodies and their reac- tions, and their ideas and sentiments as interpretations or as

CONCLUSIONS 79

motive forces. The aim and principle of sociology is to observe and understand the whole group in its total behaviour.

It is not possible here — it would have meant extending a restricted study unduly — to seek the morphological implica- tions of our facts. It may be worth while, however, to indicate the method one might follow in such a piece of research.

All the societies we have described above with the exception of our European societies are segmentary. Even the Indo- Europeans, the Romans before the Twelve Tables, the Ger- manic societies up to the Edda, and Irish society to the time of its chief literature, were still societies based on the clan or on great families more or less undivided internally and isolated from each other externally. All these were far removed from the degree of unification with which historians have credited them or which is ours today. Within these groups the indivi- duals, even the most influential, were less serious, avaricious and selfish than we are; externally at least they"vvere^nd are generous and more ready to give. In tribal feasts, in ceremonies of rival clans, allied famihes or those that assist at each other's initiation, groups visit each other; and with the development of the law of hospitality in more advanced societies, the rules of friendship and the contract are present — along with the gods — to ensure the peace of markets and villages; at these times men meet in a curious frame of mind with exaggerated fear and an equally exaggerated generosity which appear stupid in no one's eyes but our own. lln these primitive and archaic societies there is no middle path. There is either com- plete"Tfust or mistrust./ One lays down one's arms, renounces magic and gives everything away, from casual hospitality to one's daughter or one's property. It is in such conditions that men, despite themselves, learnt to renounce what was theirs and made contracts to give and repay.

But then they had no choice in the matter. When two groups of men meet they may move away or in case of mistrust or defiance they may resort to arms; or else they can come to terms. Business has always been done with foreigners, although these might have been allies. The people of Kiriwina said to

8o THE GIFT

Malinowski: 'The Dobu man is not good as we are. He is fierce, he is a man-eater. When we come to Dobu, we fear him, he might kill us! But see! I spit the charmed ginger root and their mind turns. They lay down their spears, they receive us well.'^' Nothing better expresses how close together lie festival and warfare.

Thurnwald describes with reference to another Melanesian tribe, with genealogical material, an actual event which shows just as clearly how these people pass in a group quite suddenly from a feast to a battle.^^ Buleau, a chief, had invited Bobal, another chief, and his people to a feast which was probably to be the first of a long series. Dances were performed all night long. By morning everyone was excited by the sleepless night of song and dance. On a remark made by Buleau one of Bobal's men killed him; and the troop of men massacred and pillaged and ran off with the women of the village. 'Buleau and Bobal were more friends than rivals' they said to Thurnwald. We all have experience of events like this.

It is by opposing reason to emotion and setting up the will for peace against rash follies of this kind that peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gift and commerce for war, isolation and stagnation.

The research proposed would have some conclusion of this kind. Socigties ha^^-pregressed in-thejneasure in which they, their sub-groups and their members, have been able to stabilize :their contracts and to give, receive and repay. In order to trade, man must^fir^ lay down his spear. When that is done he can succeed in exchanging goods and persons not only between clan and clan but between tribe and tribe and nation and nation, and above all between individuals. It is only then that people can create, can satisfy their interests mutually and define them without recourse to arms. It is in this way that the clan, the tribe and nation have learnt — just as in the future the classes and nations and individuals will learn — how to oppose one another without slaughter and to give without sacrificing themselves to others. That is one of the secrets of their wisdom and solidarity.

CONCLUSIONS 8l

There is no other course feasible. The Chronicles of Arthur ^^ relate how King Arthur, with the help of a Cornish carpenter, invented the marvel of his court, the miraculous Round Table at which his knights would never come to blows. Formerly because of jealousy, skirmishes, duels and murders had set blood flowing in the most sumptuous of feasts. The carpenter says to Arthur: T will make thee a fine table, where sixteen hundred may sit at once, and from which none need be excluded. . . . And no knight will be able to raise combat, for there the highly placed will be on the same level as the lowly.' There was no 'head of the table' and hence no more quarrels. Wherever Arthur took his table, contented and invincible remained his noble company. And this today is the way of the nations that are strong, rich, good and happy. Peoples, classes, families and individuals may become rich, but they will not achieve happiness until they can sit down like the knights around their common riches. There is no need to seek far for goodness and happiness. It is to be found in the imposed peace, in the rhythm of communal and private labour, in wealth amassed and redistributed, in the mutual respect and reciprocal generosity that education can impart.

