Chapter 6 — Marcel Mauss Revisited

We have here an admirable example of how capitalist property is created. The appropriation of gold, in particular, is by necessity a bloody business. In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the Spaniards massacred the Peruvians and Mexicans; in the 19^th century the Indians of California were coldly exterminated; the Australian Aborigines, methodically destroyed. And now this same genre of collective assassination which is war is directed against the Boers. The bourgeoisie no more recoils before blood than it recoils before human exploitation. Thus we see how “private property is founded upon labor”!

—Marcel Mauss, from “La guerre du Transvaal” (Le Mouvement Socialiste, June 1, 1900)

Citizens, in proposing to set off forthrightly on this path, we must never in any way forget our role as socialists and revolutionaries... We believe, comrades, that organizers and militants can indeed encourage the worker to foresight, and seek to create for him a little security in this unnatural and cruel society in which he lives. But we will not be satisfied with that. We will educate him for his revolutionary task by giving him a sort of foretaste of all the advantages that the future society will be able to offer him... We will create a veritable arsenal of socialist capital in the midst of bourgeois capital.

—Marcel Mauss, speaking before the First National and International Congress of Socialist Cooperatives, July 2–5, 1900.

In earlier chapters, I have given Marcel Mauss’ work somewhat short shrift, particularly in comparison with that of Marx. In fact, I believe Mauss’ theoretical corpus is the single most important in the history of anthropology. He was a man with a remarkable knack for asking all the most interesting questions, even if he was also keenly aware in those early days of anthropological research, that he didn’t have the means to fully answer them. In the Anglophone world, his work is now known mainly through a mere four or five theoretical essays, but almost every one of them has inspired a vast secondary literature of its own. The universally recognized masterpiece is his “Essai sur le don” (1925), which has generated more debate, discussion, and ideas than any other work of anthropology—and that has obvious relevance to the intellectual project I have been developing over the course of this book. In this chapter, then, I would like to test some of these ideas against Mauss’ material from the “The Gift” itself. In doing so, however, I intend to make a larger theoretical point. In many way I think his work and Marx’s form a perfect complement. Marx was a socialist with an ongoing interest in anthropology; Mauss, an anthropologist who, throughout his life, remained an active participant in socialist politics. And just as for many years few seemed to be aware of Marx’s subtlety as a social thinker, almost no one nowadays seems aware of Mauss’ importance as a political one. Political passions form the framework, in fact, for much of his work, and probably nowhere more so than in the case of the gift. Let me begin, then, by describing some of the background to this work.

the gift as social contract

Mauss was during his own lifetime thought of most of all as the intellectual successor to his uncle, Emile Durkheim, the founder of French sociology. The most common way to look at Mauss’ work is as the pursuit of the same intellectual problems—if, as Louis Dumont emphasizes (1952), in much more pragmatic and empirical terms.

Durkheim’s problems, in turn, largely emerged from a dialogue that had been going on between French and British thinkers about the direction of social change in the nineteenth century: about the rise of individualism, the decline of religious solidarity and traditional forms of authority, the rise of the market as the main medium of human relations. Most of Mauss’ essays can be related to one or another of these themes: just as his essay on the “category of the person” can be read as an archaeology of modern individualism; “The Gift” can be read as an exploration of the notion of the social contract.

Marshall Sahlins (1972) once suggested that the problem Mauss is ultimately tackling goes back to Thomas Hobbes: how do you create peace between people who have no immediate reason not to kill each other? Hobbes, of course, argued that given human beings’ endlessly acquisitive propensities, a state of nature could only have been a “war of all against all”; society proper could only begin when everyone agreed to create some overarching political power. The original “social contract,” then, was a matter of people agreeing to abandon their right to use force, and invest it in a state that was, in turn, capable of enforcing any contracts they might agree to with each other. By the nineteenth century, a line of argument that started with SaintSimon and reached its apotheosis with Herbert Spencer proposed that the role of state coercion was not eternal, and that human history was seeing a gradual shift from societies based on military, to economic competition, and free economic contracts between individuals. Durkheim framed much of his sociological theory as a response to Spencer: pointing out, for example, that the growth in private contracts, far from causing the state to wither away, was causing it to intervene in citizens’ lives as never before.

In an intellectual climate like this, it’s easy to see how “the origin of the contract” would seem an important question—and one about which the newly emerging field of anthropology should have something to say. In the first pages of his essay, Mauss emphasizes twice that his work on the gift is part of a much wider program of research “on archaic forms of contract” that he had been pursuing for some time, along with his colleague Georges Davy.[113] He also notes that, contrary to the speculations of the likes of Hobbes, or Adam Smith, or modern economists, the first voluntary, contractual relations were not between individuals but between social groups: “clans, tribes, and families” (3). Neither were they essentially political, or for that matter economic, in nature; rather, they were, as he puts it, “total,” bringing together domains we would differentiate as “religious, legal, moral and economic.” Gift-giving is a perfect example of this sort of thing: because it is a purely voluntary act (or, anyway, can be) that nonetheless creates a sense of obligation. Hence his explanation of the central question he intends to answer:

In primitive or archaic societies 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? (page 3)

By framing his question so, one might say Mauss was posing a very ingenious reply to the free-market theorists of his day. Rather than history moving from a social contract with the state, with its monopoly of force, to free contracts among individuals, we discover that the origin of the contract long predates the state—that these contracts had much more to do with what we would now consider economic than political concerns, but that, at the same time, they looked absolutely nothing like what free-market theorists would have imagined primitive economics to be like. The working assumption of economists had been—in fact, still is—that the original form of exchange was barter, motivated by material self-interest: two people meet and agree to exchange something one needs for something needed by the other; once the deal is struck, it’s over; the two need have nothing further to do with one another. What Mauss is arguing, however, is that the first agreements that could be described as economic contracts were agreements not to act in accord with one’s economic self-interest, since if one is simply speaking of material gain, then obviously it is in the interest of the giver to demand an immediate return, and even more obviously, in the interest of the recipient to simply take the goods and keep them, rather than waiting for a discrete interval and making a dramatic counter-gift.

At the same time, though, Sahlins was surely right: the ghost of Hobbes does linger over his account. Mauss repeatedly emphasizes that on the most primitive level (one that seems to exist entirely in his imagination), there is no alternative between giving everything, and all-out war. No explanation of why members of different “clans, tribes, and families” should feel inclined to kill each other in the first place is ever offered. True, the emphasis on hostility does make the antieconomism even richer. It has often been noted that when something resembling barter does occur in stateless societies it is almost always between strangers, people who would otherwise be enemies. Rather than there being some fundamental contradiction between relations of violence and economic self-interest (as Spencer argued, and just about any modern neoliberal would automatically assume) the two are really just variations of the same thing: both reflect the way one acts with people towards whose fate one is indifferent. The moment one makes peace with others, one has to maintain at least the pretense that one is taking some consideration of their interests as well as one’s own. Hence, as Mauss notes, within gift economies, even in cases where one really is simply interested in obtaining material goods, one has to pretend otherwise. There is no doubt a profound wisdom here. But in this case, the wisdom comes at a terrible price, because the underlying assumption that order and amicable relations are things that need to be explained, while the potential for violence and conflict does not (an assumption which came to be the basic starting point of structural-functionalism) ends up reinforcing the cynical premises which lie beneath economism if anything even more than Mauss’ conclusion undercuts them.

Mauss’ solution to the problem he set for himself, on the other hand, leads in an entirely different direction. Why do people feel obliged to return gifts? His answer is famous: objects are seen to partake of something of the personality of the giver.[114] It was to this effect that he introduced the testimony of a Maori sage named Tamati Ranapiri, the famous passage about the hau or “spirit” of the gift—according to Mauss’ interpretation, that part of the donor’s soul that becomes, as it were, entangled in the gift, and that, through its wish to return home, compels the recipient to make a return.

I’ll be looking at this passage in a more detail later on. For now, suffice it to say that Mauss’ interpretation has come under a great deal of criticism—not only from Maori scholars, but also from ambitious theoreticians like Claude Levi-Strauss (1950) who, in the introduction to what became the popular French edition of Mauss’ work, argued that Mauss had made a fundamental logical mistake in trying to explain a phenomenon like reciprocity, which he felt was rooted in the unconscious structure of the human mind, through one particular cultural exegesis. It seems to me though that all this debate rather misses the point. One could probably say that in his interpretation of the hau, Mauss had, himself, produced a kind of myth: but like all good myths, Mauss’ did capture something essential, something that would have been difficult to express otherwise. If it had not, it would have been long since forgotten.

At any rate, the hau was supposed to be just one example of a constant theme, one that also appears in Mauss’ analysis of kula, in which “the mechanisms of obligation... are resident in the gifts themselves” (1925 [1965:21]), in Northwest Coast treasures that contain spiritual personalities that possess the owner (1925 [1965:44]), in his reconstruction of early Roman law in which “the person [is] possessed by the thing” (1925 [1965:51]), and elsewhere. All of this turns on a much broader point about the relation of persons and things. Modern law makes strict distinctions between the two; it is only for this reason that modern theory can imagine that persons are motivated by something called “self-interest,” which basically comes down to the desire to accumulate things. One of the main points of the essay, as Mauss repeatedly emphasizes, is to call the whole set of assumptions underlying this notion of “self-interest” into question.

In doing so, he was not simply challenging modern common sense about economic relations. He was saying that the assumptions of economics and social science do not adequately represent the common sense even of people in our own society. This is a point that, it seems to me, is lost on many—probably most—modern commentators on Mauss. True, Mauss did wish to argue that it is only with the market that it is even possible to imagine a pure self-interest—a concept that, he remarked, could not even be translated into Greek, or Latin, or Sanskrit, or classical Arabic—and that the modern ideal of the pure selfless gift is simply an impossible mirror image of this notion. But he was also trying to understand the popular appeal of socialism. To explain that, he ended up producing something surprisingly similar to Marx’s notion of alienation— though Mauss himself was probably not aware how similar it was.

Let me try to place “The Gift” in its political context.

the “essai sur le don” as a contribution to socialist theory

Most of Mauss’ essays were works in progress, preliminary reports on ongoing projects of research. He spent the last half of his life surrounded by uncompleted projects: a thesis on the nature of prayer, a book about the origins of money, yet another on socialism and nationalism ... When he did issue a progress report, it was usually because he was asked to, or felt there was some pressing reason. In the case of the “essai sur le don,” it’s quite clear that reason was ultimately political.

Few anthropologists nowadays seem to be aware of the fact that Mauss was, throughout his life, a committed socialist. In his student years he was a close associate of Jean Jaurès, leader of the SFIO (or “French Section of the Workers International”), nowadays famous for his defense of Dreyfus and tireless antiwar campaigns, for which he was finally assassinated by a right-wing fanatic in 1914. Mauss considered Jaurès as much a mentor as he did Durkheim, though he was in many ways more radical. After the war, Mauss continued to work within the party, serve on the editorial board of socialist periodicals, and write for the left-wing press. Above all he was active in the French cooperative movement: he and a friend founded and managed a consumer co-op in Paris, he held various posts in the national organization, and made periodic journeys to other parts of Europe, returning to publish reports on the cooperative movement in Germany, in England, in Hungary, in Russia, and so on (Fournier 1994).

The early 1920s, and particularly the period around 1923 and 1924 when Mauss was actually writing “The Gift,” was also one of his most intense periods of political engagement. These were also the years immediately following the Russian revolution, which had caused the SFIO to split apart into communist and socialist parties. Mauss himself had always favored a vision of socialism created from the bottom up, through cooperativization and union action aimed at the ultimate abolition of the wage system. He argued that both communists and social democrats were equally guilty of “fetishizing politics” and the role of the state; rather, he saw the role of the state as being largely limited to providing a legal framework within which workers could more easily take control over their industries and in a broader sense, perhaps, bring law into accord with popular morality. Events in Russia left him profoundly ambivalent. He was, from the start, an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution, but highly suspicious of the Bolsheviks.[115] Mauss felt the whole project of imposing socialism by force was oxymoronic;[116] he was repelled by the notion of a party line, and while he made due allowances for the difficult wartime situation in which the Soviet regime was forced to operate, decried its use of terror, its contempt for democratic institutions and above all for the rule of law. If there was one common theme to his objections, it was his disgust at the Bolsheviks’ cold-blooded utilitarianism (“their cynical notion that ‘the end justifies the means,’” he later wrote, “made them seem mediocre even among politicians.”)

It is important to stress, however, that his denunciations were always set against the background of an unbreakable sense of kinship and, most of all, a sense that the revolution represented a magnificent experiment:

Since Marx the socialists have cautiously refrained from constructing utopias and drawing up the plans for future societies. On the contrary, hardly advocating anything but the general apocalyptic thesis of the ‘taking over of the administration of things,’ they have left vague, because unpredictable, the collective procedures of this administration. How would this revolution suppress ‘the administration of men by men’?’ What would emerge from all this moral effervescence, this political and economic chaos?

However irreligious my socialism, however little respect was aroused in me by the first acts of the Bolsheviks—the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk—I could not disassociate myself from them. Moscow seemed to many among us what it remains for very many enlightened people, even here, a kind of sanctuary incubating the very destiny of our ideas. (Mauss 1925a [1992:173])

Much of Mauss’ published work in the years leading up to “The Gift” concerned the significance of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, announced in 1921, which abandoned earlier attempts at forced collectivitization, legalized commerce, and opened the country to foreign investment. While Mauss could only celebrate the fact that the Soviet state was no longer employing terror to suppress independent cooperatives, he strongly opposed the NEP’s opening of the country’s resources to foreign capital—the “sale of Russia,” as he called it in an article in La Vie Socialiste[117]—which he saw as likely to mark the beginning of the end of the revolution. Already in 1921, he was predicting its imminent collapse; at other times he allowed himself a guarded optimism, even suggesting the Soviet regime might finally be evolving toward a more genuine socialism. But clearly, the whole business not only preoccupied his mind, it left him torn and profoundly disheartened.

It was no coincidence then that Mauss’ two most important published works of that decade were, on the one hand, his Sociological Assessment of Bolshevism, and on the other, “The Gift,” both published in the same year of 1925. They were clearly meant as two legs of the same intellectual project. With the first great attempt to create a modern alternative to capitalism foundering, Mauss apparently decided it was time to bring the results of comparative ethnography—crude and undeveloped though he well knew them to be—to bear, in order to sketch out at least the outlines of what a more viable alternative might be like. He was particularly concerned with the historical significance of the market. One thing the Russian experiment had proved was that it was not going to be possible to simply abolish buying and selling by writ. Lenin had tried. And even though Russia was the least monetarized society in Europe, he had failed. For the foreseeable future, Mauss concluded, we were stuck with a market of some sort or another (1925a [1992:188–90]). Still, there had to be a difference between “the market” as a mere technique for the allocation of certain types of economic good (for instance, between democratically organized cooperatives or professional organizations), and “the market” as it had come to exist in the industrial West, as the basic organizing principle of social life, the ultimate determinant of value. What Mauss set out to do, then, was to try to get at the heart of precisely what it was about the logic of the market that did such violence to ordinary people’s sense of justice and humanity. To understand the popular appeal of socialist parties and social welfare programs, and by examining the ethnographic record, imagine what a society in accord with such popular standards of justice might look like: one in which the market could be relegated to its proper function, as a technique for decentralized decision-making, a kind of popular polling device on the relative appeal of different sorts of consumer goods, and in which an entirely different set of institutions preside over areas of really significant social value—for example, ones centered on “the joy of giving in public, the delight in generous artistic expenditure, the pleasure of hospitality in the public or private feast” (1925 [1965:67]).

What Mauss was doing, in effect, was trying to understand the appeal of Marxist ideas with minimal reference to the works of Marx. Here is another point that is often overlooked. Marx’s work was not, in fact, all that well known in France in the early part of the century. Most of it had not been translated; there were no French Marxist theorists in this period; even socialist militants were more likely to be familiar with the ideas of Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, or even Robert Owen (Mauss 1920, 1924). When “Marxist theory” was invoked, it was usually assumed to consist of some kind of simplistic, mechanical determinism. Mauss knew better than that; he was familiar with the subtlety of Capital; but he was probably not aware that he was addressing many of the same questions as Marx did in his early writings.[118] Where a German, Hungarian, or Russian author of the period would probably have accused the Bolsheviks of betraying their own best inspiration, Mauss instead turned to a very different intellectual tradition.

The critical thrust of Mauss’ essay is somewhat obscured by the fact its author spent so much of it discussing the most competitive, and most aristocratic, forms of gift exchange. Jonathan Parry (1986) and Maurice Godelier (1996) have done a useful service here by reminding us of Mauss’ overall scheme. Mauss began with what he called the “total prestation.” Two groups that would otherwise come to blows end up instead creating a relation of complete mutual interdependence by offering one another everything: as an example, Mauss points to the relations between moieties in many Australian and American societies, which can be seen as total contracts in which two sides of a village are bound to rely on one another for food, military and ritual services, sexual partners, “dances, festivals and fairs,” gestures of respect and recognition, and practically everything else (1925 [1965:3–4]). All this is rather vague. Fortunately, Mauss did later enlarge on the notion of “total prestation,” in a much less speculative, and more empirical light. In lectures delivered at the Institut d’Ethnologie at the University of Paris between 1935 and 1938, he speaks of “total prestations” (or “total reciprocity”) as open-ended rights that in most societies exist mainly between particular families and particular individuals:

In the beginning was a system which I will call the system of total prestations. When an Australian Kurnai finds himself in the same camp as his wife’s parents, he does not have the right to eat any of the pieces of game which he brings with him; his parents-in-law take all, their right is absolute. The reciprocity is total, it is what we call “communism,” but it is practiced between individuals. In its origin, commercium goes together with connubium, marriage follows commerce and commerce follows marriage. The obligatory present, the fictive gift, what is referred to as ‘legal theft,’ is in reality a kind of communism with an individual, social, and familial base. The fundamental error consists in opposing communism and individualism. (Mauss 1947:104–105)

What drew Mauss’ attention here was the open-ended nature of the obligations that so often accompanied marriage. A Melanesian who needed a new canoe could call on his sister’s husband and his people: since he had given them a wife, they in effect owed him everything and had to provide him not in accord with any principle of repayment, but simply in response to his needs. Hence, his use of the term “communism.” Mauss argued that it was a key mistake to assume that “primitive communism”—or any other sort—was a matter of collective ownership. First, because personal possessions of some sort always exist; Mauss thought modern-day revolutionaries were being absurd when they imagined they could abolish them (e.g., 1920:264; 1924a:637). Second, even where property is owned by a group, it is rarely democratically administered: the difference between a private owner and a chiefly manager is often little more than legal formality. One has to look not at titles, then, but principles of access and distribution. When someone has the right to take what she feels she needs without any direct payment or reciprocation, then this is communism. But this means that it is perfectly possible to have a system of individualistic communism: in which specific individuals are bound together by such open-ended obligations, whether (as in the case of relations between affines) one-sided, or whether (as nowadays, he remarked, between husband and wife), both parties have equal rights to call on the other.[119] These could then knit together across the society, creating “a collection of individual positions which constitute a system of total reciprocities.” The result would “correspond exactly to what we call communism, but it will still be a strictly individual thing” (1947:105, cf. Godelier 1999:36–49).

But to return to “The Gift .” Over time, Mauss argued, reciprocity can also take on a more competitive cast as assertive individuals—first acting as representatives of clans or other social groups, later, in their own capacity (Parry 1986)—end up vying to see which can outgive the other. Such systems of “agonistic exchange” Mauss proposed to label “the potlatch,” after the particularly dramatic competitive exchanges that had been recently documented on the Northwest Coast of North America. Usually, such competition took mild forms, but in rare cases it could, much like the competitive games of capitalism, tend to suck everything else into a frantic struggle to outdo one’s rivals: even if they are based on opposite premises, since of course, the whole point here is not to accumulate possessions but rather to express one’s utter contempt for material possessions by giving as much as possible away.

In other words, what Chris Gregory (1982) described in his famous reanalysis is not a gift economy per se, but what Mauss would call a potlatch system, which is a particular agonistic variation—even, in some ways, a slightly pathological one. The gift as contest continued to dominate in aristocratic societies like the ancient Celts or Germans, or in Vedic India, but gradually, unevenly, the rise of money and market exchange (involving definitive sale and, therefore, alienation of goods that were no longer seen as entangled in the giver) allowed it to be eclipsed by an ethos of accumulation for its own sake. Most of the societies of the ancient world lingered somewhere in between; it was possible to accumulate fortunes, but the rich were considered, as Mauss put it, “the treasurers of their communities,” expected—or, in the Greek liturgy system, compelled—to disburse their wealth again in civic projects.

