Introduction
Among the fundamentally important philosophical questions posed by thinking the idea of the gift one could count: the meaning of history and temporality, the origin of society and language, and how to think the relation between structure, system and economy on the one hand, and play, interruption and surplus on the other hand.
The publication of Marcel Mauss's essay, The Gift in 1924 revolutionized anthropology.1 As Mary Douglas points out, Mauss's reflections offered a new way of discriminating between archaic, primitive, or pre-literate societies on the one hand, and modern, industrial or literate societies on the other hand (see G, xiv). If the difference between gift-economies and market economies quickly came to be determinative for ethnology, it also left a number of crucial problems unsolved. Claude-Lévi Strauss, while heavily indebted to Mauss's work, which he regarded as ground-breaking, was also critical of it for not being sufficiently scientific. Since the adequacy of scientific method increasingly yields to the pressure of a more mythological approach in Lévi-Strauss's own work, Mauss must be credited not only with having a decisive impact in recasting the terms of ethnology, but also as instrumental in shaping structuralism. Given the importance of the idea of the gift for Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralist analysis in Elementary Structures of Kinship2 took up Mauss's notion of gift-exchange in relation to the prohibition of incest, by arguing that the most basic form of the gift was the exchange of women in marriage, it is hardly surprising that Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most prominent philosopher associated with post-structuralism, has revisited the notion of the gift by engaging with Lévi-Strauss, Mauss, Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, and others.3 Neither is it surprising that Lévi-Strauss's failure to problematize the idea of women as objects of exchange has been made good by theorists such as Gayle Rubin, Marilyn Strathern and Luce Irigaray.4
Mauss's essay on The Gift has been taken up in many directions. Some readers have focused on the incipient theory of a social contract,5 while others have concentrated on challenging Mauss, and those who have followed in his footsteps, for failing to take account of the impact that colonialism had on the societies that were taken as case studies for studying gift economies.6
At first sight, the gift seems to be free, spontaneous, and voluntary. On closer inspection our intuitive or unreflective grasp of the gift gives way to a more complicated structure in which our initial sense of what it means to give a gift takes on implications than run counter to its immediate associations. Gifts are embedded in social and symbolic systems of reciprocity in ways that appear to render them not only free, but, as Mauss emphasizes, also obligatory. There are assumptions about what makes a particular gift appropriate or inappropriate in specific contexts, and complex implicit rules and norms about the cultural implications and ethical expectations of giving. Gifts seem to be bound up in social bonds, incurring obligations involving our relations to others and how we understand ourselves in terms of our commitments, wants and desires. We are compelled to consider gifts not as isolated, pure and gratuitous, but rather as implicated is social conventions, as plural, reciprocal, as part of a systematic form of social exchange. In the first part of this paper we examine a series of distinctions that need to be made in order to clarify what makes a gift a gift. Are gifts free or obligatory, or are they somehow both at once? Are gifts by nature plural? Do gifts assume the autonomy and independence of subjects, or do they only make sense in a context that is already intersubjective, a context which prohibits us from assuming we are discrete, isolated individuals? Are gift exchange and market economy clearly different from one another, or are they locally distinguished by the ways in which emotion is taken up and emphasized or de-emphasized in each?
The paradox, aporia, or impossibility of the gift that serves as a starting point for our reflections in the second part of the paper consist in its tendency to turn into its opposite as soon as we try to think it, thematize it, or even recognize the gift as a gift. On the one hand, in order for there to be a gift, it has to be intentional, but on the other hand, to posit the gift is already to call up all the structures that gifts would seem to escape: gratitude, recompense, indebtedness. Because the gift withdraws from the very thought that would think it, Jacques Derrida has approached the discourse of the gift as analogous to Martin Heidegger's Being, which also defies our attempt to think it without reducing it to a being. Derrida also thinks the gift as parallel to time, which exhibits the same uncanny quality of disappearing from the thought that tries to grasp it. We talk as if we have time, or we lack time, but how can time belong to anyone?
If Derrida's formulation of the aporetic character of the gift, Being, and time, serves as one of the inspirations for this paper, it situates itself at a nexus of issues arising from recent interrogations of the gift. Reference points include feminist and postcolonial responses to Mauss and Lévi-Strauss (see Strathern and Thomas), and the connection between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the literature of the gift (following Gayle Rubin, Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida). We also consider the relationship between anthropology and philosophy, showing how Derrida problematizes his relation to traditional philosophy, and how Lévi-Strauss problematizes his relation to the scientific status of anthropology. In the background of these reflections is the larger question of how to conceive of the relationship between structuralism and post-structuralism, as exemplified by Lévi-Strauss, and Derrida.
We explain the Heideggerian context that Derrida elaborates in his articulation of the "logic of the gift," whereby the aporia or impossibility of the gift is thought in tandem with Heidegger's ontological difference, and his critique of the metaphysics of presence. One of the motifs we follow through in the paper is the impossibility of isolating the pure gift from an economy (see Douglas's preface to Mauss), whether that economy is understood ultimately in terms of market or symbolic forces. We argue for the need to both take seriously the central role that colonialism has played in ethnological discourse about gift-economies, and to be wary of asserting any rigid distinction between gift economies on the one hand and market economies on the other hand. The impossibility of establishing the purity of the gift undermines both the nostalgic tendency to posit archaic gift economies, as if they represented a naïve and innocent authenticity–a lost ideal which needs to be recaptured, and progressive modernist narratives, which see the ostensible transcendence of gift–economies as a mark of the maturity, sophistication, and civilization of modernity.
Part one: Voluntary and Obligatory
To begin, we want to place into open conflict two passages, one from Douglas's foreward to Mauss's The Gift, and the other from Derrida's Given Time.
It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor's intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. (G, vii)
According to Douglas, the idea behind Mauss' essay, The Gift, is that the very notion of a "free gift" is an error, a misunderstanding and a distortion of the very concept, gift.