Thus we see how it is possible under certain circumstances to study total human behaviour; and how that concrete study leads not only to a science of manners, a partial social science, but even to ethical conclusions — 'civility', or 'civics' as we say today. Through studies of this sort we can find, measure and assess the various determinants, aesthetic, moral, religious and economic, and the material and demographic factors, whose sum is the basis of society and constitutes the common life, and whose conscious direction is the supreme art — politics in the Socratic sense of the word.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ABBREVIATIONS

USED IN THE NOTES

5th, yth, gth or 12th Report: Boas, 'Reports on the Tribes of N.W. Canada'

in British Association for the Advancement of Science, 189 1-8. nth Census: 'Report on the Population, etc., of Alaska' in Eleventh Alaskan

Census, 1900. 19 Tears: Turner, Nineteen Tears in Polynesia. A.M.N.H. : Report of the American Museum of Natural History. Andamans: A. R. Brown (A. R. Radcliffe-Brown), The Andaman Islanders. Anuc.: Anucasanaparvan, Book XIII of the Mahabharata. A.R.B.A.E.: Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Argonauts: Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. A.S. : L'Annee Sociologique. B.A.E.: The Bureau of American Ethnology.

Chukchee: Bogoras, 'The Chukchee' in Jesup North Pacific Expedition, VII. Eth. Kwa. : Boas, 'Ethnology of the Kwakiutl', in Annual Report of the

Bureau of American Ethnology, XXXV. Foi Juree: Davy, 'Foi Juree' in Travaux de V Annie Sociologique, 1922. Forschungen : Thurnwald, Forschungen auf den Salomo Inseln. Haida : Swanton, 'The Haida' in Jesup North Pacific Expedition, V. Haida Texts: Swanton, 'Haida Texts' in do., VI and X. Haida T. and M. : Swanton, 'Haida Texts and Myths' in Bulletin of the

Bureau of American Ethnology, no. 29. H.M.S.: Rivers, History of the Melanesian Society. J.N.P.E. : Jesup North Pacific Expedition. J.P.S. : Journal of the Polynesian Society. J. R.A.I. : Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Koopen : Kruyt, 'Koopen in Midden Celebes' in Meded. der Konink. Akademie

V. Wet., Afd. Letterk., 56, series B. Koryak : Jochelsen, 'The Koryak' in Jesup North Pacific Expedition, VI. Kwakiutl: Boas, 'The Kwakiutl Indians' in do., V. Kwa. T. I: Boas, 'Kwakiutl Texts', First Series, in do.. III. Kwa. T. II: Boas, 'Kwakiutl Texts', Second Series, in do., X. Magie et Droit: Huvelin, 'Magie et Droit Individuels'in Annie Sociologique, "ii.. Manuel: Giraud, Manuel Elementaire de Droit Romain, 7th edn. M.C.D. : Tregear, Maori Comparative Dictionary. Melanesians : Seligman, The Melanesians of British New Guinea. Prim. Ec: Malinowski, 'Primitive Economics' in Economic Journal, March

1921. Sec. Soc. : Boas, 'Secret Societies and Social Organization of the Kwakiutl

Indians' in Report of the American Museum of Natural History, 1895. Textes : Giraud, Textes de Droit Romain. Tlingit: Swanton, 'The Tlingit Indians' in Annual Report of the Bureau of

American Ethnology, XXVI.

82

NOTES 83

Tlingit T. and M. : Swanton, 'Tlingit Texts and Myths' in Bulletin of the

Bureau of American Ethnology, no. 39. T.N.Z-I-: Transactions of the New Zealand Institute. Tsim. Myth. : Boas, 'Tsimshian Mythology' in Annual Report of the Bureau

of American Ethnology, XXXI. Walde: Walde, Lateinisches Etymologisches Wdrterbuch.

Introductory

^ Cassel in his Theory of Social Economy, Vol. II, p. 345, mentions this text.

