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====== The obligations of the gift ======

===== The obligations of the gift =====

==== Week 2: Society as a system of total services ====

Ryan Schram\\
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world\\
Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2022/2.2

**Main reading:** Eriksen (2015)

**Other reading:** Mauss ([1925] 1990)

===== Reciprocity is a triple obligation =====

[[:Marcel Mauss]] argues that every society is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The three obligations of reciprocity are symptoms of this:

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

===== 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.

===== Moka is a competitive system =====

The Kawelka //moka// (and the //potlatch// ceremonies of the Pacific Northwest) is a system of total services of an agonistic type.

Agonistic means that the sides in an exchange are competing to give more services to the other, and to raise the stakes of reciprocity.

Competing for prestige versus gaining profit?

===== Reciprocity is everywhere =====

Gift economies are not simply societies in which there’s a lot of gifts. A gift economy is a society in which reciprocity is a “total social phenomenon.”

Even societies which have created the possibility of individualism still have gifts and still have reciprocity.

===== References and further reading =====

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. “Exchange and Consumption.” In //Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology//, 4th ed., 217–40. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.16.


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.



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