The Gift Economy

David Cheal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317401322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Until recently we have known more about gift giving practices in pre-industrial societies than about those of industrial western society. In this book, first published in 1988, David Cheal shows that the process of present giving and receiving is a vital element in contemporary social life, relevant to some of the most important theoretical traditions in sociology, particularly those of Durkheim and Weber, and to the social constructionism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. This volume is the result of a major study of gift rituals carried out by David Cheal and his associates in which general themes are richly illustrated with details from individual case histories gathered during the research. It is highly significant that in western society women are more active gift givers than men and, while their voices explain how emotions and interests are interrelated within the gift economy, the author shows how that in turn is related to current theories about family, gender and religion.

1
Moral economy

In recent years, many of the most interesting developments in the scientific study of society have occurred at the boundaries between economics and the other social sciences. New approaches to economic life have reshaped the ways in which we think about familiar economic processes, such as labor markets. At the same time, there has been an upswing of interest in forms of economic life that were previously ignored. One of them is gift giving.

It is surprising that we know so very little about the reasons why we give things to others, for we do know that a great many people derive a great deal of pleasure from the act of giving. Yet, as social scientists, we do not possess ways of talking about this that make sense of everyday gift transactions in industrial societies. Researchers interested in social policy issues have drawn increasing attention to the many forms that giving, altruism, and self sacrifice take. As a result, it is now recognized that existing social theories have been inadequate, and that new ideas are needed. Further, it has sometimes been suggested that these alternative approaches must break with influential theoretical traditions in sociology and related disciplines (Stacey 1981).

In this book we will explore some of the limits to existing sociological traditions, as well as the possibilities that they contain. It will be suggested that the concepts of mainstream social theory are not as deficient as has sometimes been claimed, and that they can still throw new light upon important questions. At the same time, it is clear that many of the old answers no longer serve us well. In this chapter we are going to examine why it is that gift giving has not been seen as a significant social phenomenon in the study of modern societies, and we will consider what might be done to recover it as a topic for sociological theory. In addition, claims about gift practices that are not supported by the available evidence deserve to be exposed and, where they cannot be improved, discarded.

Sociological studies of gift behavior have been uncommon. In anthropology the situation has been quite different. Gift transactions in primitive societies have been intensively studied, and a great deal is known about them. From time to time anthropologists have pointed to the need for similar investigations to be conducted in modern societies (Belshaw 1965:49-51; Firth 1967:17; Munn 1973:607-8). Despite that encouragement, sustained work on modern gift practices has been undertaken only very recently. The reasons for this neglect can be traced to the considerable influence among the social sciences of two theoretical approaches. They are anthropological elementarism and political economy.

The major barrier to the development of a sociology of gift practices has been the tendency to see them as archaic customs, whose influence on social life has been in decline for a long time. Marcel Mauss, for example, felt that in modern times gift morality must depend upon "people and classes who uphold past customs" (Mauss 1954:63). He claimed that giving to others reappears in our own society "like the resurrection of a dominant motif long forgotten" (1954: 66). The conclusions that Mauss drew from this antiquarian approach to gift transactions have had such an enormous influence upon the social sciences (e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1969; Bourdieu 1977) that they deserve our close attention.

Beyond elementary structures

Mauss maintained that the study of the gift involved a "return to the old and elemental" (Mauss 1954: 67). That point of view, which Ekeh refers to as elementarism (1982: 128—32), Mauss derived from his mentor Emile Durkheim. Durkheim (1947:4-7) believed that sociology would sometimes have to ignore things that are "secondary" in order to concentrate on the "essential" features of phenomena, as they appear in primitive societies. Mauss applied Durkheim's method to an analysis of the gift (Mauss 1954). He concluded that the essential features of gift transactions are the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to make a return for gifts received. Mauss's discussion of the latter has been particularly influential, and others have subsequently claimed that the norm of reciprocity is a cultural universal (Gouldner i960). That point of view remains strong in the French sociological tradition (Maffesoli 1979).