* I have been unable to consult Burckhard, Z^m Begriff der Schenkung, pp. 53 ff. But for Anglo-Saxon law our immediate point has been noted by Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, Vol. II, p. 82: 'The wide word "gift" . . . will cover sale, exchange, gage and lease.' Cf. pp. 12, 212-14: 'Perhaps we may doubt whether ... a purely gratuitous promise . . . would have been enforced.' See also the essay by Neubecker on the Germanic dowry. Die Mitgift, 1909, pp. 65 ff.

' 'Foi Juree' ; see bibliography in Mauss, 'Une Forme archaique de Contrat chez les Thraces' in Revue des Etudes Grecques, 1921; R. Lenoir, 'L'Institution du Potlatch' in Revue Philosophique, 1924.

* M. F. Samlo, Der GUterverkehr in der Urgesellschaft, Institut Solvay , 1909, has some sound discussion on this, and on p. 156 suggests that he is on the lines of our own argument.

* Grierson, Silent Trade, 1903, argued conclusively against this view. See also Von Moszkowski, Wirtschaftsleben der primitiven Volker, 191 1; although he considers theft to be primitive and confuses it with the right to take. A good exposition of Maori data is to be found in W. von Brun, 'Wirtschaftsorganisation der Maori' in Beitrdgungen Lamprecht, 18, 19 12, in which a chapter is devoted to exchange. The most recent comprehensive work on so-called primitive economics is Koppers, 'Ethnologische Wirt- schaftsordnung', in Anthropos, 1915-16, pp. 611-51 and 971-1079; strong on presentation of material but for the rest rather hair-splitting.

* We wrote recently that in Australia, especially on a death, there is the beginning of exchange on a tribal basis, and not merely amongst clans and phratries. Among the Kakadu of the Northern Territory there are three mortuary ceremonies. During the third the men have a kind of inquest to find out who is the sorcerer responsible for the death. Contrary to normal Australian custom no feud follows. The men simply gather with their spears and state what they require in exchange. Next day the spears are taken to another tribe, e.g. the Umoriu, who reaUze the reason for the visit. The spears are piled and in accordance with a known scale the required objects are set before them. Then the Kakadu take them away (Baldwin Spencer, Tribes of the Northern Territories, 19 14, p. 247). Spencer then states that the objects can then be exchanged for spears, a fact we do not fully understand. But he fails to see the connection between the mortuary ceremony and the exchange of gifts, adding that the natives themselves do not see it. But the custom is easy enough to understand. It is a pact which takes the place of a feud, and which sets up an inter-tribal market. The exchange of objects

7

84 THE GIFT INTRO.

is simultaneously an exchange of peace pledges and of sentiments of solidarity in mourning. In Australia this is normally seen only between clans and families which are in some way associated or related by marriage. The only difference here is that the custom is extended to the tribal basis.

^ A poet as late as Pindar could say veavla yafi^pw TTpoirivoiv oiKodev ot/caSe, Olympiads, VIII, 4. The whole passage still reflects the kind of situation we are describing. The themes of the gift, of wealth, marriage, honour, favour, alliance, of shared food and drink, and the theme of jealousy in marriage are all clearly represented.

• See specially the remarkable rules of the ball game among the Omaha : Fletcher and la Flesche, 'Omaha Tribe' in A.R.B.A.E., 1905-6, pp. 197 and 366.

* Krause, Tlingit Indianer, pp. 234 ff., notes the character of the festivals and rituals although he did not call them 'potlatch'. Boursin in Eleventh Census, pp. 54-66, and Porter, ibid. p. 33, saw and named the reciprocal glorification in the potlatch. Swanton, however, has the best commentary, in 'Social Conditions ... of the Tlingit Indians' in A.R.B.A.E., XXVI, 345, Cf. our notes in A.S., XI, 207 and in Foi Jurie, p. 172.

1" On the meaning of the word potlatch, see Barbeau, Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie de Quibec, 191 1, and Foi Jurie, p. 162. It seems to us, however, that Davy does not take into account the original meaning of the word. Boas, admittedly for the Kwakiutl and not the Chinook, uses the word 'feeder', although the literal meaning is 'Place of getting Satiated' — Kwa. T., II, p. 43; cf. Kwa. T., I, pp. 255, 517. But the two meanings suggested, gift and food, are not exclusive since the usual content of the gift, here at any rate, is food.

