The writer who gave us the bigger picture

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About a hundred years ago, a French social scientist who had lost several close colleagues to the first world war sat down to write an essay titled “The Gift”. Marcel Mauss wanted to understand how most societies in the past had managed to avoid mass slaughter. In a preface, he honours each fallen friend in turn: “Robert Hertz was killed in the useless attack of Marcheville, April 13, 1915, at the age of 33, leading his section out of the trench.” Mauss discusses the work they would have done had they lived. And then he delivers an essay that remains so influential that some social scientists have their own favourite footnote. He decodes, among other things, this week’s Christmas gift-buying frenzy.

Mauss argues that reciprocal gift-giving is the basis for all society. It’s a visible system that still exists today, alongside the market’s “invisible hand”. It is the ritual that mostly allows us to live together in harmony.

The bulk of his essay is a bewilderingly erudite study of giving practices in what Mauss calls “archaic” societies, from native Alaskans to ancient Germanic tribes. These people gave useful objects, but also women, children, banquets — anything. Today still, a gift is magical when it contains something of the person who gives it. A piece of the giver’s soul.

Mauss explains that giving is in part self-interested (because we expect reciprocity), yet it isn’t hypercommercial. A gift can be a repayment for a service or thing you have been given. It can raise your status. It helps maintain alliances. Giving, in this sense, isn’t charity. There’s no such thing as a free gift. You give, knowing that one day you’ll receive. Or in the old mafia phrase: “I don’t do favours, I just collect debts.” Mauss identifies three binding obligations: to give, to receive and then to give a gift in return.

Not giving can have terrible consequences. He cites the myth of the wicked fairy who curses the newborn because she hasn’t been invited to the baptism feast. Failing to reciprocate gifts is dangerous too, so receiving one puts you in a vulnerable position. Mauss says that may be why the German word Gift means “poison”.

He accuses economists of overlooking the vast gift-system, because they only see the market, the place where exchanges are impersonal and strictly commercial. In markets, we owe other people only if we have agreed a deal, and our obligations end the moment the contract is fulfilled.

But gift-giving is an eternal cycle of reciprocity. Mauss argued that it survived into his day. He wrote: “We do not only have a market ethic. There remain among us people and classes who still have the moral customs of a bygone age, and almost all of us observe them, at least at certain times of year or on certain occasions.” We are not yet all “economic animals”, he writes.

I’d argue that we still aren’t today. Even hard-nosed financial houses throw Christmas parties for staff and clients, knowing that the profit motive alone doesn’t suffice for long-term business partnerships. I suspect that most people who work in sectors like health, education, care or the arts identify more with Mauss’s cycle of reciprocity than with the market ethic. These workers feel they are giving a piece of their souls, not selling labour in an impersonal market.

Many artisans, farmers and restaurateurs probably also believe, in the Maussian sense, that they put something of themselves into the things they produce. Sure, the market pays them, but the market doesn’t aim for moral fairness, and so the market price might not be commensurate with what they gave. For similar reasons, the modern separation between producer and buyer (we buy stuff through intermediaries like supermarkets or Amazon) seems harshly impersonal to people who live by the ethic of the gift cycle. There’s more human reciprocity in buying something direct from the person who made it.

Some of today’s political conflicts are in fact clashes between the gift ethic and the market. Take the issue of raising the pension age. Many workers feel that they gave something of their essence in their labour, and that they are owed their pensions under the life-long Maussian system of reciprocity.

Market purists argue, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, that there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals who buy from and sell to each other. Mauss would have retorted: there is a society, and it’s built partly on Christmas presents.

Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him at [email protected]

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