The Gift (7 page)

To restate this choice in slightly different terms, a circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not
entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, the group, the race, or the gods. Furthermore, although these wider spirits are a part of us, they are not “ours”; they are endowments bestowed upon us. To feed them by giving away the increase they have brought us is to accept that our participation in them brings with it an obligation to preserve their vitality. When, on the other hand, we reverse the direction of the increase— when we profit on exchange or convert “one man’s gift to another man’s capital”—we nourish that part of our being (or our group) which is distinct and separate from others. Negative reciprocity strengthens the spirits—constructive or destructive—of individualism and clannishness.

In the present century the opposition between negative and positive reciprocity has taken the form of a debate between “capitalist” and “communist,” “individualist” and “socialist”; but the conflict is much older than that, because it is an essential polarity between the part and the whole, the one and the many. Every age must find its balance between the two, and in every age the domination of either one will bring with it the call for its opposite. For where, on the one hand, there is no way to assert identity against the mass, and no opportunity for private gain, we lose the well-advertised benefits of a market society—its particular freedoms, its particular kind of innovation, its individual and material variety, and so on. But where, on the other hand, the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of gift exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling. For where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to participate in those “wider spirits” I just spoke of— unable to enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community out of the mass, and, finally, unable to receive,
contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition. Only when the increase of gifts moves with the gift may the accumulated wealth of our spirit continue to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality beyond his or her solitary powers.

The old engraving reproduced here shows gifts being given out at a funeral, a custom common in Wales a century or more ago. The coffin was placed on a bier outside the house near the door. One of the deceased’s relatives would then distribute bread and cheese to the poor, taking care to hand the gifts
over
the coffin. Sometimes the bread or cheese had a piece of money inside it. In expectation of the gift, the poor would have earlier gathered flowers and herbs to grace the coffin.

Funeral gifts belong to a general class I call “threshold gifts,” gifts that mark the passage from one place or state into
another. The gifts passed over the coffin in this instance reflect a particular image of what it is to die. Bodily death is not a final death, they say, but a change, a passage that benefits from the protection of gift exchange. The Welsh believed that the dead who were not properly laid to rest would be left to walk ceaselessly on earth. They would become the restless dead, never bound up in the spirit of their race. Similar myths are found all over the world. The Haida believed the dead live in spirit villages to which they must travel after death, and a corpse was buried with gifts intended to help the soul on its journey. The image is kin as well to the Roman Catholic belief that a soul’s stay in purgatory can be relieved through the charity of the living and the sacrifice of the mass. In each case, death begins a passage that ends with the soul’s incorporation into the spiritual world, or the spiritual body of the tribe (“the bosom of Abraham” for the Jews).

Threshold gifts belong to a wider group we might call “gifts of passage.” I have adapted these terms from Arnold Van Gennep’s classic work,
The Rites of Passage.
Van Gennep divides rites of passage into three groups: rites of separation, rites of transition, and rites of incorporation. He also calls these “preliminal,” “liminal,” and “postliminal rites”—that is, before the doorway, on the threshold, and in the house. Rites of separation are not so commonly marked by gifts, but even a quick survey of Van Gennep’s work will show that rites in his other two categories are.
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Threshold gifts may be the most common form of gift we have, so well known as to need little elaboration here. They attend times of passage or moments of great change. They are with us at every station of
life, from the shower for the coming baby to the birthday parties of youth, from graduation gifts (and the social puberty rites of earlier times) to marriage gifts, from the food offered newcomers and the sick to the flowers placed upon the coffin. Once in my reading I came across an obscure society that even gave gifts to celebrate the arrival of a child’s second teeth—only to realize later that of course the writer meant the tooth fairy!