The reputation or the French tradition or elementarism has owed a great deal to the claims made by Claude Lévi-Strauss (see especially Levi-Strauss 1969:268), who argued that universal structures of reciprocity are the foundations for all social life. Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by the potlatching of certain groups of North American Indians, and he believed that direct parallels could be drawn between it and gift practices in modern societies. He claimed that Christmas gift giving in contemporary North America "is nothing other than a gigantic potlatch" (1969: 56) conducted in the pursuit of prestige. That conclusion, which has been echoed in other anthropological commentaries (for example, Shurmer 1971), holds that gift practices in modern western societies are merely exaggerated versions of the competitive struggles for power and status that are to be found in certain primitive forms of exchange.

From the elementarist point of view, the cultural significance of gift transactions lies in their being the building blocks for human society, in which they are "first and foremost a means of controlling others" (Mauss 1954: 73). It must therefore be emphasized, in opposition to this point of view, that achieving control over others by overwhelming them with gifts is likely to be found on a large scale only where more effective forms of domination do not exist. In modern societies there exist a variety of means of domination in which gifts play little part. Large scale gift giving today is therefore not easily explained by drawing an analogy with the potlatch.

The major difficulty with the elementarist approach to the study of social relations is that it ignores the situated character of social practices (Habermas 1970: 363-5). It overlooks the fact, described by Simmel (Wolff 1950), that the same form of behavior may have many different meanings according to the local context, and it may therefore appear in a wide range of interaction episodes with different social effects. The unfortunate consequence of the elementarist approach has been that the diversity of gift giving in modern societies has been ignored. As Ekeh has pointed out, from the perspective of cultural elementarism ways of life that are peculiar to modern societies have been disregarded as "nonessential accretions" (Ekeh 1982: 128). This neglect of the present has meant that we have only just begun to comprehend the dynamic nature of the gift economies of contemporary western societies.

Gift practices are, as Mauss suggested, rooted in custom and tradition. But gift customs are not fixed, for they have been affected by changes in the larger society, as Theodore Caplow has concluded (Caplow 1982, 1984; Caplow et al. 1982). Caplow claims that in the USA there has been an increase in the ritualization of family life, as a means of stabilizing relationships that are both important and insecure. In his opinion it is the vulnerability of family life in modern society that is responsible for the great importance attached to gift giving (Caplow 1982: 391-2). Among the threats to family relationships, it is thought, are temptations for wives and mothers to reduce the amount of nurturing they provide for family members so that they can take up paid employment (Caplow et al. 1982: 243). Caplow and his colleagues have suggested that the material rewards from participation in the labor market are countered by symbolic rewards for caring for others, which are produced in the rituals of the festival cycle (Caplow et al. 1982:244).

The tension between market relationships and personal relationships is a distinctive characteristic of social life in capitalist societies. Clearly, that tension is not found in the simplest societies, where an institutionalized market economy does not exist. Knowledge of the elementary structures of primitive societies is therefore likely to be of dubious value in interpreting the gift practices of modern societies. For this reason it is necessary to abandon elementarism, and instead to approach the study of social life in a different manner.

Many sociologists who are interested in economic life in capitalist societies have followed a broad interdisciplinary approach that is sometimes referred to as the political economy paradigm (Marchak 1985). According to this approach, social relationships are believed to be determined by power structures whose origins lie in systems of property rights. It is claimed, following Marx, that the most important rights are those over the means by which the goods used in daily life are produced. Historical changes in modes of production, including the shift towards capital intensive manufacturing, are therefore believed to have had profound effects upon social organization. The theory of political economy provides particular accounts of those effects, which have been discussed extensively elsewhere (see for example Baudrillard 1975).