11 The legal aspect of potlatch has been discussed by Adam in his articles in the Z^itschrift fur vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft starting 191 1, and in the Festschrift to Seler, 1920, and by Davy in Foi Jurie. The economic and ritual aspects are no less important and merit the same detailed study. The religious nature of the people involved and of the objects exchanged or destroyed have a bearing on the nature of the contracts, as have the values attributed to them.

" The Haida call it 'killing wealth'.

i« See Hunt's documents in Eth. Kwa., p. 1340, where there is an interesting description of the way the clan brings its potlatch contributions to the chief, and a record of some of the discourses. The chief says: 'It will not be in my name. It will be in your name, and you will become famous among the tribes, when it is said that you have given your property for a potlatch' (p. 1342).

1* The potlatch is not confined to the tribes of the North- West. We consider also the 'Asking Festival' of the Alaskan Eskimo as something more than a mere borrowing from neighbouring Indian tribes.

" See our observations in A.S., XI, loi and XIII, 372-4, and Anthro- pologie, 1920. Lenoir notes two clear potlatch traits in South America, 'Expeditions Maritimes en Melane'sie' in Anthropologic, Sept. 1924.

" Thurnwald, in Forschungen, Vol. Ill, 19 12, p. 8, uses this word.

^' Revue des Etudes Grecques, XXXIV, 1921.

CH. I NOTES 85

Chapter I

1 Davy, in Foi Jurie, p. 140, studies these exchanges with reference to the marriage contract. Here we point out further impUcations.

* 19 Years, p. 178; Samoa, pp. 82 ff. ; Stair, Old Samoa, p. 75. 8 Kramer, Samoa-Inseln, Vol. II, pp. 52-63.

* Stair, Old Samoa, p. 180; Turner, 19 Tears, p. 225; Samoa, p. 91. 'Turner, 19 Tears, p. 184; Samoa, p. 91.

* Kramer, Samoa-Inseln, Vol. II, p. 105; Turner, Samoa, p. 146.

' Kramer, ibid., pp. 96, 313. The malaga trading expedition (cf. the walaga of New Guinea) is very like the potlatch and characteristic of the neighbouring Melanesian archipelago. Kramer uses the word Gegenschenk for the exchange of oloa and tonga which we shall discuss. We do not intend to follow the exaggerations of the English school of Rivers and Elliot Smith or those of the Americans who, after Boas, see the whole American potlatch as a series of borrowings, but still we grant that an important part is played by the spreading of institutions. It is specially important in this area where trading expeditions go great distances between islands and have done from early times; there must have been transmitted not only the articles of merchandise but also methods of exchange. Malinow^ki, whom we quote later, recognizes this. See Lenoir, 'Expeditions mari times en Melanesie' in Anthropologie, 1924.

* Rivalry among Maori clans is often mentioned, particularly with regard to festivals, e.g. by S. P. Smith, J.P.S. XV, 87.

• This is not properly potlatch because the counter-prestation lacks the element of usury. But as we shall see with the Maori the fact that no return is made implies the loss of mana, or of 'face' as the Chinese say ; the same is true for Samoa.

*" Turner, 19 Tears, p. 178; Samoa, p. 52. The theme of honour through ruin is fundamental to North-West American potlatch.

^1 Turner, 19 Tears, p. 1 78; Samoa, p. 83, says the young man is 'adopted'. This is wrong; it is fosterage. Education is outside his own family certainly, but in fact it marks a return to his uterine family (the father's sister is the spouse of the mother's brother). In Polynesia both maternal and paternal relatives are classificatory. See our review of E. Best, Maori Nomenclature in A.S., VII, 420 and Durkheim's remarks in V, 37.

" 19 Tears, p. 179; Samoa, p. 83.

" See our remarks on the Fiji vasu in 'Proc^ verbal de I'l.F.A.', Anthro- pologie, 1 92 1.

^* Kramer, Samoa-Inseln, Vol. I, p. 482; Vol. II, p. 90.

1* Ibid., Vol. II, p. 296. Cf. p. 90 [toga equals Mitgift) ; p. 94 exchanges of oloa and toga.

^* Ibid., Vol. I, p. 477. Violette, Dictionnaire Samoan-Frangais, defines toga as 'native valuables consisting of fine mats, and oloa valuables such as houses, cloth, boats, guns'; and he refers back to oa, valuables in general.