Threshold gifts mark the time of, or act as the actual agents of, individual transformation. In a recent book on the Trobriand Islands, Annette Weiner presents an interesting idea
about these gifts that mark the various stages of the life cycle. Weiner tells us that in the Trobriands at least, “at each important phase in the cycle (i.e., conception, birth, marriage, death, and rebirth), a transformation of a person occurs as artifacts are detached from others and invested in ego.” She means that there are two sides to each exchange and to each transformation: on the one hand, the person approaching a new station in life is invested with gifts that carry the new identity; on the other hand, some older person—the donor who is leaving that stage of life—disinvests himself of an old identity by bestowing these same gifts upon the young. Weiner’s main contribution to the ethnography of the Trobriand Islands has been to describe a sexual division of labor within this series of transformations. Men’s gifts organize the social and political identities of middle life, while women’s gifts are more concerned with birth, death, and rebirth. Women especially are in charge of collecting and disbursing the gifts given away at a mortuary ceremony during the course of which it is understood that the deceased is released not from any particular station in life but from his or her entire social being. “Symbolically,” Weiner writes, “women untie the dead person from all reciprocal claims, thus securing a [soul] that is pure ancestral essence.”

Giving food over the coffin.

I have taken death gifts as my example of threshold gifts not as an exceptional case but as the type, for I would like to speak of all transformations as involving death.
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Spiritually, at
least, the old life must leave before the new may enter. Initiation ceremonies make a good illustration because they commonly include a symbolic death. A man who was to be initiated into the priesthood among the Sabians (a Gnostic sect) would confine himself to a reed hut for a full week. During this time he was not allowed to sleep. Each day he would change his clothes and give alms to the poor. After seven days a funeral would be held for him, as he would then be considered dead. After the funeral he would be taken to a river and baptized. For the next two months he would bathe three times a day, eat only certain foods and give alms.

The novitiate’s gifts are intended to encourage the death of the secular self and the birth of the spiritual. The alms are the evidence that the would-be priest is giving up the old life. All old gifts are handed over the coffin. It might be said that the gifts we give at times of transformation are meant to make visible the giving up we do invisibly. And of course we hope that there will be an exchange, that something will come toward us if we abandon our old lives. So we might also say that the tokens we receive at times of change are meant to make visible life’s reciprocation. They are not mere compensation for what is lost, but the promise of what lies ahead. They guide us toward new life, assuring our passage away from what is dying.

The guidance is of use because there are those who do not survive change. It is as if human beings were like that subclass of insect, the Metabola, which must undergo complete metamorphosis from egg, through larva and pupa, to imago. In some way the fluidity of gift exchange assures the successful metamorphosis. Woody Allen used to tell a joke at the end of his stand-up routine: he would take a watch from his pocket, check the time, and then say, “It’s an old family heirloom. [Pause] My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed.” The joke works because market exchange will always seem
inappropriate on the threshold. There is a discrete range of conditions that will assure the emergence of the imago. A man who would buy and sell at a moment of change is one who cannot or will not give up, and if the passage is inevitable, he will be torn apart. He will become one of the done-for dead who truly die. Threshold gifts protect us from such death.

There is a story in the
Babylonian Talmud
of a man whose astrologers told him that his daughter would not survive her marriage. She would, they prophesied, be bitten by a snake and die on her wedding day. As the story goes, on the night before her wedding the girl happened to hang her brooch up by sticking its pin into a hole in the wall where it pierced the eye of a serpent. When she took the brooch down in the morning, the snake came trailing after it. Her father asked if any act of hers could account for her having so luckily avoided her fate. “A poor man came to our door yesterday evening,” she replied. “Everybody was busy at the banquet, and there was none to attend to him. So I took the portion that was given to me and gave it to him.” “You have done a good deed,” her father said, and he went about thereafter lecturing that “charity delivereth from death.” And, the
Talmud
adds, “not merely from an unnatural death, but from death itself.”