The obvious question: how did one get from there to here? What were the origins of this conception of “self-interest” to begin with, and how did it come to efface almost everything else? Alain Caillé (1994:10–12), one of the founders of an interdisciplinary group that calls itself the Mouvement AntiUtilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, or MAUSS, points to the role of Christianity. Roman aristocrats and grandees still kept much of the ethos of magnificent generosity: dedicating public buildings and gardens, vying to host the most spectacular public games. But much Roman largesse was quite obviously meant to wound: a favorite aristocratic habit, for example, was scattering gold and jewels into the crowd so as to be able to revel in the ensuing animalistic melee. Understandably, early Christian theories of the gift developed in reaction to such obnoxious practices. True charity, in Christian doctrine, could not be based on any desire to establish superiority, or gain anyone’s favor, or indeed, from any egoistic motive whatever. To the degree that the giver could be said to have gotten anything out of the deal, it wasn’t a real gift. But this in turn led to endless problems, since it was very difficult to conceive of a gift that did not benefit the giver in any way. At the very least, doing a good deed put one in better standing in the eyes of God and thus aided one’s chance of eternal salvation. In the end, some actually ended up arguing that the only person who can make a purely benevolent act was one who had convinced himself that he was already condemned to hell. From here it’s hardly much of a step to the sort of cynicism discussed in earlier chapters of this book, where any apparent act of generosity is assumed to mask some form of hidden selfishness, and to take pleasure in having done a good deed is seen to somehow undercut it—really two different versions of the same idea.[120]

The modern ideal of the gift, then, becomes an impossible mirror of market behavior: an act of pure generosity untrammeled by any thought of personal gain. But as the members of the MAUSS group endlessly insist, this does not mean people no longer give gifts: even in modern, capitalist societies things are constantly changing hands without any immediate return or explicit agreement about a future one. It does not even mean that gifts are no longer important. In fact, they argue, modern society could not function without them. The gift has become the “hidden face of modernity” (Nicolas 1991): “hidden” because one can always produce some reason to say any particular gift (money given to children, wedding presents, donations of blood, dinners for business associates, offering advice to friends or spending hours listening to their tedious problems) are not really gifts at all. So too in social theory. The result, as Godbout puts it, is a science that has “come to speak of social ties without using the words that are associated with them in daily life: surrender, forgiveness, renunciation, love, respect, dignity, redemption, salvation, redress, compassion, everything that is at the heart of relationships between people and that is nourished by the gift” (1998:220–21).

In the Anglophone world, the MAUSS group has been almost entirely ignored. Those who like to think of themselves as engaged in cutting-edge critical theory have instead come to read Mauss through Jacques Derrida (1991; cf. Gasché 1972, Schrift 1997), who in Donner le Temps examined Mauss concept of the gift to discover—surprise!—that gifts, being acts of pure disinterested generosity, are logically impossible.

I suppose this is what one would have to conclude, if one believed that there is something that can be called “Western discourse,” and that it is incapable of referring to anything other than itself. But even those of us who believe that anthropology is, in fact, possible often seem to miss the point that Mauss was not dealing primarily with discourses but with moral principles that he felt were to some extent embodied in the practice, if not the high theory, of all societies.

True, Mauss emphasizes that in most of the societies he was examining, there’s no point in trying to distinguish between generosity and self-interest. It is we who assume the two should normally be in conflict. (This was one reason why he tended to avoid the term “gift” at all when speaking of other societies, preferring to speak of “prestations.”) But—and this is where I think it’s crucial to understand the political context—Mauss was not trying to describe how the logic of the marketplace, with its strict distinctions between persons and things, interest and altruism, freedom and obligation, had become the common sense of modern societies. Above all, he was trying to explain the degree to which it had failed to do so; to explain why so many people—and particularly, so many of the less powerful and privileged members of society—found its logic morally repugnant. Why, for example, institutions that insisted on the strict separability of producers and their products offended against common intuitions of justice, the moral “bedrock,” as he puts it, of our own—as of any—society. “It appears,” he wrote in his conclusions, that the whole field of industrial and commercial law is in conflict with morality. The economic prejudices of the people and producers derive from their strong desire to pursue the thing they have produced once they realize that they have given their labor without sharing in the profits... (1925 [1965:64])

Here there is undoubtedly an echo of Marx. But Mauss’ theory of alienation derived from very different origins; not from the Hegelian, dialectical tradition Marx employed in his early writings on the subject (which Mauss almost certainly hadn’t read), but rather from that of legal history—in which property is “alienated” when all rights in it are detached from one owner and vested in another. Particularly for the French working classes, which were not far removed from peasant and artisanal backgrounds, there still seemed something profoundly wrong in this. Mauss was trying to understand what that was—just as he was trying to understand why it was that social insurance legislation, “inspired by the principle that the worker gives his life and labor partly to the community, and partly to his bosses” (1925 [1965:65]), and therefore deserved more than a weekly wage, seemed right. His answer, quite different from Marx’s, was that a relation of wage labor was a miserable and impoverished form of contract. Because, as we’ve seen, the elementary form of social contract is, for Mauss, precisely, communism: that is, an open-ended agreement in which each party commits itself to maintaining the life of the other. In wage labor the worker does give of the totality of himself, he “gives his life and labor,” but the cash he receives in return has nothing of the same total quality about it. If one gives one’s life, one’s life should at least be guaranteed.

It is commonplace to dismiss Mauss’ political conclusions at the end of “The Gift” as weak, inconsistent, not of the same power or brilliance of the rest of the essay.[121] It’s true that it does at times seem tentative. I suspect this is partly because Mauss is writing about politics, not for his accustomed proletarian audience, but for a broader educated public. I also suspect this may be the reason for some of the essay’s most idiosyncratic suggestions: for instance, Mauss’ call for the return to an ethos in which the only excuse for accumulating wealth is to give it away again, in which the rich would again consider themselves as the “treasurers of the community”—a suggestion that interestingly, does not appear elsewhere in his political work. It would be easy to write off the whole thing as a stumblingly inadequate attempt to do Marx. Most of the usual complaints leveled by Marxist scholars about the weaknesses of the essay are true enough: Mauss doesn’t even talk about production in preindustrial societies, he has no sense of the reproduction of social systems as wholes, he lacks a theory of value. But one could also treat Mauss’ approach to alienation as providing a useful corrective to some of the more common blind spots of Marxian anthropology. By seeing alienation as something that can happen every time an object changes hands, for example, Mauss reminds us that just as socialization does not end at age twelve or eighteen, the creation of objects does not end on the factory floor—things are continually being maintained, altered, and above all, vested in new meanings, even as they are often repeatedly detached and alienated again. More daringly, Mauss appears to be suggesting that a certain degree of subject/object reversal—in certain contexts, at certain levels—might act not as a mystification and tool of exploitation, but as a normal aspect of creative processes that may not be nearly so dangerous as its opposite, the reduction of all social relations to any sort of objective calculus. This at any rate was what Mauss saw as the downfall of the Soviet Marxists: their extreme utilitarianism, in which he perceived—quite rightly, I think—the logic of the market, slightly transposed.

All in all, Mauss’ work complements Marx because it represents the other side of socialism. Marx’s work consists of a brilliant and sustained critique of capitalism; but as Mauss himself observed, he carefully avoided speculating about what a more just society would be like. Mauss’ instincts were quite the opposite: he was much less interested in understanding the dynamics of capitalism than in trying to understand—and create—something that might stand outside it.

objects and persons

Mauss was always tentative about his conclusions, because he knew he was working with inadequate material. Ethnography was then in its infancy. This is no longer the case. If anything, the problem is the opposite: the literature on the Massim, or New Zealand, or the American Northwest Coast has become so vast it would be almost impossible for a non-specialist to do it justice. There have been some recent attempts to return to these examples and see how well Mauss’ conclusions bear up: notably by Annette Weiner (1985, 1992) and Maurice Godelier (1996), both of whom use roughly the same theoretical approach. To my mind, though, the results have been uneven. Both are scholars whose expertize is mainly in Melanesian anthropology, and their accounts become more sketchy and attenuated the further from Melanesia they go. Of course, I’m not an expert in any of these areas (technically, my expertize is on Madagascar), but I will take the plunge. At any rate, in trying to bring Mauss’ material into relation with the theoretical issues that have cropped up over the course of this book—issues of value, history, potential, visibility, and so on— I will be asking slightly different questions than they. As should be clear by now, just saying that gifts incorporate a part of the giver’s self leaves many of the most interesting questions unanswered. For example: what part? Mauss’ own formulation seems to span both Tylor’s concrete, visible “image” soul, and his “life-soul,” the invisible source of human powers or intentionality. In his work on the person, as I’ve pointed out, he seems interested in the degree to which persons are constituted by a set of emblems or properties (by which logic giving away one would necessarily be giving away a fragment of one’s self ); on the other, in the “The Gift” itself, he sticks with a Maori notion that seems to be all about intentions and inner powers. Another confusing question: to what degree are these objects really personified?

And afterwards, we will see whether the results can tell us anything new about the overall aims of Mauss’ analysis: understanding the relations between interest and generosity, freedom and obligation, persons and things.

case 1: kula armshells and necklaces

Mauss made great use of Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). He considered kula, the famous exchange of armshells and necklaces that linked together the island societies of the northern Massim region of Papua New Guinea, an example of a potlatch system. However, he was also rather frustrated by the fact that while they had names and histories, it was almost impossible to find examples of the heirlooms being treated as if they acted of their own accord—or, the Trobrianders being, he noted, “positivists, after their own fashion,” treated as objects of cult (1925 [1990:24]). Mauss was forced to rely mainly on the poetic metaphors to be found in magical incantations.

One thing that does emerge from the literature on the cultures of the kula chain is that any adequate understanding of exchange in these societies has to begin with an understanding of local theories of procreation. Now, Trobriand opinions on the subject of procreation have been the subject of endless debate, ever since Malinowski announced (1929:153–58) that the Trobrianders he knew claimed that sexual intercourse was not the cause of pregnancy: or, more precisely, that while women could not become pregnant if they had never had sex at all, as soon as the womb had so been “opened,” pregnancy occurred when certain ancestral spirits called baloma entered a woman while she was bathing, whether or not the woman in question had recently had sex. Descent was strictly through the mother’s line; the men had nothing to do with it. The most curious thing, though, was that the same informants also insisted that children, both male and female, inherited their fathers’ looks and not their mothers’. Why? No explanation appeared to be forthcoming. The best Malinowski could come up with was the statement of some unnamed informant: “maternal kinsmen are the same flesh, but similar faces they have not” (Malinowski 1929 173–78). This is not really an explanation, though; it has more the air of statement of self-evident truth. If they all come from the same origins, then what other reason could there be for the fact that they look so different—except that they all have different fathers?

In fact, a child’s body was thought to be derived from its mother’s substance—ultimately from the immortal substance of its mother’s clan. Form or external appearance, on the other hand, was conveyed through males (Malinowski op cit.; Weiner 1976:121–23). It is much the same on Gawa (Munn 1986:142–43), where the key distinction made is between undifferentiated maternal substance inside the body, and a child’s face—which is the expression of their individuality—and elsewhere in the Massim.

A child’s upbringing follows the same implicit pattern. The mother and her brother provide the child with nurturance and food; the father and his sister provide for its bodily adornment, perform the beauty magic crucial both to courting and kula exchange, and, if the child is a boy, will usually give him his first kula valuable as well (Weiner 1976:123–29; Malinowski 1922:334–41; 1929:103–10, etc.). The last contribution fits in perfectly well with the others—kula valuables are after all themselves articles of adornment—but it also reveals how, as a child grows older, these same relations are transposed onto ever wider domains of activity.

This, according to Nancy Munn (1986:55–73, 111–18, etc.), is in turn the key to Gawan notions of value. What Gawan men aspire to above all is fame, the extension of one’s self outward in space and time. Fame is in itself a kind of adornment to the person. If the ornaments one wears are (like one’s physical appearance) external, visible aspects of the self that extend the self toward others, kula armshells and necklaces can extend it even further by circulating abroad and spreading knowledge of one’s name with them wherever they go. But one can expand outward into these broader domains only after having first established a stable center or base, one that is always seen as relatively homogenous and feminine but at the same time as the dynamic “source” of expansion. Thus inner maternal substance lies hidden behind one’s outer appearance and beauty, and kula exchange is itself based on continual gifts of food (homogenous substance itself intended for the inside of the body) between affines and continual hospitality between kula partners.

Gawan men, for instance, send regular gifts of food to their married sisters; their sisters’ husbands reciprocate with occasional but more substantial gifts: minor kula valuables, a painted canoe. For the man who provided the food, the latter represents not mere reciprocity but an increment in value, an exchange of “nameless and perishable” things for unique and durable items which will allow him to participate in wider, interisland transactions (Munn 1977; 1986:121–62). In Munn’s terms, their greater value lies in their capacity to open the way to the control of more expansive levels of space and time. One could also see it as derived from their greater capacity to convey history— though in this instance, these really come down to the same thing, since an owner can realize the potential value of such objects only by giving them away and allowing them to circulate, thus carrying his name along with them. An object’s capacity to embody history simply determines how far that name can go.

The literature on kula exchange is by now quite extensive indeed, and it would be possible to go into some detail about how kula articulates with internal exchange systems on each island in the chain, in each case slightly differently: the connection between male exchange and women’s mortuary ritual on Kiriwina (Weiner 1976, 1978, 1988), the transformation of canoes in Gawa (Munn 1977, 1983, 1986), the gradual conversion of courtship presents, and then affinal exchange into kula on Muyuw (Damon 1978, 1980, 1995), and so on. But it’s not really necessary for present purposes. All I really want to stress here is the degree to which these valuables do indeed partake of persons; or, to be more accurate, since kula shells do not, generally speaking, become permanently attached to any one person’s identity, that they are made of the same stuff as persons. A kula shell is like a fragment of individual identity that has, as it were, broken off. What’s more, the actions of engaging in kula exchange are simply an extension of those that create persons; actions that can be quite neatly divided here into those organized around two contrastive values, one centering on the (dark, heavy, interior, invisible) aspect of the self identified with the matrilineal clan, the other, on the (bright, light, exterior, visible) aspect identified with fame and beauty. And just as proposed in chapter 4, the hidden interior of the individual is identified with powers of action, and the external particularity with a seductive power capable of inspiring actions in others.

Even the Tylorian analogy tends to hold up. This becomes especially apparent when one moves to the southern part of the Massim archipelago. Most of the islands here do not participate in kula exchange; rather, the “creative focus of social life,” as Debbora Battaglia puts it (1983:289) lies in funerary ritual. However, the cultural assumptions are otherwise much the same.

On Sabarl, according to Battaglia, people make an explicit distinction between two aspects of the self: on the one hand an internal dynamic energy or life-force hidden within the body (here too associated with food), on the other a “soul” with an external “image”—the word used bears the literal meaning of “shadow” or “reflection,” in good Tylorian fashion—that has all the usual properties of being detachable from the body and surviving death. When a person dies, the life-force is no more; the soul departs from this world to the afterworld, where it loses its “image” and becomes a baloma— the latter being much the same here as in the Trobriands, undifferentiated spirits of the matriclan, responsible for the women’s fertility (1983: 293–94, 1990:68–71).

Funeral ceremonies, which are a major occasion for exchange, reproduce this passage on the level of goods. The dead person’s paternal kin first display a number of greenstone axes—these axes, rather than kula shells, are on Sabarl the most exalted form of wealth—and then give them to representatives of that person’s matriclan. (Representatives of the matriclan will later reciprocate with gifts of food.) Afterwards, the maternal kin retire to an undisclosed location where they use the axes to construct an effigy of the deceased, which is called the “corpse.” Then, hiding the effigy behind a screen, they invoke it as an ancestor asking it to use its powers of fertility to reproduce more axes for the community (Battaglia 1983).

This is certainly not the only form of exchange the Sabarlese engage in but it is the most important one, and it moves in the exact opposite direction as kula—not from hidden feminine powers to visible masculine form, but the other way around. The reason is obviously because in this case the process is modeled not on the creation of the person in procreation and child-rearing but on its dissolution in death. But this does not alter the larger point, which is that one cannot hope to understand the circulation of valuables in a “gift economy” of this sort without first taking into account the more fundamental processes by which the human person is created and dissolved. And that when such general principles as action and reflection, or the movement between abstract potential and concrete form do appear— which they generally do—these too are always aspects of persons before they are aspects of things.

Battaglia too makes the Maussian point that really important valuables on Sabarl are said to have the same properties as persons: they have not only an external “image” but an inner life-force of their own (1983:301), as well as being, in their external form, models of the forms of social action which they mediate. This latter point I cannot pursue here, but I refer the reader to Battaglia’s exemplary discussion of the form of axes and ceremonial necklaces (1990:128–35). Similar analyzes can no doubt be carried out of the form of kula valuables themselves, which, like so many other shell valuables (Wagner 1986:58–59; Clark 1991, Robbins and Atkins 1999:16–19), seem to be such perfect embodiments of value because they combine exterior brilliance with the constant reminder of a dark, mysterious, womblike interior.

Maori versus Kwakiutl

I started with the Trobriand case because it was so relatively straightforward. The two key values correspond nicely with my own categories of action and reflection. The next two cases are far more complicated, because each leans so heavily on either one or the other.

It’s interesting to contrast how differently Mauss uses his Maori and Kwakiutl material. The Maori appear largely as theorists. Mauss begins his essay, as we know, by asking why it is that people who receive gifts feel obliged to give something back in return; for an answer, he refers to the reflections of a Maori sage on the hau or “spirit of the gift.” But he has next to nothing on the sociology of Maori gift exchange. When dealing with the Northwest Coast it’s quite the other way around. There is very little reference to philosophy, but endless detail on the actual conduct of potlatches and nature of the wealth exchanged.

In a way, though, this is not altogether surprising. Already in Mauss’ time, the products of Maori priestly colleges had developed a reputation as the great intellectuals of the “archaic” world: as cosmologists, philosophers, even metaphysicians. The Kwakiutl reputation, on the other hand, was as masters of theater, or dramatic and artistic display. One seemed obsessed with essences, the other with surfaces. In the rest of this chapter I would like to argue (among other things) that these reputations are not entirely undeserved. This will I think become all the more apparent when we try to fill in the missing parts of the picture: that is, to examine the actual mechanics of Maori exchange (circa 1750), or the implicit philosophy behind the Kwakiutl potlatch (circa 1895). In fact, the two seem in many ways to represent two extremes of logical possibility for a system of gift exchange, a fact that I would argue actually makes the comparisons between them all the more revealing if one wishes to understand precisely what the underlying commonalities in such systems might be.

Here I want to build on a tradition of comparison between Polynesia and the Northwest Coast begun by Irving Goldman (1970, 1975) and developed by Marshall Sahlins (1988). The basic argument comes down to something like this: Polynesian societies tended to see the entire universe as structured on a vast genealogy in that everyone is descended from the gods in one way or another. The result was a tendency toward homogenization, in which nobles were constantly trying to set themselves apart by some unique or astounding act. The Kwakiutl cosmos, on the other hand, was one of radical heterogeneity. The universe was fragmented into social groups each with their own completely unique mythological origins; their current leaders were incarnations of totemic creatures from the beginnings of time that had no real connection with each other. What the system lacked was any uniform medium for comparison. Hence Sahlins notes the difference in the demand for Western goods when each society first came in contact with the world market system: Hawaiian lords immediately sought out unique treasures to set themselves apart from other lords; Kwakiutl chiefs accumulated thousands and thousands of identical Hudson Bay trade blankets, which became a kind of uniform currency of prestige.

This seems to me a useful starting place because not only does it tie in with exchange, it also makes sense of some of the differences in ideologies of the person between the two. The Maori universe is a vast genealogy; it is entirely generated by a single principle, which is ultimately that of the interior, creative powers of gods and humans (though imagined, in this case, as an almost entirely sexual, and therefore naturalized, type of creativity.) The result is a remarkably rich philosophy of interior powers, with little explicit attention to external forms. Among the Kwakiutl it is precisely the other way around. Everything is surfaces, containers, masks. Interiors, when one finds them, always turn into yet more surfaces again. Maori histories are all about reciprocity, but almost nothing about wealth. Kwakiutl histories consist of little but detailed accounts of different sorts of wealth, with next to nothing about reciprocity. And so on.

case 2: gifts in Aotearoa

Mauss was originally drawn into the study of Maori religion while editing the posthumous papers of his colleague, Robert Hertz. He ended up becoming quite fascinated with it, teaching himself the Maori language and offering a series of lectures on Maori cosmogonic epics (Schwimmer 1978:202–203). These epics always take the form of a huge genealogy, beginning with abstract entities like Day and Night, or Thought and Desire, proceeding through the gods and ultimately including everything in the entire cosmos—forests, seas, crops, humans, even clouds and stones. All living creatures, then; indeed, every aspect of reality in the “world of light” in which humans dwell, were generated according to one single principle of sexual procreation.

Historical records simply continue the same story, telling of the great canoes that carried the first immigrants from the mythical island of Hawaiki to Aotearoa, and of the wanderings of the men and women who became ancestors of the different Maori iwi (“tribes”), then, later of hapu (“lineages” or “clans”). This was the great historical armature that provided the framework for politics, because the Maori were one of those extraordinarily rare groups whose members actually remembered their genealogies: most people could trace back their ancestors for several hundred years into the past. Genealogies, in turn, were the basis of rank: since children were ranked in order of seniority, and since in theory everyone could be placed somewhere on the same genealogical structure, everyone should know precisely where they stood in relation to everyone else. In reality, things were infinitely complicated, since Maori kinship was cognatic: one could trace to famous ancestors through either male or female links, and therefore just about any free Maori could make a claim to being a rangatira, a highborn noble, through some connection or another.

Society was organized into a series of tribes and hapu, each, in principle, under the leadership of its ariki, descended from its founding ancestor through an unbroken line of (male or female) senior children. Here again, real politics was infinitely more complicated; the fact that a firstborn daughter rarely succeeded to political office—but still outranked her brothers— alone allowed endless possibilities for struggles over status, shifting alliances, and political intrigue. Finally, since cognatic kinship ensures that most people had any number of choices for which group they wished to join; in any cognatic system, politics largely becomes a matter of pulling people together. Ambitious leaders could use an almost infinite variety of ties to assemble followers and effectively construct new kin groups in which they or some close relative could claim to stand as the ariki (Schwimmer 1978, 1990). Hapu, at least, were being continually re-created on such lines. But all this also meant politics became an obvious zero-sum game: there are only so many people around, and everyone one draws into one’s own genealogical group is lost to all the others.

mana and tapu

Of all the metaphysical concepts the Maori have contributed to anthropology, the most famous are certainly mana and tapu (“taboo”). In Maori they are often used interchangeably, since they imply two different aspects of power: the one, power in its capacity to act; the other, power in how it must be respected by others. This is of course altogether in keeping with the terms mapped out in chapter 4, but in fact things in this case are a good deal more complicated.

