Florence WEBER The Gift: Towards an ethnography of non market services Preface to Marcel MAUSS, The Gift, Presses Universitaires de France, new edition (2007), translated from the French by Punam PURI (2012), COPYRIGHT FLORENCE WEBER Why read The Gift more than eighty years after it first appeared? Published in 1925, this work of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) is unquestionably the most celebrated text in the field of social anthropology, but it is also the most obscure. The publication of a new edition in 1950 with an introduction by Claude Lévi-Strauss brought it to the attention of a wide public. Translated in English in 1954, this seminal work of the social sciences has gained an increasing audience at the turn of the 21 st century, spreading Amerindian concepts like the potlatch, or Oceanian ones like the kula 1 far beyond anthropology into the global realm of economic science, management and marketing. Mauss was well aware of the unfinished and imperfect character of this pioneering work. While concluding, he said: We are really posing questions to historians and ethnographers, and putting forward subjects for enquiry rather than resolving a problem and giving a definitive answer [The Gift: 100] 2 Indeed, this is the reason why one could read the text le coeur battant, la tête bouillante {with one s heart beating, one s head swirling} [Lévi- Strauss 1950: XXXIII]: it opened the doors to new worlds. A work in progress, it inspired an entire scientific community to resume what had been started earlier. The text packs in the 156 pages of its first edition nearly two centuries of scientific work: upstream, the ethnographical documents and works of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries synthesised by Mauss; downstream, the theoretical reinterpretations that were made thereof and the empirical research that drew inspiration from them. The extensive scope of the book brings together researchers that everything seems to separate: their generation, their discipline, their field of specialisation, and their epistemological or political convictions. Reading it today is being able to appreciate the vistas it opened and rediscovering at their root the principles of the ethnographic approach to the study of non market services, a continent better explored today. It is also, as we shall see, learning to finally do away with the gift. An ethnographic sociology If one places The Gift in the context in which it was written, it is the first link, and the most explicit one, of the ethnographic inflexion that Mauss gave to Durkheimian sociology between the two wars. Mauss brought about a discreet Copernican revolution by putting at the centre of sociology not, as his uncle Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) urged us to do, social facts removed from their context such as the rate of suicide or the pre-eminence of the right hand but, in the very words of The Gift, vast sets of concrete complex facts or total 1 In keeping with the first French translation of Malinowski [1922], we will continue the practice of using the term kula in the feminine in French. The dates in square brackets refer to the bibliography of this preface. 2 These numbers refer to the pagination of The Gift, the English translation from the French by W.D Halls, Rutledge, 2002 edition.
social facts that involve the totality of society and its institutions (The Gift: 100), and which allow one to grasp more than ideas or rules, [ ] men, groups and their different forms of behaviour (The Gift: 102). This theoretical revolution brought about by Marcel Mauss as if in passing and hailed by Marc Bloch for whom it made collaboration between historians and sociologists possible did no more in reality than make explicit the principle of the ethnographic method as it was first practised by Malinowski and later his successors. The ethnographer strives to follow the relations of interdependence among human beings to the extent he can observe them, either because he can see them directly in the course of the face to face relations in which he participates, or the public ceremonies he attends, or then because these relations of interdependence occur through the mediation of material and institutional mechanisms the functioning and genesis of which he can once again observe directly. The principle of direct observation was presented for a long time in the form of local monographs emanating from surveys during which the observer partook of the life of those he observed [Malinowski 1922]. It is only recently that it gave rise to studies free from the constraint of the physical co-presence of the investigator and the investigated in a given space: for example, a microhistorical reading of the archives [Farge 1989], a historical ethnography [Laferté 2006] or multi-located ethnographic surveys [Marcus 1998] during which the observer moves in the midst of relocated social settings or among several social settings linked to one another [Weber 2001]. Founding Social Security The Gift is not just a scientific work. It is a watershed in the relationship between Durkheimian sociology and politics. While the work of Durkheim may be considered as one of the intellectual pillars of the 3 rd Republic [Fabiani 1988], The Gift is a vital link in the invention of French style social security. By asserting that society does not discharge its obligation towards workers, who have given their life in its service, with the mere payment of wages, but that it is also obliged to provide them with the means to live a decent life in old age and when unemployed, Mauss breaks with the principles of charity that were the cornerstone of social policies, as also with the unconscious and injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver (The Gift: 84) that he talks about in the conclusion of The Gift. He paves the way for the creation of social services which cease to be charity and are conceived instead as rights fashioned by individuals over society as a whole. Mauss work has not fallen into the trap of the divide between western societies (Us) and the rest of the world (Them), as anthropology would have us believe, a discipline which for a long time has been overly cautious in its treatment of contemporary societies. To the contrary, his analysis of the gift in primitive and archaic societies was driven by the need to find answers to a few problems posed by the crisis in our own law and economic organisation (The Gift: 5), in other words, at a time when extreme solutions, bolshevism in Russia since 1917 and fascism in Italy since 1922, prevailed over a reasoned reform of market capitalism capable of correcting social inequalities and preventing the ensuing economic crisis. It took another twenty years, a world war, a civil war in France, and other works such as those of Polanyi [1944] for Mauss intuitions to crystallise in the form of a coherent social model that placed wage work at the centre of social solidarity, a gift that has to be repaid with more than mere wages. Sixty years later, the transformations in the wage
