The Gift (6 page)

When the history has been told, the talk stops. Now the true return gift appears, these formalities having merely raised the exchange into the general area of this copper’s worth. Now the receiving chief, on his own, announces he would like to “adorn” his guests. He brings out two hundred more blankets and gives them individually to the visitors. Then he adds still another two hundred, saying, “You must think poorly of me,” and telling of his forefathers.

These four hundred blankets are given without any of the dialogue that marked the first part of the ceremony. It is here that the recipient of the copper shows his generosity, and it is here that the copper increases in worth. The next time it is given away, people will remember how it grew by four hundred blankets in its last passage.

Before I comment on this exchange, I must describe a second situation in which coppers were felt to increase in value. Several occasions called for the actual destruction of a ceremonial copper. The Tsimshian tribes, for example, would break a copper when they held a potlatch to honor a dead chief and recognize his heir. During this “feast for the dead,” a masked dancer would come forward with a copper and instruct the new chief to break it into pieces and then give these pieces to his guests. The chief would take a chisel and cut the copper apart. Among the Kwakiutl when Boas studied them, a man would sometimes break a copper and give the pieces to a rival, who would then try to find a copper of equivalent
value, break it, and give back the pieces of both. The man who had initiated the exchange was then obliged to hold a potlatch, distributing food and valuables at least equal to the new (and broken) copper he had received. Sometimes the initial recipient of a broken copper would find a second one, break it, and then throw them both into the sea, an action that brought him great prestige. Most coppers did not end up in the water, however; even when broken, the pieces were saved and continued to circulate. And if someone succeeded in gathering up the parts of a dismembered copper, Boas reports, they were “riveted together, and the copper… attained an increased value.”

It is clear in the literature that coppers increased in worth as they were broken, but I’m not sure it is clear why. To suggest an explanation, I want to introduce an image of dismemberment and increase from a very different culture. There are several ancient gods whose stories involve being broken and then brought back to life—Osiris in Egypt, Dionysos in Crete and Greece, and Bacchus in Rome, to name a few. I shall take Dionysos as my example here.

Carl Kerényi, the Romanian historian of religion, introduces his book on Dionysos by saying that his first insight into the god of wine came to him in a vineyard—he was looking at the grapevine itself and what he saw was “the image of indestructible life.” The temples are abandoned, but the vine still grows over the fallen walls. To explain the image, Kerényi distinguishes between two terms for “life” in Greek,
bios
and
zoë. Bios
is limited life, characterized life, life that dies.
Zoë
is the life that endures; it is the thread that runs through
bios-life
and is not broken when the particular perishes. (In this century we call it “the gene pool.”) Dionysos is a god of
zoë
-life.

In his earliest Minoan forms, Dionysos is associated with honey and with honey beer or mead. Both honey and grape juice became images of this god because they ferment: “A natural phenomenon inspired a myth
of zoë,”
writes Kerényi, “a
statement concerning life which shows its indestructibility… even in decay.” When honey ferments, what has rotted not only comes back to life—bubbles up—but its “spirit” survives. Moreover, when the fermented liquid is drunk, the spirit comes to life in a new body. Drinking the mead is the sacrament of reconstituting the god.

The association of Dionysos with honey came very early; wine soon replaced mead as the spirit drink, but the essentials of the image remained the same. In later centuries Greek celebrants of Dionysos would sing of the dismemberment of their god as they crushed the grapes through the winepresses.

Dionysos is a god who is broken into a higher life. He returns from his dismemberment as strong as or stronger than before, the wine being the essence of the grapes and more powerful. The Tsimshian tribes called the fragments of a copper given away at a mortuary potlatch “the bones of the dead.” They stand for what does not decay even though the body decays. To dismember the copper after the death of the chief and then to declare the pieces, or the reassembled copper, to be of increased value, is to declare that human life participates in
zoë
-life and that the spirit grows even though, or perhaps because, the body dies.
*
In terms of the gift: the spirit of the gift increases because the body of the gift is consumed. When a copper is exchanged for blankets, the increase comes as a sort of investment, but when coppers are broken, it comes simply through consumption. People feel the gift is worth more just because it has been used up. Boas, when he discusses the potlatch, lumps feasting and the breaking of
coppers together in the same paragraph; both are “eating the gift” as much as the destruction of property.