For one thing, while in most of Polynesia “mana” is the power of the gods, or by extension, any invisible power capable of making things happen or “appear,” among the Maori it also takes on a more explicitly political meaning. Mana can mean “prestige,” “authority,” or “influence.” Within this usage there seems to be a recognition that political power is built largely on reputation; that it is only the fact that others believe one has it that allows it to exist. As such it required constant maintenance: Maori nobles (and just about all free men considered themselves noblemen) were notoriously touchy. To leave even an implied sleight or insult unavenged would lead to the weakening of one’s mana, unless set straight by some sort of utu, some act of recompense, reciprocity, or revenge.

As for tapu: it referred, above all, to restrictions; or even more, to a state of being surrounded by them, thus rendering one sacred, pure, “set apart” from a relatively profane (noa) world characterized especially by biological processes: cooking, eating, excretion, sexuality. Cooked food especially had to be kept away from tapu objects. “Every man in Maori society,” writes Firth,

had some degree of personal tapu, varying according to his rank and becoming very intensive with the more important chiefs. Cooked food and all things connected therewith were the very antithesis of tapu, and contact with them as sufficient to destroy the tapu of any object, however sacred. Hence no man possessed of any self-respect would engage in cooking, or collect firewood, nor, since the most tapu parts of his person were his head and back, would be carry burdens of cooked food. Such work was left to slaves, who had lost their tapu, and to women, who [for the most part] did not have any. (Firth 1959:181; see Graeber 1997)

These were not static categories. Life was a process of the endless imposition, and stripping away, of tapu. To define oneself as tapu, for example, was always a matter of defining others as relatively noa: hence, according to one early traveler’s account, Maori chiefs went to war carrying a taiaha staff whose blade was shaped like a protruding tongue, so as to imply the desire to turn the enemy into food. In this case it was no abstract symbol—Maori warriors did indeed feast on their defeated foes—but the same chief might hold out the same weapon as a staff when making speeches to his own people, simply as a sign of higher status (Angas 1847 I: 318). The fact that the entire universe was seen as part of a vast genealogy created a sort of cosmological dilemma: humans were the offsprings of the gods, but then, so was everything else, including the animals and plants one had to eat to survive. What’s more, the divine remained present in all these things; it had to be in order for them to grow—since the divine was, above all, the principle of natural generativity. For one’s sweet potatoes to grow, one had to maintain tapus to ensure the gods’ presence. To be able to harvest one’s sweet potatoes, one had to break them, to drive the gods away, and, effectively, make war on the crops, so as to be free to kill and eat them (Williamson 1913, Johansen 1958; Sahlins 1985b:200–206). The whole universe was an arena of endless consumption but at the same time, all driven by a principle of utu or recompense where everything ultimately leads to its comeuppance; i.e., eventually the gods eat us in return, which is why we ultimately must die (Smith 1972).

This ability to appropriate what rightfully belongs to the gods was the paradigm for a general possibility of reversing existing hierarchies, which in Maori myths and histories, usually plays itself out in stories of younger brothers or daring young warriors who, unencumbered by the endless taboos and protocol that hedges about senior figures, can make a name for themselves by breaking all the rules (Gudgeon 1905a:62–65; Smith 1972:62–63). By doing so, they in effect proved their mana and could eventually become highly tapu figures in their own right. It was a very dangerous strategy. Maori history is full of transgressive warriors who finally went too far, transgressed one rule they shouldn’t have, and ended up being destroyed by it. Still, it allowed for a broad division between sorts of leaders: on the level of the tribe, sacred ariki, who had little immediate political power; on that of the hapu, figures who had largely achieved important roles through their own efforts. These were in fact the effective political actors, since it was the hapu (or “clan”) that was the really significant economic and political unit.

Maori values

From this, one begins to get a very rough idea of the structure of value in traditional Maori societies. As an initial approximation, one can distinguish two broad terms: call them “generation,” and “appropriation.” The first is identified with powers of creativity and growth, which is ultimately the generative power of the gods. In human society it is embodied most of all in the figure of the ariki, particularly the really grand ariki (often women) who are the firstborn of a whole tribe: the living embodiments of ancient ancestors and ultimately of gods. Such figures were considered ultimately responsible for the fertility and spiritual state of their group’s territories, but they were so hedged about by tapu that they did not do much, or in some cases, anything; their main role was simply to exist. The second is all about human achievement, the transgression and appropriation, and the mythic figures of younger brothers who usurped the ariki’s authority. One is severely fetishized, since all human powers of creation are seen as refractions of the powers of the gods; the other, while all about human assertiveness, is not seen as fundamentally creative at all, but more about destruction[122]—Tu, who is the god who represents the human side of the cosmos, is also the god of war. The two might be said to come together in a broad notion of honor, which is both one’s ability to defend one’s tapu and the ability to encompass ever more of the universe within it.

All this does recall the terms I was developing in chapter 4: the passive aristocrat, oriented toward the past, whose role is just to be; the active warrior oriented toward the future. But the particularly metaphysical quality of Maori philosophy also means that it is difficult to make a clear distinction between, say, visible forms of power identified with the display of property and hidden powers of action. First of all, the persuasive display of wealth simply was not much of a factor. Instead, one has a constant movement back and forth between visible and invisible forms, with the usual idea being that the former are simply particular, probably ephemeral, emanations of the latter; and all of this takes place in a context of danger and overall cosmic strife.

This becomes especially clear when one looks at property. The “personal tapu” of an important person very much extended to their possessions. This was particularly the case since anything that came into contact with one’s person could thereby be considered an extension of the person himself or herself. A lord’s cloak, or in fact any garment, was part of that lord and often seemed to represent that very capacity for encompassment: to throw one’s garment over a prisoner meant that person was spared from death; an important unmarried woman who threw her cloak over a man thereby married him (Weiner 1992:61). If an ariki used a house, no one else could, for fear of violating their tapu (this would usually entail dire consequences). But by extension, any act of identifying another person’s land or other property with the tapu parts of one’s body or personal effects could, if unchallenged, be taken as a claim of ownership:

Thus, a chief named Raukataura, passing through a forest owned by a friendly tribe, had one of the feathers of his head-dress torn out by a shrub. Sitting down, the chief made a little fence of broken sticks round his sacred feather. He was accompanied on this occasion by some of the men of the tribe owning the place, but they said and did nothing. Their silence and inaction were construed as an assent to ownership, and the sons of Raukataura held possession of this title until the present day... Sometimes if a chief should wash or comb his sacred head when journeying across a piece of land his people would claim the land, or if he slept in a temporary hut for a night, title would be asserted. These claims were not, however, made lightly, there were to be other circumstances, such as the death of a near relative at the time; something to mark the event as of importance before such claim was established, and it always had to be upheld by the law of the strongest. (Tregear 1904:132–33)[123]

The same principle however was also applied in a far more aggressive mode of appropriation called tapatapa (“challenge”). A chief—that is, a recognized local leader whose tapu was particularly great—could, in effect, appropriate an object simply by identifying it with his name or a part of his body. Maning (1863:137–39; Firth 1959:345) gives the example of a group of chiefs who, observing a fleet of canoes that their armies were about to seize as plunder, began laying claim to the best ones: “that swift canoe is my backbone,” said one, “my skull shall be the baler to bale that one out,” “those two are my two thighs,” and so on. Each thereby effectively brought it within the circle of his tapu, which would then have been violated had the man who actually captured the canoe in question not immediately handed it over to him.

In all these cases we are dealing with some version of “the law of the strongest.” Since simply enshrining a feather from one’s headdress in a forest, or laying claim to a canoe by identifying it with one’s backbone, did not in itself give anyone a right to it, such an action was a test of power: one still had to persuade others to agree (even if from fear), or defend one’s claim by force. But successful persuasion, intimidation, or the application of force was, it seems clear, itself the proof of one’s mana. This was perhaps the most dramatically the case with tapatapa, because in performing it what one was actually doing was cursing oneself. The most powerful curses (or “witchcraft,” in Aotearoa it was the same thing) consisted of identifying one’s victim with cooked food—an act that, especially if one has some object taken from the victim to use as a medium, is efficacious in itself in destroying the tapu of the victim and setting them to waste away (White 1885:150–51; cf. Dunne 1927:88–89). Tapatapa was slightly milder: it might consist of, say, naming one’s dog after a rival chief—though, if discovered, such an act would require an act of vengeance as its utu (payback, reciprocity). In other words, in calling a canoe his backbone, the chief in question was creating a situation in which anyone who did not pass the canoe over to the chief would have been offering him a terrible challenge.[124]

Tapatapa, being a form of appropriation outright, does not seem to have been much used against those of equal status: White notes it was most often used to seize the property of slaves. If a chief employed it against a free person, someone with tapu of their own, he would be expected to eventually reciprocate—presumably in appropriately lavish aristocratic style. But as one might expect in a society in which most free men claimed noble status, such behavior was not limited to the mighty. In fact, much of what would normally be called gift exchange seems to have taken the form of mutual appropriation: one party requests some object (tacitly or otherwise); the owner immediately supplies it, then later appears to request something of roughly equivalent worth.

Thus to admire something belonging to another person usually meant that it was immediately presented to the person who praised it. The effectiveness of this in procuring the article desired is illustrated by a story given by John White of a noted gourmand of traditional days, Te Reinga of Kaitaia. He was of such greedy disposition that when anyone was passing up or down the valley with fish or other products he always hailed him, saying, “I am very fond of that food.” This was equivalent to a direct request for it, so of course the food was handed over to him. So tiresome became this practice that at length the people of the district, to end his begging, sent a war party against him and slew him. (Firth 1959:411–412)

Te Reinga apparently had little worth requesting in return. Early European visitors to New Zealand soon had to teach themselves never to praise or admire an object of Maori manufacture, lest its owner immediately press it on them and then later expect to be able to demand something of roughly equal worth.

While as Firth notes, barter itself was absent in traditional New Zealand, this is about as close to barter as gift exchange can get. Haggling might have been absent, but each party chose what it wanted from the other on the basis of a presumed equivalence. Of course as one might imagine, it is not as if anyone were free to claim anything at all. First of all, there seems to have been a broad distinction between types of valuables. Food, and objects of everyday use, was a sphere of lavish generosity; to refuse a request for food seems to have been well nigh impossible.[125] But requests for an heirloom could be refused: Johansen (1954:119) notes a proverb about a certain Tuahu Mahina who was refused an heirloom cloak: “he is a stingy man; this is evident as the dogskin cloak was not given to him.” As in the Trobriands, such heirlooms were seen especially something one party extracts from another—but here, this is not seen as a result of the seductive beauty of the recipient, but their potential for action: in this case the capacity (or disposition) to reciprocate.

There seems to have been a complex set of principles governing who could demand, or give, what to whom under what circumstances—one whose finer points it is by now impossible to reconstruct. For example: sometimes people did offer important heirlooms as gifts. The recipient was under no obligation to accept (Mauss’ “obligation to receive” was apparently not in effect in Aotearoa), but if he or she did, acceptance was seen as placing the donor in a situation in which he would later be able to demand almost anything in return.

An instance of this occurred when a chief called Papaka... while on a visit to the Ngatihape tribe, by whom he was entertained as a guest, made a present of his ear ornament to the Ngatihape chief. Now anything worn on the person of a chief is sacred, and the presentation by a chief of an ear or head ornament, is a mark of the greatest respect that can be shown by one Maori to another. Papaka was accustomed to wear attached to his ear the tail of a Maori dog called “waro,” which he gave to the Ngatihape chief, and it was accepted. Soon afterwards Papaka returned and assumed the leadership of the Ngatihape tribe, and consequently a right to all their lands, which claim has continued good to his descendants to the present time... (White 1885:196)

“The Ngatihape tribe,” he explains, “in receiving the present from Papaka virtually bound themselves to give whatever he might demand in return ...” This is obviously an extreme case, but the same logic recurs throughout the early literature: whether it be the case of the Maori chief who, before departing on his first visit to Auckland, pressed numerous unwanted pigs on his host, so as to be able to demand some of things he expected to see there (Shortland 1856:215–17), or the conduct of important intertribal marriages, in which, according to Dunne (1927:189) the suitors would offer the woman’s family a gift of heirloom weapons and ornaments; if accepted, it was “tantamount to the acceptance of the young warrior as a son-in-law.”

There was yet another form of traditional appropriation. Within kinship groups, goods were constantly changing hands through a kind of ritualized pillaging called muru (Maning 1863:83–91; Johansen 1954:140–46). Anyone who was considered to have damaged the honor or safety of a group by violating an important tapu, by sexual indiscretions, by accidentally injuring another or even accidentally injuring themselves, would be subject to a raiding party of their own kin—its size varying with the gravity of the offense— that would descend on the culprit’s homestead, heavily armed, and strip it entirely bare of movable possessions. To be the object of such a raid was considered no little honor. Neither were they by any means a rare occurrence— Maning remarks that anyone who accumulated an unusual store of wealth would tend to be observed constantly for possible infractions, and that he had himself observed, during the time he was living in a Maori settlement, the same European coat change ownership six times by means of muru, ultimately ending up in the hands of its original possessor.

mauri and hau

So far then, we have established that a person’s property is seen as a continuation of their person, or at least what Firth calls their “personal tapu.” We have also established that this does not stand in the way of a remarkably fluid situation in which most objects are subject to potential appropriation by others—indeed, it could even serve as a means to facilitate it. Not only were relations between humans and gods conceived in terms of ritual appropriation, but so, to a surprising degree, were relations between humans.
Most authors who have considered the relation of property and the person in Aotearoa—Mauss included—have not looked so much at mana and tapu as the terms mauri and hau. This will require a brief excursus.

At first glance, Maori theories about the constitution of the human person (Best 1900, 1901a) do seem to fit the classic Tylorian mold. There is indeed one aspect known as the wairua, or “double,” particularly immanent in reflections and shadows, which is also the aspect that survives death; alongside it, a set of terms concerning hidden, invisible powers identified with life, mind, strength, productivity, and so on. But the first term is used in only a very limited fashion: mainly, for ghosts, and for that aspect of the self that wanders abroad in dreams. It is the invisible principles that are really developed; and, critically, they that became caught up in one’s possessions. All the emphasis is on the terms hau and mauri; both of which refer to an active life-force that exists both in human beings, and—appropriately enough for a philosophical system which sees the entire universe as emerging from the same generative powers—is immanent in animals, plants, and features of the landscape as well.

When one speaks of the hau or mauri of a forest or coastal inlet used as a fishery, one is speaking first of all of productivity: that which makes it live and grow, and produce fish and birds and eels. When one speaks of the hau or mauri of a person, however, one is not talking about “productivity” in anything like the same sense: the term does not appear to have anything to do either with human fertility, or to material production of any sort. Rather, it appears to be rooted in a certain notion of essence. Firth (1959:255) calls it “vital essence”: the assumption being that behind any material form is an invisible, dynamic power that makes it what it is. It is at once the source of appearance and potential for action, which, as various authors (Johansen 1954, Schwimmer 1978) note, was for Maori philosophers seen as merely an expression of an inner nature. If interfered with, contaminated, or “lost,” the object or being that is its emanation—in this case, a human being—will therefore begin to lose its integrity, decay, or simply die.

When speaking in such broad terms, mauri and hau could be used almost interchangeably. Insofar as they were distinguished, it was largely by the ways they became invested in material objects. As a rough formulation, I might offer the following: insofar as this essential power became caught up in objects that mediated relations between people, especially in ways which open some of them to peril, then those objects were called hau; when it was instead invested in an object that was then hidden away to preserve and protect that power, that was a mauri (cf. Gudgeon 1905b:127–28).

For example, if a magician wishing to curse someone managed to get hold of the clippings of their hair or nails, leftovers from one of their meals, or even the impression of their footprint, this would be called a hau. Having thus attained access to the source of that person’s powers, as embodied in the object, he would have much opportunity to harm her. But one could also employ a similar process to invest the generative powers of, say, a forest in a “talisman”: say, the branch of a tree from the forest, or some similar metonymic token, or more often some unusually shaped stone or other object. One could convey the powers to this object by the chanting of spells, then hide it as a mauri. It would then normally be buried in a secret place in the forest, so as to both protect the fertility of the forest by embodying it in a form that enemies could not find to harm. Usually, it was also placed in a lizard, which thus became immortal and wandered unseen in the forest. Only by capturing this lizard or finding the hidden talisman would enemies (who seem to have been legion in most such matters) be able to destroy the forest’s or fishing-place’s fertility. Similar mauri were placed near fisheries (e.g., Mitchell 1944:42–43).

There is something to me quite fascinating about such hidden talismans. Descriptions of them (see Best 1909, 1929, 1942) almost invariably emphasize that their power was twofold: not only did they increase the fertility of birds or fish, but they also drew them in from other forests, or other parts of the sea. Clearly, there seems to be an echo here of the zero-sum game of cognatic kinship; the hidden powers of the mauri of a forest or fishery were models for the sorts of power that could create descent groups—both natural fertility, which is the basis for kinship itself, and the more political power of gathering and assembling, drawing in individuals from other localities, since, in a cognatic system, one has a fixed number of individuals all of whom could be members of any number of different groups.

There are two points to be made here. First of all, the generative power was not seen as human, but divine. One might recall that Maori agricultural ritual was seen as a way of bringing in the gods (who gave the field its powers of growth and fertility), during which time the field was laden with tapu, and then, before harvest, banishing them to free the place for human beings. Normally, such fields also contained a mauri either buried in the soil, or displayed in the form of “kumara gods” (Best 1925:199–203); it was usually removed after the harvest. Also, the very first sweet potato from each field was left as an offering for the gods—this offering was called a hau, and it was this that lifted the tapu state of the field and crops so it could eaten by ordinary humans.

Second, this idiom of generation and gathering—modeled on the creation of human, political groups—was not so clearly set out when those terms were applied to the human groups themselves. Hence there is in effect a double displacement.

the hau of the gift (one more time)

Mauss’ “ hau of the gift” argument has sparked an apparently endless discussion and debate (Firth 1959:279–81, 417–21; Johansen 1954:116–118; Levi-Strauss 1950; Panoff 1970; Sahlins 1972; 1992; Gathercole 1978; MacCall 1982; MacCormick 1982; Cassajus 1984; Guideri 1984; Taïeb 1984; Weiner 1985, 1992:49; Thompson 1987; Racine 1991; Babdazan 1993; Godelier 1996:49–56; Salmond 1997:176–177; Gell 1998:106–109; Godbout and Caillé 1998:131–134). In a way it’s rather odd that it should, since just about none of these authors accepts Mauss’ own interpretation— that in Maori philosophy, gifts were seen as containing something of the giver’s soul (his hau), and that it is the desire of this fragment of the soul to return to its native lands and former owner that obliges the recipient to offer something in return.

The most famous text that Mauss made the center of his analysis is actually from an essay on bird-snaring (Best 1909). It appears to be taken from a letter written by a Maori sage named Tamati Ranapiri, in response to a series of inquiries on the subject sent him by Elsdon Best. What follows is quite possibly the most quoted paragraph in all of anthropology:

I will now speak of the hau, and the ceremony of whangai hau. That hau is not the wind that blows; no, not at all. I will explain it carefully to you. Suppose that you possess a certain valuable (taonga), and you give that valuable to me. We have no agreement about payment. Now, I give that article to a third person, who, after some time has elapsed, decides since he has the valuable, he should to make some return for it, and so he does so. Now, that valuable that he gives to me is the hau of the one I first received from you and then gave to him. I must hand it over to you. It would not be right for me to keep it for myself, whether it be desirable or otherwise. I must hand it over to you, because it is a hau of the other valuable. Were I to keep such an equivalent for myself, then some serious ill would befall me, even death. Such is the hau, the hau of personal property, the hau of the forest... (Ranapiri in Best 1909:439, 441)[126]

All of this is offered to explain a ceremony called whangai hau (“feeding the hau”), meant to lift the tapu from a forest when Maori fowlers come to collect its birds. The first they trap must be cooked on a sacred fire and a certain share offered to the forest’s mauri: the talisman that embodies its life-force, and part also to the priests who placed it there. Since “it is the mauri that causes the birds to be abundant in the forest,” Ranapiri notes, “these birds are the property of, or belong to, the mauri.” This gift, he explains, is also called a hau.

Now most commentators have turned this one passage over and over— and I am not going to be so entirely different—but it’s important to note that this is by no means the only reference in the Maori literature to “the hau of the gift.” Mauss himself listed quite a number in the accompanying footnotes: especially, concerning the expressions hau whitia, “averted hau” or kai hau “eating the hau”—both of which refer to the consequences of not returning a gift. Nine years earlier, Best had written:

Should I dispose of some article belonging to another person and not hand over to him any return or payment I have received for that article, that is a hau whitia and my act is a kai hau, and death awaits me, for the dread terrors of makutu (witchcraft) will be turned on me. For it seems that that article of yours is impregnated with a certain amount of your hau, which presumably passed into the article received in exchange therefor, because if I pass that second article on to other hands, it is a hau whitia (averted hau).