For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or differance. This is all too obvious if the other, the donee, gives me back immediately the same thing. ... It is annulled each time there is restitution or countergift. (GT, 12)
In a moment when Derrida addresses the gift as a pure concept, he says that the gift, in order to be a gift, must be free. It must be free in the sense that it makes no demand of a return, that it in fact makes no return at all, to the giver. The conflict in these two passages amounts to a difference in how each understands the very definition of "gift". Douglas says that a gift that does not bind is not a gift, that gifts by their very nature are not free of an obligation to reciprocate; Derrida says that a gift that does bind is not a gift, that gifts by their very nature must be free of all reciprocation. We pose this question: What would it mean to give a gift that is not free? This question rests upon another question: what do "voluntary" and "obligatory" mean, in the context of the gift? This in turn presents the further question: what is the difference between gift exchange and exchange economy? Our focus in this section will be on the first two questions, but we will close the section with some thoughts on the third, as it more directly relates to the structure of the gift relation generally (since one point of difference between gift exchange and exchange economy might be in their structure).7
In the beginning of The Gift, Mauss states that, in many civilizations, gifts are voluntary in theory and obligatory in practice (G, 3) because gifts function as essential elements in "the system of total services" (G, 5). In fact, while they appear to be voluntary, they are ultimately "strictly compulsory" (G, 5). This apparent collapse (of gift into obligatory exchange) provides an occasion for investigating the concepts of obligatory and voluntary, an investigation which we hope will allow us to get clearer both on the "freedom" of the gift and on how it is that Mauss can use the term gift when it seems, as Derrida accuses him, that he "speaks of everything but the gift" (GT, 24).
If gifts are essential elements in the social system, then it seems reasonable to suppose that they are necessary, which makes us wonder how freely chosen they are. Given the structure of social relations, gifts cannot be free: in the sense that they are necessary for society's survival, they are part of its mechanism. Consequently, by defining gifts as essential elements in the social whole, Mauss has said that gifts are not free because they are necessary. Let's call this kind of necessity structural necessity: they are a part of the social system that is required for it to function as a whole. What is structurally necessary is so when we focus on the system (rather than on the individual).
Something that is structurally necessary may take many particular forms (which is evidenced in the anthropological research of figures such as Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss). That does not mean that the individual is free to take up any form whatsoever. Rather, the individual is constrained, as a member of a particular society at a time and place, to enact the structure in a more restricted context. There may be various ways to enact that structure, and the rules of the game often direct, though they do not dictate, the ways to take up the gift. (There are, for example, rules of hospitality, charity, birthdays, and even for spontaneous, no-reason-at-all gifts.) Here too, then, the ways in which an individual engages gift exchange are not arbitrary because they are set forth in the process of enculturation. Let's call them then, directed, and this is so primarily when one focuses on the system, but even the individual knows that there are considerations of appropriateness, so the sense in which gifts are directed applies both to the system and to the individual.
But structural necessity and directedness are are not all that Mauss has in mind by the claim that gifts are obligatory. To say that something is "obligatory" is different from saying that it is "necessary": we are focusing on the way that something is necessary for the social structure taken as a whole; on the other hand, to say that something is obligatory is to look at the social element by focusing on the individual who does the obligatory act. Furthermore, to say that a gift is directed is different from saying that it is obligatory because directedness still emphasizes the social structure more than the individual who tries to conform to the rules of the game. When Mauss says that the gift is obligatory, he means something more than that it is a necessary part of social structure, and he means more than that it has rules of appropriateness. Gifts are obligatory in the sense that we must give, they are both expected of us and necessary for us to continue in our social setting. One who refuses to give refuses to relate or to engage, and this is so because to have relationships with others is to incur obligations to them and to obligate them in turn. If I want relationships with others, then I must give: to refuse the obligation that pulls us into the giving relation is a desperate or pathological response, whose consequences are, on Mauss's analysis, dire.
It is important to note here that there is a significant difference in the direness of the consequences of refusing the obligation to give, depending on whether one focuses, as Mauss does, on cultures whose primary form of exchange is gift exchange (so that refusing to give is to jeopardize your very physical survival), or on cultures whose existence does not depend entirely (or even primarily) on gift exchange. This latter type of society is my focus: one could continue to survive physically in our society if s/he refused to give and receive gifts because s/he could still go to the grocer. Nonetheless, gift exchange is still a fundamental part of our social structure, and even if it is not literally necessary for physical subsistence, it is still a crucial element in our emotional well-being. Later in the paper we consider the contrasts between these societies.
The non-free gift might well be the gift of obligation, which differs from structural necessity, from directedness, and also from coercion – even if the gift is expected and required for further interaction and relationship, gifts are not coerced. The differences between, on the one hand, the social pressures that become obligations to give gifts, together with the dire consequences associated with refusing to give and accept gifts, and, on the other hand, coercion, are subtle, and lie primarily (for my purposes) in the processes involved rather than in the outcome of those processes. For this discussion, we will focus on the individual's relationship to freedom and on the affective character that obtains in cases of coercion versus that in cases of obligatory gifts.
It might be useful, by way of a beginning, to distinguish types of coercion in terms of two features: temporality and the object of harm. We can see that the danger at stake in a case of coercion might be to one's physical person, e.g. being dragged by the arm or having a gun to one's head, or it might be to one's psychological well-being, e.g. sense of moral worth or understanding of who you are. In addition to these types of objects of harm, there is also a difference in the temporality of that harm, since being dragged by the arm is immediate harm but having a gun to the head is a threat of future harm. Coercion, then, threatens or engages the individual with physical or psychological harm.
A major effect of coercion on the individual coerced is that s/he loses a sense of freedom in the process. S/he is divorced from their freedom in such a way that, even if they have options (from the perspective of some third party), they do not feel that they have options. A crucial focus for us here is on the affective character of coercion and how it differs from the affective character of giving gifts within the context of social expectations. If coerced into giving, the individual who gives doesn't usually feel that what s/he gives is a gift because s/he didn't get to give it voluntarily. What I do for or give to another, in other words, is not necessarily a gift.8 For the giver to feel that it is a gift depends (in large part) on whether it is given voluntarily.
What makes an act voluntary is the sense that it is freely chosen. We emphasize this in the way we talk about gifts and are even addicted to giving and receiving them: I want to give, not because it is expected of me, but because I want to. The desired aspect cannot be overlooked, even if we know that gifts are structurally necessary, directed by context, and even obligatory in the sense that they are required of us by our relations to others. When the individual downplays the obligatory nature of the gift, there is a very good reason for it: s/he wants to give. In the tendency to downplay (or deny) obligation and to emphasize the voluntariness of gifts, it is not that individuals are mistaken and have it wrong. The fact that generosity is a virtue, that there is a whole system of expectations and rewards involved is deeply taken up in the individual consciousness that says, 'I want to give'. Additionally, even though the context of the occasion directs what one gives, there also remains an optional character that accompanies its voluntary nature. What I give, on this occasion, is directed, but still optional because, in the end, I choose according to the personalities involved and according to the limitations of my resources. Whether I give this or that is not completely open, because it is directed and because I am an individual in a particular relationship with particular people (and limited resources). Nonetheless, whether I give this or that is still optional for me.