society have endangered this European model described as conservative or continental [Esping-Andersen 1999). One more reason to reread The Gift. 1. A disconcerting text The Gift sets for itself an extremely well-defined area of study: the exchange of gifts, in theory voluntary, in reality necessarily given and reciprocated obligatorily (The Gift: 3). Today, this subject is referred to in French as don et contre-don and in English as the maussian gift. The dynamic of the text consists in revealing the existence, the universality and the complexity of this specific phenomenon. The first two chapters define the query (where does the obligation to return originate?) and develop a comparative ethnography of the Pacific Basin, Polynesia, Melanesia and the American Northwest; the third chapter examines the same phenomenon in ancient Indo-European systems of law, Rome, India and Germanic law. Finally, Mauss does not limit himself to the analysis of this phenomenon in the societies surrounding us [the subject of the first two chapters] or those that immediately preceded us [the subject of the third chapter]. In the fourth chapter of the conclusions, he observes that this morality and this organisation still function in our societies, in an unchanging fashion and, so to speak, hidden, below the surface (The Gift: 5). This is indeed a discovery of comparative sociology, as it names indicates, even if the scope and nature of the discovery remain debatable. In fact, some see in the maussian gift the very essence of the gift, namely its extreme ambivalence, whereas others only view it as source of confusion between simple transfers and transactions [Testart 2007]; some consider the maussian gift to be a paradigm [Caillé 2000], whereas others interpret it as merely one of the forms of non market services. My position is this: I believe that in The Gift Marcel Mauss has described the entire series of non market services in all their diversity, without however always clearly drawing the borders between phenomena still to be established in ethnographic terms. Though open and rigorous, The Gift remains nonetheless a disconcerting text, a series of documentary cards allowing the reader to travel, at the risk of getting lost, through the centuries and continents, from the Scandinavian Edda and the ancient Indian Vedas to the shores of the Pacific, from Melanesia in the west where the Trobriand islands are located and where Malinowski studied the kula, to Alaska in the east where the Kwakiutl Indians live and where Boas studied their potlatch. The Gift in fact has been written in a spiral. The same set of ethnographical facts in different societies of the Pacific and beyond have been discussed four times: briefly in the introduction, to state the problematic ; next in chapter 1 ( The Exchange of Gifts and the Obligation to Reciprocate ) to show the existence of the phenomenon studied, defined as the obligation to reciprocate, and find in the hau of the thing given the answer to the question (where does this obligation come from?); then in chapter 2 ( Liberality, Honour, Money ), to demonstrate the extension of the system and enlarge the scope of the question in respect of the triple obligation to give, receive and reciprocate; finally, after chapter 3 and its discussion of ancient systems of law to see if these principles obtain here, the same
ethnographic facts are taken up again in the conclusion, which too has been written in a spiral; divided into three parts, first, it deals with morality (i.e. social policy), then economic sociology and political economy, and finally general sociology and once again morality. The genesis of the text Though in the course of this work Mauss realised that the coherence of each social system had to be restored instead of cutting up the real into logical elements, he did not however fully adapt his style of writing to this realisation and it is for the reader to ferret out from a reasoning marked by the uncertainty of discovery the social facts that this very reasoning helped bring to light. Indeed, the reader is a live spectator to the construction of a scientific object: but in this case, it is an ethnographic object, in other words, observable, and not an abstract object. The Gift is thus a fully ethnographic text, one that raises ethnography to the level of a scientific theory though the author of the text only practiced what may be described as second hand ethnography. But he cross-checked documents and used sources in the manner of a historian, showing the deep seated kinship between the methodology of ethnography and that of history. To restore the chronology of the articles from which The Gift picks up elements is to understand the genesis of the text and, at the same time, make for an easier reading. Mauss was first interested in the origin of money in a text of 1914 The origins of the notion of money, which he discusses again in a long note in chapter 2. Next, he compares the kwakiultl potlatch studied by Boas with the Melanesian kula in a short text written in 1920 on the the extension of the potlatch in Melanesia published in the same year. There were no other publications between these two periods, the war preventing Mauss from working though it provided him the opportunity to observe the body techniques of British and Australian soldiers. In 1921, Mauss published a long article on an ancient form of contract among the Thracians which provides the matrix for chapters 2 and 3. It was only in 1923 that he discovered the underlying principle of this entire body of work on primitive money, exchange and archaic contract: this time, an article entitled the obligation to return presents provided the material for chapter 1, in particular his famous and controversial analysis of the hau, an indigenous concept found in a text by the Maori sage Tamati Ranapiri (Mauss wrongly transcribed the name as Tamati Ranaipiri ). Finally, the text Gift, gift, published in 1924, completes the 1921 text and