by Lewis Hyde
But a gift makes a connection. To take the simplest of examples, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss tells of a seemingly trivial ceremony he has often seen accompany a meal in cheap restaurants in the South of France. The patrons sit at a long, communal table, and each finds before his plate a modest bottle of wine. Before the meal begins, a man will pour his wine not into his own glass but into his neighbor’s. And his neighbor will return the gesture, filling the first man’s empty glass. In an economic sense nothing has happened. No one has any more wine than he did to begin with. But society has appeared where there was none before. The French customarily tend to ignore people whom they do not know, but in these little restaurants, strangers find themselves placed in close relationship for an hour or more. “A conflict exists,” says Lévi-Strauss, “not very keen to be sure, but real enough and sufficient to create a state of tension between the norm of privacy and the fact of community… This is the fleeting but difficult situation resolved by the exchange of wine. It is an assertion of good grace which does away with the mutual uncertainty.” Spacial proximity becomes social life through an exchange of gifts. Further, the pouring of the wine sanctions another exchange—conversation—and a whole series of trivial social ties unfolds.
There are many such simple examples, the candy or cigarette offered to a stranger who shares a seat on the plane, the few words that indicate goodwill between passengers on the late-night bus. These tokens establish the simplest bonds of social life, but the model they offer may be extended to the most complicated of unions. As I took gifts at the time of death as the best examples of threshold gifts, so I would take gifts as peace overtures and gifts given in marriage as the types for the class of gifts that bring people together and make one body out of several (gifts of incorporation). The ceremonies are no different from the wine pouring. To take just one of the innumerable examples of marriage gifts, in New Caledonia when boys reach puberty they seek out girls from the clan complementary to their own and exchange tokens whose value and nature are set by custom. A boy’s first question to a girl whose favor he seeks is, “Will you take my gifts or not?” The answer is sometimes “I will take them,” and sometimes “I have taken the gifts of another man. I don’t want to exchange with you.” To accept a boy’s gifts initiates a series of oscillating reciprocations which leads finally to the formal gifts of nuptial union. Courtship in New Caledonia, it seems, is no different from courtship throughout the world.
Gifts of peace have the same synthetic character. Gifts have always constituted peace overtures among tribal groups and they still signify the close of war in the modern world, as when the United States helped Japan to rebuild after the Second World War. A gift is often the first step toward normalized relations. (To take a negative example, the United States did not offer aid to Vietnam after the war. The American Friends and the National Council of Churches both gave gifts to the Vietnamese—medical supplies and wheat—but Congress refused all reconstruction aid and the State Department went out of its way to frustrate the churches’ attempts to ship food. For the government, it seems, the war was not over.)
The bonds that gifts establish are not simply social, they may be spiritual and psychological as well. There are interior economies and invisible economies. Gift exchanges may join figures and forces within the drama of our inner lives. Were we to take the characters in a dream as separated powers of the soul, for example, then a gift given in a dream might serve the soul’s integration. To read the Scottish tale “The Girl and the Dead Man” in a similar fashion, the daughter who gives food to the night birds is joined to the spirit of her mother from whom she has parted in fact (while her sisters are estranged from the mother in fact and then in spirit). Gift exchange is the preferred interior commerce at those times when the psyche is in need of integration.