To give a gift that is not free is, apparently, to give when one feels obliged to do so. That does not thereby make it something other than a gift, however. The gift one gives on Mother's Day, because it is Mother's Day, is not solely required, it is also chosen. Apparently, to give a gift that is not free is simultaneously to give a gift that is free, free because voluntary and optional.
But is it "free", free in the sense of asking nothing in return? Certainly not, as Mauss affirms repeatedly. The gift that is not free is not involuntary, but obligating because obligation is an essential part of gift exchange. So, it is both obligated, or required, and also obligating, or making a demand of a return (of some kind). What it means to give a gift that is not free is at once to give a gift from a certain motivation, and to give a gift that transmits a motivation. But, Mauss does not reduce the giving motivation to obligation; on the contrary, he maintains (as he must, in our view) the sense in which the giver is (at least) doubly motivated. The one who gives the non-free gift gives both out of duty and from desire. If they did not, there would not be sufficient motive for giving a gift on Mother's Day: while the day makes a demand on the giver, if the appropriate feelings were not also there, there would be no gift. After all, does one give gifts purely from duty, or is it not the case that our very notion of gift exceeds duty: without that excess, would we call it a gift?
Why does one give a non-free gift? The fact that, according to Mauss, gifts are by nature obligatory is itself less interesting than the reasons for which we engage them, and less interesting than our tendency to downplay or deny their obligatory character. Mauss demonstrates that gifts are a social phenomenon, that they are a function of the social whole, not (only) of its parts. This realization is very important: the gift never functions in isolation. It is never separated from those who give and those who receive, from the past or from the future. In essence then, the gift is not single. (To talk of "the" gift is, then, an error.)
First, Mauss stresses the collective nature of gifts:
In the economic and legal systems that have preceded our own, one hardly ever finds a simple exchange of goods, wealth, and products in transactions concluded by individuals. First, it is not individuals but collectivities that impose obligations of exchange and contract upon each other. (G, 5)
Gifts happen in a social context. Mauss' concern for archaic societies brings him to emphasize that gifts are public for those peoples, but it seems that, even for us, they remain social, public affairs even when they are done in private. There are all kinds of social conventions and understandings about the appropriate gift: what, when, how, to whom, where, why. Even the private gift, given on no particular occasion with no audience, slipped surreptitiously into the pocket of my friend's jacket, even anonymously, has rules. The very value of a private gift is a function of social conventions, determined by a need and desire for connection. Even the anonymous gift brings us together because even if I do not know to whom I give, there is something social, sociable, in giving without connection that creates connection, that encourages interaction with others. Gifts happen in a social context, they have a conventional and interactive dimension, there are always not merely two, but inevitably a whole group involved in the exchange.
In addition to their collective character, Mauss points out that gifts take many particular forms:
[W]hat [collectivities] exchange is not solely property and wealth, movable and immovable goods, and things economically useful. In particular, such exchanges are acts of politeness: banquets, rituals, military services, women, children, dances, festivals, and fairs, in which economic transaction is only one element, and in which the passing on of wealth is only one feature of a much more general and enduring contract. (G, 5)
Because gifts are not restricted to particular inanimate objects, exactly what is given is often less clear than the term "gift" implies. In his introductory discussion of Madame de Maintenon's line "The king takes all my time; I give the rest to Saint-Cyr" (GT, 1), Derrida indicates to us that the object given might not be an object. Mauss points to this problem of single identification by listing several types of gifts. A fair, e.g., has many components that are collected under a name, but that name is insufficient and misleading. And while we might see that the woman given in marriage is one woman, she is never alone because she comes with "baggage": not merely her own complex psyche, but a family, a fortune and so on. Not only is she herself plural, but marriage also refers to a whole set of socio-symbolic rituals and conventions.
Again, a gift is not "a" gift because of the complexities, not merely of social convention and multiplicity of object, but also because of the ways in which gifts enable and cement social engagement.
In short, this represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. (G, 20)
One of the problems with trying to articulate the gift relation is precisely that it is a relation. Gifts bring together (and tear apart), they symbolize and enact mutual ties. The gift is not simply what is given, but it is in a way also who is given because what one gives when one gives is an opening to the "self". Because it is an opening, it is also an altering of the self: to engage the other is to bring the other into the self and to be changed by him/her. Insofar as we are social creatures who are socially constituted by our relations to others, gifts are ways for us to invite another to become a part of us. I do not, in other words, stand alone: who I am is a function of those with whom I'm involved. To invite and affirm involvement is to invite and affirm becoming someone other than who I am now.
Having said that, it might become more apparent why it is that gifts are not reducible to exchange economy. Even if, in the end, everyone gives back as much as they take (and it is doubtful that we could ever make that assessment), and even if the rules of the giving game require that the gifts be appropriate and worthy of what they return, the process of that return, the motives and accounts involved in that process, the feelings and relations generated by that process, are quite different. And the difference between giving gifts and making purchase depends, to a great extent, on the difference in focus and the difference in emotive involvement attached to the two processes.
Economic exchange could take place between anyone. The stranger is no stranger to exchange: you don't have to know me, you don't have to like me, you don't ever have to see me again, just pay for the product (by whatever method we use) and go on about your business. The shopkeeper or trader can be indifferent to the buyer. Insofar as we are even capable of neutrality towards our fellow human beings, the environment of economic exchange accepts it, even encourages it. There is a difference in how affect is processed in the two cases such that an emotive remove is expected and understood in market economy, even if it isn't pure in practice. There are, after all, people who won't buy from 'that person' or 'that store', but it's usually because they don't trust them to do right by them (they sell poor quality goods as if they were quality goods, they lie about their products or their prices, they 'bait and switch' their customers – in short, because they aren't "neutral", but are apparently out to get them).
Gift exchange does not take place between 'just anyone'. If the other is a stranger, giving a gift solicits, and requires something more – or better, something other – than exact return. A "thank you" is insufficient if not also accompanied by a certain air, a demeanor that indicates recognition and gratitude, preferably pleasure and a desire for further engagement. The "extra" that is appropriate in the case of a gift is some sign that you're comfortable with, or that you desire, social connection with this person/group; and, while there are not fast rules about how to indicate this, we are generally pretty good at recognizing whether it has happened or not. The same set of expectations can be said to exist for the giver: giving is not enough, it must also be accompanied by a spirit of generosity, however that manifests itself in you in this context. In the case of gift exchange, there is a relation between giver and receiver (often before the fact, but perhaps only established in the process, or even only realized after the event) that means that one is not neutral to the other. To take up neutrality with reference to one to whom you have given or from whom you've received a gift is an insult (an insult with severing consequences: you are believed to be opposed to a relationship with that person).