The position taken here is that gift transactions cannot be adequately understood from the perspective of political economy, since its assumptions include three theses which trivialize gift behavior. They are: the thesis of capitalist transformation; the thesis of emotional sequestration; and the thesis of economic rationalization. I shall argue here that the effects of each of these processes have been overstated. Gift giving in fact makes a vital contribution to contemporary social life. The nature of that contribution will be outlined in general terms in the following pages. In later chapters it will be described in greater detail, with illustrations from empirical case studies.

Capitalist transformations

The theory of political economy shares with cultural elementarism the assumption that gift giving was a uniquely important type of economic relationship in pre-capitalist societies, but that to all intents and purposes it was destroyed by the expansion of the system of market exchange. This point of view is evident in a number of influential histories, such as Karl Polanyi's (1957) description of "the great transformation" by which capitalism came into existence. It is generally assumed that the emergence of capitalist society meant that morals were replaced by markets (Thompson 1971; Zelizer 1979), and that gift transactions therefore became of lesser importance. Viviana Zelizer, for instance, has shown that in nineteenth-century America support for the bereaved shifted from a gift-type of mutual aid to an impersonal market system served by insurance companies. She reports that family and neighborhood transactions were replaced by transactions with organizations, and that the management of death therefore became rationalized and formalized. This change had some fundamental consequences for beliefs about life and death. According to Zelizer, it broke "a powerful normative pattern: the division between the marketable and the nonmarketable, or the sacred and the profane" (Zelizer 1979:43).

It is possible to accept Zelizer's observations, as I think we must, without necessarily implying that the social significance of gift transactions has been drastically diminished. In the first place, people in the western societies continue to spend large amounts of money on gifts, particularly during the Christmas season (Caron and Ward 1975; Cramer 1977). It is therefore most likely that what has happened is a process of the differentiation of gift transactions within a changing moral order of economic relationships. As a result, gifts are no longer used principally as practical means for mutual aid, but instead they are symbolic media for managing the emotional aspects of relationships (Cheal 1986, 1987a).

The sequestration of sentiments

The theory of the political economy of capitalism has not entirely ignored emotions and symbolic processes. It has described them as being consigned to a private sphere of family ties, which are thought to be segregated from the public world of industry and politics. The theory of public and private spheres has been very influential, especially because it provides a way of accounting for the different social characteristics of women and men (Gamarnikow and Purvis 1983). Women, in the middle classes at least, have often been confined to the private sphere, and so their lives have revolved around care giving in ways that men's lives have not. A large amount of work has been conducted on this topic in recent years, including studies on gift giving.

According to the theory or privatized family life in capitalist society, family commitments are thought to be separated from public involvements and to be limited to a narrow range of relationships (Barrett and McIntosh 1982). These relationships are grounded in the reproduction of life itself, and in the reproduction of daily existence within domestic groups. In the sexual division of work most domestic labor has traditionally been performed by women, and so the maintenance of this private sphere has normally been defined as women's special responsibility.

In many ways the theory of segregated private and public spheres of action is a useful vantage point from which to explore the social dimensions of gift behavior. It has been able to explain a wide range of findings which no previous theory could have encompassed. Thus, it has been shown that generosity in private giving and generosity in public giving are predicted by different factors (Cheal 1987b); that the most valuable Christmas gifts are given to close family members, especially spouses (Cheal 1986); and that women are more active in all forms of gift giving than are men (Cheal 1987a). In addition, it has been possible to extend the theory of contradictory consciousness (Cheal 1979) to show how gift transactions are shaped by the unstable boundary between market exchange and family solidarity (Cheal 1987a).

The strongest argument for the distinction between public and private worlds is that it casts new light upon those activities of women which were rendered invisible by the public biases of mainstream social science (Reiter 1975; Yeatman 1984). Nevertheless, this approach has been criticized by some feminists as being oversimplified and deterministic (Eichler 1980). It is argued that upon close inspection the distinction between private action and public action dissolves into a multitude of overlapping and interdependent contexts for interactions between individuals.