I was having a flax shoulder-cape made by a native woman at Rua-tahina. One of the troopers wished to buy it from the weaver, but she firmly refused, lest the horrors of the hau whitia descend upon her. (Best 1900:198)

Where Mauss sees the hau as a fragment of the human soul, endowed with its own desires, Best sees it in more passive terms as a kind of spiritual substance, one which overflows the person and can be absorbed in its possessions. Both seem alien to the Maori conception. Here Best’s own final example serves as a counter-illustration. In the case of the woman at Rua-tahina, no object had yet changed hands. Rather, what would have been “averted” was a declared intention—an intended movement of objects between people.

In fact, if one examines other uses of the term hau, one finds they often turn on some sort of notion of intentional movement. At its simplest hau could mean “the wind that blows,” which is very close to pure movement and nothing else; as a verb it could mean “to strike,” but also “to command,” or “to animate, inspirit, urge on” (Williams 1844:46–47; Tregear 1891:52). Here we simply have a movement from one intentional subject to another, or better, a movement of intentional action, a project, that starts from one person and then proceeds through another. The same seems to apply to the intended movements of objects, such as Mr. Best’s flax shoulder cape. At its broadest, hau could refer to fame and reputation, the process by which one’s name is heard and broadcast far and wide. Here of course it overlaps with mana.

If so, one might say that an object becomes a hau when it mediates such an movement and that this hau is “averted,” or “eaten,” when such a movement is not allowed to take its normal course. Perhaps so. But this wouldn’t tell us much: after all, any object that plays a part in human society mediates action in some way or another.

In the end, then, I think it will pay to look at Ranapiri’s text again. What Ranapiri seems to be doing, there, is drawing a parallel between two different common uses of the word “hau.” On the one hand, according to Williams’ Maori dictionary (1844:47), hau could mean “return present by way of acknowledgment for a present received”—any return gift, whether or not a third party was involved. The other usage refers to offerings made to gods to lift tapu (Williams, Tregear 1891:52). It might be best to examine this parallel in greater detail.

giving, taking, and the gods

The ritual described in Ranapiri’s text, called whangai hau (feeding the hau) is, as I’ve already mentioned, actually just this sort of ritual of tapu removal. Forests were heavily tapu’d during most of the year, during the period when the gods were present doing their productive work, filling the trees with birds, plants, and wildlife. Cooked food, for example, must never be brought into such a place. In order to harvest what they have produced and reduce it to human food—to move from the moment of divine generation to that of human appropriation—it is necessary to remove this tapu. This is somewhat obscured in Ranapiri’s text which makes the whole process rather magical: he emphasizes that the forest’s hidden mauri, and hence its productive capacity, is seen as having been placed there by the priests. Nonetheless, almost all other texts (e.g., Best 1909:12, 1922:26, 1929:3) make it clear that the power of a mauri is ultimately that of some atua, some divine power of generation.

Hence, the significance of the fact that the birds offered to the priests— and mauri—were cooked. Jean Smith observes that this was typical of tapu- removal rites: a gift is offered to the gods, but in a form—say, by placing cooked food in the mouths of their images—that was polluting and destructive of the tapu that enforced their power. Such gifts were “an agent of control disguised as an act of propitiation” (1972:33).

The word hau was especially used to refer to one type of tapu removal ritual, called pure. Pure referred, most often, to gifts of either cooked food or human hair that had been cut off, which had a similar ability to destroy the strength of divine powers. Now, I’ve already observed that cut hair, nails, and similar exuviae were referred to as hau when used as the means to curse someone. What precisely is the connection? Babdazan (1993:61; Gell 1998:108) has suggested that both represent a capacity for growth: one’s fingernails and hair are the parts of one’s body that are most obviously and continually growing, and can thus be seen as tokens of the generative potential of the individual. I would add: both are tokens of the generative potential that are not capable of further generation themselves. Hair or nails in themselves are simply dead matter, incapable of growth. By cutting them off, one is rendering a part of the person that embodies growth utterly infertile. Sweet potatoes—the paradigmatic foodstuff—are still capable of generating new life, even after they’ve been harvested, but this is why the emphasis is on cooked food; in cooking a tuber, one destroys its generative potential and renders it fit only for consumption.[127] The same is of course true of the cooked birds offered in Ranapiri’s text.

The parallel with cursing (which is also referred to as “witchcraft”) is quite clear, then. In one case, “sorcery” is said to use the medium of the victim’s hair or nails (hau) to destroy the victim’s life-force (hau); in another, curses declare him to be cooked food. In fact, these are precisely the same thing (cf. Shortland 1856:114–15).

According to Smith, by placing cooked food in the mouth of an image or tossing cut hair at a sea monster, one was ostensibly making a gesture of propitiation but really attempting to destroy its strength and subordinate it to humans. One is in an attenuated way doing the same thing to the gods as one does in cursing a human being; neutralizing its generative power and reducing at least an aspect of its creation to food. The objects, then, embody processes. They form a compressed icon of the actions accomplished through their medium: growth, detachment from the source of growth, destruction of the generative power in a way that makes its products appropriable for human beings. It’s a motion that renders the two key principles of value in Maori society—divine generation and human appropriation—two moments of a single frozen narrative.

Does the gift of a hau as return present do something similar? Well, on one level, it could certainly be said that it does. It removes the tapu from the original object. Hertz himself had noted that if one were to steal an object, that object is still full of “taboos” and “signs of ownership” that charge it with a kind of power (called either mana or hau) which will punish the thief (in Mauss 1925 [1990:90n29]). Until a counter-gift is offered, the object is still within the circle on the giver’s tapu, not the recipient’s. As such it constitutes a danger: it can be used as a medium of attack, destroying the recipient’s own tapu (as in cursing), or perhaps, as Mauss suggests, operating all of its own accord.

But it seems to me there is a broader sense in which a “return present” operates to lift tapu—one that can be fully understood only when one considers the peculiarly appropriative style of Maori gift exchange. If you accept a valuable gift from another, this places you in a position in which that person can demand pretty much anything the giver deems to be equivalent: even, in some cases, one’s lands or one’s daughter or one’s self. One can refuse only at the risk of a total collapse of honor (not to mention the threat of “witchcraft”). So in effect, all one’s possessions are potentially within the donor’s power. This is the very opposite of tapu; to be noa, free of tapu, also means to be “within another’s power.”[128]

Hence the logic of Ranapiri’s analogy between the two sorts of gift becomes almost perfect. The donor really is in the position of the generative god. The god (or mauri, if you like), after all, has created the birds that have just been harvested through its generative powers; they belong to it. In order to appropriate the birds for themselves, the human hunters give back a small portion as a “first fruits offering,” but in a cooked form that implies at least the temporary destruction of that power. The god should properly have rights to everything. Not only the forest but its products are under its tapu. Through the medium of the hau, humans lift the tapu the god has previously imposed while its generative power was in effect. It is quite the same as with sweet potatoes. Now, the power of the donor is not quite so sweeping as that of the god; except in exceptional cases, like Papaka’s, he does not have the right to demand everything. But he does have the right to demand anything, and so his power hangs over all the recipient’s possessions in a similarly undifferentiated, encompassing fashion. But this means that by offering a return present, a hau, one effectively heads this prospect off. By offering a portion, one frees the rest of one’s possessions from the threat of falling under the donor’s tapu.

What I’m suggesting then is that one reason offering a return gift could be seen as a hau was that a Maori of the time would not have automatically assumed this to be the normal practice. When we think of gift exchange we normally assume a scenario in which A offers something to B, and then B, after a discrete interval, offers something back again. This does not appear to have been the scenario which an eighteenth or nineteenth century Maori would necessarily have had foremost in their mind. As we’ve seen, when goods changed hands, it was often—probably most often—through one of various complex forms of appropriation. If so, then offering a return gift— say, by giving the taonga to a third party, getting something in return, and passing it back to A again—could be seen as among other things a rather clever stratagem; a way of taking the initiative and salvaging one’s autonomy.

heirlooms

At this point I can return to Annette Weiner’s treatment of the Maori literature in Inalienable Possessions (1991). Weiner is trying to salvage the core of Mauss’ argument: that the obligation to return a gift is, for the Maori, due to the identity of the gift being caught up in that of its original owner. Or at least, she argues this is true of certain types of gift, heirlooms classed as taonga.[129] These, she claims, can for this reason never really be given away at all. They so partake of the identity of their original owners that they are always seen to belong to them, and therefore, in a certain sense they can never really be given away at all.

Of the two most important categories of heirloom, one—greenstone weapons and ornaments—were seen as fundamentally male products, and the other—various elaborately crafted flax, feather, or dogskin cloaks—as female ones. Such objects, she argues, tend over time to be seen as the veritable embodiments of the ancestors. This is perhaps the most obviously the case for greenstone: in fact Weiner suggests (1992:56–58) that in the earliest periods of human settlement in New Zealand, before greenstone came into common use, the main treasures were actually made from ancestral bones. And if greenstones were bones, cloaks were an extension of the skin. Even in recent times, at funerals of important men or women, such valuables would be laid at the body’s side, sometimes along with the bones of other, earlier ancestors, and usually, buried with them for a time, before being recovered and ritually freed of tapu to become valued heirlooms once again (Tregear 1904; Metge 1974:263; Best 1924 II;54–55; cf. Taylor 1855:62). Heirlooms quite literally partook of the dead and stories of the recovery of long lost heirlooms almost always culminate in a scene in which “it was carried to the village, where it was wept over, as though it had been a long lost and dear relative” (Gudgeon 1905a:57)—after which it was usually laid to rest in a collective tomb.

I have already remarked that there is a certain incoherence in Mauss’ analysis of the hau of the gift. If the gift I give to you contains a portion of myself, one that wishes to return home, then why should it be satisfied by your giving me something else? Wouldn’t this just compound the problem? You would think if this ideology were used to justify anything, it would be the return of the object itself. In fact, this is precisely what Weiner is arguing. To continue the analogy: if I give you my father’s skull as a gift, it does not thus become your father’s skull, no matter what you give me in return. Unless exchange is seen as effecting a complete alienation of rights, and rights are all that is considered important, it will certainly be seen as still belonging to me. In Aotearoa at least, this meant such an object could never really be given away. Gifts of heirlooms were really only loans. Often two chiefs concluding an alliance would swap heirloom weapons, or two sections of a tribe would pass an ancestral heirloom back and forth between them; sometimes they were given as gifts during marriages or funerals; but in every case, whether or not there was a return gift, it was understood that the object was given only for safekeeping, as a kind of trust; eventually, it would have to be given back.

But of course, Maori heirlooms were not really made from human bodies. The question is how it was that certain objects came to be so entangled in history that they are treated as if they might as well be. Here, Weiner speaks broadly of objects embodying the “cosmological origins” of a group; and one does hear occasionally of such things as adzes once used to separate Heaven and Earth in the beginning of time (Gudgeon 1905a:55–57), or tribes that still owned axes their ancestors had used to carve the canoes in which they first migrated to Aotearoa, centuries before (Mitchell 1944:187; White 1887 III:301–302; IV:17–18). Heirlooms like these would be handed down in the senior, ariki line of the tribe.[130] Now, there is already something immediately interesting about these heirlooms. Axes or adzes are tools. Tools are, by definition, not created to be significant in themselves, but to be useful; they exist in order to become the media for human actions. Hence, if they are valued as heirlooms today, their value is that of the actions they facilitated in the past—actions that, in turn, contributed to the fame of the actors, whom the tools can then memorialize.

These acts can be acts of creation or also acts of destruction. Many of the most famous heirlooms were weapons.

The meré is highly regarded as a tribal treasure, and the best of them had bad records; there are no notches on them to indicate the number of heads they have split, but these are all memorized and the circumstances in relation to each can be recounted by members of the tribe as accurately as a gramophone repeats a record. (Dunne 1927:187)

Even when what is memorialized are acts of creation, however, these do not seem to include the creation of the object itself. Many heirlooms are now considered works of art; still, the names of the artists or craftspeople who made them usually remain obscure—even if the names of subsequent holders are known in extraordinary detail.[131]

The emphasis on active powers seems appropriate considering the overall metaphysical quality of Maori thought. Of course feminine goods represent the other side of the equation: if Weiner is right, the visible exterior skin as opposed to the hidden inner bones (enablers of action). Where male treasures create or destroy, female ones are, as we’ve seen, tokens of the power of encompassment. But even here, the value of the object arises above all from the actions that have surrounded it, or which—somewhat paradoxically—its own desirability have given rise to.

It might be useful here to consider how such valuables appear, when they appear in Maori historical accounts.

Before I do so, though, a word on Maori history. The surprising thing when one goes through Maori oral histories, rich and detailed as they are, is that heirlooms rarely play much part. These are mainly the histories of migrations, of begettings, insults and vengeance, exploration and romance, with occasional feats of magic or even exploits of hunting or fishing. There are seductions and elopements and treacherous murders, and endless wars, but very little about property (it’s especially striking if one compares them to, say, the Kwakiutl histories gathered by Boas, which seem to be entirely about property)—unless, that is, an item was drawn into the action of the drama itself. On the other hand, if these stories contain little about property, and almost nothing about gifts, they are very much about reciprocity. The notion of utu, of paying back debts, is the central theme of most of them: it is just that the idiom of reciprocity is overwhelmingly one of violence. Here is my abbreviated summary of one of the few accounts in which an heirloom—in this case, a dogskin cloak—does take center stage:

In about 1675, a certain inland chief had possession of two famous treasures, a greenstone war club called Karioi-Mutu and a dogskin cloak called Pipi-teWai. Two rival chiefs from the coastal Kawhia region set out to ask him for them; the more prominent, Tuahu Mahina, failed;[132] but his rival Pakaue succeeded. After an ally warned Tuahu Mahina that now no one would consider him a man as long as Pakaue lived, he attacked Pakaue’s fort. Pakaue fled and was eventually hunted down and killed by a relative of Tuahu Mahina named Tuatini Moko, who appropriated the heirlooms.

Most of Pakaue’s people fled to a nearby tribe where they found allies, raised an army, and ultimately took their revenge on Tuahu Mahina, killing him and many of his followers. Satisfied with their vengeance, they made peace with the survivors. Pakaue’s son Te Wehi however was not satisfied because his father’s killer remained alive and in possession of the heirlooms; eventually he found allies of his own, two brothers who were famous warriors from Waikato. Their expedition was successful; they took the fort where Tuatini Moko was living, and when the latter tried to flee with the heirlooms, Te Wehi ran him down and killed him. He quickly secreted the treasures under his cloak, but the two brothers had sent a spy who reported what had happened. So the two asked him for the heirlooms, and he was obliged to hand them over.[133]

These two brothers, who conquered much of Waikato, eventually became such outrageous cannibals that they began to kill and eat even their own relatives; eventually, their neighbors raised a huge army to take revenge, and after great battles, they were killed.

The history goes on to detail yet another cycle of vengeance, as one of the warrior’s sons grew up and discovered the fate of his father. There was no word of the treasures, though, until many generations later, when a Waikato chief named Te Whata Karaka was making peace with the Ngati Maru tribe to the north. To seal the agreement, the Ngati Maru chief handed over the dogskin cloak. No one was quite sure how it came into their possession, but many speculated his tribe must have taken part in the battle in which the two brothers fell. At any rate since it was returned to its “original owners,” it has never passed to any other tribe. First it was laid up in a secret limestone cave; later, when Europeans discovered the cave, it was moved to the family burial vault where it has remained, “along with other tribal heirlooms,” ever since.[134]

One of the most striking things about this story is that we never learn anything about the heirloom’s origins. Clearly, when the story begins, KarioiMutu and Pipi-te-Wai must have already had some significant history— otherwise they would not have been desirable heirlooms. But about the cloak we only hear that it came originally from a different tribe, the Whanganui, to the south; about the club we don’t learn even that much. But in a way this makes sense. Because if this was a token of the history of Whanganui, that’s where the club should properly end up; instead, the point of the narrative is to establish how it became entangled in the history of Waikato. The value of the cloak, then, became that of the murders which Pakaue’s acquisition of it inspired, and the subsequent wars of vengeance, all of which were enough in themselves to attach it to the territory and descendants of Waikato.[135]

If acts of exchange are only rarely included in the histories (Pakaue’s solicitation clearly only appears because it led to violence), it’s because they did not in themselves contribute to establishing or demonstrating the object’s value. To the contrary, as with the medieval relics discussed by Geary (1986), which in their histories were always being stolen, the idea that someone might part with such an object voluntarily suggested that it might not be so desirable as the narrator would wish to imply. Even when the cloak did change hands voluntarily, it was always at another’s request.

Maori heirlooms, Anne Salmond once suggested (1984), created fixed points in what was otherwise an endlessly shifting terrain of descent, marriage, war, and appropriation. Still, it was extremely difficult to keep these points fixed. Some heirlooms do seem to have been passed down from eldest child to eldest child in unbroken succession—but this itself was a great accomplishment. The presence of famous taonga inspired attack, and weak groups would often offer up their most famous heirlooms to an enemy raiding party, hoping to assuage it. Salmond herself describes Captain Cook’s impressions from the 1770s, of an island in which powerful territories full of taonga alternated with impoverished ones full of heavily fortified settlements, victims of constant raids by their neighbors, in which there were no taonga at all. All of them had long since been carried off, or given away. While the exchange of heirlooms could seal a peace, their very existence could inspire wars, and, as the story of Pipi-te-Wai suggests, if the resulting conflict was sufficiently bloody, the object could end up entangled in the history of an entirely different descent line and hence “belong to” someone else. Indeed, one is left with the suspicion that one reason for the habit of hiding such heirlooms away in caves or tombs beneath the earth was precisely to avoid this: to ensure that, rather than making further trouble, they would be permanently bound to the group’s mana, its invisible potency.

Maori systems of value, then, were based not only on a remarkably strong emphasis on invisible, creative powers, and very little on exterior display, but also on a peculiar cosmology that saw powers of creativity—even those hidden within humans—as partaking of the divine, and in which the most characteristically human forms of action instead consisted of one or another sort of appropriation, consumption, or destruction. It was through the latter—especially, through transgressive exploits of one sort or another—that one made oneself an individual and left one’s mark on history. It is only once one bears this in mind that the notoriously difficult metaphysics of Maori exchange, which have fascinated anthropologists from Mauss onwards, can really make sense.

case 3: the kwakiutl potlatch

Mauss’ observations on the potlatch were not limited to the Kwakiutl—he used information on many other Northwest Coast societies as well—but it would seem more manageable to hold them down to the one, best documented, case. Actually, terminologies have recently changed; “Kwakiutl” now refers to a subgroup among the nation that refers to itself by the unpronounceable name Kwakwaka’wakw, which means “those who speak the Kwakwala language.” However, since most of the information we have comes from the Kwakiutl themselves (the four tribes that live around Fort Rupert, on Vancouver Island) there seems no need to drop the name entirely.

This material presents certain problems the Maori case does not. For the Maori, I thought it possible to take a single point in time—around 1750— as an ethnographic baseline. In dealing with the Kwakiutl, this isn’t really possible. The most interesting material is derived from roughly the time when Franz Boas was doing his fieldwork; but this was a time of extraordinarily rapid social change. Therefore, while I will try to focus on what’s called the “Fort Rupert period,” which ran from roughly 1849 to 1925, I’ll be drawing on a range of historical periods. Another problem is that Boas’ material, while very rich, is rather difficult to deal with. Much of it consists simply of Kwakwala texts (a clan history, an account of a marriage, an exposition on traditional handicraft techniques, etc.) presented without even the most minimal ethnographic context: for instance, clan histories do not come with any indication of who the narrator is, let alone any description of the present composition of the group. More conventional ethnographic material does exist, but mainly from a much later period.

One thing almost everyone who writes about Northwest Coast cultures emphasizes is the incredible bounteousness of the physical environment. This was a place veritably bursting with food: salmon ran so thick that the rivers seemed black with fish, and there were endless supplies of berries, roots, seals and other aquatic mammals. As a result, it was capable of supporting a quite dense population on hunting, gathering, and especially fishing alone, and because so much of the food was storable, there was a physical surplus capable of supporting a class of non-producers. Even in the eighteenth century, Kwakwala speakers lived in great cedar plank houses, full of carved boxes of preserved food, in villages in which aristocrats amassed wealth for great ritual distributions and prepared the paraphernalia for dramatic ceremonies; commoners did the work of food collection and preparation; there was even a small stratum of slaves who fetched firewood and performed other menial tasks. The Kwakiutl thus lived in communities more permanent, and more stratified, than almost anything elsewhere documented for people who do not practice agriculture.

For hunter-gatherers, the Kwakiutl were doubly remarkable because they appeared to work much harder than they really had to. At least this was the conclusion of most early observers:

In a region where subsistence demands could have been met easily by concentration on getting and storing enough of a few natural products such as salmon and berries, the Kwakiutl chose the grand manner in production as well as in the great displays, distributions and even destructions of wealth so distinctive of their culture... The Kwakiutl [were] among the best housed and most lavishly supplied, as well as the best fed, of the peoples of the New World. Pluralization was a conspicuous feature of much of this manufacturing. Each household made and possessed many mats, boxes, cedar-bark and fur blankets, wooden dishes, horn spoons, and canoes. It was as though in manufacturing as well as in food production there was no point at which further expenditure of effort in the production of more of the same items was felt to be superfluous. (Codere 1950:19)

These themes run through Kwakiutl life: the tendency to break tasks down into highly specialized and differentiated bits, each involving its own specialized set of tools; the tendency for endless duplication, and for making piles of wealth. It is very difficult to explain all this in terms of ecological “adaptation” (though many have tried); more reasonable to approach it as a question of value. If value is ultimately about how people portion out their creative energies, then most hunter gatherer societies known to anthropologists behave much like agricultural societies such as the Kayapo: they devote most of those energies not so much to the production of material things as that of certain sorts of people. In anthropology, the mechanisms by which they do so tend to be labeled “kinship systems.” The Kwakiutl, then, are remarkable because they were a group of people who really did devote a huge proportion of their time and creative energy to the gathering of food and to related material production, not out of necessity, but because that’s what they considered really important. It is not fortuitous, then, that Kwakwala texts give us endless details on food preparation and next to nothing on household structure. Indeed, though we know a good deal of the cedar-board construction of Kwakiutl houses, actual household composition, circa 1900, remains something of a mystery.