Our gifts may connect us to the gods as well. Sacrifice turns the face of the god toward man. We have already discussed the rites of the first fruit, a return gift that seeks to maintain relationship with the spiritual world. On the other side, the side of the gods, there are compassionate deities who approach us with gifts. The special case I want to consider here are the gods who become incarnate and then offer their own bodies as the gift that establishes the bond between man and the spiritual state to which the god pretends. In some of these cases the gift makes amends for an earlier separation. “Christ gave his body to atone for our sins, so that we might be made one with God.” “Sin” here is a falling away, a splitting apart: a man who sins acts so as to divide himself, internally or from his fellows or from God. “To atone” is to reunite, to make “at one.” There was a time when a criminal was allowed—and expected—to atone for his crime with a gift, the synthetic power of which would reestablish the broken bond and rein-corporate him into the body of the group. Spiritual systems call for atonement when a particular person or mankind as a whole is seen as having fallen away from an original unity with the gods. The Christian story is well known. In the Crucifixion or in the “Take, eat: this is my body,” Christ’s body becomes the gift, the vehicle of atonement, which establishes a new covenant between man and God.*
In other spiritual systems an incarnate spirit makes a gift of the body, though not in atonement, for no fall has preceded. There are higher states to which the race might aspire, and the spirit that has attained to them gives its body to open a path and establish a connection for others who would follow. Such a gift potentially revalues or redeems mankind. Again, this aspect of the Christian story is well known. Among the stories that are told about the Buddha there is another such tale of giving up the body. Tradition holds that the giving of alms is the first of the ten perfections required of a future Buddha. The JĀtaka, the Pali collection of accounts of the Buddha’s former lives, tells us that there was no limit to the number of existences in which Gautama Buddha became perfect in almsgiving, but the height of his perfection was reached during a lifetime in which he was a rabbit, the Wise Hare. Being a Future Buddha, this hare was naturally a rather special animal, one who not only gave alms but kept the precepts and observed the fast days.
The story goes like this. On one particular fast day the Wise Hare lay in his thicket, thinking to himself that he would go out and eat some dabba-grass when the time came to break his fast. Now, as the giving of alms while fasting brings great reward, and as any beggar who came before him might not want to eat grass, the hare thought to himself, If any supplicant comes, I will give him my own flesh. Such fiery spiritual zeal heated up the marble throne of Sakka, the ruler of the heaven of sensual pleasure. Peering down toward the earth, he spied the cause of this heat, and resolved to test the hare. He disguised himself as a Brahman and appeared before the Future Buddha.
“Brahman, why are you standing there?” asked the hare.
“Pandit, if I could only get something to eat, I would keep the fast-day vows and perform the duties of a monk.”
The Future Buddha was delighted. “Brahman,” he said, “you have done well in coming to me for food. Today I will give alms such as I never gave before; and you will not have broken the precepts by destroying life. Go, my friend, and gather wood, and when you have made a bed of coals, come and tell me. I will sacrifice my life by jumping into the bed of live coals. And as soon as my body is cooked, eat my flesh and perform the duties of a monk.”
When Sakka heard this speech, he made a heap of live coals by using his superhuman power, and came and told the Future Buddha, who then rose from his couch of dabba-grass and went to the spot. He shook himself three times, saying, “If there are any insects in my fur, I must not let them die.” Then “throwing his whole body into the jaws of his generosity” (as the Sutra puts it), he jumped into the bed of coals, as delighted in mind as a royal flamingo when it alights in a cluster of lotus blossoms.
The fire, however, was unable to burn even a hair-pore of the Future Buddha’s body. “Brahman,” said the hare, “the fire you have made is exceedingly cold. What does it mean?”
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“Pandit, I am no Brahman. I am Sakka, come to try you.”
“Sakka, your efforts are useless, for if all the beings who dwell in the world were to try me in respect to my generosity, they would not find in me any unwillingness to give.”
“Wise Hare,” said Sakka, “let your virtue be proclaimed to the end of this world-cycle.” And taking a mountain in his hand, he squeezed it and, with the juice, drew the outline of a hare on the disk of the moon.
The JĀtaka records 550 stories of the Buddha’s anterior lives; the point of these stories is to record the helical development of Gautama Buddha through the cycles of birth and rebirth. Almsgiving is always a part of the preparation for incorporation into a higher level, and the story of the Wise Hare is, says the JĀtaka, “the acme of almsgiving.” It is a Buddhist version of “Take, eat: this is my body,” the highest gift of the incarnate spirit. It is not a tale of atonement because the gift follows no previous alienation from the spirit world. But the gift connects the Buddha—and any who would follow his spirit—to a higher state. We must all give up the body, but saints and incarnate deities intend that gift, and, through it, establish bonds between man and the spiritual world.