The astrologers had predicted that the daughter would not survive the passage from maiden to wife, but she does survive through an act of spontaneous generosity; she has the right spirit on the day of her wedding. The tale offers the same image as the Welsh funeral rite or the Sabian initiation: a moment of change is guarded by the giving of gifts. It’s not that there is no death, nor that there is no change—the novitiate and the bride suffer a “death,” but they are able to pass through it into new life under the aegis of the gift. We should really differentiate two sorts of death here: one that opens forward into a greater life and another—a dead-end death— that leaves a restless soul, unable to reach its home. This is the
death we rightly fear. And just as gifts are linked to the death that moves toward new life, so, for those who believe in transformation (either in this life or in another), ideologies of market exchange have become associated with the death that goes nowhere. George Romero, the man who made the movie
The Dawn of the Dead
, set his film in a shopping mall near Pittsburgh; the parking lots and aisles of discount stores may be where the restless dead of a commodity civilization will tread out their numberless days.

These stories present gift exchange as a companion to transformation, a sort of guardian or marker or catalyst. It is also the case that a gift may be the actual agent of change, the bearer of new life. In the simplest examples, gifts carry an identity with them, and to accept the gift amounts to incorporating the new identity. It is as if such a gift passes through the body and leaves us altered. The gift is not merely the witness or guardian to new life, but the creator. I want to speak of “teachings” as my primary example here. I do not mean schoolbook lessons, I mean those infrequent lessons in living that alter, or even save, our lives. I once worked for several years as a counselor to alcoholics in the detoxification ward of a city hospital. During those years I naturally became acquainted with Alcoholics Anonymous. AA provides a “program of recovery” for alcoholics that makes a good example of the sort of teaching gift I have in mind.

AA is an unusual organization in terms of the way money is handled. Nothing is bought or sold. Local groups are autonomous and meet their minimal expenses—coffee, literature—through members’ contributions. The program itself is free. AA probably wouldn’t be as effective, in fact, if the program was delivered through the machinery of the market, not because its lessons would have to change, but
because the spirit behind them would be different (the voluntary aspect of getting sober would be obscured, there would be more opportunity for manipulation, and—as I shall argue presently—the charging of fees for service tends to cut off the motivating force of gratitude, a source of AA’s energy).
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So AA’s teachings are free, a literal gift. Someone who comes to the group will hear it said, “If you do such and such, you will stay sober for a day.” His pain is heavy or his desire strong, so he tries it. Suppose it works. Now he’s in an odd state. He has received the teaching and he’s seen that it has some power, but, as is always the case, it takes some time before the message really sinks in. An insight may come quickly, but the gut transformation is slow. After a day, even a month, of sobriety the newcomer isn’t a drunk, technically, but he’s not a recovered alcoholic, either. The teachings are “in passage” in the body of their recipient between the time they are received and the time when they have sunk in so deeply that they may be passed along. The process can take years.

AA has “twelve steps to recovery,” which more or less summarize the program. The twelfth step is an act of gratitude: recovered alcoholics help other alcoholics when called upon to do so. It is a step in which the gift is passed along, so it is right that it should be the final one. In AA they speak of people who are “two-steppers”—that is, people who take Step One (accepting they are an alcoholic) and then jump
directly to Step Twelve (helping others) without the in-between steps where the labor lies. They try to pass along something they themselves have not yet received.

There are many other examples of teachings as transformative gifts. Spiritual conversions have the same structure as the AA experience: the Word is received, the soul suffers a change (or is released, or born again), and the convert feels moved to testify, to give the Word away again. Those whose lives have been touched by a true mentor will have known a similar history. I once met a man who ran a research lab for a large petrochemical firm. He had started to work for the company just out of high school, literally pushing a broom. An older man, a Ph.D., had then asked him to be the handyman in his research lab. The two of them worked together for years, the older man training the younger. When I met him in his late forties, the former handyman had earned a master’s degree in chemistry and was working in the same situation his mentor had filled when they first met. When I asked this man what he planned to do in the coming years, he said that he wanted to teach, “to pass it on to the younger men.”