Gifts, or society as a system of total services

Gifts, or society as a system of total services

Week 2: Gifts, commodities, and spheres of exchange

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Monday, August 05, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/2.1

Main reading: West (2012)

Other reading: Mauss ([1925a] 1990), 1-14, 39-46, 78-83; Marx ([1867] 1972), 319-329; Bohannan (1959); Bohannan (1955)

Durkheim and Mauss

Emile Durkheim is a founding figure of sociology and anthropology

• He wanted to analyze society as an objective fact
• Society is a collective consciousness, like the Borg, from Star Trek (yes).

Marcel Mauss was a nephew and student of Durkheim

• Applied a Durkheimian analysis to economic activity
• Reciprocity is an obligation underlying many if not all transactions

Gifts

In the islands of PNG, fishermen exchange fish for garden food with gardeners. Fishermen always cook their food in fresh water, even though they live by the sea. Inland gardeners cook their food in sea water, even though they have fresh water nearby. “Intoxicated with great love of exchange, they exchange even the water of their respective dwelling places and carry it home for the boiling of their food” (Fortune [1932] 1963, 206).

Many people throughout the world exchange things they don’t need for things they don’t need. They even exchange identical things, like water.

Why?

Gifts create obligations

Mauss says: Because you have to.

Gifts come with obligations because it is part of the system of total services. Specifically, giving a gift involves a triple obligation:

• The obligation to give
• The obligation to receive
• The obligation to reciprocate, or to give back to one who has given.

Society, in essence, is a total system. Reciprocity is an expression of this fundamental reality of society. We may not even be aware of this state of interdependence, but it is still there.

Gifts have spirit

For Mauss, the Maori word hau means the “spirit of the thing given.” When someone gives a gift, they give part of themselves. “The hau wishes to return to its birthplace” (Mauss [1925b] 1990, 12).

Total services

What, then, is society? Mauss says that the essence of society is a “system of total services” in which everything one does is for someone else, and other people do everything for you. It is a state of total interdependence.

Yam gardening in Auhelawa

Auhelawa is a society of people living on the south coast of Duau (Normanby Island), off the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea.

Every family in Auhelawa produces most of their own food grown on their own lands, and the most important of these are

• ʻwateya (Dioscorea alata)
• halutu (Dioscorea esculenta)

Yet although most of people’s effort and thinking goes into growing these yams, most of the ʻwateya are not grown as food for one’s family.

The best halutu are also preserved.

Tiv spheres of exchange

What if everything you owned “wished to return to its birthplace” (Mauss [1925b] 1990, 12)?

Everything of value would be embedded in social relationships.

In many societies the embeddedness of value takes the form of a system that organizes objects into distinct, ranked spheres of exchange. One example is the Tiv of Nigeria, who have three spheres:

• Women as wives
• Prestige items: brass rods, tugudu cloth, slaves
• Subsistence items: food, utensils, chickens, tools

Some things, like land, cannot be exchanged for anything, but are inherited (Bohannan 1955).

Money in Tiv society: Bohannan’s prediction

Bohannan claimed that money would disrupt the separation of spheres of exchange. However…

• Money was initially placed in the lowest of spheres, or even outside of the three spheres (Bohannan 1955, 68). It continued to mainly be exchanged against low-ranking items (Parry and Bloch 1989, 13–14).
• Other scholars have noted that money does not have this revolutionizing effect on similar systems (Hoskins 1997, 186–88).

References and further reading

Bohannan, Paul. 1955. “Some Principles of Exchange and Investment Among the Tiv.” American Anthropologist, New Series, 57 (1): 60–70. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1955.57.1.02a00080.

———. 1959. “The Impact of Money on an African Subsistence Economy.” The Journal of Economic History 19 (4): 491–503. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700085946.

Fortune, R. F. (1932) 1963. Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Hoskins, Janet. 1997. The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History, and Exchange. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0x0n99tc&chunk.id=d0e7605&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e7388&brand=ucpress.

Marx, Karl. (1867) 1972. “Capital, Vol. 1.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 294–438. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Mauss, Marcel. (1925a) 1990. “Selections from introduction, chapters 1-2, and conclusion.” In The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

———. (1925b) 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. https://archive.org/details/giftformreasonfo0000maus/page/4/mode/2up?q=total+services.

Parry, Jonathan, and Maurice Bloch. 1989. “Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange.” In Money and the Morality of Exchange, edited by Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, 1–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

West, Paige. 2012. “Village Coffee.” In From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea, 101–29. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.