For people living in such a bounteous environment, the Kwakiutl seemed to place a peculiar emphasis on hunger. The spiritual beings that populated the Kwakwala cosmos, as Stanley Walens (1981) has emphasized, were creatures driven primarily by their ravenous appetites—spirits, animals, and humans all endlessly consuming one another. Ritual involved constant creation of the experience of hunger: as Walens notes, not only was self-control and self-denial at table considered a crucial mark of noble status, but rather than being moments of collective indulgence, feasts were almost always solemn affairs at which the portions served were unsatisfyingly small—and nobles were not even supposed to finish their portions. Everything was happening as if the system was meant to create a feeling of deprivation where none really needed to exist.

The most reasonable place to look for an explanation, it seems to me, is in the existence among the Kwakiutl of something very much like a class system. The two anthropologists who have written the most extensively on Kwakiutl cosmology, Goldman (1975) and Walens (1981), both emphasize that this was essentially a hunting cosmology, of a sort familiar in a variety of forms from Siberia to South America. Such systems are often based on the supposition of a kind of cooperative relationship between humans and their prey: when one kills game one must do it properly, and this is all the more true of the disposal of animal remains; this is a ritual responsibility that ensures the continued reincarnation of the animals. Such cosmological systems are all about food, and the circulation of souls and substance between humans and their prey. They almost never become ideologies of rule or support for the existence of an aristocracy of non-producers, because in huntergatherer societies such a stratum almost never exists. In other words, it would seem that the existence of rich, storable food surpluses on the Northwest Coast both eliminated much of the insecurity which tends to generate such an emphasis, and at the same time allowed the emergence of a kind of ruling class that then maintained that same cosmology as justification of its rule. Nobles did not hunt or fish. But they maintained the circulation of souls that made hunting and fishing possible.

Already one can see how different all this is from a cosmology of the Polynesian variety. In fact, in many ways Kwakwala assumptions seem exactly the opposite. Where the Maori saw humans as dependent on supernatural powers in order to reproduce themselves, here, it’s if anything the other way around.

Here is one area where one simply cannot brush aside questions of history. Deep cosmological structures to the side, we’ll probably never be able to know how much of this rather unusual situation was true for Kwakala speakers of, say, the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, because the information we have begins in a period of enormous social upheaval. The authors of Boas’ texts were living in a time when the overall Kwakiutl population had been declining precipitously for a hundred years, as a result of newly introduced diseases and lack of medical attention from the Canadian authorities, and in which the Kwakiutl had been incorporated not only into the Canadian state but a larger market economy in ways that exerted both enormous pressures and, especially at first, enormous opportunities for the accumulation of unprecedented new levels of wealth. The main immediate result of both was a crisis of authority—what some have dubbed the “Fort Rupert class struggle” (Kobrinsky 1975, Masco 1995, Wolf 1999), after the Canadian fort around which most of the most important Kwakiutl tribes assembled. Commoners had more and more resources with which to challenge their previous marginality; an ever-dwindling aristocracy was desperately trying to fend them off and maintain its privileged position while at the same time engaging in ever more dramatic and magnificent competition with one another. One result was the enormous inflation of potlatches— ceremonial gatherings in which nobles established their rights to important titles by the distribution of furs and other property, but that began to involve the lavishing of what even in Western terms was remarkable wealth (tens of thousands of blankets, fifty phonograph machines, a thousand silver bracelets, sixty washbasins, etc.) on people whom the giver usually claimed to consider enemies. It also resulted in a veritably dazzling spate of ritual and artistic creativity: the generation of new dramatic forms and techniques, new ritual, and an outpouring of works of material art, of masks, sculptures, and paintings, so inspired that Levi-Strauss was moved to remark (1982:4) that it was as if one small society had produced seven different Picassos all at the same time.

But it’s important to bear in mind that just about all of this was part of what was in the end a losing struggle—an effort of an elite to redefine its privilege in the face of equalizing forces—and that the accounts that Franz Boas and his assistant George Hunt gathered, both clan histories and accounts of traditional practices, were very much part of it. It’s not just that these accounts present an almost exclusively male, aristocratic point of view—one can never be quite sure how much the historical memory itself is somewhat reconstructed with political ends in mind. Were eighteenth century Kwakiutl aristocrats, for example, really forbidden to hunt or fish? Was this true of a whole third of the population, or just a few most exalted title holders? Were feasts always organized to create an illusion of hunger, or was that a later development? It’s impossible to say.

Of course most texts are problematic in one way or another. I’m emphasizing the matter here only because it bears somewhat on what I am mainly interested in: the relation between cosmological conceptions, notions of the person, and the exchange of gifts.

kinship

One might say there are two main forms of productive action that remain largely hidden in the material assembled by Boas. The first is the normal operation of domestic units (particularly commoner ones); second, related social relations of a cooperation (cf. Codere 1956). In part this is because what we call “kinship” was, for Boas’ Kwakiutl informants, largely a matter of the transfer of titles and heirloom treasures. The life-cycle of an aristocrat was marked out by potlatches and the distribution of property; the life-cycle of a commoner (a “house person”) was not. Hence Boas and Hunt found it impossible to collect information about kinship relations among commoners. Aristocrats claimed commoners did not marry but “stuck together like dogs”; commoners said they would be too ashamed to even speak of such matters. It would seem most houses, for example, contained both aristocratic and commoner families, but it’s impossible to know how these related to each other, because in the accounts, commoners simply disappear.

Boas did provide some fairly detailed information on the organization of the most important kinship groups. There were two of these. The smallest unit, which Boas sometimes called a “clan,” sometimes a “gens,” was called the numaym. In earlier times a typical numaym consisting of perhaps a hundred people. Several would be grouped together into a “tribe,” which shared a single winter village.[136] Neither were precisely descent groups. Boas in fact ended up concluding they were best seen as collections of named offices or titles: it was of these “seats” that a numaym was really seen to consist (1966:50).

A tribe would, generally speaking, be named after the ancestor who founded it. These ancestors were almost never human. Usually the legend related how some mythical animal (a gull, a thunderbird, a whale, etc.) came down to earth and removed its animal mask, and thus became a human being. This founder was considered the ancestor not of the tribe as a whole but only of the chief aristocratic line of its highest ranking numaym. Usually, each of its other numayma was founded when an entirely different mythical figure, or sometimes a pair of them, “descended” to earth in similar fashion (Boas 1935:41–52; 1966:41–44) to become ancestors of its senior line. The founder’s animal masks—and other, associated paraphernalia—were then given as a gift to his descendants, to be transferred, along with the founder’s name, as heirloom treasures (tlogwe), ideally from father to eldest son, along with the name of the ancestor himself. The head of the group, then, was considered the living incarnation of the founder. Each however was the result of an entirely different original event.

To make the sense of discontinuity even more extreme: other titles held by a numaym might derive from entirely different events (the encounter of an ancestor with a supernatural being for example). And it usually turns out that the bulk of its members of these groups were not related to the chiefly founder at all. In myths the commoner members were said to descended from guests who stayed after one of his feasts (Boas 1897:383), or from people he created out of gulls’ eggs, or seashells, or who emerged from the posts of his house (Boas 1935:43). In more prosaic histories, they often turn out to be clients attached to the core line for any number of different reasons, as well as younger children of the core line who did not inherit aristocratic status.[137] Below them, slaves were not considered members of the group at all.

The key to understanding the system is to understand that one’s identity thus became caught up in one’s possessions. Each numaym possessed—indeed, in the Kwakwala view largely consisted of—a collection of aristocratic names or titles, each with its associated treasures. From a Western perspective these treasures were both material and immaterial. A founder’s title might carry with it the right to paint a certain emblem, or “crest”—say, a bear or killer whale—on one’s house or other possessions, the right to perform a certain dance or song at a potlatch or Winter Ceremonial, and so on. Others were quite corporeal, including houses, carved house-poles, masks, dance costumes and related paraphernalia, feast dishes, and so on, all of which tended to have their own names and histories. But it is probably deceptive to distinguish corporeal and incorporeal property at all.

Here an example might be useful. An important Kwakiutl house would normally contain four or five named “feast dishes,” carved in the shape of some mythic creature. Ownership of such a dish carried with it the right to distribute certain sorts of food at collective feasts; it also carried with it rights of access to certain territories where that sort of food (berries, fish, etc.) could be collected. When such famous dishes changed hands, the actual physical object was usually destroyed—what was really transferred was simply the right to reproduce it and to call the new dish by its name.[138] Similarly, transfer of a dance-name would give its recipient the right to play a certain part in the dramas of the Winter Ceremonial; it would be accompanied by a great wood box containing the actual costumes and paraphernalia, though here again the physical objects might well be destroyed and replaced in the process.

The ownership of the treasures, then, was everything. Not surprising, then, that the family histories provided by Boas are overwhelmingly about property, its acquisition and transfer. Or that Claude Levi-Strauss (1981), despairing of trying to figure out the Kwakiutl descent system through more conventional means, ended up creating an entirely new concept, “the house,” in order to do so, arguing that, much like Medieval aristocratic families, Kwakiutl descent was really organized around a patrimony—houses, lands, heirlooms, a sense of family honor—more than any principle of descent, a patrimony that could be conveyed in a number of ways, by inheritance, marriage, gift, and so on.

Obviously, in any such system, the rules of transfer become allimportant. Here the key distinction seems to have been between two broad classes of title (each with a different sort of accompanying property). One class was attached to the numaym itself. Each numaym contained a certain number of named positions, often called “seats” because they afforded their owners a place in potlatches. The sources insist that these titles—the canonical number for the Kwakwaka’wakw as a whole is usually given as 658[139]— were all ranked in relation to each other: both within numayma, and overall, since numayma and tribes were all ranked in relation to each other. As with most ranking systems, however, it was impossible to get the same version from any two informants.[140] At any rate, these ranked positions were the very substance of a numaym. Ideally, they should pass from father to son, or at least to eldest child. But anyone who received such a title became a member of the numaym simply by the act of holding it.

The second variety were titles that could pass back and forth between numayma: these included, especially, feast names or titles that gave one a role in the Winter Ceremonial. Many of these could be passed on only by marriage.

Potlatches were, for the most part, the occasions on which names of either sort were “fastened on” to a new holder and in doing so, “given weight” by distributing more ephemeral forms of wealth to one’s fellow title holders.

Ideally, titles of the first sort should have passed from father to son (or, exceptionally, to daughters).[141] But it would seem that even from early on, things were much more flexible. Often, names would be passed on from wife’s father to daughter’s husband in marriage, or even more, to the latter’s children. As a result the system was effectively cognatic. One could also acquire such names by gift, from an entirely unrelated holder—it was considered crucial for elderly nobles to give their titles away before they died—or in fact by killing the former holder and appropriating their names and possessions. In fact, a well-connected nobleman could acquire a number of seats, and hence to be a member of several different numayma at the same time,[142] though this appears to have become especially common only during the “Fort Rupert period,” when the total population was undergoing catastrophic decline.[143] Even when the total population had hit rock bottom, however, and the total number of adult males was well below the number of available titles, distinctions between aristocrats and commoners were maintained—through it often took the aristocrats frantic efforts to prevent titles from passing to those they considered unworthy. In fact, they managed to prevent very many titles from passing to chiefly women, even though such transferals were not, strictly speaking, forbidden but merely frowned upon. However all this could be accomplished only by developing an inheritance system of truly baroque complexity, so intricate and pliable that it is almost impossible to reconstruct how property had been transferred in simpler times.

elements of the person

It should be clear enough by now that this was a society in which property played a crucial role in the constitution of social identity. At least in the case of titles and their associated treasures, on taking possession of them, one literally became someone else. Mauss himself made note of this phenomenon in his famous essay on the “Category of the Person,” written in 1938. Mauss began by noting that the Latin word “persona” is in fact originally derived from an Etruscan word, phersu, meaning “mask.” “The person,” in ancient Rome, was defined by having a certain legal standing (the father of a family was a jural person, its women, children, and slaves were not, but were absorbed into his legal personality and thus had to be represented by him), but an older usage was also reflected in the term dramatis personae, a cast of characters, especially because Roman theater was one of stock characters (the Sycophant, the Braggart Soldier, etc.), each with his or her own easily identifiable mask, costume, and emblematic props. Presumably, wrote Mauss, such a system is ultimately derived from something like the Kwakiutl one, in which only nobles had true personae, and these were embodied in certain sorts of emblematic property, passed in the ancestral line, that literally made the person who he was. Historical speculation aside, the analogy could hardly be more perfect. As we’ll see, not only were the public personae of Kwakiutl aristocrats made up of just such emblematic properties, but these were entirely caught up in a kind of theater; in fact, the properties themselves could, for the most part, equally be considered theatrical props.

Here the contrast between the Maori and the Kwakiutl is especially striking. In the former case, there’s an endless wealth of material on aspects of the “soul,” of spiritual powers like mana, vital energies like the mauri and hau, and so on, but very little parallel to these material tokens of identity. In Boas’ texts, the difficult thing is finding anything on the nature of the soul.[144] Such speculation just doesn’t seem to have been a topic of much interest for his informants. It’s especially interesting considering that both Goldman (1975) and Walens (1981) see the Kwakiutl cosmos as a vast system for the recycling of souls, which flow endlessly back and forth between human and animal realms. But even here, explicit theories of the soul are lacking; the picture these authors provide is largely reconstructed, by extrapolating what they take to be the implicit logic lying behind Kwakiutl myth and, especially, intense moments of theatrical display.

Goldman (1975:62–63), for example, had to coin the term “form souls” to describe them. Recall here the ancestral figures who came to earth and cast off their animal masks in order to become human beings. In myths, animals and humans turn into one another quite easily by slipping out of their masks or skins. In stories about the foundations of lineages, however, the mask remains: or, to be more exact, the original, physical mask eventually disappears, but its form remains. The right to reproduce that form— whether it be a killer whale, or bear, or eagle—now becomes a possession of the (now human) descendant who bears its name and is thus its current heir and incarnation, who also has the right to wear the mask at certain significant moments at potlatches or other ceremonial events. He also has the right to paint the design on the outside of his house, or carve it onto its supporting poles, or otherwise use it as an emblem of his numaym’s identity: this is what Boas (1897:554) referred to as a family “crest.”[145]

Actually, Goldman ends up arguing that the Kwakiutl recognized three aspects of the human soul, which he labels the personal soul (which everyone has, even commoners), the name soul, and the form soul (these two belong only to nobles). The first is almost entirely unelaborated. Actually, it’s arguable that the other two are really two aspects of the same thing, since there’s no reason to believe that Kwakwala speakers made an explicit distinction between a title and the emblematic treasures that came with it.

They did—as noted—make a distinction between two broad classes of titles and their respective costumes, powers, and paraphernalia. There was a primary one passed down within the numaym, ideally from father to eldest son, and a subsidiary one that passed from wife’s father to daughter’s husband, or to the latter’s children. A better way to phrase this, though, is that certain names were an intrinsic part of the numaym to which they belonged, so that if an outsider acquired the name, that person became a member by doing so. If someone obtains such a name in marriage, or as a gift, or for that matter by killing its previous holder (in which case the killer had the right to all the names and possessions of the victim), that person becomes a member in the numaym simply by doing so. This is not true of the host of secondary names and paraphernalia—feast names, Winter Ceremonial names, and the like—that normally passed between groups on marriage and represented, one might say, subsidiary aspects of an aristocrat’s persona. Even in pre-contact times, it would seem that one of the great aims of any great noble was to accumulate as many of these subsidiary names as possible, to literally swell oneself up with more and more identities; as a Kwakwala speaker would no doubt put it, to become increasingly “weighty.” This notion of weight, as we’ll see, was the key to the underlying notion of value.

It would be easy to take this too far. A noble with several titles was not seen as simply the incarnation of a set of mythical figures; there was some notion of a unique individual who united them, had acquired them, and had the potential to acquire more. But again, about this “personal soul,” and its powers, we learn almost nothing. It’s not clear if a nineteenth-century Kwakwala speaker would have felt that there was anything that could be learned or was worth learning. This seems to be a general rule of the Kwakiutl cosmos. Strip away one layer of exteriority and one is likely to encounter yet another surface. The masks that represented founding ancestors—often magnificent works of art—tended to be masks within masks: the beak of a giant bird that opened to reveal not the wearer’s own face but another mask inside; sometimes even that mask would open to reveal another one. Stanley Walens (1981:46–49) argues that among the Kwakiutl the person is conceived as a kind of a box. The Northwest Coast art is famous for its elaborately carved boxes, and these played a critical role in Kwakiutl culture. Potlatches largely consisted of taking various sorts of wealth out of one set of boxes, displaying them, and transferring them to others. Masks and costumes were generally kept locked up in huge boxes until the time came to take them out for ceremonial occasions. Of course, if one opened up such boxes, what one found inside was just another set of exterior “form souls.” And inside those, another set of surfaces. Walens suggests that the Kwakiutl saw almost everything as a box: clan territories were boxes, houses the boxes inside them, human bodies the boxes inside those. Social groups like numaym are conceptual boxes, defined through physical ones: there are collective property and food storage boxes for the numaym as a whole, in addition to which, each family has their own smaller storage box. As for the individual: one’s name is seen as itself a kind of box in which one’s various powers, qualities, and rights are contained.

Humans are born from boxes, swaddled in boxes, catch, store and serve their food in boxes, live in boxes, travel in boxes, and when they die are buried in boxes. Even the body itself is a type of box: humans not only live and die in boxes, but are themselves boxes... Names act as containers for invisible spiritual matter in the way that wooden boxes contain material items. (Walens 1981:46)[146]

Boxes become souls, then, when they acquire names and become eternal; this is for Goldman too why a “form soul” can be called a soul; it is a soul because it will always exist.

Throughout the literature there is almost no speculation about the ultimate energetic forces that move creatures, or about generative powers: inside boxes there are, generally speaking, just more containers, or if not that, sheer undifferentiated potentiality. When hidden potentiality is imagined, too, it is in remarkably dramatic, tangible form: largely as digested and regurgitated food. At “oil feasts,” for example, guests were ladled oulachen (candlefish) oil to drink, challenged to consume as much as possible before regurgitating; meanwhile, the same kind of oil poured continually onto a central fire through “vomit beams,” wooden faces with wide open mouths.

For the Kwakiutl, vomit is not a substance of filth. Vomit is to a culture with oral metaphors what semen is to a culture with sexual metaphors: an important category of material existence, a symbol of undifferentiated matter with no identifying features and a total potential for becoming. All the power of vomit is potential, not realized. Vomit is the first stage of causality, the state of existence that precedes order and purpose. All things about to begin the process of becoming—fetuses, corpses, the universe before Transformer changed it—are symbolized by vomit. The act of vomiting is not an act of rejection but a positive act of creation, a necessary step in the process of transformation.

Vomit is the transformed identity of the most precious of spirit gifts— food. All food, even though it may not be regurgitated, becomes vomit at one stage in the digestive process. Food and vomit are complementary aspects of single substance: the bodies of animals transformed into, respectively, cultural and spiritual forms. Vomit is thus the symbol of transformed substance: and the cycle of ingestion, digestion, and regurgitation is a metaphor for the cycle of death, metempsychosis, and rebirth. (Walens 1981:146–147)

While probably somewhat overstated, this passage gives some idea of how such matters were dealt with in Kwakiutl ritual symbolism. The hidden, undifferentiated interior was indeed considered to represent pure potentiality, but it was in an utterly tangible, material form—a kind of cosmic soup.

Walen’s comparison of vomit and semen is especially intriguing because it once again implies that this was an ideology that emphasizes the production of food over the production of people. Goldman (1975:50–52, 139–40, 202–205), however, is the most explicit here: in fact, he spends a good deal of time trying to reconstruct the implicit theory of creative powers that lie behind the different sorts of heirloom treasures. He concludes that there are two basic sets, one that correspond to the ranked, numaym titles, the other with those that are transferred only by marriage. The ranked titles that make up a numaym, which go back to supernatural Founders, and also grant one rights to hunting, fishing, and berrying territories represent, he suggests, an ideal of asexual reproduction. They are passed on between men (women can, exceptionally, hold them, but if so they too are considered males) at ritual feasts and distributions. As in so many hunting societies, sexual intercourse itself is considered inimical to the hunt; bodies that have had anything to do with reproductive processes give off a scent that disturbs animals and drives them away. However, sexual powers do enter in again in the second, subsidiary set of properties, which are not ranked,[147] but which are transferred only at marriage, given from the bride’s family to the groom’s. Here again, the contrast with the Maori is striking. For the Maori, everything in the universe is generated through a single principle of sexual reproduction; it’s only when one wishes to think about the reasons for differentiation between various features of that creation that one invokes a second principle, which has to do with competition and violence, and attempts to reduce others to the status of food. For the Kwakiutl, there is no single story of the creation of the universe as a whole; instead, there is an endless series of little creations by Founders, all in isolation from one another, which are seen as establishing an essentially asexual order that regulates relations between human beings and food; sexual reproduction enters only later, as a subordinate principle that creates links between all these heterogeneous groups.

But this is all very abstract. It might help to look in greater detail at the actual practice of Kwakiutl marriage.

marriage

As I mentioned, marriage was concerned primarily with the transfer of ancestral property; so much so that commoners, who had none, were not considered to marry at all.