As already noted, this severing affect would not normally or directly threaten physical survival in a market economy, and in this sense it appears to be inessential both to biological survival and to the market system itself. While there would be no immediate or obvious threat, gift exchange supports market economy at a deeper, structural, affective level, which makes it essential, but in a way that usually goes unacknowledged. So far, we have emphasized the complex structure of the gift in contrast to the moment in which Derrida wants to preserve the purity of the gift. However, there is another moment in which he acknowledges its impurity.
Part two: Philosophy and Anthropology
Towards the beginning of a text, the title of which joins together time and the gift (GT 6; DT 17) Derrida makes an assertion which would seem to separate his intention in Given Time not only from the discipline of anthropology, but also from that of metaphysics itself, and even from tradition itself.
Even though all the anthropologies, indeed the metaphysics of the gift have, quite rightly and justifiably, treated together, as a system, the gift and the debt, the gift and the cycle of restitution, the gift and the loan, the gift and credit, the gift and the countergift, we are here departing, in a peremptory and distinct fashion, from this tradition. That is to say, from tradition itself (GT, 13 ; DT, 25).
Derrida thus marks his departure from the metaphysical tradition, with which he associates "all the anthropologies," even as he appears to endorse it. He raises the question of the difference between an assumption that appears to unify these anthropologies on the one hand, and his own position on the other hand. He thus complicates the relation between philosophy and anthropology from the start, associating anthropology with traditional philosophy, with the metaphysics of the gift (which will turn out to be another way of formulating what has also come to be known as the metaphysics of presence), while dissociating himself both from the metaphysical tradition and from anthropology. Whatever is at stake, then, in Derrida's alleged departure from an anthropological tradition that he characterizes as treating "together, as a system, the gift and the debt," it is no simple separation, symbolic or otherwise, of anthropology from philosophy. In fact, by distancing himself, with the same gesture, both from "all the anthropologies" and from "tradition itself," Derrida erects a division that it is far from clear that the anthropologists themselves would reject, a division that, with the possible exception of Lévi-Strauss, they might be more than happy to embrace, and one which would precisely divide them from Derrida, and put them on the side of traditional philosophy. All the indications are that anthropologists would like to see their work taken seriously by the tradition of philosophy. While Derrida identifies anthropology with traditional philosophy, and places himself outside that identification, Douglas, in her preface to an anthropological work that will be of central importance here, seems to affirm as unproblematic the idea that Mauss would want to be taken seriously by philosophy when she writes, "Following Durkheim, Mauss also considered that every serious philosophical work should bear on public policy" (G, x). We can only assume that the model of philosophy which both Douglas and Mauss share is a traditional one. Whether or not Marcel Mauss' The Gift attained the status of a "serious philosophical work," and whether or not the standard Mauss adduces is the relevant one, it certainly earned him a series of impressive accolades. Derrida calls it a "monumental" work (GT, 24; DT, 39), while Lévi-Strauss acknowledges that this "famous" study "is regarded as a classic" (ES, 52) that it "inaugurates a new era for the social sciences,"9 that it represents "a decisive event in the evolution of science" and that it has a "revolutionary character" (IM, 37). For all this, the achievement of Mauss's contribution remains elusive in its origins, as Lévi-Strauss makes clear when he asks, "what is the source of the extraordinary power of those disorganized pages of the Essai, which look a little as if they are still in the draft stage, with their very odd juxtaposition of impressionistic notations and . . . inspired erudition, which gathers American, Indian, Celtic, Greek, or Oceanian references seemingly haphazardly, and yet always equally penetratingly?" (IM, 38). Several questions immediately present themselves.
First, is Derrida right to suggest that all the anthropologies have treated the gift and the debt as a system, and if he is, what is the significance of this characterization? Secondly, if Derrida's characterization is accurate, by what right, and with what justification can he claim to depart from it? What would it mean to depart from tradition itself? How could such a departure be accomplished? To what logic could one appeal in marking such a departure? Is there such a thing as the "logic of the gift," or, as Derrida suggests, does "a consistent discourse on the gift become impossible" (GT, 24; DT, 39)? What would such an impossibility amount to? Thirdly, how far could such a logic, if it exists, succeed in distinguishing itself from the tradition from which it seeks to depart, and to what extent must it rejoin, or respond to precisely the tradition it seeks to establish as different from itself? And how far has Derrida anticipated this repetition?
Turning to the first question, is Derrida reliable in his characterization of all the anthropologies as having privileged a systematic relationship between gift and debt, such that an economy of restitution governs any approach to the gift? Or are there instances in which the gift escapes the economy that consists in paying back loans, in making good credit, in balancing or restoring any debts that may have been incurred? And if such instances can be found, how should they be read, understood, or interpreted? Do they follow the same logic of interruption as Derrida's own intervention into the symbolic system, a logic that Derrida will also describe in terms of the paradoxical instant, as a logic of contradiction, an aporetic logic, impossibility, and madness?
To begin to answer this first question, consider Douglas's preface to Marcel Mauss's essay, The Gift, around which Derrida's meditation circulates, and in terms of which "all the anthropologies" to which Derrida points are set in motion. If one were to isolate a decisive, organizing motif of Douglas's remarks, that motif might well be that Mauss's interest lies in dispelling an illusion: the illusion of the purity of the gift. Douglas claims that the profound originality of Mauss lies in the way that his reflections on the gift upset our usual assumptions about the purity of the gift: Mauss "runs against our established idea of the gift" (G, viii). "`Pure gift? Nonsense!' declares Mauss . . . Even the idea of a pure gift is a contradiction" (G, viii). What is of particular interest to us is Mauss's motivation for dispelling this illusion of purity. If we follow Douglas in her suggestion that Mauss's target is Bronislaw Malinowski, we must also, it would seem, take issue with Derrida's assertion that all the anthropologies treat the gift as part of a system, the logic of which is completed by countergifts, debts and loans. For Malinowski seems to present us with an exception to the general rule that Derrida posits. Malinowski, Douglas tells us "evidently took with him to his fieldwork the idea that commerce and gift are two separate kinds of activity, the first based on exact recompense, the second spontaneous, pure of ulterior motive. . . . he expended a lot of care in classifying gifts by the purity of the motives of the giver" (G, vii-viii).10 Unless we deny Malinowski the title of anthropologist, we must depart from Derrida's generalization that "all the anthropologies" treat the gift as if it could only be approached as part of the economic system. But why would we tempted to refrain from calling Malinowski an anthropologist? Unless, upholding Derrida's association of anthropology with the tradition of philosophy, we judge him insufficiently rigorous, theoretically inept, or lacking the philosophical sophistication to be granted recognition as an anthropologist? I cannot resist recalling a parenthetical remark made by Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, a remark that does indeed cast doubt on Malinowski's credentials as a theorist, thereby throwing into question not only how seriously he can be taken as a philosopher, but also how seriously he should therefore be taken as an anthropologist. It is also a remark that illustrates the dangerous, ambiguous character of the gift, an ambiguity noted by both Derrida and Mauss, namely that the gift carries with it an inherent tendency to turn into its opposite (see GT, 12; DT, 25).11 The proximity between, or even the identity between, gift and poison, can be seen in the following tribute that Lévi-Strauss pays to Malinowski, an insult dressed up as a compliment which one imagines Malinowski would rather not have been paid. Lévi-Strauss says, "It is one of the great misfortunes of contemporary ethnology that Mauss never undertook to exploit his discovery, and that he thus unconsciously incited Malinowski (of whom we may, without prejudice to his memory, acknowledge that he was a better observer than theorist) to launch out alone upon the elaboration of the corresponding system, on the basis of the same facts and analogous conclusions, which the two men had reached independently" (IM, 42). For all its apparent generosity, the formality and decorum of such a remark cannot remove the poisonous taste its polite veneer leaves behind. It would have been a bitter pill, as we say, for Malinowski to swallow.