" ig Tears, p. 179; cf. p. 186; M.C.D., p. 468 under taonga confuses this with oloa.

86 THE GIFT CH. 1

The Rev. Ella, 'Polynesian Native Clothing', in J.P.S., VIII, 165, describes the ie tonga (mats); they were 'the chief wealth of the natives; indeed at one time were used as a medium of currency in payment for work, etc., also for barter, interchange of property, at marriage and other special occasions of courtesy. They are often retained in families as heir- looms, and many old ie are well known and more highly valued as having belonged to some celebrated family.' Cf Turner, Samoa, p. 120. We shall see that these expressions have their equivalents in Melanesia, in North America and in our own folklore.

" Kramer, Samoa-Inseln, Vol. II, pp. 90, 93.

*• See M.C.D. under taonga: (Tahitian) tataoa, to give property, yflateoa, to compensate; (Marquesan) Lesson, Polynesiens, Vol. II, p. 232, taetae; tiau tae-tae, presents given, 'local produce given in exchange for foreign goods'. Radiguet, Derniers Sauvages, p. 157. The root of the word is tahu, etc.

*" See Mauss, 'Origines de la Notion de la Monnaie' in Anthropologic, 19 14, where most of the facts quoted, except for Negrito and American material, belong to this domain.

*^ Proverbs, p. 103.

^^ Maori Momentoes, p. 21.

*' In Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, I, 354.

** New Zealand tribes are divided in theory by the Maori themselves into fishermen, agriculturalists and hunters, who are supposed to exchange their produce. Cf. Best, 'Forest-Lore', in 7".JV.^./., XLII, 435.

"' Ibid., p. 431; translation, p. 439.

** The word hau, like the Latin spiritus, means both wind and soul. More precisely hau is the spirit and power of inanimate and vegetable things. The word mana is reserved for men and spirits and is not applied to things as much as in Melanesian languages.

" Utu means satisfaction in blood vengeance.

^* He hau. These sentences were all abridged by Best.

'• Many facts illustrating this point were collected by R. Hertz in his Pechi et V Expiation. They show that the sanction against theft is the mystical effect of the mana of the object stolen; moreover, the object is surrounded by taboos and marked by its owner, and has hau, spiritual power, as a result. This hau avenges theft, controls the thief, bewitches him and leads him to death or constrains him to restore the object.

*' In Hertz will be found material on the mauri to which we allude here. Mauri are talismans, safeguards and sanctuaries where the clan soul (hapu) dwells with its mana and the hau of its land.

Best's documents require more comment than we can give here, especially those concerned with hau whitia and kai hau. See especially 'Spiritual Concepts' in J.P.S., X, 10 (Maori text), and IX, 198. Best translates hau whitia well as 'averted hau\ The sins of theft, of non-repay- ment, of non-counter-prestation are a 'turning aside' of the spirit {hau) as in the case of a refusal to make an exchange or give a present. Kai hau is badly translated as the equivalent of hau whitia. It implies the act of eating the soul, and may well be synonymous with whangai hau (cf. Tregear,

CH. I NOTES 87

M.C.D., under kai and whangai). But kai refers to food and the word alludes to the sharing of food and the fault of remaining in debt over it. Further, the word hau itself also belongs to the realm of ideas. Williams, Maori Dictionary, p. 47, says ^hau, return present by way of acknowledgement for a present received'.

31 We draw attention to the expression kai-hau-kai, M.C.D., p. 116: 'The return present of food, etc., made by one tribe to another. A feast (in the South).' This signifies that the return gift is really the 'spirit' of the original prestation returning to its point of departure ; 'food that is the hau of other food.' European vocabularies have not the ability to describe the complexity of these ideas.

** The taonga seem to have an individuality beyond that of the hau, which derives from their relationship with their owner. They bear names. According to the best authorities (M.C.D. under pounamu, from the manu- script of Colenso) they comprise: the pounamu, jades that are the sacred property of the clan chiefs; the rare, sculptured tiki; various kinds of mats of which one is called koruwai (the only Maori word recalling the Samoan oloa, although we have sought for an equivalent). A Maori document gives the name taonga to the karakia, individual heritable magic spells. J.P.S., IX, 126, 133.

" E. Best, 'Forest Lore', in T.N-Z-U XLII, 449.