The synthetic or erotic nature of the giving of a gift may be seen more clearly if we contrast it to the selling of commodities. I would begin the analysis by saying that a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. I’m obviously using these terms in a particular sense. I mean “worth” to refer to those things we prize and yet say “you can’t put a price on it.” We derive value, on the other hand, from the comparison of one thing with another. “I cannot express the value of linen in terms of linen,” says Marx in the classic analysis of commodities which opens his Capital. Value needs a difference for its expression; when there is no difference we are left with tautology (“a yard of linen is a yard of linen”). The phrases “exchange value” and “market value” carry the sense of “value” I mean to mark here: a thing has no market value in itself except when it is in the marketplace, and what cannot be exchanged has no exchange value.*
It is characteristic of market exchange that commodities move between two independent spheres. We might best picture the difference between gifts and commodities in this regard by imagining two territories separated by a boundary. A gift, when it moves across the boundary, either stops being a gift or else abolishes the boundary. A commodity can cross the line without any change in its nature; moreover, its exchange will often establish a boundary where none previously existed (as, for example, in the sale of a necessity to a friend). Logos—trade draws the boundary, eros—trade erases it.
In his analysis of commodities, Marx gives many examples of useful objects which are the product of human labor but which are not commodities. A man who makes his own tools does not make commodities. Likewise, “in the primitive communities of India … the products of … production do not become commodities.” The materials that circulate inside a factory are not commodities. Marx intends by all of these examples to underline his point that a commodity becomes such when it moves between two separate spheres (without, we would add, abolishing their separation). “The only products which confront one another as commodities are those produced by reciprocally independent enterprises.”
This being the case, commodity exchange will either be missing or frowned upon to the degree that a group thinks of itself as one body, as “of a piece.” Tribal groups or Marx’s “primitive communities of India” or close-knit families would all be examples. There is a famous law in the Old Testament—which I shall expand upon in a later chapter so as to present a history of gift exchange—a double law which prohibits the charging of interest on loans to members of the tribe while allowing that it may be charged to strangers. In terms of the present analysis, such a law asks that gift exchange predominate within the group (particularly in the case of needy members), while allowing that strangers may deal in commodities (money let out at interest being commodity-money or stranger-money). The boundary of the group is the key to which of the two forms of exchange is proper. Such a double law is not at all peculiar to the Jews; any close-knit group will express their sense of “brothers and others” in a double economy. In an earlier chapter I referred to an ethic among the Uduk: “any wealth transferred from one subclan to another, whether animals, grain or money, is in the nature of a gift, and should be consumed, not invested for growth.” No such prohibition applies to dealings with strangers, but the subclans of the Uduk intermarry; they are meant to be “of a piece,” and the preferred economy is therefore gift exchange, not market exchange.
If a thing is to have a market value, it must be detachable or alienable so that it can be put on the scale and compared. I mean this in a particular sense: we who do the valuation must be able to stand apart from the thing we are pricing. We have to be able to conceive of separating ourselves from it. I may be fond of my wristwatch but I can put a value on it because I can imagine parting with it. But my heart has no market value (at least not to me!), for to detach it is inconceivable. (I address below the interesting question of value in relation to body organs used for transplant.) We feel it inappropriate, even rude, to be asked to evaluate in certain situations. Consider the old ethics-class dilemma in which you are in a lifeboat with your spouse and child and grandmother and you must choose who is to be thrown overboard to keep the craft afloat—it’s a dilemma because you are forced to evaluate in a context, the family, which we are normally unwilling to stand apart from and reckon as we would reckon commodities. We are sometimes forced into such judgments, to be sure, but they are stressful precisely because we tend not to assign comparative values to those things to which we are emotionally connected.