Marriage was often represented as the equivalent of war. Great nobles went out “all over the world” to win over princesses and acquire new names and powers by so doing. To succeed was always framed as a feat, a contest: the suitor’s party often faced a mock battle on coming ashore at the woman’s father’s village; these mock battles could sometimes shade into the real thing, and people could be wounded, even killed. Or the suitors might have to undergo ordeals—having to run through doorways hung with torches, to sit unmoved as the master of the house poured oil onto the fire, scorching everyone. Often, these trials would exactly reproduce events in myths in which wandering heroes encounter some terrifying supernatural monster, and, in prevailing against it, acquire great treasures, or its beautiful daughter as his wife.

Such habits underline what is without a doubt one of the most salient features of Kwakwaka’wakw culture: its remarkable sense of theater, its flair for the magnificent gesture, and particularly, for simulated horror. Hunt recounts the case of a man who raided a graveyard the night before a suitor was to appear to ask for the hand of his daughter, and gathered seven human skulls and “a large number of long bones” and placed them in the jaws of a huge bear mask. When the suitor entered the room, a man emerged costumed as a bear, the so-called “Devourer of the Tribes.” The bear opened the jaws of his mask, the skulls rolled out to shatter on the ground. “Such was the fate,” he warned him, “of the last six men who tried to win my daughter” (1897:363). Kwakwala performances were full of this sort of thing, shot through with a kind of carnival bunkum love of trap doors, fake blood, and cannibal monsters taking bites out of carefully simulated rotting corpses. It is in part for this reason that rituals themselves could be referred to, in the Kwakwala language, as “frauds”—though this made them no less sacred. Indeed, the presence of sacred power, nawalak, was seen above all in its ability to make its audience shiver with fear.

In the most important marriages, though, the suitor’s party is almost always seen as drawing the woman out of her natal household—not by gifts, but by the mere display of inherited powers and paraphernalia (Goldman 1975:79). There was, in effect, a contest of the attractive powers of the suitor’s wealth, which, just by being displayed, would tend to draw the princess to him. The symbolism here is important, because it recurs in potlatches as well. The princess is always represented as being infinitely heavy: unmovable, evoking mythic women who are literally rooted to the floor of their houses. In part, she is heavy with property, which is arranged around her or on her person in the ceremony (in Kwakiutl rhetoric, weight and wealth are practically synonymous); in a broader sense, one might say simply heavy with importance, or value. “Chiefs of the tribes!” says a suitor in one of Boas’ texts (1925:249–69), who has assembled a host of allies to assist him. “We have come to this great wedding. Now we shall show the powers residing in us and transmitted to us by our ancestors, and with them we shall shake from the floor the princess of this chief of unblemished ancestry.” He then calls on them one by one to display their treasures: one displays a bow, which his ancestor acquired in the wilderness and used to vanquish his enemies; another a harpoon given by his ancestor, the Thunderbird; the next a quartz crystal “which the wolf vomited into my ancestor Great Smoke Owner,” the next, a Grizzly Bear growl. After each speech, the chief notes that the princess has thus been moved further from the center of the house, until finally she is drawn to the door.

Now, the groom did in theory pay a “brideprice” to his bride’s father— usually a modest sum in skins, or, later, blankets. Kwakiutl informants always made note of this, so much so that Boas suggested that they saw marriage as a kind of purchase. But if one examines the full cycle of transactions, one invariably discovers that the amount “paid” by the bridegroom and his family was negligible in comparison to the vast flow of wealth that moved in the opposite direction. Consider one fairly typical historical account from the late eighteenth century. The groom gave a total of fifty-four animal skins of different sorts; the father-in-law gave (over the course of three payments) over three hundred skins, two major titles, a copper shield, six slaves, five different dances with accompanying dance names and paraphernalia, and a “cannibal pole” (Goldman 1975:78–79). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the disparity remained no less dramatic.

What’s more, unlike the bride’s father’s payments to the groom, the groom’s payment had to be repaid. Some years after the marriage, a wife’s father could “repurchase” the bride, paying back, again, far more than the original amount; the woman was thereby considered free of the union (she could stay on if she desired, but it was considered a bit unseemly.) Sometimes this was done to raise the status of one’s daughter—a woman who had been married and repurchased four times was considered to have obtained the highest degree of nobility—but in part, too, it seems to have been to gain control of the children. This I think helps explain the otherwise mysterious way in which so many chiefs willingly parted with such a huge share of their heirloom possessions to their sons-in-law: much of what they donated was what might be called “constitutive property.” The names that they gave, sometimes directly to the husband but more typically to any offspring of the union, were names that belonged to their own numaym; in giving them, they were effectively reproducing their own group. On some occasions, the suitor himself would thus be turned into a member of his wife’s numaym; at the very least, his children would have the option of becoming so if they took on those names. And of course, if the bride was repurchased and no longer living with the father of her child, this would make the latter outcome all the more likely.

potlatches

This in turn makes it easier to understand what happened at a potlatch. Potlatches were, as noted, meant to “fasten on” names. There were a whole succession of increasingly important categories of names to be fastened on over the course of a young noble’s life, starting with modest titles reserved for children or youths, which only gave one the right to distribute minor objects to close kin, to more and more important ones, which carried with them the right to distribute property to members of other numayma, or to rival tribes.[148] These titles were also called “seats” because each corresponded to a place of honor at collective gatherings: guests would sit in rank order according to their titles, as the hosts appeared and displayed their various treasures and privileges, made the sort of boastful or vainglorious speeches for which the Kwakiutl have become so famous, and of course distributed property to all. After having held a potlatch and fastened on a name, then, one had the right to take that seat at subsequent potlatches or feasts. (If one held several seats, one would only take one place oneself but leave wooden boxes on the other to receive blankets or other property.) The objects distributed at such events, whether blankets, oil, flour, silver bracelets, or Singer sewing machines, were not in themselves constitutive wealth, and for that reason nobles would make a point of speaking of them with disdain, referring to them as trifles or literally, “bad things.” Still, there was a sense that in distributing property, one established one’s right to bear the name of an original Founder by reproducing, in a limited way, a Founder’s defining action—that of giving things away (Goldman 1975:124).

It’s interesting to think for a moment about the conception of historical action at play here. If one reads things very literally, it might seem that there is none at all. All the great deeds that created society were performed long ago, in mythic times; the key social actors are themselves reincarnations of those ancient heroes, but now reduced simply to acting out the same gestures in a much lesser key. If one looks a bit deeper, though, things are somewhat more complicated. First of all, it’s not as if there were no idea of nobles as individual, conscious actors who are assembling these identities and disposing of them, but who remain essentially continuous throughout. “Doing a great thing,” holding a potlatch or a feast or otherwise giving away property, not only added weight to a name but contributed to the fame of the actor behind the mask, as it were. True, there was little way for that fame to endure beyond the living memory of those who’d witnessed those deeds, because, in the long run, it was the eternal names, rather than the actors that held them, that would tend to be remembered. But even here there was a kind of play of mirrors. Because the names themselves almost invariably refer to wealth and the habit of it giving it away. A famous list of titles reads: Creating Trouble All Around, The Great One Always Alone in the World, Four Fathom Face, Making Potlatch Dances All the Time, Copper, From Whom Property Comes, Giving Wealth, Giving Food, Giving Potlatch Everywhere, To Whom People Paddle, Whose Body Is All Wealth, From Whom Presents Are Expected, Great Mountain, About Whose Property People Talk, Always Giving Potlatch, Envied, Around Whom People Assemble, Throwing Away Property, Always Giving Blankets Away While Walking, Satiating, Getting Too Great (Boas 1897:339–40; Goldman 1975:61, Codere 67).

This is perhaps the greatest paradox of all. Even the names, which hark back to the inimitable deeds of mythic ancestors, do not refer to these inimitable deeds but rather to actions in the present. Even more, they refer to the impression these actions make on a broader audience. Even the heirloom treasures themselves, which did tend to refer to mythological events, took the form of costumes and props full of tricks and stage illusions—often replete with complex apparati of pulleys and strings, all meant to wow the appreciative spectator:

The clan Haa´nalino have the tradition that their ancestor used the fabulous double-headed snake for his belt and bow. In their potlatches the chief of this gens appears, therefore, dancing with a belt of this description and with a bow carved in the shape of the double-headed snake. The bow is simply a long carved and pointed stick to which a string running through a number of rings and connecting with the horns and tongues of the snake is attached. When the string is pulled, the horns are erected and the tongues pulled out. When the string is slackened, the horns drop down and the tongues slide back in. (Boas 1966:100)

Ultimately everything goes back to theater, to what one can put over on a (demanding but appreciative) public. The titles and treasures would be meaningless without it; everything about them refers to the presence of an audience. And as suggested in chapter 3, the dimensions of this audience corresponds, from the actor’s point of view to the dimensions of the society as a whole. And of course here “the actor” is to be taken in the most literal sense, which brings us back to my original point about history. These performances are not in themselves remembered. If potlatches did enter into historical accounts, it appears to be only when they served to “fasten on” some new names and privileges won in marriage—this because heroic marriages can be seen as an example of the basic Kwakwala myth in which the hero wanders far away to edges of the universe to win great prizes from the beings he encounters there. Otherwise “great deeds,” like most great performances, tend to disappear. Kwakiutl theater is semi-improvizational; the costumes and props and performances themselves undergo constant innovation and refashioning, but almost none of the creative energies that go into them leaves a permanent trace on collective memory.

property, distribution, and cosmology

A word or two on potlatches as cosmic events.

Princesses are always represented as heavy; men use displays of wealth as one way to draw them out. Similarly, wealth and distributions of wealth are all about adding “weight” to one’s name, becoming big and heavy in one’s turn. If there is a single notion of value that pervades Kwakiutl culture it is this notion of “weight”—which, in the case of a formal title, was measured by the total amount of wealth given in order to fix the title on (cf. Oberg 1973:125). A title’s rank often seemed a secondary matter in comparison.[149] At least, this was what really seemed to stir passions and foster rivalries. The consummate image of success is that appealed to periodically in Boas’ rendition of potlatch speeches, in which the host is likened to a giant mountain, infinitely heavy, from which blankets and other wealth flow down like an avalanche of property, simultaneously enriching and imperiling everyone around. It’s an image that perfectly sums up the peculiar Kwakiutl combination of aggression and generosity.

The image of the mountain is telling, I think, because Boas himself (1935:334) notes that in many origin myths, the first ancestor of a numaym is said to have descended from heaven to earth either on a “moving mountain,” or along a “potlatch pole”—the latter being the pole beside which the host stands when speaking and distributing gifts at such affairs. Apparently, we are dealing with what Mircea Eliade would call a kind of axis mundi: the common mythological image of a central tree, pole, or mountain that is the point at the center of the universe where everything comes together—sky and earth, visible world and invisible Otherworld, life and death, mundane present and mythic past—and where it is possible to move back and forth between them. In most systems, this is reflected in ritual, where an altar, post, or tree, or statue represents that cosmic center, but just by way of a refraction or stand-in for a real center (Mount Meru, Jerusalem, Aztlan.) that’s usually assumed to be very far away. The problem is of course that in a Kwakwala universe fragmented into an endless number of unconnected founding events, there is no one single cosmological center but an almost endless number of possible ones. Everyone, in effect, claims to represent the center of the universe. Part of the notorious grandiosity and hyperbole of the Kwakiutl chiefs, I think, stems from the fact that all shared an ultimately impossible ambition.

With all these particular, incommensurable centers, it should be obvious why some generic medium of comparison became so important. Hence the appeal of Hudson trade blankets. Before the Kwakiutl were in regular contact with Europeans, the closest there was to these were animal skins, which were, in effect, generic “form souls”:

The animal skin is also a form, a garment that originally converts a human inner substance into animal form. In myth, animals easily slip in and out of their skins to become momentarily nonanimal... From the mythical perspective, the skin is the animal’s essential attribute from which, however, it is separable, in the way in which soul separates from body... Thus the animal skin... is like a mask. But it is not, of course, a crest. Crests are individual, and have epithetic names; animal skins are generalized, and are namelessly generic. (Goldman 1975:125)

Hence, since crests are passed down within precise channels of descent, “animal skins circulate ceaselessly among the tribes.”

In other words, rather than a division between particular objects, identified with one’s exterior persona, and generic ones (like money) identified with interior powers, one has an endless variety of exteriors: these are ranged, however, into more relatively particular and generic forms. Hence crests and associated treasures tended to accumulate the deepest and most specific histories, dating back to mythic times; treasures transferred by marriage were much harder to keep track of, and thus tended to have shorter, more fragmentary ones. The skins, being without history, could thus represent a kind of undifferentiated soul-stuff or vitality; according to both Goldman and Walens, part of the overall purpose of ritual was, as in most hunting cosmologies, to aid in an endless recycling of souls. But even the skins were not really a uniform medium of exchange: while they could be seen as representing the souls of individual animals, they were obviously of different sorts, sizes, and qualities. Hence, as Sahlins notes, the immediate and overwhelming popularity of the Hudson Trading Company’s woolen blankets, which were analogous to skins but, being mass-produced, all utterly identical. They immediately became the currency of the system—or, they did until the 1910s or ‘20s, when they began to be replaced by actual Canadian currency.

Before going on I should enter another proviso about history. When Goldman and Walens analyze Kwakiutl ritual as centering on a circulation of souls, what they are doing is offering a reconstruction of a ritual system assumed to have existed around the middle of the eighteenth century, based on analogies with other hunting cosmologies, particularly other Native American ones. There’s nothing in the actual texts that directly states that giving away skins or blankets has anything to do with recycling souls. Again, it makes one wonder whether what one is dealing with in historic times is a ritual system originally based on keeping a cosmic balance among sources of food, now transformed into something different: an endless quest to establish cosmic centrality in a world that had become rapidly unhinged.

The introduction of trade blankets allowed for a number of other innovations. The most important was the creation of what might justly be considered a system of high finance. In earlier periods, a noble wishing amass wealth for a potlatch would normally have had to appeal to the members of his numaym, or tribe, for contributions. Blankets allowed the introduction of the principle of the 100 percent interest loan, which Drucker and Heizer (1967:78) plausibly suggest was probably inspired by the example of some early Fort Rupert loan shark. If a chief wished, for example, to start a son on a potlatch career, he’d first contribute a hundred blankets, which the boy would then immediately loan out to allies, and call in the loans as soon as possible. Eventually he would have enough blankets to buy one of the cheaper heirloom coppers that circulated within the community: these were engraved copper plates that were the most important circulating treasures in Northwest Coast societies. It was a matter of principle that anyone buying a copper should pay more for it than its last purchaser had. Hence, before holding a potlatch, one could sell it again to a rival clan, which would then feel obliged to provide an impressive increment. Almost all major distributions seem to have been proceeded by the sale of a copper, which moved Boas to describe them as having “the same function which bank notes of high denomination have with us” (1897:344; 1966:82)—a description that, I think, is not entirely without justice. Coppers were the ultimate repository of value and, of all forms of forms of wealth, the ones that came nearest to representing life in the raw.

the role of coppers

About the origin of these coppers there has been a good deal of debate. Local legend has it that copper was first discovered and first smelted by the Bela Coola nation to the far northeast of Vancouver Island. Even in the eighteenth century, European accounts of different Northwest Coast societies report that sheets of beaten copper, roughly shieldlike in appearance, were one of the most treasured forms of local wealth. It is not clear though how many such ancient, aboriginal coppers there were: while many hundreds of Kwakiutl coppers have been preserved, none are made from native metal. Instead, the copper invariably turns out to have come from copper sheeting bought from European merchants or salvaged off the sides of European ships in relatively recent times.

There has also been a fair amount of debate about the copper’s characteristic form: usually about two feet long, wider at the top, with a cruciform frame and the top half in the form of a schematic face. Some suggest coppers are meant to represent the forehead of a sea monster named Komogwa, who bestows great wealth on those mortals lucky enough to find his palace beneath the sea (Waterman 1923). Widerspach-Thor argues (1981) it is simply a schematic representation of the human body. Whatever the case, the value of coppers seems to derive at least in part from the fact that they are considered equivalent to human lives.

In early times this seems to have been quite literally so, since coppers were seen as equivalent of slaves (war captives). Only the greatest nobles owned either, and what’s more, they owned them as personal possessions—neither were they attached to any other sort of heirloom property but could be disposed of at will, to circulate between groups. Slaves were sometimes sold; the dedication of houses or totem poles, at funerals, initiations, and similar important events would often be marked by sacrifices, in which the owner would either kill a slave, or liberate her—in either case, owners were abandoning their property in such a way as to lend glory to the event. With the colonization of Vancouver Island in 1849, and the construction of Fort Rupert, war and slavery both came to an end; but it seems to be around this time that coppers began to be produced in large numbers, and they seem to have gained in importance both as instruments of finance, but also, as substitutes for slaves—they too could be sacrificed, broken or literally “killed” on momentous occasions (Kan 1989:238–41).

It is important to emphasize that these coppers were not heirlooms in the same sense of most of the “heirloom treasures” I have been discussing—crests, masks, or winter dance privileges.[150] They neither have particular historical origins, nor do they become part of their owner’s social persona. In myths, coppers are won from sea monsters and ogres at the edges of the universe; but the origin of individual coppers is always a mystery; they are seen as coming from far away, outside of the community, a kind of generic Elsewhere. And while each copper was unique, with its own name and design, and therefore had the capacity to accumulate histories, insofar as it did, these histories were extremely brief (e.g., Duff 1981:153, Jonaitis 1991:40–41). Rarely would they go beyond the name of last owner or two—and of course how many blankets they had received for it.

Often coppers would flow in the same direction as brides: a father-inlaw would send one or two along with his daughter and perhaps provide additional coppers later on, when his son-in-law or grandchild needed to fund a potlatch to fasten on a name he had provided. In one long account of the sale of a copper provided by Boas (1967:84–92), the copper itself is treated almost as a bride: there is a constant emphasis on its extraordinary weight, as the numaym that assembles its resources to purchase the copper piles up an ever heavier pile of blankets, which ultimately becomes capable of drawing the copper toward it. It appears, once again, to be a drama about the creation of cosmic centers: the mountain of blankets being again a kind of axis mundi, as the seller, it would seem, poses as a Dzonoqwa, one of the ogres from the edges of the world responsible for first giving coppers to mankind.

The mythological associations of coppers are extremely complicated. Goldman, for example, claims that they are identified with the sun, with salmon, with fire, and with blood, and that they were the one form of wealth that brought together all cosmic domains (sky, sea, coast, and interior; 1975:126–27). They seem to have been as close as the Kwakwaka’wakw came to abstract representation of life, or vital energy, itself. WiderspachThor calls coppers a “metaphor of energy,” a “container and catalyst of energy held in each individual, each chief, each tribe” (1981:172); Sergei Kan argues that coppers were like slaves in that they were in a certain sense persons and in a certain sense not; also “like slaves, coppers were “alive,” and hence were the quintessential wealth exchangeable for all other types of property” (1989:246, cf. 345n65).

It was because they were alive that coppers could be killed. This leads us, finally, to one of the most notorious features of Kwakwaka’wakw culture: the ceremonial destruction of wealth and status competition. I have saved this element for last for two reasons. First of all, because especially since the work of Ruth Benedict (1934), the importance of status rivalry and “fighting with property” has been vastly exaggerated, to the point sometimes of making the Kwakiutl seem paranoid megalomaniacs. Once again, this seems to be a result of the Kwakiutl love for theatrical effect: in this case, one might say that their theatrical skills were a bit too effective for their own good. Second of all, because it finally brings us to the issue of reciprocity.

Now, it did sometimes happen that there were two claimants to the same title, or even that two numayma or tribes might challenge their relative standing, and therefore each would compete to throw the grandest potlatch to validate its claims. Sometimes, these would turn into what Drucker and Heizer (1967:102–103) call “fictitious rivalries” between two chiefs over long-dead claims no really cared about anymore, where at any notable potlatch where they were both in attendance, one might destroy a canoe, the other a minor copper, and back and forth, each trying to outdo the other. Most of this was really just another example of fun and showmanship, but at other times, such “fighting with property” could take a more serious turn.

