Lecture 7 Mauss, gifts and commodities

1
Lecture 7 Mauss, gifts and commodities
2
gift commodity
3
Mauss evolutionary development

• Gift societies - the structure of kinship
  typically provides the basis of peoples
  identity, relations and obligations.
• Industrial societies - dominated by commodity
  relations and market exchange between individuals

4

• Malinowski - continuum from pure gifts to real
  barter. Exchanges are essentially dyadic
  transactions between self-interested individuals.
  
• Mauss - It is not individuals but groups or moral
  persons who carry out exchange.

5
A total social phenomenon

• Transactions in goods and property is not the
  only element of exchange.
• Fulfilling an obligation to give does not
  discharge it, but recreates it by reaffirming the
  relation of with the obligation is part.
• Obligation to give and reciprocate.
• Exchange creates enduring social relations.

6
Hau the spirit of the gift

• Among the Mauri certain items called taonga are
  strongly linked to the person, the clan and the
  earth.
• Obligation to return. The hau which wishes to
  return to its birthplace, sanctuary of the forest
  and clan, and to the owner.
• Persons and things It is because the thing
  contains the person that the gift creates
  enduring bond between persons

7
Summary

• Gift exchanges is the (1) obligatory transfer
• of (2) inalienable objects or services
• between (3) related and mutually obligated
• transactors.

G
8
James Carrier - Ideology of the gift

• The opposition between the pure disinterested
  gift and calculating barter emerges within modern
  industrial society.
• The household became a realm of domestic
  affection distinct from an outside world of
  commerce.
• Gift relationships lost their material dimension
  - stand instead in opposition to calculating and
  material commodity relations.
• The present altruistic, moral and loaded with
  emotion.

9
Gift exchange and personhood

• Transactors are related in terms of their
  inalienable attributes
• They are not individuals who are defined
  independent of social relations
• They are social persons defined in their
  inalienable positions in a structure of social
  relations that encompasses them

10
Commodity exchange and personhood

• The perfect present is freely given
• The free, independent individual motivated by
  internal will
• Neither bound to give nor bound by giving
• Central element of the Western liberal tradition

11
Tension between gift and commodity

• Need to have the gift express the givers
  identity but the objects available are impersonal
  mass commodities
• Appropriation
• Christmas - people demonstrate that they can
  transform commodities and use them to recreate
  enduring personal relations.

12
The impersonal economy?

• Gifts and commodities represent not exclusive
  categories but poles defining a continuum.
• Gift and commodity are analytical tools
  rather than empirical descriptions
• The economy is permeated by social relations at
  the margins of reputable commercial transactions,
  the black economy etc.

13
Occidentalism

• Western constructions of home and work are not
  accurate descriptions but ways of expressing a
  fundamental distinction
• Mausss work manifests both orientalism (Edward
  Said) and occidentalism
• The notions of the autonomous individual and the
  separation of the economic and social are the
  West talking to itself about itself and its
  dominance in the world.