concludes the reasoning of chapter 3 on the ambivalence of the gift. In other words, the order in which the text is read does not correspond to the chronology of his discovery. To the extent that the latter can be restored, Mauss began with the ethnography of the Pacific, which forms the subject matter of chapter 2, the longest chapter in which we glean the first premises of his though process. Chapter 3 constitutes the core of his analysis: the work on ancient systems of law and the nexum completes the ethnographic analysis of chapter 2, wheareas the ambivalence of the word gift, discovered last of all, completes the whole of The Gift. Chapter 1, the shortest chapter, which takes up the text of Tamati Ranapiri and the notion of the hau, was written after the main body of chapter 3. Finally, it appears that Mauss wrote the introduction and the conclusion in 1925. We will use this order of writing and begin by describing the potlatch and the kula with the help of their numerous interpretations and then move on to analyse the nexum and the indigenous
concept of hau, before coming back to the overall theoretical discussion suggested in chapter 1 without ever losing sight of the political stakes that Mauss discussed in the introduction and the three conclusions. 2. Potlatch and kula: two institutions and their interpretations Before taking up Mauss demonstration, and the palimpsest of interpretations it gave rise to, let us stress a point on which there is unanimity among ethnographers today, and which enables one to free oneself at the outset from the famous critique made by Lévi-Strauss: Strauss felt that Mauss, falling victim to the indigenous interpretation of the Maori sage Ramati Tanaipiri, stopped short of the Promised Land of structural analysis. This critique of Mauss usage of the notion hau has become commonplace among ethnographers, whereas it is this very notion that opens fascinating perspectives within the framework of an ethnography that deals with the material matrix of interactions. It is thus worthwhile dwelling briefly on this disqualification of indigenous concepts. Indigenous concepts that became scientific concepts Ethnography abandoned structuralist certitudes to take indigenous categories seriously both in their performative dimension to say is to do and in their descriptive dimension: to say is to break up social reality into relevant units in terms of signification. It is from the distance between indigenous or vernacular concepts (emics) and the concepts of the observer, ethnographer or historian (etics) that reflexive ethnography draws its scientific capacity to break with pre-conceived notions. The emics-etics distinction is, in fact, a two stage process. At an initial level, it designates the difference between the categories of thought of the people observed (emics) and those of the observer of another society (etics). This distinction enables one to analyse the difference between the indigenous conceptual opposition of the kula and the gimwali, present in the Trobriand Islands studied by Malinowski, and the pair of concepts gift and barter in English, the language in which Malinowski wrote. However, at a second level, the emic concept of the kula has become a scientific term which derives its meaning in relation to another scientific concept, the potlatch, borrowed this time from an Amerindian language studied by Boas. The comparison between kula and potlatch is only possible in the scientific universe, since these terms belong to two different indigenous languages. It takes us back to the interminable discussions on the interpretation of Malinowski, Boas and Mauss, which helped define the concept of gift, a term far too polysemic. These indigenous concepts, once they entered into scientific language, allow us today to consider the concept used by the observers, gift, as an emic concept, in other words a concept used in the social universe of the observers, who themselves are natives of their own society. The inversion of the two terms of opposition emics (kula then gift) and etics (gift then kula) marks the construction of a scientific language, distinct both from the concepts used by the persons observed and by the observers. The ethnographical knowledge of all societies, whether exotic or western, has emerged enriched from this. The decentring effected by the foreign observer to understand the indigenous categories (emics) tells him as much about the categories in use in his own society (etics). To
implement an ethnography by distancing oneself is to draw from the work carried out on an earlier or exotic Elsewhere to effect this decentring, to some extent, by proxy, and thus acquire the distant perspective characteristic of the anthropological approach. Mauss approach thus appears today as more contemporary than that of Lévi-Strauss: for Mauss as for us, the long detour via the Pacific and then the history of western concepts provides the conceptual tools to study contemporary reality. The potlatch as a struggle for prestige: establishing hierarchy Credit must be given where credit is due: though Mauss may have studied the potlatch in chapter 2 only after the kula, presenting the latter as a supreme case of the exchange of gifts and the former as a sort of monstrous product of the system of presents, nevertheless he used potlatch to show from the introduction itself the existence of a system of total services of an antagonistic type. Indeed, it is potlatch that retained the attention of Mauss first readers, George Bataille to begin with [1933] and then Claude Lefort [1951]. This is an institution present in the Indian societies of the American Northwest, Alaska (Tlingit and Haïda) and British Columbia (Haïda, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl), studied towards the end of the 19 th century by the American anthropologist Franz Boas. These societies are characterised both by the richness and the difference of their winter life (when they are concentrated in cities and have a very active social life) and the summer life (when they are dispersed). It has subsequently been shown that the potlatch studied by Boas represented a kind of perversion of a preceding system, linked to the sudden wealth of fishermen who traded with several colonial powers and who, on account of the scarcity of the goods they collected, acquired overnight an abundance of products of prestige [Schulte-Tenckhoff 1986]. Mauss suggests that the concept of potlatch be systematised so that it can be extended beyond societies that use the term