Lévi-Strauss's remark is of more than anecdotal interest. If Malinowski's failure to recognize the systematic connection between gift and commerce was due not so much to a philosophical vision of competing coherence, as to a habitual lapse of theoretical sophistication on his part, then perhaps Derrida's assertion remains in tact. Perhaps, in so far as they succeed in being philosophically rigorous, all anthropologies have indeed sought to treat the gift together with debt or restitution, as a system. But if the anthropologies have "quite rightly and justifiably" refused to separate the gift from the debt, by what right, or with what justification can Derrida effect such a separation? On what basis can he depart from a system that he himself acknowledges is right and justifiable? What notion of right and justification underlies his departure? Let us pay close attention to the way in which Derrida claims to depart from this tradition. He says: "we are departing, in a peremptory and distinct fashion, from this tradition. That is to say, from tradition, itself. We will take our point of departure in the dissociation, in the overwhelming evidence of this other axiom: There is gift, if there is any, only in what interrupts the system as well as the symbol, in a partition without return and without division [répartition], without being-with-self of the gift-counter-gift" (GT, 13; DT, 25). By taking as axiomatic that which interrupts system and symbol, Derrida both takes account of the need to disrupt the circularity of its economy, and at the same time acknowledges that such a disruption can never be ultimate. Whatever departure Derrida sees himself as making, it is a departure that must keep in mind that from which it is departing. Thus Derrida says, "One should not necessarily flee or condemn circularity as one would a bad repetition, a vicious circle, a regressive or sterile process. One must, in a certain way of course, inhabit the circle, turn around in it" (GT, 9; DT, 20). In an earlier essay, Derrida formulates the same point in a slightly different way when he says that "the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy . . . but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way." 12 Turning back again to Given Time, we find Derrida emphasizing both the ineliminable relation of the gift to economy, and that the gift breaks up, disrupts or suspends the rules of economic exchange:
[T]he gift, if there is any, would no doubt be related to economy. One cannot treat the gift, this goes without saying, without treating this relation to economy, even to the money economy. But is not the gift, if there is any, also that which interrupts economy? That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange?" (GT, 7; DT, 18).
We cannot completely grasp how it is that Derrida is proposing to think the gift both as inherently bound up with a system of exchange, and as exceeding, disrupting or upsetting that system, unless we also understand the sense in which the structure of the gift is thought by Derrida in a way that is analogous to that of Being and time. And for this, it will be necessary to engage in a brief excursion that will take us into Heideggerian territory, [the rewards of which will be to return us to the heart of Lévi-Strauss's notion of the symbolic]. Clarifying the Heideggerian context in terms of which Derrida introduces the problematic of the gift will also enable us to judge with more precision with what justification, and in what sense Derrida can be said to depart not only from Mauss, but also from "the anthropologists who come after him or refer to him" (GT, 26; DT, 42 check). This will allow us to engage our second question, concerning the impossibility or aporia of the gift, and to begin to approach our third question, concerning how far Derrida's departure from the tradition takes him away from it, and in what sense he might have anticipated his return to it.
Part three: Departing from the Tradition? The "logic of the gift"
From the beginning of his meditation on the gift, Derrida is concerned with what he calls its impossibility. By this he means that the gift is both subject to the economics of exchange, yet at the same time it transgresses the circularity of restitution and recompense that governs an economic relationship. "If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but it must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness" (GT, 7; DT, 19 check). The gift is "the impossible but not the unnameable or the unthinkable" (GT, 10; DT, 22). There is a "certain essential excess of the gift, indeed an excess of the gift over the essence itself" (GT, 10; DT, 22).
Derrida is trying to catch sight of the ineluctable quality of a gift that makes it disappear as soon as it is recognized as such, grasped, or comprehended for what it is. "For there to be a gift," he says, "there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt" (GT, 12; DT, 24). As soon as the gift appears as gift, it is no longer a gift in the sense that it engenders obligations, and thus becomes or turns into a debt. "The symbolic opens and constitutes the order of exchange and of debt, the law or the order of circulation in which the gift gets annulled" (GT, 13; DT, 26). "The simple identification of the gift seems to destroy it" (GT, 14; DT, 26).13
The problem that Derrida is thinking through is that "In order for there to be gift, gift event, some 'one' has to give some 'thing' to someone other," (GT, 11; DT, 24), yet the very knowledge or recognition that the gift is a gift seems to turn the gift into its opposite–into a debt to be repaid, an obligation to make some return, or at the very least an obligation to acknowledge the gift in gratitude, or perhaps to make some compensatory gesture by giving a gift in return. The gift, it seems, must present itself as other. Thus the "conditions of possibility of the gift (that some `one' gives some `thing' to some `one other') designate simultaneously the conditions of the impossibility of the gift" (GT, 12; DT, 24). One might ask about the apparent symmetry with which Derrida posits the condition of possibility and that of impossibility, but for the moment let us focus on the respect in which the gift exhibits, for Derrida, the same impossible, aporetic, or paradoxical structure as Heidegger's Being.14 In both cases, there is a "precomprehension" (GT, 11; DT, 23) of the gift, or Being, and in both cases the explication of gift, or of Being, reduces it to an economic structure, or to an ontological entity. We have already understood the gift, or Being in a way that is operative for everything that is said about the gift or Being, but which remains essentially unthematized. And as soon as we try to make it thematic, the very thing we are trying to theorize disappears. So too, we seem to have a grasp on time that appears to elude us as soon as we subject time to analysis. We talk as if we have time for something, or as if we have no time. We talk as if we own time, or as if we have run out of it, as if time could belong to us, such that we can take it and use it, or use it up, as if it were a commodity. "But," asks Derrida, "how can a time belong? What is it to have time? If a time belongs, it is because the word time designates metonymically less time itself than the things with which one fills it" (GT, 3; DT, 13-14).