But I should stop here, for I have already strayed back toward explaining the increase of gifts by way of natural metaphors. Not that it is incorrect to speak in this manner; inorganic gifts do become the vehicles of
zoë
-life when we choose to invest it in them.
*
But there is a different sort of investment—one that can be described without invoking the gods of vegetable life—in the exchange of a copper as Boas has recorded it for us. To begin with, each time the copper passes from one group to another, more blankets are heaped into it, so to speak. The increase is not mysterious or metaphorical: each man really adds to the copper’s worth as it comes toward him. But it is important to remember that the investment is itself a gift, so the increase is both concrete (blankets) and social or emotional (the spirit of generosity). At each transaction the concrete increase (the “adornment”) is a witness to the increase in feeling. In this way, though people may remember it in terms of blankets, the copper becomes enriched with social feeling, with generosity, liberality, goodwill.

Coppers make a good example here because there is concrete increase to manifest the feeling, but that is not necessary. The mere passage of the gift, the act of donation, contains the feeling, and therefore the passage alone is the investment. In folk tales the gift is often something seemingly worthless—ashes or coals or leaves or straw—but when the
puzzled recipient carries it to his doorstep, he finds it has turned to gold. Such tales declare that the motion of the gift from the world of the donor to the doorsill of the recipient is sufficient to transmute it from dross to gold.
*
Typically the increase inheres in the gift only so long as it is treated as such— as soon as the happy mortal starts to count it or grabs his wheelbarrow and heads back for more, the gold reverts to straw. The growth is in the sentiment; it can’t be put on the scale.

One early commentator on North Pacific culture, H. G. Barnett, in struggling to understand the potlatch, concluded that the property given away was not economic in our usual sense (the investment is not capital investment), it wasn’t pay for labor (though guests sometimes labor), and it wasn’t a loan. In a description reminiscent of Malinowski, he concludes that it can only be described as a gift, “in complete harmony with the emphasis upon liberality and generosity (or their simulation) in evidence throughout the area. Virtue rests in publicly disposing of wealth, not in its mere acquisition and accumulation. Accumulation in any quantity by borrowing or otherwise, in fact, is unthinkable unless it be for the purpose of an immediate redistribution.”
^†

The potlatch can rightly be spoken of as a goodwill ceremony. One of the men giving the feast in the potlatch Boas witnessed says as the meal begins: “This food is the goodwill of our forefathers. It is all given away.” The act of donation is an affirmation of goodwill. When someone in one of these tribes was mistakenly insulted, his response, rather than turning to a libel lawyer, was to give a gift to the man who had insulted him; if indeed the insult was mistaken, the man would make a return gift, adding a little extra to demonstrate his goodwill, a sequence that has the same structure (back and forth with increase) as the potlatch itself. When a gift passes from hand to hand in this spirit, it becomes the binder of many wills. What gathers in it is not only the sentiment of generosity but the affirmation of individual goodwill, making of those separate parts a
spiritus mundi
, a unanimous heart, a band whose wills are focused through the lens of the gift. Thus the gift becomes an agent of social cohesion, and this again leads to the feeling that its passage increases its worth, for in social life, at least, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts. If it brings the group together, the gift increases in worth immediately upon its first circulation, and then, like a faithful lover, continues to grow through constancy.