to designate any total service of an antagonistic type (The Gift: 8). A potlatch is an immense festival that gathers together an entire tribe, even several tribes, for exchange of gifts that could extend to the extravagant destruction of wealth (some natives speak of killing wealth ) the principle of which is rivalry and the struggle between chiefs. The objective pursued in the course of this bid to outdo each other in generosity is the establishment of hierarchy among the different groups and their representatives: the strongest is the one who will have offered the maximum wealth, including its destruction. Potlatch would thus only exist, Mauss opines, in societies with an unstable hierarchy, where it likely to be challenged at each ceremony. This is emphasised at the end of chapter 1 in a crucial note (The Gift: 37) that attributes the difference between the Polynesian kula (where, he says, only the theme of rivalry, combat and destruction is lacking, for there to be potlatch, The Gift: 12) and the Amerindian potlatch to the assumption of the disappearance of potlatch in Polynesia. Thus there is missing one of the main conditions for the potlatch, namely the instability of a hierarchy that rivalry between chiefs has precisely the aim of temporarily stabilising (The Gift: 37). Far from seeking material gain, the protagonists of a potlatch owe it to themselves to display the scorn in which they hold wealth for wealth s sake, and the price they attach to their honour and prestige by each one showing himself themselves to be the most
generous and more spendthrift of them all. What is committed in these bids to outdo each other in generosity is in point of fact the honour of the protagonists, their mana [Weiner, 1992: 49-54] or furthermore, their face in the Chinese sense of the term [Goffman, 1974]. The multiple transfers of wealth may be analysed at two levels: within a potlatch, in a system of spontaneous ritual exchange, the host offers and receives gifts, thereby displaying his munificence vis-à-vis all the persons present who owe it to themselves to rise to the occasion, be they members of his clan whose potlatch confirms dependence, or chiefs of other clans with whom he competes. A potlatch without offering gifts is meaningless; going there without carrying gifts is equally meaningless. At a second level, each important invitee to a potlatch owes it to himself to offer in turn a potlatch to all his partners, thus entering into a sequence of differed transfers without however allowing any potlatch to be considered as an obligation to reciprocate the preceding one. I may never return a potlatch: undoubtedly, I will lose my honour, but no one can come and claim his due. Bataille [1933] on the one hand, and Claude Lefort [1951] on the other, only retained the potlatch from The Gift. They saw in it the essence of the gift, exchange, in fact, modern consumerism. Their reading is pessimistic: all exchanges are struggles, every struggle to outdo each other in generosity is a power struggle and the gift is only a process of destruction that knows no limits. The double circuit of kula and ritual reciprocity Mauss emphasised on several occasions the kinship between the kula and the potlatch which he considered as two systems of total services where only the presence or absence of competition distinguished one from the other. On my part, I would like to emphasise this difference which seems fundamental and which is basic to the understanding of the contradictory interpretations of The Gift. Unlike the potlatch, an antagonistic system in which the hierarchy between persons and groups is constructed and which combines a set of instantaneous ritual transfers and sequences of several transfers linked to each other, the kula, a peaceful and regulated form of ceremonial exchange, consists of a dual circle of ritual transactions during which highly stable statutory relations are reinforced. Malinowski was the first to study the kula, a vast and long cycle of exchanges which he observed in the Trobriand Islands. The inhabitants of these islands were rich fishermen, traders and navigators who periodically embarked on long journeys during which certain precious things, vaygu a, always moved in the same direction: mwali or bracelets, moved from West to East, whereas soulava or necklaces travelled from East to West. Here, the main objective was to be linked lastingly to prestigious partners. Finally, despite the lapse of time between the journeys and during the entire period of the circulation of a vaygu a, it appears that for every vaygu a given, the giver could demand repayment. A moneyless form of the market functions along with the kula under the name of gimwali which does not exclude bargaining and profit seeking, and carrying out kula as one carries out gimwali is explicitly forbidden. The ritual exchanges kula and the market exchanges gimwali take place during the same journeys between the islands with both circuits being watertight: commonly consumed goods cannot be exchanged for precious things. Numerous ethnographical surveys carried out in the Massim zone where the kula takes place [Leach & Leach 1983] helped clarify facts not clearly established while Mauss was writing The Gift. We thus know today that one can introduce and remove kula things
from the kula circulation [Testart 2007: 176]. It was this watertight nature of the circuits that led Malinowski to consider vaygu a as money, whereas Mauss, and after him, economic anthropology as a whole viewed them as a form of money that has preceded our own (The Gift: 129) to account for the fact that they could clear a debt, in other words be a means of payment. Furthermore, the most recent ethnography reveals that these precious things can, if need be, be acquired or sold against ordinary goods. It remains to be verified whether this was the case while Malinowski was observing these exchanges: the historical work carried out on the potlatch observed by Boas was not carried out on the kula observed by Malinowski, even though archaeological traces more than 500 years old bear testimony to the continued existence of the system. The kula thus functions according to a principle of ritual reciprocity among persons who get linked to each other through regular exchanges. At any point in the chain, simple reciprocity links two kula partners, one offering to the other a necklace S for a bracelet M, this gesture constituting a ritual transaction <S for M>. If we go by Weiner [1992], each one of these precious things keeps