The particular formulation that Derrida uses when he suggests that Mauss never addressed the problematic he himself is articulating owes everything to Heidegger's ontological difference. It is the difference between "the gift exists" and "there is gift," in Derrida's view, that is never "deployed or even approached by Mauss, no more than it seems to be," he goes on, "to my knowledge, by the anthropologists who come after him or refer to him" (GT, 26; DT, 41 check). Undoubtedly this Heideggerian formulation was not employed by Mauss, but it is less certain that even if Mauss did not approach this problem under this heading, he did not name it in another way. And it is still less certain that Lévi-Strauss didn't approach precisely the problem that Derrida indicates, even if he approaches it from another direction, and even with different intentions. And finally, contrary to first appearances, it is much less certain that Derrida, has ruled out any of these possibilities in advance.
One of the threads that can be followed through the various approaches to the gift informing this paper is the sense in which the gift seems to depend upon a certain excess. It constitutes a kind of remainder or residue to the system or economy within which it is inscribed. As such, it plays an auxiliary role to the economic structure, its excluded other, and at the same time it is precisely that which allows the system to function. It represents a surplus that cannot be wholly cashed out in terms of the rules of exchange, yet at the same time facilitates or underwrites the very system from which it is excluded. Thus Lévi-Strauss comments that Mauss adds a kind of supplement that is extraneous to the economic operation of exchange, one that cannot be explained in terms of its systematic coherence, and yet is indispensable to it. The logic of the system is thereby completed by something that is entirely foreign to it, an aberration. While Lévi-Strauss is suspicious of the quasi-mystical flavor of Mauss's appeal to notions such as hau and mana in so far as he locates in them the breakdown of scientific rigor, he also finds this appeal productive. Such notions "represent an indeterminate value of signification, in itself devoid of meaning and thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at all" (IM, 55). Derrida, in his turn, finds problematic the extent to which Lévi-Strauss continues to endorse scientific empiricism, but he takes up the idea of the "movement of supplementarity" (SSP, 289) as a way of thinking that does not rest on a central, unique, fully present foundation or ground. One can see the proximity between Lacan's phallus and the suggestion that meaning is only given on the basis of a supplementary structure which operates not on the basis of a permanent metaphysical truth, but with reference to a "floating signifier," (IM, 63) which is in itself empty of meaning, "a zero symbolic value" (IM, 64), but which is therefore the guarantor of any meaning at all. Since, for Lacan, the "signifier of the phallus constitutes" woman "as giving in love what she does not have" (Ecrits), one can also see why, at the beginning of Given Time Derrida installs the figure of a woman who gives that which cannot be given.
"It really would be a great mistake," intones Lévi-Strauss, "to isolate the Essai sur le don from the rest of the work, even though it is quite undeniably the masterwork of Marcel Mauss, his most justly famous writing, and the work whose influence has been the deepest" (IM, 25). Both Douglas and Lévi-Strauss, in different ways, situate Mauss's essay on the gift in the context of his other works. For Douglas, the decisive work for understanding Mauss's work on the gift is his 1889 book on Sacrifice, co-authored with Henri Hubert, which, in Douglas's words, "took for its central theme a Vedic principle that sacrifice is a gift that compels the deity to make a return" (G, ix). Douglas suggests that Mauss's studies in Vedic literature gave him "the idea of a morally sanctioned gift cycle upholding the social cycle" (G, x). Lévi-Strauss also looks to Mauss's early works, but–in keeping with the function he attributes to hau and mana in Mauss's work–he turns to those in which it is not the idea of sacrifice, but the concept of magic that prevails. If it is the concept of magic towards which Lévi-Strauss propels us most forcefully, and the idea of sacrifice that Douglas suggests is crucial for Mauss's reflections on the gift, we shall have occasion to ask whether, in the final analysis, their analyses of Mauss converge. Does the direction in which Douglas suggests we pursue Mauss's work on the gift expose Mauss, in the end, to the same critique that Lévi-Strauss makes of his work? Lévi-Strauss directs our attention to the notions of hau and mana. He both locates Mauss's genius in the use of these notions, and identifies their function in his thought as harboring a potentially "dangerous path: even a path of destruction" (IM, 57). He finds here "the reason why such a rich, penetrating, illuminating inquiry veers off and ends with a disappointing conclusion" (IM, 56).15 "[L]ike hau, mana is" says Lévi-Strauss "no more than the subjective reflection of the need to supply an unperceived totality" (IM, 58). In his view these notions "represent an indeterminate value of signification, in itself devoid of meaning and thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at all; their sole function is to fill a gap between the signifier and the signified" so that "a relationship of non-equivalence becomes established between signifier and signified, to the detriment of the prior complementary relationship" IM, 55-6). I propose that the gap that Lévi-Strauss names here between signifier and signified is comparable to what Derrida calls the "gap between the impossible and the thinkable" in which "a dimension opens up where there is gift" (GT, 10; DT, 22).16 At issue here, of course, is Derrida's relationship to structuralism. To ask whether and how far Derrida has gone beyond the relationship between the signifier and the signified as thought by Lévi-Strauss is also to ask in what respects Derrida has gone beyond structuralism. One way of expressing Derrida's divergence from Lévi-Strauss's structuralism is in terms of his suspicion of science (see SSP, 288), which is precisely the authority Lévi-Strauss calls upon in his rejection of Mauss.17 Referring to Durkheim and Mauss, Lévi-Strauss says, in a reflection that opens up a further path of enquiry I want to pursue here, "one wonders whether their theory of mana is anything other than a device for imputing properties to indigenous thought which are implied by the very peculiar place that the idea of mana is called on to occupy in their own thinking" (IM, 57). Lévi-Strauss goes on to warn against those who content themselves with celebrating an attenuated version of Mauss's thinking, and in doing so only succeed in admiring what Lévi-Strauss calls, in a description heavily laden with irony, Mauss's "exceptional talent for rehabilitating certain indigenous theories in their strangeness and their authenticity" (IM, 57). Were ethnography to follow Mauss in this direction, Lévi-Strauss predicts, it "would dissolve into a verbose phenomenology, a falsely naïve mixture in which the apparent obscurities of indigenous thinking would only be brought to the forefront to cover the confusions of the ethnographer, which would otherwise be too obvious" (IM, 58). The problem I want to highlight here also emerges in a statement intended by Douglas to be a measure of the fertility of Mauss's thought, but one which inadvertently reveals a fundamental tension in it. She says, "When anthropologists search around for a telling distinction between societies based on primitive and modern technologies, they try out various terms such as pre-literate, simple, traditional. Each has limitations that unfit it for general use. But increasingly we are finding that the idea of the gift economy comprises all the associations – symbolic, interpersonal, and economic – that we need for comparison with the market economy" (G, xiv). If the opposition between a gift economy and a market economy does indeed come to mark a decisive transition from ancient or pre-historic to recent or contemporary societies, it seems to me that Mauss does not entirely eschew the naive paternalism that has haunted the anthropological tradition as it casts around for a "telling" discrimination to separate the modern from the archaic.