The difficulties involved in dichotomizing social life into private and public domains can be illustrated with reference to the North American custom of women's gifts to brides at pre-wedding "showers" (Cheal 1988b). In many ways these occasions are intensely private events. At a bridal shower everyone is there by virtue of a personal relationship, either to the bride herself or to one of her relatives or friends. The location of a bridal shower in the private sphere is further affirmed by the exclusion of men, and by the fact that only those women who have been invited are expected to attend. Nevertheless, bridal showers are not entirely privatized. In Canada they are sometimes organized as large gatherings, in which some of the guests may be unrelated to the bride and may never have met her before. Clearly, under such circumstances a close relationship between a bride and her benefactors cannot be assumed, and private knowledge is replaced by formal organization. The public nature of these occasions is demonstrated by the fact that they are held in public places, such as community halls, and by the fact that the interaction rituals include formal introductions made as public announcements. Are hall showers, then, to be identified as private encounters or as public events? In truth they are both, or neither. They are ambiguous occasions with their own logic that defies any neat division of the world into watertight compartments (Cheal 1988a).

In later chapters we shall see that bridal showers raise other interesting questions for the sociology of contemporary gift behavior. Here we will simply note that bridal showers dramatically confirm the importance that many women have traditionally attached to giving to other women. The gendered value of giving has often been overlooked in theories of the political economy of gift transactions.

Economic rationalization

Gift giving is often described by sociological theorists as a process of exchange through which individuals rationally pursue their self interests. This point of view, known as social exchange theory (Emerson 1976, 1981), is evidently modelled upon the political economy of market transactions. According to the exchange theorists such as Peter Blau (1964), the generosity that we observe in gift giving is only an apparent altruism. In reality, Blau maintains, giving to others is motivated by the expectation of some reward, whether direct (such as power over others) or indirect (such as social approval). Blau's arguments have not gone unchallenged (Bochner 1984: 578-80; Cheal 1984), and they have recently been criticized from a feminist standpoint by Nancy Hartsock (1983b, 1985).

Hartsock (1983a) has pointed out that grand theories derived from the political economy of market relations have not paid sufficient attention to the experiences of women within the sexual division of labor. Exchange theory, for example, has a male bias towards competitive interaction and cannot describe the relations between mothers and growing children. Hartsock has therefore suggested that, "one could begin to see the outline of a very different kind of community if one took the mother/infant relation rather than market exchange as the prototypic human interaction" (Hartsock 1983b: 41-2).

Hartsock has argued that the institutionalization of motherhood "results in the construction of female existence as centered within a complex relational nexus" (Hartsock 1985:64). The social construction of femininity has three aspects which, Hartsock claims (1985:65-6), are incompatible with exchange theory. Firstly, the importance of empathy in women's self-definition contradicts the assumption in exchange theory that individuals are fundamentally separate and purely concerned with their own interests. Secondly, women's experiences do not support the view that all social relations conform to the market model of voluntary transactions. Those who are responsible for small children typically have little choice over whether or not to interact with them. And thirdly, unlike market relations, which necessarily involve an opposition of interests, conflict is not at the core of the relationships between mothers and their children.

The generosity of most parents towards their children, even adult children, has been remarked upon in a number of studies (Caplow 1982; Cheal 1983). This well-known pattern of behavior raises questions about the relevance of exchange theory for understanding intergenerational transfers, which have not been satisfactorily answered (Cheal 1988c). Some of those questions will be taken up in later chapters, and further discussion of social exchange will be postponed until then. For now it is sufficient to acknowledge that not all social life in a capitalist society is dominated by the rational acquisition of goods and influence.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Moral economy
• 2 Tie-signs
• 3 Transactions and relations
• 4 Love culture
• 5 Social reproduction
• 6 Intimacy and community
• 7 Gift games
• 8 The social future
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Name index
• Subject index