I do not mean to imply by these explanations that the increase of coppers is simply metaphorical, or that the group projects its life onto them. For that would imply that the liveliness of the group can be separated from the gift, and it cannot. If the copper disappears, so does the life. When a song moves us, we don’t say we’ve projected our feelings onto the melody, nor do we say our lover is a metaphor for the other sex. Likewise, the gift and the group are two separate things; neither stands for the other. We could say, however, that a copper is an image for the life of the group, for a true image has a life of its own. Every mystery needs its image. It needs
these two, the ear and the song, the he and the she, the soul and the word. The tribe and its gift are separate, but they are also the same—there is a little gap between them so they may breathe into each other, and yet there is no gap at all, for they share one breath, one meal for the two of them. People with a sense of the gift not only speak of it as food to eat but also feed it (the Maori ceremony “feeds” the forest
hau).
The nourishment flows both ways. When we have fed the gift with our labor and generosity, it grows and feeds us in return. The gift and its bearers share a spirit which is kept alive by its motion among them, and which in turn keeps them both alive. When Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux holy man, told the history of the Sioux “sacred pipe” to Joseph Epes Brown, he explained that at the time the pipe had first been given to him, his elders had told him that its history must always be passed down, “for as long as it is known, and for as long as the pipe is used, [the] people will live; but as soon as it has been forgotten, the people will be without a center and they will perish.”

The increase is the core of the gift, the kernel. In this book I speak of both the object and its increase as the gift, but at times it seems more accurate to say that the increase alone is the gift and to treat the object involved more modestly as its vehicle or vessel. A Kwakiutl copper is a gift, but the feeling involved—the goodwill of each transaction—is more clearly embodied in the excess, the extra blankets thrown in at the end by each new recipient. And certainly it makes sense to say that the increase is the real gift in those cases in which the gift-object is sacrificed, for the increase continues despite (even because of) that loss; it is the constant in the cycle, because it is not consumed in use. The Maori elder who told of the forest
hau
distinguished in this way between object and increase, the
mauri
set in the forest
and its
hau
which causes the game to abound. In that cycle the
hau
is nourished and passed along, while the gift-objects (birds,
mauri)
disappear.

Marshall Sahlins, when he commented on the Maori gift stories, asked that we “observe just where the term
hau
enters into the discussion. Not with the initial transfer from the first to the second party, as well it could if [the
hau]
were the spirit in the gift, but upon the exchange between the second and third parties, as logically it would if it were the yield on the gift. The term ‘profit’ is economically and historically inappropriate to the Maori, but it would have been a better translation than ‘spirit’ for the
hau
in question.”

Sahlins’s gloss highlights something that has been implicit in our discussion, though not yet stated directly—the increase comes to a gift as it moves from second to third party, not in the simpler passage from first to second. This increase begins when the gift has passed
through
someone, when the circle appears. But, as Sahlins senses, “profit” is not the right word. Capital earns profit and the sale of a commodity turns a profit, but gifts that remain gifts do not
earn
profit, they
give
increase. The distinction lies in what we might call the vector of the increase: in gift exchange it, the increase, stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit. (These two alternatives are also known as positive and negative reciprocity.)

With this in mind, we may return to a dictum laid out in chapter
i
—one man’s gift must not be another man’s capital—and develop from it a corollary, saying: the increase that comes of gift exchange must remain a gift and not be kept as if it were the return on private capital. Saint Ambrose of Milan states it directly in a commentary on Deuteronomy:

“God has excluded in general all increase of capital.” Such is the ethic of a gift society.
*

I have explained the increase of gifts in three ways in this chapter: as a natural fact (when gifts are actually alive); as a natural-spiritual fact (when gifts are the agents of a spirit that survives the consumption of its individual embodiments); and as a social fact (when a circulation of gifts creates community out of individual expressions of goodwill). In each of these cases the increase pertains to an ego or body larger than that of any individual participant. Thus to speak of the increase of gifts is to speak of something simultaneously material, social, and spiritual. Material wealth may be produced in the course of a commerce of gifts (in the cases at hand, for example, food is gathered and preserved for the winter, canoes are constructed, lodges are built, blankets are woven, banquets prepared, and so forth and so on). And yet no material good becomes an item of commerce without simultaneously nourishing the spirit (of the salmon, of the tribe, of the race). To reverse the vector of the increase may not destroy its material portion (it may even augment it), but the social and spiritual portions drop away. Negative reciprocity does not feed the
hau.
To say, then, that the increase of a gift must itself be a gift is to ask that we not abandon the increase-of-the-whole in favor of a more individual and more plainly material growth.