'* We should really discuss here the ideas implied in the interesting Maori expression 'to despise tahu\ The main document is Best, 'Maori Mythology', xaJ.F.S., IX, 1 13. Tahu is a symbolic name for food in general, its personification. 'Do not despise tahiC is the injunction to a person who refuses a gift of food. It would take much space to study Maori food beliefs so we simply point out that this personification of food is identical with Rongo, the god of plants and of peace. The association of ideas becomes clearer: hospitality, food, communion, peace, exchange, law.

" See Best, 'Spiritual Concepts' in J.P.S., IX, 198.

•* See Hardeland, Dayak Worterhuch under indjok, irek, pahuni. The comparative study of these institutions could be extended to cover the whole of Malayan, Indonesian and Polynesian civilization. The only difficulty is in recognizing the institution. For instance, it is under the name of 'compulsory trade' that Spencer St. John describes the way in which (in Brunei) the aristocrats seek tribute from the Bisayas by first giving them a present of cloth to be repaid with high interest over a number of years {Life in the Forests of the Far East, Vol. II). The error arises from the custom of civilized Malayans of borrowing cultural traits from their less civilized brothers without understanding them. We do not enumerate all the Indonesian data on this point.

" Not to invite one to a war dance is a sin, a fault which, in the South Island, is called puha. H. T. de Croisilles, 'Short Traditions of the South Island' isxJ.P.S., X, 76. (Note tahua means a gift of food.)

Maori ritual of hospitality comprises: an obligatory invitation that should not be refused or solicited; the guest must approach the reception house looking straight ahead; his host should have a meal ready for him straight away and himself partake of it humbly; on leaving, the guest

88 THE GIFT CH. I

receives a parting gift (Tregear, The Maori Race, p. 29). See later, identical rites in Hindu hospitality.

In fact the two rules are closely connected like the gifts they prescribe. Taylor, Te ika a mani, p. 132, no. 60, translates a proverb expressing this: 'When raw it is seen, when cooked it is taken' (it is better to eat half-cooked food and to wait until strangers arrive than to have it cooked and be obliged to share it with them).

Chief Hekemaru, according to legend, refused food unless he had been seen and received by the village he was visiting. If his procession passed through unnoticed and then messengers arrived begging him to return and take food, he replied that 'food would not follow his back'. He meant that food offered to the 'sacred back of his head' would endanger those who gave it. Hence the proverb: 'Food will not follow at the back of Hekemaru' (Tregear, The Maori Race, p. 79).

'* Among the tribe of Tuhoe Best ('Maori Mythology' in J.P.S., VIII, 113) saw these principles: When a famous chief is to visit a district, his mana precedes him. The people hunt and fish for good food. They get nothing. 'That is because our mana has preceded us and driven all the food (fish and birds) afar off that they may not be visible to the people. Our mana has banished them.' (There follows an explanation of snow in terms of whai riri — a sin against water — which keeps food away from men.) This rather difficult passage describes the condition of the land as the result of a hapu of hunters who had failed to make preparations to receive the chief of another clan. They would have committed kaipapa, a ' sin against food', and thus destroyed their cultivations, hunting grounds and fisheries — their entire sources of food.

*» E.g. Arunta, Unmatjera, Kaitish; Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 610.

*" On vasu see especially Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, 1858, Vol. I, p. 34, and cf. Steinmetz, Entwickelung fUr die Strafe, Vol. II, pp. 241 ff. The right of the sister's son is only analogous to family communism. There are other rights present, the right of in-laws and what may be called 'permitted theft'.

*i See Chukchee. Obligation to give, receive and return gifts and hos- pitality is more marked with the Maritime than the Reindeer Chukchee. See 'Social Organization', J.N.P.E., VII, 634, 637. Cf. rules for sacrificing and slaughtering reindeer. 'Religion', ibid., II, 375; the duty of inviting, the right of the guest to demand what he wants and his obligation to give a present.