As Nicholas Thomas reminds us, "it must be recognized that anthropology is a discourse of alterity, a way of writing in which us/them distinctions are central, and which necessarily distances the people studied from ourselves" (EO, 3). As such it tends to construct the areas and the peoples it studies "as authentic, meaningfully stable domains which differ fundamentally from Western social regimes and which resist interpretation on the basis of Western categories" (EO, 3). The idea that the distinction between gift economy and market economy can provide a decisive line of demarcation between primitive and modern cultures suppresses the "entanglement" that indigenous cultures have/had "with other systems such as capitalism" (EO, 4), and fails to take account of the fact that "[n]early all the societies which anthropologists made into case studies for exchange theory were or still are colonized" (EO, xi). Thomas argues for the need to appreciate that "island societies have been profoundly affected by relationships with dominant European powers and their local extensions and expressions" (EO, 205). To his credit, he avoids simply representing colonized societies as acting in a way that is docile, submissive, or merely reactive in the face of aymmetrical colonial power relations. To do so would reinscribe the representation of indigenous peoples in terms of a figure of alterity that prejudges them as innocent, gullible and backward. As Thomas says, "much of the action of indigenous peoples in dealings with intrusive Westerners has been rendered childlike or irrational because of ignorance of the contexts of particular transactions" (EO, 8). So "While the profound asymmetries of colonialism cannot be overlooked, any theory which recapitulates the pioneers' ideology of vacant or passive spaces for European conquest and achievement must falsely diminish the prior dynamics of local systems, their relative autonomy, and their capacity for resistance" (EO, 205-6).
Thomas attempts to "disabl[e] the simple connection between the gift/commodity opposition and any distinction between traditional and modern societies, or clan and class, by establishing a greater degree of diversity and contingency than this evolutionary dichotomy can contain" (EO, 18). But while he is to be congratulated on his recognition of the need to problematize a recasting of the transition from primitive to modern society as a shift from a gift to a market or commodity economy, he apparently failed to draw out fully the implications of his own insight. At one point Thomas argues that the "ideology of primitivism" and the "modernist celebration of progress" are two sides of the same coin. It would be mistaken to imagine that the utopian celebration of "simple societies because they display what has been lost and provide a model for a more wholesome and fulfilling way of living . . . transcends the narrative of social evolution" (EO, 10). To nostalgically look back to primitive societies as "authentic" and "closer to nature" than the "highly mechanized" and "industrial world" of modern society is not so much to overcome evolutionism as it is to embody "the direct antithesis of the modernist celebration of progress" (EO, 10), and in so doing to redeploy its fundamental assumptions. In Derrida's words, it is to embrace a model of history "as the movement of a resumption of history, as a detour between presences" (SSP, 291), one which subscribes, however tentatively, to the view that there is a pure nature, a true essence, a basic humanity from which we have deviated. The passage of history is understood as progressive deviation from that central truth, and the implicit task to which we are called is the recovery or recapture of our lost humanity.
While Thomas has seen that the nostalgia for an original, but lost, state is merely a reversal of the belief that the civilized world will deliver us to truth, he fails to take his argument one step further in realizing that it implies the impossibility of sustaining a rigid distinction between commodities and gifts (see EO, 4). If a romantic nostalgia for what is projected as the lost innocence of a pure gift economy is precisely bound up with the modernist narrative of progress from which it tries to disassociate itself, then the naive utopian hope that our commodity bound economy can make more room for gifts inadvertently rests on an assumption which it seems to have outlawed in advance, namely that gifts can be pure.
Thomas might be accused of harboring a nostalgia of his own, one that consists of clinging to the alleged clarity with which he can designate the purity of gifts as distinct from the system of commodity exchange. Gift-economies would be a mark of pristine, innocent humanity, and market economies would be replete with alienation and exploitation, tainted by an ardor for profit. This nostalgia does not detract from the merit of his analyses, which succeeds in fleshing out an observation that Derrida makes, but which he does not develop very far. Derrida suggests that the birth of ethnology as a science was bound up with the dislocation of European culture as "the culture of reference" (SSP, 282). He also concedes that "the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them" (SSP, 282.) Acknowledging that "no one can escape this necessity" (SSP, 282), just as we cannot do "without the concepts of metaphysics" (SSP, 280) even as we put them into question, Derrida adds that there are different "ways of giving into it," not all of which will be necessarily equivalent to one another. Thomas confronts the inevitable ethnocentrism of ethnology not by evading or denying it, but by contesting the privilege it assumes, offering alternative accounts, the details of which undercut the centrality and authority of European "discoverers" as the sole actors and the sole narrators of colonial history.
Concluding Remarks
There is, on the surface of things, a tension at work here in our readings of Derrida. Part one began with a contrast between Derrida and Mauss on the question of freedom in gift-giving, showing how Derrida seems to misunderstand gifts because he requires them to make no demand of a return, in fact, they must suffer no return at all. Here our reading emphasized Mauss's insight that, insofar as gifts structure and maintain relations between people, to require that there is no return is to keep gifts from performing a structurally integral part of their function, which is to keep interaction going. We noted at that point that the passages in which Derrida is most adamant about the need for gifts to avoid circulation or return are places where he discusses gift as a pure concept. The question of purity and impurity is constantly at play in our discussion.