Some twentieth-century informants claimed that in the distant past, a noble might try to embarrass or belittle a rival simply by offering him a splendid gift, so as to dare him to try to return something of roughly equal grandeur (Drucker and Heizer 1967:119). This is of course the classic gift scenario, but it does not appear to have occurred in historic times. Examples from historic times invariably involve destroying something, most often, coppers. For example, if one noble felt another had in some way insulted him or his family, he would normally take a valuable copper and break it into pieces, thus “killing” it, giving the various pieces to other chiefs, and then presenting the T-shaped cross-piece to the culprit, who would then be considered defeated unless he was able to “kill” a copper of equal value of his own.[151] Such coppers could still be patched back together again: the recipient would usually be able to sell off the cross-piece for a considerable sum to some other chief interested in assembling all the pieces, and thus be in a good position to buy a new copper; for this reason, a really determined rival might simply presenting the cross-piece briefly and then taking it offshore to “drown” it in the sea.[152] Another focus of rivalry was oil feasts, in which hosts would pour oulachen oil into the central fire of their houses until guests’ clothes were scorched, daring them to flinch; a rival guest might— especially if he felt he had thrown a greater feast—rise up and try to “put out the fire” by throwing in blankets, coppers, and canoes, forcing the host to answer him in kind, which could, on occasion, turn into what seemed to outside observers like paroxysms of destruction, in which rival chiefs vied to express their contempt for wealth and their absolute dedication to the magnificent gesture.

exchange and reciprocity

Maori histories are all about reciprocity—or at least, about revenge—with next to nothing on property; Kwakiutl family histories are quite the other way around. In fact, one of the striking things about the Kwakiutl material is how little a role reciprocity plays. There has been a great deal of misunderstanding on this point in the past, particularly because of Franz Boas’ mistaken impression that everything distributed at a potlatch eventually had to be paid back double. This inspired Mauss to write that “the obligation to reciprocate constitutes the essence of the potlatch” ([1925] 1990:41), which in turn has colored most discussion of the subject since. But in fact, under normal circumstances, there does not seem to have been any obligation to reciprocate involved. Frank Curtis had already pointed this out in 1915. When the host distributed blankets, or oil, or other “trifles,” at a potlatch, he does not appear to have placed the recipients under any sort of obligation at all. Certainly none of the recipients would then feel obliged to hold a potlatch of his own and distribute property to hundreds of different people just because the previous donor would be among them. Drucker and Heizer (1967:37, 56–57) observed that if the host of a potlatch had recently received something from one of his guests, he might give that person a somewhat larger share than the others (say, two cans of oil instead of just one), but when they asked hosts if they expected a return, the normal response was that obviously only a fraction of the guests were likely to hold potlatches of their own at any time in the foreseeable future, and anyway, no one was keeping precise accounts. Curtis (1915:143, Testart 1998) observed that if a chief receiving goods at a potlatch so much as remarked that he had given more to the donor at one of his own, most people would consider this to his profound discredit, since a real chief shouldn’t care.

In another sense, though, the fact that some of the guests were going to hold potlatches of their own was absolutely crucial. This was because one held a potlatch to establish one’s right to hold a title. It was only when the former host received property under that title at someone else’s potlatch that one could say that the potlatch had succeeded. Hence, at one’s own potlatch, one passed judgment on others’ status; at their potlatches, they passed judgment on one’s own (Barnett 1938, 1968; Rosman and Rubel 1971). Insofar as anything even remotely like “repayment” was involved, it was not in the object given (a mere “trifle”), but in the act of recognition giving it entailed.

So: titles and related constitutive property were transferred, whether from parent to child, or from wife’s father to daughter’s husband, without any “obligation to repay.” The titles were then fastened on at collective distributions, which also did not involve any principle of reciprocity. In fact there are only a few contexts in which one can talk about reciprocity:

1. In “finance”: outside of potlatches, loans of blankets had to be repaid at rates of 30 to 100 per cent. This does not appear to create social ties, though it usually proceeds along existing ones.

2. In marriage: while the overall relation is entirely lopsided and unreciprocal, a wife’s father can “buy her back.” This not only does not create ongoing ties, it negates existing ones.

3. In rivalry: direct challenges between people lead to an attempt to give gifts the other cannot match.

Of the three, it’s only in the last that there is anything like the classic dynamic of gift and counter-gift. Otherwise, Kwakiutl exchange appears to have worked on entirely different principles.

Perhaps this is not the place to try to unravel all of these principles; but there is one that I think is absolutely crucial. Insofar as gifts were identified with any party to the exchange, it was less with the giver than with the recipient. In the case of constitutive property, one literally becomes what one is given. The same principle applies to acts of rivalry: the main way of making a challenge, for example, was to “kill” a copper, which was as we’ve seen identified with a human life, and then hand the broken pieces to one’s rival. Doing so was considered analogous to an act of violence, it was “striking” him. And finally, it was entailed in the distribution of potlatch gifts before the advent of Hudson Bay trade blankets: the skins of sea mammals like seals and otters were reserved for high nobility, forest mammals for other nobles, cedarwood bark robes for commoners (Goldman 1975:136–37; Sewid-Smith 1986:63). All of which suggests why such generic gifts, as, blankets, or silver bracelets, or Singer sewing machines were officially disdained as “bad things,” the distribution of which could itself be seen as a kind of assault on the recipients. They were bad because they were all the same. A potlatch turned on a contrast between two sorts of transfer: the host received a unique title, thus defining himself as unique and particular, while at the same time defining the guests as faceless and generic in comparison. It was a way of reproducing, in material terms, the relation of the particular, “specific” actor and faceless spectators. Even if, ironically, he had to wait until he was himself a guest and was recognized under that title for the value thus produced to be completely realized.

Again, all this is almost an exact inversion of the Maori principle by which important valuables would continue to be identified with the giver. But in order to understand the differences, it will be necessary to make a more systematic comparison.

conclusions I: unraveling some things

We have obviously come a long way from Lenin’s New Economic Policy. Let’s see if we can’t tie some of the many threads of this chapter together.

First of all, what conclusions can we come to about the relations of persons and things? Here, I think we can say that Mauss’ overall conclusions have been quite clearly confirmed. In every case, the most valuable objects in gift economies are valued primarily because they embody some human quality, whether this be the creative potential of human action, or fertility, or the like, or particular histories and identities that have already been achieved.

Of course, I’ve already argued something similar about market economies as well; but here, one can say that the ideal of the complete detachability of persons and things (which Mauss emphasized) is part of that same overall movement that led also to the separation of the spheres of production and consumption, emphasized by Marx, which allows these essential links to be obscured. In this sense it is not gift economies but market economies that deny “the true soil of their own life,” since they are constantly obscuring the fact that all “economic” activity is ultimately a means to the creation of certain sorts of person.

On the other hand, one thing that has definitely emerged is that gift economies can vary enormously in how they do this; and particularly, in how personal identities become entangled in things—far more, one suspects, than Mauss himself would have anticipated. Two of his key examples seem to represent the limits of possibility in either direction. To put the matter succinctly: the most important Maori heirlooms were so caught up in the identities of the owner that they couldn’t really be given away at all; among the Kwakiutl, they were so identified with a particular person that if given away, the recipient became the person who the giver used to be. At either extreme, identification does not facilitate reciprocity. It makes reciprocity impossible.

pink cadillacs and autographed baseballs

Such apparently exotic practices might seem to put some strain on Mauss’ assumption that we are dealing with a moral logic that, in its most elementary forms at least, exists everywhere. But it’s not hard to find familiar parallels. In the case what I’ve been calling “constitutive property,” the most obvious one is inheritance. When a Kwakiutl aristocrat passes his name, with all its attendant rights, costumes, and paraphernalia, on to his son this is clearly a combination of what we’d call “inheritance” and what we’d call “succession to office.” Even when a man passes a Winter Ceremonial name to his daughter’s husband, it is usually to be held in trust for his grandchildren. Even in our own society inheritance is the most common, and ambiguous, form of gift: on the one hand, to pass on one’s wealth is obviously not an act of pure self-interest; on the other, it is gifts of this sort that are responsible for most of society’s fundamental inequalities.

One might propose then that among Kwakwala speakers, all gifts operated a bit like we assume inheritance to operate. But this is only a first approximation.

On a deeper level, it might be useful to distinguish between two modalities of gift-giving: one of which turns primarily on the identity of the giver, the other, on the recipient. Again, let’s take a familiar example. Many celebrities— rock stars, ball players, movie stars—are in the habit of giving away tokens of themselves to fans they happen to meet: bits of clothing, or jewelry, a guitar pick or the like; so, in many times and places, have kings and holy men. In cases like this one might well say the giver gives a fragment of himself, in the way Mauss proposes; one that the recipient will then keep as a way of vicariously participating in the giver’s identity. But that recipient does not really become more like Elvis for having been given a rhinestone ornament, or a Cadillac, or more like Darryl Strawberry for owning a baseball he hit out of the field, or more like the President of the United States because she has the pen with which he signed an important piece of legislation. Neither, of course, is the recipient in such cases under any obligation to make a return gift; to give a piece of one’s own clothes, or one’s own pen, would be rather insulting (or at best comical); rather, one could say the very willingness to accept such an object is an act of recognition in the Kwakiutl sense.

At the other extreme, consider a badge of office. Such badges can at the very least be considered “emblematic property,” in that only a policeman is legally allowed to possess a policeman’s badge, and only the English sovereign can wear the Crown Jewels. In some cases, though, matters go even further, and such badges become constitutive: the badge is the office, or at least so one is told, and whoever takes possession of it thereby accedes to it. In the Ankole kingdom in what is now Uganda, an ancient drum, kept in a shrine in the royal compound, was considered the real embodiment of the unity of the kingdom and its people (Oberg 1940:150–57).[153] On the death of a king, his heirs fight a war for its possession, “and many Banyankole claim that if a foreign king were able to capture the royal drum he would automatically become King of Ankole” (ibid:156). This is clearly “constitutive property.” Though one must bear in mind that in almost all such cases, we are dealing with something of a figure of speech: a daring foreign burglar who made off with the drum presumably would not be considered to have much of a claim on the kingdom. The “drum” in other words was really a metonym for a whole package of rights and properties, including the royal compound itself, much in the way Kwakiutl property appears to have been.

Even this sort of principle is not so exotic as one might think. An English dukedom includes a manorial residence, an entailed estate including manorial lands, the right to use certain heraldic emblems, and so on. In effect, whoever comes into possession of these things is the Duke. True, there are rules that ensure that this cannot be just anyone, and certainly someone who simply murdered the duke and occupied the place with a band of thugs would not thereby become nobility. So one might say these are emblematic but not constitutive. But if so, this is largely because the English nobility is preserved as a kind of museum piece: in the tenth century this approach might well have been effective. As with the Ankole king’s stool, one seems to be dealing with access to a kind of productive apparatus, properties that are emblematic of rule because they play a key role in the continual creation of a mystique of office; of just the sort of evocative display described in chapter 4, so typical of aristocracies, in which a history of past acts of recognition or obeisance is seen as emerging from the nature of the objects themselves. And of course if a duke were to pass his title and attendant paraphernalia to an adopted successor, and that would be in effect giving the dukedom as a gift.

So why, then, does the identity of the modern celebrity not rub off in a similar way, if only slightly, with the transfer of guitar picks or autographed photos? The answer, I think, is that the celebrity’s mystique—if one wishes to call it that—is seen as being derived not from an exterior apparatus, but from within. The great blues guitarist B. B. King, for example, never goes anywhere without his famous guitar, which is called Lucille. Almost any blues fan is likely to know this. But even if B. B. King were to give away Lucille, it wouldn’t make the recipient any more like B. B. King because what makes B. B. King famous is ultimately not his guitar but his ability to play it. The celebrity’s identity does not carry over to the recipient because it was seen as having been derived from inside, from some interior essence or capacity (which we usually label “talent”) rather than from anything he or she owns.[154]

In a system like the Kwakiutl, these capacities are alienated onto property. Even the right to sing a certain song or tell a certain story is often owned by a specific individual. The right to play a specific role in great ritual performances is dependent on owning the paraphernalia. One might say here the key issue would be not the ability to play the blues but the right to do so, which possession of Lucille could, in such a system, give you.

The Maori/Kwakiutl comparison, in turn, allows us to add nuance to some of the distinctions mapped out in chapter 4. Money, I noted, being generic, cannot accumulate history, and hence cannot add to the holder’s identity. Unless, that is, one has a very large amount of it. At time of writing, for example, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is famous primarily for being the richest man on earth. If Bill Gates were to wake up one morning and decide to sign over his entire fortune to me (and incidentally, in the unlikely circumstance that Bill Gates is reading this: this might not be an altogether bad idea), I might not thereby become the founder of Microsoft or a brilliant salesman, but I would become the richest man on earth. I will have acceded to the most important part of his current identity. Now, it might seem odd that this can be true of money—the ultimate, generic, historyless stuff—and not of specific historical objects like Lucille; but herein, I think, lies a hint as to what is really going on. If Bill Gates were to give me the rights to some software he designed, it would not make me the designer. It is because of money’s resistance to history that its identity does not cling to the former owner. Similarly, in fact, with a Kwakiutl dance title. Constitutive property of this sort does not change in its essence—or perhaps we should better say, in theory should not change in its essence—because of any actions a previous holder might have undertaken. How well, or how badly, any former owner danced the Bear Dance at past winter festivals is quite irrelevant. The internal capacities of the individuals involved are not an issue. Everything is alienated onto the object. This is equally true regarding the duke’s entailed estate: it is a notorious feature of aristocracies of this sort that even if the duke turns out to be a Communist, or is convinced that he is Jesus Christ, it does not make him less a duke, any more than a Catholic priest’s sexual indiscretions should make him less qualified to perform the Eucharist. Neither should the dukedom change in its nature afterwards as a result.

If so, the crucial fact about Maori-style heirlooms would seem to be that they are not entirely resistant to history: as we’ve seen in the case of the dogskin cloak Pipi-te-Wai, entanglement in dramatic historical events can erase their former significance and give them an entirely new one. This might seem to contradict Weiner’s notion of “inalienability,” but I don’t think it really does. After all, if Maori taonga could not absorb the identities of their owners, then they would still belong not to the giver but to whoever first made them—and in fact, in almost every case, the identity of that person wasn’t even known. Rather, they tended to become identified with a lineage through a cumulative history of being passed on, used, lost and recovered, protected and maintained. Kwakiutl treasures, on the other hand, almost invariably received their historical significance in a single dramatic event in the distant past. Either some mythic being came to earth and became human, or some heroic human passed into the Other World and encountered one; similar events could perhaps still happen in the present day, but in that case they would add new treasures, not transform old ones; therefore, a treasure’s value and significance was seen as permanently fixed. It would mainly be used to reenact the original event, in events that were thus by definition so minor in comparison they could do little to change the significance of the object.

This attitude toward history helps to explain one otherwise rather puzzling similarity in Kwakiutl and Maori attitudes toward their treasures. Both these societies are famous for their spectacular visual arts; yet in either case, the creativity of the artists who actually designed most of these objects was not ordinarily considered a significant factor in their value—even if in each case this seems to have been for completely different reasons. Kwakiutl artists (who are mostly chiefs) are mainly seen to be simply reproducing treasures whose prototypes were given to humans in the ancient past; carving a new mask, or crest, or feast dish is not seen as creation but re-creation, an act on the same level as performance. The reason why the role of Maori artists (who are also supposed to be of aristocratic rank) in creating heirlooms was so rarely mentioned seems more complicated, but I might suggest two factors. One is that if the meaning of an object is identified with the artistic creativity of its creator, its meaning is in effect fixed from the beginning: as in our own system, where even entanglement in quite dramatic events will have little effect on the meaning ascribed to a Matisse or Michelangelo. Another is that the primary human value in Aotearoa focused on a logic not of creation but appropriation. Here though we get back to the crux of the problem of the difference between Maori and Kwakiutl systems of value.

a final comparison

For much of the chapter, I have been developing a set of systematic contrasts between Maori and Kwakiutl cosmologies, systems of value, and patterns of exchange. Perhaps it would be helpful to place the most salient of them alongside one another on the following table:

Maori: Kwakiutl:

• Single overarching cognatic descent system

• Elaborate philosophy of interior/invisible/generic powers with taonga (the most important items of wealth) as important specific exceptions

• Reciprocity as endless theme in stories

• Very little emphasis on property in histories

• Emphasis on self-realization through appropriation

• Gifts maintain the identity of the giver

• Groups of utterly heterogeneous origins

• Next to no theory of soul, emphasis on surfaces, with coppers (the most important items of wealth) as important generic exceptions.

• Little reciprocity except in antagonistic relations

• Histories about nothing but transfers of property

• Emphasis on self-realization through giving

• Gifts constitute the identity of recipient

One could go even further. Maori thought is dominated by a metaphysical theory of powers and dynamic essences, which takes its highest form in the arcane lore of the priestly “House of Secrets”; it seems only appropriate then that the Kwakiutl emphasis on forms and surfaces took its highest form instead in moments of public theatrical display. What’s more difficult to account for is how all this leads to the last two terms on the table.

Here, it may be remarked, the two systems often look like precise mirror images of one another. In some cases its really quite extraordinarily. Among both Maori and Kwakiutl, for example, it was the custom that if an important man made a major social faux pas, say, by injuring himself or violating some ritual restriction, or (in the Kwakiutl case) being caught arguing with his wife in public, the only way to restore his status was to denude him entirely of his possessions. The major difference: in the Kwakiutl case, it is the chief himself who invites everyone present into his house and bids them take away all they can carry; in the Maori custom of muru, the man’s kin organize a raiding party and pretend to appropriate his goods by force, even when they are really acting with his complete acquiescence. The custom is precisely the same, except in the one hand the idiom is of complete, openhanded generosity; in the other, aggressive appropriation.

Why? It seems to me the easiest way to resolve the conundrum is to examine the kind of dilemmas each cosmological system creates for a wouldbe historical actor. An ambitious Maori was the product of a gigantic genealogical system of generation that gave him the right to make certain claims over others’ allegiances, but almost everyone else had analogous rights to some degree or another. To turn them into reality was a matter of assembling people about one but in the process differentiating oneself from them. To put it in another way: Maori actors were armed with generic powers, but those powers were, in essence, the power to make oneself an individual. It was the peculiar effect of Maori cosmological assumptions as Schwimmer pointed out, that since the generative power of the gods was what made people fundamentally the same, differentiation was seen as an effect of conflict and strife. Appropriation, and in particular violent or implicitly violent incorporation of land, property, or persons, was the corresponding social form. It was the means through which one established one’s unique historical identity. For an ambitious Kwakiutl the fundamental historical dilemma was very different. Unique individual identities there were aplenty. The problem was not, as it was for the Maori, one of how to set oneself off from society (a society that ultimately embraced the entire cosmos), but rather of how to create society in the first place. Because there was no assumption of a fundamental prior unity or even necessary connection between most Kwakwala speakers—a unity that, I must hasten to point out, logically did have exist on some level, at least a cultural one, or else people would not have shared the common assumption that it did not. The dilemma then was not about self-definition but about the definition of others. In this light, the potlatch was a mechanism for the endless re-creation of society: society defined, as I have suggested it is so often defined, essentially as a potential audience, the totality of those people whose opinions matter to a social actor. Reproducing society is about assembling and having a dramatic effect on audience; this is the aim of really significant social action; gifts, and accompanying recognition, correspondingly its medium and its final realization.

conclusions II: political and moral conclusions

My habit of using examples like American celebrities or tycoons as a way to come to grips with apparently exotic practices might seem a bit forced, but really it is a quite intentional strategy. It is my way of declaring my sympathies for Mauss’ own intellectual project, which was to explore the common moral basis of all human societies. Of course my comparison of the Maori and Kwakiutl might seem to tend in the opposite direction, to show just how different even gift economies can be; but in fact, even the differences between the Maori and Kwakiutl are largely differences of emphasis. For all the Maori emphasis on appropriation, for example, in the exchange of food, and particularly in the organization of collective feasts, the Maori often did try to outdo each other in generosity in ways strikingly reminiscent of the potlatch.[155]

The problem is always one of finding viable terms of comparison, and in this case I think the problem is particularly acute. Mauss’ own terminology— the “potlatch,” the “total prestation,” “the gift,” “reciprocity”—served well enough for making broad moral points about the logic of the market, but as terms of cross-cultural comparison, they are blunt instruments: extremely imprecise. In fact, I would argue that the muddiness of his terms made it impossible for him to frame his basic questions—particularly, “Why is that gifts have to be repaid?”—in a way that they could be meaningfully answered.[156] Not that Levi-Strauss (1950) did much better: in fact, the term he fixed on to solve the problem, “reciprocity,” is really the bluntest instrument of all. As currently used, “reciprocity” can mean almost anything. It is very close to meaningless.

so: why do gifts have to be repaid?

As should be obvious by now, gifts do not always have to be repaid. The question should really be: When do they have to be repaid? What sort of gifts? In what circumstances? And what precisely can count as a repayment?

The conclusion would have been impossible to avoid had Mauss made a serious effort to explore his own notion of the “total prestation” (which he also referred to as “total reciprocity”), instead of moving directly to “the potlatch.” Because in the former, gifts do not have to be repaid. This is because unlike competitive gift exchange, “total prestations” created permanent relationships between individuals and groups, relations that were permanent precisely because there was no way to cancel them out by a repayment. The demands one side could make on the other were open ended because they were permanent; nothing would be more absurd than for the member of an Iroquois moiety to keep count of how many of the other’s side dead each had recently buried, to see which was ahead. This is why Mauss considered them “communistic”: they corresponded to Louis Blanc’s famous phrase “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Most of us treat our closest friends this way. No accounts need be kept because the relation is not treated as if it will ever end. Whatever one might conclude about the realities of the situation (and these can vary considerably), communism is built on an image of eternity. Since there is supposed to be no history, each moment is effectively the same as any other.

The real problem, it seems to me, came when Mauss moved from here to unilateral relations, in which only one party has an unlimited right to draw on the other’s resources. It must have seemed a logical step, considering Mauss was drawing his main examples from relations created by marriage. Where sister exchange is the predominant form of marriage, both sides see themselves as standing in a relation of permanent mutual debt[157]; where women flow in only one direction, the debt is all on one side, and the wifegiver can often make unlimited demands on the wife-taker’s family, while the latter can make no effective claims at all. But how exactly can this be considered an example of “reciprocity”? It seems about as far from reciprocity as one can possibly imagine. Of course with a term that vague, one can always come up with something, and this is what Mauss did, suggesting that such unequal relations generally form an overall circle in which accounts ultimately balance out (1947:105–106).