the trace of those whose hands it has passed through, but only the person who introduced it into the kula circuit can withdraw it from the circuit. A common reciprocity links all the kula partners, since the necklaces move in one direction all along the circuit and the bracelets in the other direction. Mauss makes a historical assumption about the anteriority of potlatch over kula and the disappearance of potlatch in Polynesia, linked to the stabilisation of the hierarchy: Indeed there is a reason for its having disappeared from part of this area. It is because the clans have definitively become hierarchised in almost all the islands [ ]. Likewise, if we find more traces among the Maori than in any other island, it is precisely because chieftainship had been reconstituted there, and isolated clans had become rivals (The Gift: 37). It would seem to the contrary that the potlatch is a degenerate form of kula due to the influx of wealth from colonial trade. The linking of potlatch and kula to commercial circuits, internal like the gimwali or external, is in any case a fundamental point in the understanding of the dynamics of the systems of total services. To simplify matters, in Alaska the potlatch is a dual form of the circulation of wealth acquired through foreign trade: within clans, it is the redistribution of precious things to dependents (who cannot reciprocate), between rival clans, it is a battle of prestige that pertains to the mirror model of the schismogenesis of behaviour, each of the two partners trying to surpass the other. In this second case, there is a purely internal relational dynamic. On the contrary, the kula seems to escape this dual warrior logic of dependence and rivalry. Mauss comes back to the link between potlatch and kula in the conclusion, emphasizing in more general way the great instability between festival and war of the systems of total services than can veer at any moment from one to the other [The Gift: 105]. This prompted his dual normative conclusion: avoid the dependence produced by the gift of redistribution (charity); seek inspiration from the kula as a positive model of gift and avoid the tendency towards the rivalry of the potlatch. Time, debt and personal domination If we look at present at relational atoms two by two whose reunion comprises the systems of total services potlatch and kula, we can distinguish two fundamental points in Mauss analysis: on the one hand, an incompressible lapse of time separates the first gift (the
opening gift or the first potlatch) from the counter gift (the return gift); on the other hand, the gift increases the stature of the giver donor and lowers that of the receiver. It is on the basis of these two points stated on numerous occasions in Mauss text that Pierre Bourdieu was pessimistic in his interpretation of the gift, as he takes the antagonistic dimension of the potlatch, not at the level of the system of total services, but at that of the dual relationship between giver and receiver. At the same level, Lévi-Strauss in his analysis of the simple reciprocity between two partners A and B had stressed both the peaceful and balanced character of the relationship and the instantaneous character of the gesture of exchange: for example, the exchange of rings (which we call wedding rings) between husband and wife at the time of the wedding ceremony. Such a symbolic gesture does not come under the purview of Bourdieu s analysis of the gift as personal domination, because it lacks one essential element, the duration that separates the gift from the counter gift and establishes personal domination, but also because the identity of the two rings symbolises the equality of the two spouses. For Bourdieu, it is the lapse of time between the gift and the counter gift that distinguishes the maussian gift from the instantaneous exchange of two equivalent goods, an instantaneousness characteristic of three other types of exchange: market and monetary transactions, market and non monetary transactions (if it is the strict equivalence of the two goods that is sought by the partners, as in barter), and ritual transactions (if the goods exchanged are identical, as in the example of the rings). It is this lapse of time that allows the giver to both do violence to the receiver compelled to remain in the giver s debt for such time and mask this violence in the guise of generosity without any ulterior motive. Bourdieu thus subscribes to a path opened by Mauss, that of fiction and the social lie. It is also this time interval that establishes a parallel between gift and debt: the receiver becomes dependent on the giver, is obliged to him and becomes his inferior. Two principles of interpretation Before discussing the link between gift and debt put forward by Bourdieu, let us state clearly our position on Mauss text and the multiple interpretations it gave rise to. On the one hand, three major corrections were made to the ethnographic information available to Mauss. I have already taken into consideration two of them: the historical study of Schulte-Tenckhoff [1986] helped restore the specific context of the forms of potlatch analysed by Boas, without in any way questioning Mauss interpretation, by specifying the conditions of its appearance and inversing the historical link assumed by Mauss; the ethnographic analysis that culminated in the work of Weiner [1992] altered significantly Malinowski s analysis of the kula, leading to a greater distinction between kula and potlatch. Further on, I will discuss Sahlins critique [1972], taken up by Weiner and Testart, on the basis of a new translation of Tamati Ranapiri s text on the hau of the taonga (the force of things). At the same time, the recent progress made in the ethnography of non market transactions [Testart 2007; Zelizer 2005; Weber 2000] lead one to distinguish clearly the two forms of services to which the kula and the potlatch pertain: transaction and transfer. A transaction entails the obligation to repay; consequently, it must be thought of as a unit noted as <A for