We have followed through two competing motifs that structure the gift-relation, both of which can be specified in relation to Derrida. He seems to assume on the one hand that the true gift must be pure, yet at the same time he acknowledges that the gift is impure. This is the ambiguity that we follow up in parts two and three. The gift, it seems, must both be free of restitution, it must entail no responsibility, it must call for no return–not for gratitude, recompense, recognition, or acknowledgement, and yet there is also an inevitable contamination of this purity. There is a necessary reduction of gifts to an economic relationship, a structure that seems to call for the duplication of gifts, an indebtedness that makes the singularity of the gift impossible, and the failure to reciprocate a gift in some way seems to undermine the character of the gift as a gift. The gift does not seem to be a solitary gift that presupposes two distinct identities, but rather the plurality of gifts, the sociality they imply, and the obligatory character of the gift come to the fore. To talk of the gift, to comprehend or analyze the gift-relation is already to be at one remove from what we have intuitively understood, or pre-comprehended about the gift. To make sense of gifts is also to move into a register that undoes the very idea of the gift as free, gratuitous, spontaneous, and momentary. Must the gift remain ineffable in order to remain, or to be, a gift?
In his conclusion, Mauss appeals to us to strive to return to our "pure" origins of gift exchange as perhaps the primary economy. He makes this appeal for moral reasons, seeing the ways in which exchange societies tend to sever people from each other in the name of neutrality, fairness, and exact calculation. The affective results of this are very damaging. One of the problems with Mauss's appeal, however, is that he apparently fails to see that the cultures he examines are by no means pure gift-economies because they have been affected by the colonialization of market-economy systems.
A cursory reading of Mauss might expose him to the criticism of remaining captive to an unreflective Rousseauian romanticism. Unaware of the meta-narrative he inadvertantly sketches, he would posit, albeit obliquely, an ideal lost origin to which he would have us return. Rousseau's hypothetical state of nature is populated by innocent, childlike, solitary beings without language, or morals, an idyllic but pre-cultural garden of eden, where nature is generous and food is abundant, where avarice, greed, and competition are as yet unknown (see G, xv). Mauss's nostalgia returns us not to a pure or amoral state of affairs, but rather to a situation in which the gift is never pure. The gift, or rather, gifts as a form of exchange, are the fabric of society. They are the medium of social relations, bound up with pride, and prestige, never free of obligation and debt. They are a means of survival, but a mechanism that cannot be divorced from the elaborate rituals and institutions of exchange which specify what is appropriate to give, how much, in what manner, and at what time. The process of gift-giving is not an alienating, anonymous, impersonal, or individualist one, but neither is it unselfish, unmotivated, uncalculating or entirely altruistic. It is a process in which group-identity is at stake, where the act of giving can turn into an act of revenge, where respect is not free of rivalry, and where needs of sustenance are caught up in an ethos of risk-taking and excess. It is unlcear how far Mauss would want to endorse a return to some kind of potlatch system, but there is certainly a utopian programmatic call for the realization of "the joy of public giving" (G, 69) and for a humanism that he finds absent from modern society (see G, 70).
A lesson our paper takes from Mauss is to keep market and gift in tension and at play, to recognize the value of gift exchange. We try, however, to do this without romanticizing some pure origin as a system to recover and re-enact. Rather, we hope to bring out the struggle between gift and market as a complex interaction that cannot be idealized as two pure systems, one good the other bad. Taking Mauss seriously, we have tried to draw lessons from the value of gift exchange for gift-economies and apply them to our own society, while at the same time problematizing the assumption that there can ever be a clear distinction between what constitutes gift exchange and market economies.
1 Marcel Mauss. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W. D. Halls. Foreword by Mary Douglas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Hereafter cited as G.
2 Claude Lévi-Strauss. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Ed. Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Hereafter cited as ES.
3 Jacques Derrida. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992; Donner le temps. Paris: Editions Galiliée, 1991. Hereafter cited as GT; DT, followed by page numbers.
4 Gayle Rubin. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the `Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157-210. Marilyn Strathern. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1988. Luce Irigaray. "Women on the Market." This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 170-91.
5 Marshall Sahlins. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine de Gruyter, 1972.
6 Nicholas Thomas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991. Hereafter cited as EO.
7 I suspect that the differences between exchange economy and gift exchange are not so much about their respective structures, or even their content, but about their enactment.
8 It's useful to notice that there are often multiple perspectives in the case of a gift event because there are multiple people (setting aside the question of whether one can give to oneself). This means that it's possible for someone to coerce another and then to call what the other does or gives a gift even if the one who was coerced would not call it a gift. My interest at the moment is on the one who gives: if I am coerced, do I feel that I gave a gift?
9 Lévi-Strauss. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Trans. Felicity Baker. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 41. Hereafter cited as IM.
10 See Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge, 1922.
11 Mauss. "Gift, Gift." In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. Ed. Alan D. Schrift. New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 28-32.
12 Derrida. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 278-293, see esp. p. 288. Hereafter cited as SSP.
13 Derrida goes on to say,
"At the limit, the gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor. It cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift. Neither to the `one' nor to the `other.' If the other perceives or receives it, if he or she keeps it as gift, the gift is annulled. But the one who gives it must not see it or know it either; otherwise he begins, at the threshold, as soon as he intends to give, to pay himself, to gratify himself, to congratulate himself, to give back to himself symbolically the value of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give. The temporalization of time (memory, present, anticipation; retention, protention, imminence of the future; `ecstases,' and so forth) always sets in motion the process of a destruction of the gift: through keeping, restitution, reproduction, the anticipatory expectation or apprehension that grasps or comprehends in advance [. . .]
[. . .] As soon as the other accepts, as soon as he or she takes, there is no more gift. . . . There is no more gift as soon as the other receives . . . If it presents itself, it no longer presents itself" (GT, 14-15; DT, 26-8).
14 See Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Mcquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984. Heidegger. On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Heidegger. "The Anaximander Fragment." Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper& Row, 1984.
15 Here we find another point of convergence between Lévi-Strauss and Douglas, who judges Mauss's "attempt to use the theory of the gift to underpin social democracy . . . very weak" (G, xv).
16 I say comparable, and not identical, in part because I suspect that Lévi-Strauss has not thought through the question of time in a way that approaches the sophistication of Derrida's thinking of this issue. As Derrida says, in Lévi-Strauss, there is a "neutralization of time and history," or a failure "to posit the problem of the transition from one structure to the other," a "putting history between brackets" (SSP, 291). He retains a catastrophic model of history, we might say, one in which embodies "a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins" (SSP, 292).
17 Lévi-Strauss says, "the notions of sentiment, fated inexorability, the fortuitous and the arbitrary are not scientific notions" (IM, 56).