This was precisely the argument that Levi-Strauss was later to latch onto, and develop in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). He referred to such circular marriage systems as “generalized exchange,” a phrase that has always borne a confusing similarity to Marshall Sahlins’ “generalized reciprocity” (1972), which, however, is not really the same thing at all but is actually back to from-each-according-to-his-abilities communism again. It’s as if each author had developed a completely different aspect of Mauss’ “total prestation.” Levi-Strauss takes up Mauss’ point about the unlimited debts of wife-takers to wife-givers to describe a system of extremely hierarchical relations, which, however, can cancel out if everyone marries in a circle. Sahlins, on the other hand, defines “generalized reciprocity” as the kind of openended responsibility that prevails among close kin, all of whom will do whatever they can to help the other, not because they expect repayment, but simply because they know that in a similar crisis, the other would do the same. He contrasts it with the “balanced reciprocity” that prevails between people who, though less close, are nonetheless close enough that they feel obliged to deal with each other on a moral basis. “Balanced reciprocity,” interestingly enough, would thus include both classical gift exchange and the less cutthroat forms of trade or barter.

The connection is worth making. Actually, if one eliminates the confusing term “reciprocity” from the picture, it soon becomes apparent that the classic gift-countergift scenario has a lot more in common with market exchange than we normally assume: at least, in comparison with the sort of open-ended communism Mauss took as his starting point. Where the latter is all about maintaining a permanent sense of mutual obligation, the former is about the denial of obligation and a maximum assertion of individual autonomy. In fact, one could even say that gift exchange of this balanced sort is actually more concerned with asserting the absolute autonomy of the actors than most market contracts. Consider a rental contract, for example. I rent you an apartment for some months, after which you agree to pay me a certain amount of money. Parties to such a contract act as if they were bound by obligation, but they aren’t really. Unless the contract is backed up by the force of law, we are both perfectly well aware that you might simply leave town and skip out on your responsibilities; or (a more likely scenario, perhaps) I might ignore my contractual obligations to provide adequate heat or repair the bathroom floor. We are pretending to be more constrained than we actually are. In the classic gift scenario, it is precisely the opposite: the giver pretends he expects and desires nothing whatever in return, the recipient, that he is not bound by any sense of obligation to make a countergift. Both parties are claiming to be far freer and more autonomous than they actually are.

The emphasis on autonomy is, I think, the key to understanding this sort of gift exchange. Insofar as it is about “creating social relations,” it is really about creating relations of the most minimal, temporary kind: ones that can be completely canceled out. What’s more, while they exist they are completely unequal; the initial giver is at first superior and maintains his autonomy; the recipient’s autonomy is called into question until such time as he can make an appropriately magnificent return; but the moment he does so, the relationship is ended. Or, at any rate, it is if the parties wish it to be, since no outstanding obligations remain. At every point the emphasis is on minimizing any sense of obligation or dependency, even where it does exist. While it is certainly true that tit-for-tat exchange of this sort can help create an ongoing, mutually supportive relationship, it has only really done so when it stops being strictly tit for tat.

Marshall Sahlins suggested something similar when he noted, somewhat tentatively, that in most “primitive” societies balanced reciprocity is not the prevalent form of exchange. A question might even be raised about the stability of balanced reciprocity. Balanced exchange may tend towards self-liquidation. On the one hand, a series of honorably balanced dealings between comparatively distant parties builds trust and confidence, in effect reduces social distance, and so increases the chances for more generalized future dealings... On the other hand, a renege acts to sever relations—as a failure to make returns breaks a trade-partnership. (1972:223)

Not only a renege: with gifts, simply paying back effectively cancels any outstanding obligations between the two parties, unless, that is, the recipient was so lavish in trying to outdo the original gift that he sparked a cycle of one-upmanship. There is a reason why the two Kwakwala transactions that most resemble the gift-countergift form are the practice of “buying back a daughter”—which is a way of ending a social relation—and gifts between rivals, which the Kwakwala themselves referred to as “fighting with property.” Among the Maori tit-for-tat giving was more common; but even here the real meaning of the famous hau of the gift—if my interpretation is correct—is precisely its ability to free one from the perils of such a relationship.

Rather than “generalized” or “balanced” reciprocity, then, it might be better to think of reciprocity as relatively “open” and “closed”: open reciprocity keeps no accounts, because it implies a relation of permanent mutual commitment; it becomes closed reciprocity when a balancing of accounts closes the relationship off, or at least maintains the constant possibility of doing so. Phrasing it this way also makes it easier to see the relation as a matter of degree and not of kind: closed relations can become more open, open ones more closed.

It seems difficult to avoid the impression, then, that the closed reciprocity of gift and countergift is in fact the form of gift exchange that least embodies what makes a “gift economy” different from one dominated by market exchange. It is competitive, individualistic, and can easily (as in the Maori case) slip into something resembling barter. Why, then, did Mauss put it at the center of his analysis—even to the point of largely ignoring those networks of individualistic communism that, it turns out, were actually far more important in most of the societies he was dealing with? Once again, I think, the answer lies in the essay’s political purposes. For that, the fact that even a free market economist will be likely to feel somehow reduced if he cannot return a present is a perfect starting place: the “obligation to return” gifts, in modern society, cannot be explained either by the market ideology of self-interest or by its complement, selfless altruism.

At least this is part of the reason. I think there is another, deeper one as well, which has to do with freedom. Mauss emphasized that our accustomed sharp division between freedom and obligation is, like that between interest and generosity, largely an illusion thrown up by the market, whose anonymity makes it possible to ignore the fact that we rely on other people for just about everything. In its absence, one must necessarily be aware that, unless one wishes to live a solitary life, freedom largely means the freedom to chose what sort of obligations one wishes to enter into, and with whom. Nonetheless, one could hardly deny that the kind of open-ended, “communistic” relations Mauss highlighted can quite easily slip into hierarchy, patronage and exploitation. Even moieties are generally ranked. The real crux of the problem, it seems to me, lies in the organization of the family, which is almost everywhere both the main locus of such open-ended commitments and also the locus of a society’s most elementary forms of hierarchy, its primordial models of authority. Of course there are exceptions to anything; families are obviously organized very differently in different societies; usually they provide a society’s primordial models for equality as well; but nonetheless, everywhere, in different ways and to different degrees, communism and authority tend to overlap.[158]

In fact, I strongly suspect that the more hierarchical relations within the household, the more likely it will be that relations between male heads of household will be mediated by such balanced and potentially competitive forms of gift exchange. One thinks immediately of the highlands of Papua New Guinea, with its famous te and moka exchanges, or the gift-as-challenge of the ancient Mediterranean or modern North Africa. Are these not areas notorious for the extreme subordination of women? Or for that matter the aristocratic rivalry of the Celtic, or Vedic, world, once again premised on aristocratic households within which the principles of exchange were altogether different. In many cases, it’s quite clear that this is what gives the element of rivalry its edge. As Tom Beidelman (1989) demonstrates in his analysis of Agamemnon’s failed attempt to settle his quarrel with Achilles in the beginning of the Iliad by returning Achilles’ slave along with endless additional wealth, if one offers a gift so lavish that the other party could never possibly reciprocate, the result is to reduce him to same the level as a member of one’s household, a child or a dependent rather than an equal. No man of honor could accept such a gift.

Perhaps then we have an answer to our initial question: When do gifts have to be repaid? If one is speaking of strict equivalence, the answer is: Gifts have to be repaid when “communistic” relations are so identified with inequality that not doing so would place the recipient in the position of an inferior. Such forms of exchange then are about establishing a kind of fragile, competitive equality between actors who are almost always themselves hierarchical superiors to someone else.

a structuralist interlude (on value)

The reader might be wondering how all this ties in with questions of value, which have so far made only a sporadic appearance in this chapter. Actually, there are several important points to be made here.

First of all, on the subject of competitive gifts: in order to be able to create this kind of fragile, competitive equality, there has to be some kind of standard of equivalence between things. Otherwise it would be impossible to say that the return gift was indeed of “equal or greater value” to the first. Standards of equivalence between objects, then, can emerge from the need to establish social equality. Of course, it is theoretically possible to imagine a system of gift exchange that does not establish such standards. Presumably one could have a system where people give and return exactly the same things: as in Levi-Strauss’ famous example of two men forced to share a table at a cheap French restaurant, each of whom pours the other a glass of wine from their collective bottle (1947 [1954:58–59]). But a system in which fish could be exchanged only for fish, or yams for yams, would be remarkably impractical, unless there was next to nothing in the way of division of labor, or economic necessities could be distributed entirely through other means.

Still, in the literature on reciprocity, such apparently senseless exchange of identical things has taken on a surprisingly important role. Consider the following analysis, offered by Edmund Leach, who takes this principle to its logical extreme by arguing that this is the only way to establish social equality:

Thus the English greet one another with a verbal formula, a reciprocal ‘How do you do?,’ but simultaneously they shake hands. Neighbors affirm their friendship by reciprocal hospitality. More distant friends exchange letters or Christmas cards, and so on. In all these cases the reciprocity is like-for-like and the message that is encoded in the action is roughly: ‘We are friends and we are of equal status.’

But the majority of person-to-person exchanges are not of this like-for-like kind. Correspondingly, most of the persons in a close network of relationships are of unequal rather than equal status. The inequality of the exchange is congruent with the inequality of the status. (Leach 1982:150–151)

Surely this is too simplistic. Still, such reductio ad absurdae can be useful in clarifying the issues at hand. Leach’s analysis actually typifies an assumption shared by a surprising number of Western social theorists: that any systematic difference in social roles must necessarily also be a form of inequality. To a degree this is probably just an effect of the intrinsic ambiguity of the word “inequality,” which can mean either that things are ranked in relations of superiority and inferiority, or just that they are not the same. More broadly: all such generalizations, it seems to me, suffer from a similar fault in logic. They ignore the fact that in order to make any sort of ranking between two terms, one has to be able to establish some initial ground of similarity between them. If two terms were utterly unlike, they could not be compared at all. (This is why “black” is the opposite of “white,” and not of “frog”). If they could not be compared, they could not be declared “unequal” in the first place.[159]

The same goes for the act of declaring two things equivalent. By doing so, one is not stating that they are the same in every way: one is simply stating they are the same along those dimensions one considers important in that context, and that other possible criteria are, in that context, irrelevant. “All human beings are equal because they are all equally in possession of an immortal soul; therefore, the fact that their feet may vary radically in size has no bearing on the question.” The element of value, here, turns on which criteria are considered meaningful, or important, in any given context. Unless one is a cynic, or a Dumontian, there’s no reason to assume the most important contexts will normally be the most invidious.

All this is fairly self-evident if you really think about it. Matters become more complicated when one moves from what people feel should not be compared to what they feel cannot: for example, Dumont’s version of the first premise of modernity, “All human beings are equal because they are all unique individuals.” Our individuality makes us incommensurable, hence effectively equivalent. Still, even in the case of incommensurability there are degrees: dogs are all unique individuals too, but few believe this makes them quite our equals. So once again it is really an initial ground of similarity (“humanity”) that makes the incommensurability take on the meaning that it does.

This, in turn, brings us once again to a paradox that has cropped up repeatedly over the course of this book: how can one thing be more unique than another? You would think this would be a contradiction in terms. But by now it should be abundantly clear that many systems of value are based on making precisely this sort of distinction. To return to people and dogs: most Americans, it seems to me, apply such a system to the value of different sorts of living creature. Every individual animal—or plant, for that matter—is assumed to be unique in its own way, but certain varieties are clearly considered more unique than others: humans are thus assumed to be more individual than dogs, dogs than cattle, cattle than fish, fish than roaches, and so on.[160] The more unique each individual representative of the category, the more objectionable it is to kill it. Hence, cats should not be killed lightly; fish can be slaughtered with relative impunity; killing roaches can become a moral imperative. One might well argue that distinctions of a similar logical order are made for works of art: at any rate it’s certainly true that the fact that all beautiful paintings are unique in their beauty does not mean that one cannot say some paintings are more beautiful than others.

All this is not so much a digression as it might seem. What I am trying to suggest is that in order to understand the workings of any system of value, one has to examine both what should not, and what could not, be measured or compared within it. In the case of a gift economy, then, the refusal to keep track of inputs and outputs in communistic relations could be considered an example of the former; the emphasis on unique valuables in balanced gift exchange, of the latter. As we’ve seen, such valuables often do end up being ranked by the degree of their incommensurability. Obviously not always: there are also valuables like wampum or coppers or Fijian whale teeth. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine a system in which this was the exclusive principle of ranking (or a kula system along the lines described by Nancy Munn, which comes quite close). At the lowest level is cooked food. It would be a fairly simple matter to keep track of who had given who the largest meals of cooked yams; therefore, unless one is particularly stingy or ungracious, one does not try to do so. It would be impossible to measure the comparative merits of two famous kula ornaments, or one such ornament and an equally famous greenstone ax; therefore, it is appropriate to give one for the other in strictly balanced exchange. Something like this seems to occur in almost any marketless society: one can almost always make out at least a distinction between a sphere of everyday consumption, quite often marked by an ethos of openhanded hospitality (Sahlins 1972), and a “prestige sphere,” characterized by all sorts of careful accounting. The Maori are one obvious example.

Looking at things this way produces some interesting results, especially if we consider such spheres as Munn insists, as spheres of human action. It then becomes clear that as one proceeds upward, the actor’s role becomes increasingly obscured. In the first case, it is clearly deeds that are at issue: one is refusing to compare who has given more. In the last, the incommensurability shifts entirely to the object itself. Of course this is partly because the object becomes the embodiment of a history of other people’s actions, stretching back, usually, into the distant ancestral past. Whatever the reason, though, one could say that as one goes further up the scale, the origins of the value become increasingly mystified and increasingly likely to be seen as an intrinsic property of the object itself. Still, what I’d really like to emphasize is that this mystification, if that’s what it is, happens to a surprisingly limited degree. Mauss clearly overstated his case here: Kwakiutl coppers, kula armshells, Maori warclubs, and the like were not normally seen to have their own minds and purposes; in fact, the striking thing is how much more likely one is to run into blatant subject/object reversals in flipping through the pages of the Wall Street Journal—where money is always fleeing one market to another, bonds are doing this, pork bellies doing that—than in participants’ accounts of the operations of a gift economy. Great mystifications do normally exist in such societies, but for the most part they lie elsewhere.

summary and perspectives

To give a gift is to transfer something without any immediate return, or guarantee that there will ever be one. This is the definition adopted by the MAUSS group (e.g., Godbout and Caillé 1998), and it seems about as good a general definition as we’re going to get. It also makes it clear that the term can apply to an enormous variety of transactions, and that the term “gift economy” can apply to any not organized on market principles. One purpose of this chapter is to begin to explore just how different such economies can be.

I have not proposed an exhaustive typology of types of gifts, but I have tried to use Mauss’ ideas to develop what might serve as a reasonable backbone for one. The notion of “total prestation” is in fact an excellent place to start, provided one is willing to break it down into its constituent elements. This means that timeless relations of open-ended, communistic reciprocity, whether they apply to groups like moieties or clans, or members of a family, or a network of individuals (as in Mauss’ “individualistic communism”) have to be distinguished from balanced gift-exchange. While the former can often slip into relations of patronage and exploitation (and it is often very hard to tell, from either the analyst’s or actor’s point of view, just when one definitively turns into the other), the latter has a tendency to degenerate into outright competition—most often the kinds of contest of generosity that Mauss labeled “the potlatch” but which should probably be best referred to just as “agonistic exchange.” Alternately, as it focuses more on the objects, it can become continuous with forms of exchange that look increasingly like barter. As structures of action, one is concerned with maintaining the value of a timeless human commitment; the other, that of a more ephemeral autonomy.

These are both forms of exchange that are reciprocal—a term here defined as one in which two parties act, or are disposed to act, toward one another in equivalent ways.[161] Within relations of presumed inequality, no presumption of reciprocity exists. Alain Testart (1998:98) makes the obvious point that if you give a dollar to a beggar on the street, this will not make said beggar inclined to offer you a dollar if you run into him again; in fact, it will almost certainly make him more likely to ask you for a further contribution. In such cases, one could argue that the underlying logic is much the same as it is when the celebrity gives the fan an autograph, or a Kwakiutl chief throws a potlatch: the recipient’s very willingness to accept such an object serves as an act of recognition. It is a microscopic version of the creation of persons, which almost everywhere is based on the assumption that inner qualities (talent, generosity, decency, etc.) can be realized only in another person’s eyes. But to call this a kind of “reciprocity”—or even to assume that a desire for recognition is the only significant motive on the part of the giver—is equally absurd. That would just be playing circular economistic games again.

Annette Weiner (1985, 1992) and Maurice Godelier (1996) argue that Mauss’ emphasis on exchange was itself somewhat misguided; the ultimate valuables of a society or group will normally be those that are never given away; there are always sacred treasures and these are the real origin of the power of the objects that are actually thrown into competitive games of exchange. Actually this seems to be Weiner’s particular version of a problematic that crops up in a surprising number of authors we’ve been looking at: how to reconcile a lower sphere of self-aggrandizement with a higher one of a society’s eternal verities (e.g., Parry and Bloch 1989; Barraud, de Coppet, Iteanu, and Jamous 1994, also A. Weiner 1978, 1980, 1982). I should make my position clear here. No doubt in any human society there will be many situations in which individual concerns will be seen to conflict with higher authority or the general good, however conceived; but to take such an argument too far, it seems to me, is to do just what Mauss was warning us not to: imposing our own assumptions about individual self-interest onto others who probably do not share them. Anyway, it’s perfectly clear that in neither the Maori nor the Kwakiutl cases were the prime objects of exchange in any sense subsidiary versions of sacred treasures held within families. Instead, we have encountered extremely complicated systems of transfer in which the exact dimensions of “groups” are rarely entirely clear, in which strategic games of self-aggrandizement are, as Mauss would have predicted, so intrinsic to the nature of projects of cosmic reproduction that it would be impossible to disentangle them.

At this point, finally, we can think once again about the political and moral implications of Mauss’ work. Let me begin with a warning. There is a great danger of oversimplification here, particularly of romanticizing “the gift” as a humanizing counterweight to the impersonality and social isolation of modern capitalist society. There are times when things can work quite the other way around. Let me take another familiar example: the custom of bringing a bottle of wine or somesuch if invited to a friend’s for dinner. It is a common practice, for example, among American academics. In America, though, it is also common for young people of middle-class background to move, from the time they first begin to live independently of their parents in college, from relatively communal living arrangements to increasing social isolation. In an undergraduate dorm, people walk in and out of each other’s rooms fairly casually; often a residential hall is not unlike a village with everybody keeping track of everybody else’s business. College apartments are more private, but it is usually no big deal if friends drop by without warning or preparation. The process of moving into conventional, bourgeois existence is gradual, and it is above all a matter of establishing the sacred quality of the domestic threshold, which increasingly cannot be crossed without preparations and ceremony. The gift of wine, if you really think about it, is part of the ritualization process that makes spontaneity more difficult. It is as much a bar to sociality as an expression of it.

I am saying all this not to make a plea for some kind of universal communitas, or even as a gripe from someone who never knows what wine to buy, but mainly to make a point about critical perspectives. To adopt a critical perspective on a practice or institution (as I have just done) is usually a matter of placing it within some larger social totality, in which it can then be seen to play an intrinsic part in the reproduction of certain forms of inequality, or alienation, or injustice. This is what Marxists usually accuse Mauss of forgetting to do, and not entirely without reason. But here the Maussian could well reply that for criticism to have any purpose, one must also be able to place some practices or institutions within an imaginary totality in which they might not contribute to the reproduction of inequality, alienation, or injustice. Such questions were clearly rarely far from Mauss’ (the cooperativist’s) mind, and for me, this is precisely what is most radical about his thinking. It encourages us—to put the matter in a somewhat Hegelian way—to view practices and institutions in terms of their potentialities, to force on oneself a kind of pragmatic optimism. Take for example his apparently idiosyncratic definition of “communism,” as a matter of dispositions and practices rather than property rights. Where the ideologists and propagandists responsible for what passes for public discourse in this country seem never to miss an opportunity to claim that something they call “capitalism”—usually defined as broadly as possible as any form of selfinterested financial calculation—is always present everywhere (newspaper headline: “Even in African Refugee Camps, Capitalism Thrives”), Mauss’ definition would do the opposite. It would present us with the possibility that the specter of communism might lurk not only within families and friendships but within the very organization of corporate capitalism itself, or pretty much any situation in which people are united in a common task, and inputs and outputs therefore organized only by the actors’ capacities and requirements rather than by any balancing of accounts.

Without a critical perspective as well, such a gesture is just as meaningless as the habit of seeing “capitalism” everywhere. Even if this is a kind of communism, it remains lodged within larger structures that are anything but egalitarian. But as Mauss also emphasized, it is the presence of such practices and institutions that make it possible for people within the society to see those larger structures as unjust. Mauss did not say it, since at the time he was thinking mainly of affinal relations, but it would not take much of an extension of his ideas to argue that the very experience of the organization of work within many capitalist enterprises may often directly contradict the moral basis of the wage labor contract on which that enterprise is ultimately based.

Allow me a final word about political visions.

Those interested in broadening our sense of human possibilities, in imagining different—more just, more decent—ways to organize economic or political life quite often turn to anthropology for ideas and inspiration. It would be nice if anthropologists had something to offer them. Something, that is, more than warnings, however legitimate, that gift economies too have been known to trample people underfoot. I have tried to organize my own analysis in a way that might not prove completely useless in this regard. In my discussion of contexts, levels, and imaginary totalities at the end of chapter 3, and my (related) suggestions about value, incommensurability, and equality in this chapter, such questions were never far from my mind. True, most of these observations have been on a very abstract level. There are any number of ways one could put the pieces together, if one wanted to use such ideas to help develop a concrete visions of how a more egalitarian society might work. In a way, though, I think this is quite as should be. It strikes me that what we really need now is not one but as many different visions as possible. I like to think this would be altogether in the spirit of Mauss.