Let us take one example each of the form of deliberation appropriate to marketing a commodity and to giving a gift. I intend these examples to illustrate the nature of the gift bond, to show that a bond precedes or is created by donation and that it is absent, suspended, or severed in commodity exchange. I have chosen rather striking cases here—how the Ford Motor Company marketed its Pinto automobile and how people who are called upon to do so decide whether or not to give one of their kidneys to a dying relative—yet each case is typical of the contrast between gift and commodity in that it is the presence or absence of an emotional connection which determines the mode of evaluation.
One classic way of evaluating the production, sale, or purchase of a commodity is cost-benefit analysis, in which a balance sheet is drawn up for some undertaking, weighing its expenses against its rewards. Cost-benefit analyses have met with justifiable scorn in recent years because they often involve a hidden confusion or deliberate obfuscation of the difference between worth and value. We feel some things to be gifts by nature, and these cannot be entered into a cost-benefit analysis because they cannot be priced. What is or isn’t a gift, however, is a matter of belief or custom, so it is not necessarily obvious when quantitative evaluation is improper.
In a classic example both of cost-benefit analysis and of the confusion between worth and value, the Ford Motor Company had to decide if it should add an inexpensive safety device to its Pinto cars and trucks. The Pinto’s gas tank was situated in such a way that it would rupture during a low-speed rear-end collision, spilling gasoline and risking a fire. Before putting the car on the market, Ford tested three different devices that would tend to prevent the rupturing of the tank. One would have cost $1, another around $5, and the third, $11. In the end, however, Ford decided that benefits did not justify costs, and no safety feature was added to the vehicle. According to Mark Dowie, between 1971, when the Pinto was introduced, and 1977, when the magazine Mother Jones printed Dowie’s analysis of the case, at least five hundred people burned to death in Pinto crashes.
In order to apply a cost-benefit analysis to a situation in which the core equation is “cost of safety parts versus cost of lives lost,” one must first put a price on life. Ford was spared the embarrassment of doing this themselves becau
se the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had already done it and Ford merely cribbed the figures. Here, as it appeared in a 1971 NHTSA study, is the itemized price of a traffic fatality, including a precise figure for “pain and suffering”:
A Ford Motor Company internal memorandum estimated that if the Pinto was sold without the $11 safety feature, 2,100 cars would burn every year, 180 people would be hurt but survive, and another 180 would burn to death. Rounding off the government’s figure, Ford put the price of a life at $200,000. They estimated a survivor’s medical bills at $67,000 and the cost of a lost vehicle at $700. Given the market—11 million cars and 1.5 million light trucks every year—the company then drew up the following balance sheet:
As the costs so clearly exceed the benefits, the decision was made not to spend money on the safety feature.
If we accept for a moment that human life may be counted as a commodity, the story of the Pinto offers a picture of decision-making in the marketplace. The classic model of market deliberation assumes an “economic man” whose desire is to increase his rewards and cut his costs. Homo oeconomicus identifies the elements of a problem and all of its possible solutions, treating no element as so much a part of himself that his emotions would be unduly stirred by its alienation. He lines up his choices, assigns prices to them, weighs one against another, chooses his course, and acts. Few of our decisions benefit from such complete analysis, of course, but nonetheless it is our goal in the marketplace to deliberate in this quantitative and comparative manner. How, then, do we make choices that involve gifts?
Some of the most interesting recent work on this question has come from studies of people who have been asked to give one of their kidneys to a mortally ill relative. The human body is able to function with a single kidney, though nature has given us two. It is now the case that another person’s kidney can be transplanted into the body of someone whose own kidneys have failed. The greatest problem with such transplants has been that the recipient’s immunological system, reacting as if the body had been invaded by a disease or by a foreign protein, attacks and destroys the new kidney. The closer the match between the blood type and tissue of the donor and those of the recipient, the less likely it is that the kidney will be identified as “foreign” and rejected. Kidney transplants are therefore more successful when the donor is a close relative. An identical twin is ideal, followed by siblings and then by parents or offspring. In 90 percent of the cases, transplants from a twin are still viable after two years. With other related donors, the success rate is around 70 percent. Kidneys from nonrelatives (usually from cadavers) are accepted about half the time.