B>. A transaction remains incomplete as long as the consideration B has not been paid; it is thus noted as <A for B due>. A transfer, on the contrary, noted as <A> does not entail any obligation to repay, even if it forms part of a sequence of transfers which will thus be noted as <A> <B> <C> I thus choose to reserve the term transaction for services which entail an obligation to repay, be it market and monetary transactions, non monetary market transactions, or ceremonial transactions. I call incomplete or half-transactions unsettled entitlements <A for B due>. These incomplete transactions can be of various kinds: financial credit, commercial debt, ceremonial transactions, unsettled relations between a mutual insurance company and its subscribers, between an insurance company and its clients, between Social Security and its beneficiaries. I reserve the term transfer for services which do not entail the obligation to repay, and I call double transfer a succession of two such services, noted as <A> <B>. Finally, I call a chain of services a succession of complete services (transfers or transactions) throughout a relationship begun between the same two partners. Transfer or transaction: what kind of interpersonal relationship? It was toward such a definition that I veered [Weber 2000] when I distinguished, along with the propositions of Viviana Zelizer [2005], three levels of analysis of non market transactions: the nature of the relationship between two partners of a transaction, the form of the transaction (single or double) and the nature of repayment (monetary or not). Testart s interpretation [2007), with which I am not in agreement on several points, though I do agree with the crucial difference between the obligation to repay and lack of such an obligation, led me to clarify my terminology and distinguish, among a vast set of services, the transaction with an obligation to repay <A for B due> from the transfer without obligation to repay <A>. Therefore, I maintain the distinction of three levels of analysis: the nature of the relationship, the form of the service (transaction or transfer), and the nature of the goods transferred (monetary or not). This fundamental distinction enables us to read Mauss text in all its complexity while making a clear distinction between the various systems of exchange he studied: 1. On the one hand, the system of market exchanges gimwali consists of transactions related to ordinary goods <A for B> during which the relationship between the two partners is effaced and in which an equivalence between the two goods is both the consequence and the condition of serialising decontextualised transactions and arithmetic ; 2. At the other extremity, the potlatch consists of transfers <A> <B> <C> linked to each other by the schismogenetic logic of an antagonistic personal relationship in which each vies with the other to offer a more beautiful present than the one he receives, or else accept a relationship of dependence; 3. Between the two, the kula consists of transactions related to specific ceremonial things, mwali for soulava, <M for S> during which the relationship between the partners is defined a political alliance.
With potlatch (dependence and rivalry) and kula (alliance), Mauss explores the entire range of possible services where what matters is the personal relationship carried by the thing given, in opposition to services where interchangeable goods flow among interchangeable individuals, thus making it possible to relegate personal relationships to the background: market transactions (monetary or in kind), simple anonymous transfers (monetary or non monetary). In western societies too there exist services which involve personal relationships in terms of dependence, charity as well as the political relationship of clientelism; in terms of rivalry, public monuments and the practice of patronage; in terms of alliance, development of commercial customer loyalty where personal relations count to build trust (when the market institutions weaken). The maussian gift is not an act of credit The debt metaphor, present in Bourdieu s writings, and that of credit, present in Mauss work and, before, in the work of Boas, pose a problem as soon as one tries to analyse ethnographically credit contracts in the non metaphoric sense of the term. The problem vanishes if we accept the formal distinction between transaction and transfer. This does not pertain to the nature of the goods exchanged or the lapse of time between two transfers, but to the definition of the situation by the persons present. From this point of view, Bourdieu seems to have anticipated the critique when he wrote: La sociologie, si elle s en tient à une description objectiviste, réduit l échange des dons au donnant-donnant et ne peut plus fonder la différence entre un échange de dons et un acte de crédit {Sociology, if it restricts itself to an objectivist description, reduces the exchange of gifts to a quid pro quo and can no longer establish the difference between an exchange of gifts and an act of credit} [Bourdieu 1994: 178]. Indeed, whereas the credit contract is the basis of the unity of all the transfers included between the opening of the credit and its extinguishment, an exchange of gifts consists explicitly of two distinct transfers of which the second does not close the relationship begun by the first. The analyst may well consider that it is nothing other than a differed transaction, be it debt or credit: this interpretation will be vigorously challenged by the natives who will consider it as an error, or even lack of taste or impoliteness, whereas the sociologist will endeavour to have us believe in his capacity to unveil the truth of a relationship against the opinion of his two protagonists. The sociologist reasserts his right to objectification only when there is a disagreement, misunderstanding or conflict between the partners of the exchange. To understand whether the service observed corresponds to a balanced alliance, dependence or rivalry between two its two protagonists, it is vital to break up without any possible ambiguity the sequence of interactions that give it its meaning. In other words, the protagonists must agree to determine which was the first gift and which, consequently, was the counter gift : accordingly, if there has been reciprocation, it is an alliance, otherwise it is dependence. Without this agreement, there is a great risk of entering into a never ending spiral of rivalry. In some cases, the ambiguity about the very definition of the situation what is happening can only be removed by a third person, be it a disinterested spectator, if need be the ethnographer himself, a representative of the group of peers or a professional invested with legal authority [Weber, 2000]. The intervention of a third person determines the interpretation: this is what Viviana Zelizer has shown in respect to the recourse to law [Zelizer 2005]; it is precisely the recourse to law that freezes relations between the two partners.