** The obligation to give is a marked Eskimo characteristic. See our 'Variations saisonni^res des Societes Eskimos' in A.S., IX, 121. A recent work on the Eskimo gives other tales which impart generosity: Hawkes, 'The Labrador Eskimo' in Canadian Geological Survey, Anthropological Series,

P- 159-

In 'Variations saisonni&res' we considered Alaskan Eskimo feasts as a combination of Eskimo elements and potlatch borrowings. But since writing that we have found the true potlatch as well as gift customs described for the Chukchee and Koryak in Siberia, so the Eskimo might have bor-

CH. I NOTES 89

rowed from them. Also the plausible theory of Sauvageot ('Journal des Americanistes', 1924) on the Asiatic origin of Eskimo languages should be taken into account. This theory confirms the archaeological and anthro- pological theories on the origin of the Eskimo and their civilization. Everything points to the fact that the western Eskimo are nearer the origin linguistically and ethnologically than the eastern and central. This seems proved by Thalbitzer.

One must then say that the eastern Eskimo have a potlatch of very ancient origin. The special totems and masks of the western festivals are clearly of Indian derivation. The disappearance in east and central Arctic America of the Eskimo potlatch is ill explained except by the gradual degeneration of the eastern Eskimo societies.

*^ Hall, Life with the Esquimaux, Vol. II, p. 320. It is remarkable that this is found not with reference to the Alaskan potlatch, but to the central Eskimo, who have only communal winter festivals and gift exchange. This shows that the notion extends beyond the limits of the potlatch proper.

** Nelson, 'Eskimos about Behring Straits' in A.R.B.A.E., XVIII, 303, and Porter, nth Census, pp. 138, 141, and especially Wrangold, Statistische Ergebnisse, etc., p. 132. For the 'asking stick', cf Hawkes, 'The Inviting-in Feast of the Alaskan Eskimos' in Canadian Geological Survey, Memo. 45, Anthropological Series, II, 7.

** Hawkes, ibid., pp. 3, 7. Cf p. 9 description of one such festival, Unalaklit v. Malemiut. One of the most characteristic traits is the series of comical prestations on the first day and the gifts concerned. One tribe tries to make the other laugh and can demand anything it wants. The best dancers receive valuable presents (pp. 12-14). This is a clear and rare example (I know of others in Australia and America) of representation in ritual of a theme which is frequent enough in mythology: the spirit of jealousy which, when it laughs, leaves hold of its object.

The Inviting-in Festival ends with a visit of the angekok (shaman) to the spirit-men, inua, whose mask he wears and who tell him they have enjoyed the dance and will send game. Cf. the gift made to seals, Jennes, 'Life of the Copper Eskimos' in Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, Vol. XII, 1922, p. 178.

Other themes of gift-giving customs are strongly marked; e.g. the chief naskuk has no right to refuse a gift or food however scarce it may be for fear of being evermore disgraced. Hawkes, ibid., p. 9.

Hawkes rightly considers (p. 1 9) the festival of the Dene described by Chapman [Congres des Americanistes de Quebec, 1907, Vol. II) as an Eskimo borrowing from Indians.

** See illustration in Chukchee, p. 403.

«Mbid., pp. 399-401.

** Koryak, pp. 64, 90, 98.

*' Chukchee, p. 400. On customs of this type see Frazer, The Golden Bough (3rd edn.), Vol. Ill, pp. 78-85, 91 ff. ; Vol. X, pp. 169 fif., also pp. i, 161.

*" This is a basic trait of all North- West American potlatch. It is not very noticeable, however, since the ritual is so totemistic that its effect upon nature is less evident than its influence over spirits. It is more obvious

90 THE GIFT CH. I

in the Behring Straits, especially with the Chukchee and the Eskimo potlatch of Saint-Lawrence Isle.

^^ See potlatch myth in Bogoras, Chukchee Mythology, p. 1 4. One shaman asks another: 'With what will you answer?' (i.e. make return gift). A struggle ensues but finally they come to an agreement; they exchange their magic knives and necklaces, then their (assistant) spirits and lastly their bodies (p. 15). Thereafter they are not entirely successful for they forget to exchange their bracelets and tassels ('my guide in motion'), p. 16. These objects have the same spiritual value as the spirits themselves.

*'Jochelsen, 'Koryak Religion', J.N.P.E., VI, 30. A Kwakiutl spirit song (from winter ceremony shamanism) comments:

'You send us all things from the other world, O spirits You heard that we were hungry We shall receive many things from you.'

Sec. Sac, p. 487.

^* Foi Jurie, pp. 224 ff., refers.

'* Koopen, pp. 1 63-8, 1 58-9, 3 and 5 of the summary.

^*