The Gift (15 page)

I • The Woman Given in Marriage

As they used to say in our grammar-school workbooks, one of these things is not like the others: “And at the great festival they gave away canoes, whale oil, stone ax blades, women, blankets, and food.” Margaret Mead records an Arapesh aphorism with the same disconcerting note: “Your own mother, your own sister, your own pigs, your own yams that you have piled up, you may not eat. Other people’s mothers, other people’s sisters, other people’s pigs, other people’s yams that they have piled up, you may eat.” And in the Old Testament we read how one tribe hopes to make peace with another: “Let us take their daughters to us for wives and let us give them our daughters.”

Of all of the cases in which women are treated as gifts, this last, the woman given in marriage, is primary. We still preserve the custom in the Protestant wedding ceremony, the minister asking the gathered families, “Who giveth this woman to be married?” and the father of the bride replying, “I do.” The
ceremony is a vestige of the more ancient institution in which marriage is an exchange between tribes or clans, the one giving the bride and the other giving wealth (or service, or a different bride) in return. Typically the initial wedding gifts—the “bridewealth”—are not the end of the matter. The marriage marks only the first of a long series of exchanges that have, as usual, no apparent “economic” function but from which emerges an active and coherent network of cooperating kin.

We have seen enough of gift exchange to know that it would be too simple to say that the woman given in marriage is treated as property. Or, rather, she is a kind of property, but the “property rights” involved are not those to which the phrase usually refers. She is not a chattel, she is not a commodity; her father may be able to give her away, but he may not sell her.

This distinction hardly quiets our modern sense of justice, however. If a person can be transferred from one man to another, why is being a gift any better than being a commodity? How did the father get the right to give his daughter away in the first place? Can a mother give her son away? Is the mother consulted in the matter at all? If a marriage must be a gift exchange, why could the couple not give themselves away?

To answer we shall have to begin at the beginning, not with the day of the daughter’s wedding, but with the day of her birth. And we shall have to clarify our terms a little.

“Property,” by one old definition, is a “right of action.” To possess, to enjoy, to use, to destroy, to sell, to rent, to give or bequeath, to improve, to pollute—all of these are actions, and a thing (or a person) becomes a “property” whenever someone has “in it” the right of any such action. There is no property without an actor, then, and in this sense property is an expression of the human will in things (and in other people).

The definition is a broad one, but it allows us to make the distinctions necessary to a discussion of cases in which human
beings become property of one kind or another. A rather odd problem that arose with the advent of organ transplants will illustrate the particular distinction we need at the moment. It used to be the case that when a person died the law recognized no property rights in the body. Growing out of a religious sense of the sacredness of the body, this legal formula was intended to make it clear that the executors of an estate could not make the body of the deceased into an item of commerce to be bought, sold, or used to pay debts. It even used to be the case that a man could not direct the manner of his own burial and expect the courts to back him up, because his body, not being property, was not a part of his estate. As soon as it became possible to transplant an organ from the dead to the living, however, it became clear that the sense of “property rights” being used here was too vague. The law justly restrained the right to sell, but what of the right to bestow?

In response to just this question, every state in the Union has recently adopted what is known as the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, a law that recognizes the right of an adult to bequeath all or part of his body in the event of his death. It vests that right primarily in the person himself, of course, but in special cases it extends the right of bestowal to other people. In the case of minor children the right of bestowal lies with the parents, who may now legally donate the body of a child who has died or been killed.

Our ability to transplant body organs raises ethical questions—and has therefore required legal clarification— because with it comes the understanding that while the body from which an organ is removed may be dead, the organ itself is not. Transactions that involve life itself seem to constitute the primary case in which we feel called upon to distinguish the right of bestowal from the right of sale. The rules of gift exchange are such that what is treated as a gift retains or even increases its liveliness, and most cultures, when forced to
decide, therefore classify human life as a gift (which explains why the most significant work on gift exchange outside of anthropology has focused on matters of medical policy and ethics). If human life itself must become an item of commerce, transferred from person to person or house to house, then it must be gift property and the “rights of action” must be those that appertain to gifts, not to commodities.

With this distinction in mind we may return to the problem of the woman given in marriage, beginning, as I say, at the beginning. Not only do most cultures classify human life as a gift, but they take in particular the life of a newborn child to be a gift that has been bestowed upon its parents. (Bestowed by whom? By the gods, by the earth, by the spirits of the recently dead, by the tree near the water hole which is known to make women pregnant—however the local story has it.) The recipients of this gift are its custodians so long as the child is dependent upon them, and they may, under special circumstances, exercise their right of bestowal. The child whose body organs are given away when it dies is one instance, albeit an unusual one; the young woman whose father gives her in marriage is a second. A third example again distinguishes the right of sale from the right of bestowal: our laws prohibit parents from selling their children, but they grant them the right to give a child up for adoption. There are special restrictions and guidelines under which a child is given away, of course, but they only serve to emphasize once again our feeling that if a child’s life must be transferred from one family to another, it must be a gift.
*
There are many cultures in which all children are given away in the normal course of events, being raised by the family of a paternal aunt, for example, and not by their biological parents. In these cases a child is just one of many gifts that pass among kin.

At this point, if we are to make our way back to the woman given in marriage, we shall have to distinguish male life from female life, for even though both are taken to be a bestowal at birth, their paths invariably diverge, particularly in groups that figure descent through only one sex. In Africa they say, “Bridewealth is childwealth,” an aphorism that we may take as another response to the question, If the life of a child is a gift, who is the donor?—the answer in this case being that the mother’s clan has given the child to the father’s clan. In other words, the gifts given in marriage are not a return gift for the bride so much as for her eventual children. In patrilineal groups in particular (the primary case in Africa), a woman’s clan, when she marries, must give up its interest in her offspring and so receives the “childwealth” in return. The children then belong to their father’s clan (as, in a sense, they do in our own society, where they carry the father’s name). Looked at structurally, in a patrilineal group, males do not become gifts when they grow up because they do not circulate: a young man stays in his group when he marries, and so does his virility, his potential offspring. But a young woman moves when she marries, and the gifts given for her stand witness to the fact that both she and the rights of her fertility (rights
in gentricem)
have passed to her husband’s clan.

Again, if we look only at the structure of things, we could say that in a matrilineal group a husband (and his virility) is bestowed upon his wife’s lineage. Her family group receives his contribution to the creation of the children. No gift institution has arisen to recognize this, however (although matrilineal groups do treat bridewealth differently, a point to which I shall return). As far as I know, there are no groups in
which the men are given in marriage.
*
As the anthropologist Jack Goody puts it, “The mirror opposite of bridewealth would be groomwealth; and of bride-service, groom-service. But there is little to put in these two boxes by way of actual cases, except perhaps the payments of ‘borrowed man’ of the Menangkabau of Sumatra.” But if a borrowed man is all we have, and only one at that, we may as well say that men are not given in marriage.

What does happen to male children, then? If the life of a child is a gift, does the right of bestowal in that gift pass automatically to a boy as he becomes a man? Can he just take the car keys and go as soon as he gets his license?
^†

There is one general situation in which male children are given as gifts, or used to be. Our earlier discussion of the “rites of the first fruits” indicated that in the Old Testament all natural increase—the harvest, the calves, the lambs, and so forth—is treated as a gift from God, and its first fruits are consequently sacrificed as a return gift.
Exodus
records Yahweh’s clear statement as to the gender of these fruits: “All that opens the womb is mine, all your male cattle, the firstlings of cow and sheep.” The males are the gift from the Lord to the people, and the people pass the first one back.

The exchange was not always confined to animals, apparently. There is some indication that in antiquity the first male
child
was also sacrificed to the Lord. The Old Testament implies the rite by making the exception: “All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem.” Thus it was permitted to substitute certain ritually pure animals for the male child. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a drama of such a substitution. The New Testament repeats the motif: the Lord gives His son and the life of that firstborn is sacrificed as a gift to reconnect man and God (the story being told in the Old Testament terms: “the blood of the lamb.”)
*

In Polynesian mythology we find men, gifts, and sacrifice brought together in a manner similar to that of the Old Testament. Polynesian tribal chiefs were equated with gods, and as such they received two gifts from their people: women in marriage and men as sacrifices. The people of Fiji saw the two as equivalent gifts, the woman who is “brought raw” to be married and the “cooked man” who is sacrificed to the god-king. In the mythology at least, “cooked men” were literally eaten. A Hawaiian myth in which a man manages to redeem his life with a substitute gift indicates that had he not done so he would have been killed and baked in an earth oven. Male life is an edible good to the gods, and among the polite greetings that a Fijian commoner can offer to his ruling chief is “Eat me”! In Polynesia the continued fertility of the land was taken to be a consequence of the women and men given to the god-king. Like the God of Abraham, the Polynesian gods remained the faithful genitors of the land so long as the gift of their increase was recognized by return gifts.

In aboriginal times, therefore—including those aborigines we take to be our own ancestors—male life was sometimes treated as a gift, and parents, kings, and gods were recognized as having the right of bestowal in that gift. The modern parallel may be what Wilfred Owen called “the old lie:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”
—it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. For when the state replaces the god-king, male life is no longer baked in earth ovens, it is sent to the trenches. And while no gift ceremony accompanies enlistment (no sergeant says, “Who giveth this man?”), in our popular mythology it is the mother (or the wife if the man is married) who gives a man to the army. When a man actually dies fighting for the state, the newspapers all say the mother “gave her son,” and she is the one who receives the flag of her country handed across the coffin.

In each of these cases the boy or man who is given as a gift assumes standard functions of the gift: in the aboriginal examples, male life bestowed upon the Lord or god-king renewed the bond between that deity and the group, and ensured the continued fertility of flock and field. And although the modern state began to lose its appeal as an object of sacrifice after the First World War, we still recognize that the power of a collectively held belief can be increased by the man who gives his life in its name.

The woman who is given in marriage similarly takes on typical functions of the gift. She, too, establishes a bond (between clans or families), and as part of an ongoing system of kinship, she, like any gift, becomes an agent of the community’s cohesion and stability. In fact, the institution of the woman given in marriage makes for a rather striking example of what I earlier called “the old lovers’ quarrel between liberty and community.” For the fact is that marriages established through massive gift exchanges are more stable and enduring than those that are not; but by the same token, the partners (both men and women, but women in particular
when they are the gifts) have significantly less freedom. Where there is no gift exchange, on the other hand, marriages are less durable, the partners more independent. So the choice: where the desideratum is community we find some people trapped in bad marriages; where it is individual choice we find some people growing old in isolation.

The Uduk, the tribal group I introduced in chapter 1, make a fine example of the side of this dichotomy in which marriage is not a constraining institution.
*
The Uduk are matrilineal; neither in structure nor in ceremony is an Uduk bride (or her fertility) given in marriage. In fact, there are essentially no marriage gifts, and according to Wendy James, the anthropologist who has done the most work with the Uduk, marriage itself “is only meaningful as a sexual relationship, publicly acknowledged and accompanied by a few well-defined but short-term obligations.”