3 The force of things Let us go back to chapter 1 of The Gift which, while announcing the programme, poses a crucial dual question, emphasized by Mauss himself: What rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back? (The Gift: 4). In reality, it relates to only one of the three obligations discussed in The Gift, the obligation to reciprocate. This dual question invites several comments. First: by associating rule of legality and self-interest, Mauss enters in a theoretical discussion with economics to which we will come back later. Second: the rule of legality and self-interest can only function without the knowledge of the protagonists, since the gift is always given voluntarily and freely, even if in reality it is obligatory, constrained and interested. Mauss thus thought of dissociating the form (the present, the gift offered generously) from the content (the obligation and economic interest), evoking extreme cases where in the gesture accompanying the transaction, there is only a polite fiction, formalism and social deceit (The Gift: 4). Yet while evoking this path, that Bourdieu was to take, Mauss discards it immediately to follow another one. This leads us to our third comment: the second question, far from clarifying the first, effects in reality a decisive shift towards a veritable ethnography of transactions. The hau: from spirit to repayment What force resides in the thing given that obliges the recipient to reciprocate it? The question seeks the reason for the exchange in the narrow relationship that is established between a giver, an object given and a recipient (the one who receives). It is in the object given that we are likely to find the force that causes its recipient to reciprocate it. The initial commentaries of The Gift, those of Claude Lévi-Strauss [1950] and Claude Lefort [1951] suggest this is a flaw in the analysis, since Mauss limits himself to espousing an indigenous theory. Contemporary ethnography, interested in the things themselves [Appadurai, 1986], in the material device [Callon 1998; Callon, Lascoumes, Barthe, 2001}, in restoring the repertoires of indigenous justifications [Boltanski, Thévenot, 1991] and observing personal relationships [Weber 1989; Godbout 1992], views this on the contrary as a real theoretical breakthrough. Let us examine this more closely. As we have seen, it was while studying the Maori society of New Zealand that Mauss discovered his indigenous concept which seemed to him to be of general application: the things exchanged, taonga, are endowed with a spirit, the hau. Far from being inert, it is from them that the obligation of the recipient emanates. Mauss relies on a text of Tamati Ranapiri, the Maori informant of the ethnologist Elsdon Best, who invokes the hau or the force of things, to explain that I must give you the thing (taonga) that was given to me in exchange for the one you had given to me earlier: Cette taonga qui m est donnée [par un tiers], c est le hau des taonga qui m avaient été donnés [par toi] auparavant {This taonga given to me [by a third person] is the hau of the taonga that had been given to me [by you] earlier} [Testart: 197]. An initial translation, which
Mauss refers to, renders hau by spirit and engages the analysis in a spiritualist or animist direction, accentuated by some commentators of The Gift. As for Mauss, he saw in the hau the equivalent for things of the magical force he saw for men in the mana and which he translated on numerous occasions as honour, face. A more attentive reading of Tamati Ranapiri s text and Sahlins critique of the translation used by Mauss, leads us to consider that the hau of a taonga is nothing other than the yield, in the sense of money lending, produced by the first transfer. At least, this is the meaning Sahlins suggests. Testart proposes, in a simple and more satisfactory manner, the translation of hau by repayment. Similarly, in the analysis of land transactions in the High Middle Ages, the study of documents had led to the translation of pretium, not by price, but by repayment, this being according to the transactions at times in kind, at times in silver, at times valued, at times not [Feller, Gramain, Weber, 2005]. Should we then shelve the question about the force of things? I would argue no. In a gimwali type system as in the legal institutions that found the market, the objects are separated from the individuals who exchange them, and the real right (which pertains to things) is separated from the personal right (that pertains to persons). In the system of total services, things are not separated from persons, things and persons are mixed, says Mauss. To mark in language this fundamental difference, I will follow Mauss terminology, highlighted by Bazin [1997]: total services pertain to the circulation of things (precious things, talismans or taonga to use a Maori term, The Gift: 12) among persons (which are legal entities, The Gift: 6). For my part, I suggest reserving the terms object and individual for market transactions, so as to distinguish them clearly from non market services which imply both things and persons. The term hau is used by Tamati Ranapiri to explain to Elsdon Best the obligation to reciprocate outside the market place without any fixed price. The hau is therefore not a repayment fixed beforehand during a contract. What is fixed is that there must be repayment of the thing given. If one goes to the end of the text studied by Mauss, the hau carries a dimension of justice and sanction. If I kept this second taonga for myself, Ranapiri says, serious harm could come to me, even death. It is this dual dimension of justice and sanction that Mauss translates as the force of things. Mauss extends this Maori explication to all societies in which he analyses the various non market services. He emphasises two points. On the one hand, the things possessed with a force are distinct from ordinary objects just like, in Roman law, the res (essential things) of the familia (group consisting of persons and things) are distinct from the pecunia, small livestock and money, available for market transactions (the English word pecuniary, relating to money, comes from the Latin word pecunia). Accordingly, in Maori society, the taonga or precious things have a personality and even a name of their own. On the other hand, Mauss emphasises the relationship between these things and the persons who have been their holders: the thing that circulates conserves the trace of the persons among whom it has circulated. Even when it has been abandoned by the giver, it still possesses something of his (The Gift: 15). This presence of the person in the thing given is the main argument of Annette Weiner, who first revisited the area of Malinowski, the Trobriand Islands, paying special attention to
women, absent in the conclusions of her predecessor, their practices, their personal things and their power [Weiner 1976]. In a second more theoretical work, she stressed, following Mauss, the inalienable character of certain precious things that, like Crown jewels, cannot be transferred [Weiner 1992]. For her, reciprocity is only the superficial aspect of the exchange, which in reality is based on this inalienability. The spirit of the thing given is finally only the trace in it of the personality of each of its owners. Thus, things carry within them all their history. The French anthropologist Maurice Godelier [1996] takes up this theory by distinguishing the right of use which alone is handed down from the ownership which remains inalienable. He links all these inalienable things to the imaginary of power. These conclusions apply in particular to the study of family transmission in western societies [Gotman, 1988]. Each thing preserved carries a personal trace which forbids me from throwing it away or selling it. Here again, changes in the socio-economic context are worthwhile observing: the expansion of the ostentatious gift market among the well-to-do, where the personal link becomes more sought after than material resources, has led to an excess of useless gifts being exchanged on the Net. We may well wonder if this is not a sign of changing norms, as in the massim zone where the kula goods were able move out of the kula circuit in the 20 th century. The obligation to receive seems to have been weakened in contemporary societies without for all that removing the moral reprobation of the transgression of boundaries between social settings. The rules of gifts are not immutable, even though a systematic history of these rules is yet to be attempted. One of the best examples of such a transformation is provided by the marriage gifts in the Basel society at the end of the 19 th society. An established custom suddenly became a barbaric custom : the servant who brought the gift had to be given a tip equivalent to a fixed proportion of the value of the gift, which meant that one had to be able to evaluate correctly its price at a single glance. This rule of politeness got swept aside by social transformations in the space of a few years [Sarasin 1994]. The pledge and the nexum: of personal things Mauss would not have paid such great attention to this text of Tamati Ranapiri which he already knew and to which his friend Robert Hertz paid special attention, had he not studied archaic laws in the third chapter of The Gift. Indeed in this chapter, Mauss came back to the legal theory of the nexum, a thing which binds the contracting parties between themselves and which, as much as the formalism of the ritual gestures and formulae, gives the contract its force. The term nexum designates in concrete terms a knot and more precisely a pledge or a thing pledged. In Germanic law, the pledge, like the nexum in Roman law, is a thing of little value, but personalised, a glove for instance, given by one of the contracting parties to the other, and which incites the latter to execute the contract and respect his word. The pledge is a personal thing which pledges the honour of the one who gives it who throws it down, rather like one throws down the gauntlet in a challenge as also the honour of the one who receives it, willy-nilly. This time, unlike precious things linked first and foremost to each other, the pledge is above all a thing that links two persons. A comparison of pledge and symbol helps us better understand the scope of Mauss final remarks on archaic laws. Like the symbol (an object which represents another one), the pledge was frequently cut in two, half kept by one party and half by the other (The Gift: