The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  We should now face the question of exactly why ideas might be treated as gifts in science. To answer it we shall be obliged to speak first of the function of the scientific community. Let us say briefly that the task of science is to describe and explain the physical world, or more generally, to develop an integrated body of theory that can account for the facts, and predict them. Even such a brief prospectus points toward several reasons why ideas might be treated as gifts, the first being that the task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each individual thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of “group mind” develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person. The commerce of ideas—donated, accepted (or rejected), integrated—constitutes the thinking of such a mind. A Polish theoretical physicist who had once been isolated from science by anti-Semitism testifies to the need to be in the stream of ideas: “Like the Jewish Torah, which was taught from mouth to mouth for generations before being written down, ideas in physics are discussed, presented at meetings, tried out and known to the inner circle of physicists working in the great centers long before they are published in papers and books …” A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must “fit,” and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.

  These remarks on the scientific community are intended finally to illustrate the general point that a circulation of gifts can produce and maintain a coherent community, or, inversely, that the conversion of gifts to commodities can fragment or destroy such a group. To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary. Guilds of artisans, such as stone masons or leather tanners, used to keep their know-how a secret and charge the public for their services. Their knowledge would circulate as a “common” within the guild, but strangers paid a fee. Seen from the outside, trade secrets (commodity ideas) inhibit the advancement and integration of knowledge. Each trade may be its own community, but there will be no “community of science”; there may be pockets of expertise, but there will be no mechanism whereby a group mind might emerge, nor a body of theory be drawn together. A modern industry that patents the discoveries of its research scientists also sets a fee barrier around ideas.* Within an industrial research facility there may be a microcosm of gift exchange, but at the company gate it is profit that governs the flow of ideas. An industrial scientist often cannot contribute his ideas to the scientific community because he has to wait, sometimes years, while the company secures the patent. Even then, the discovery emerges not as a contribution but as a proprietary idea whose users must pay a fee, a usury, for its use. (There will always be exceptions, but as a rule, scientists who treat ideas as gifts thereby enjoy higher repute in the community, they are more apt to be engaged in theoretical [“pure,” “basic”] research, and they are less well remunerated. Those who hire out to proprietary concerns are more anonymous and less a part of the community, they tend to be working in applied science, and they are better paid.)*

  The remarkable commercial potential of recombinant DNA technology has recently prompted a debate within the scientific community over precisely the issues of gifts, commodities, and the goals of science. Not only have many academic biochemists been drawn into the marketplace and ceased to treat their ideas as gifts, but several academic institutions have considered following suit. In the fall of 1980, for example, Harvard University announced a proposal to found a university-related corporation to exploit the gene-splicing technology developed by its faculty. The idea was opposed (and eventually rejected) on several grounds, a primary one being the conflict between the need for secrecy in commercial ventures and the free exchange of ideas to which the academy is dedicated. As a geneticist at MIT, Dr. Jonathan Kind, remarked: “In the past one of the strengths of American bio-medical science was the free exchange of materials, strains of organisms and information … But now, if you sanction and institutionalize private gain and patenting of microorganisms, then you don’t send out your strains because you don’t want them in the public sector. That’s already happening now. People are no longer sharing their strains of bacteria and their results as freely as they did in the past.”

  Here we may revise my remarks on the connection between freedom and the marketplace. Free-market ideology addresses itself to the freedom of individuals, and from the point of view of the individual there often is a connection between freedom and commodities. But the story changes when approached from the point of view of the group. A gift community puts certain constraints on its members, yes, but these constraints assure the freedom of the gift. “Academic freedom,” as the term is used in the debate over commercial science, refers to the freedom of ideas, not to the freedom of individuals. Or perhaps we should say that it refers to the freedom of individuals to have their ideas treated as gifts contributed to the group mind and therefore the freedom to participate in that mind. The issue arises because when all ideas carry a price, then all discussion, the cognition of the group mind, must be conducted through the mechanisms of the market which—in this case, at least—is a very inefficient way to hold a discussion. Ideas do not circulate freely when they are treated as commodities. The magazine Science reported on a case in California in which one DNA research group sought to patent a technique that other local researchers had treated as common property, as “under discussion.” An academic scientist who felt his contribution had been exploited commented, “There used to be a good, healthy exchange of ideas and information among [local] researchers … Now we are locking our doors.” In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.

  There are forms of organization other than the one that follows a circulation of gifts. The military is highly organized. So is General Motors. One could develop a “contractual” theory of the organization of science which would assert that scientists are motivated by the desire for power and money, that they do research and publish in order to attract these rewards from whoever it is—the company, the consumer, the government—that hands out the jobs and the cash. Such a reward system leads to its own sort of group. But in science, at least, as Hagstrom points out, it is precisely when people work with no goal other than that of attracting a better job, or getting tenure or higher rank, that one finds specious and trivial research, not contributions to knowledge. When there is a marked competition for jobs and money, when such supposedly secondary goals become primary, more and more scientists will be pulled into the race to hurry “original” work into print, no matter how extraneous to the wider goals of the community. (In the literary community, at least in the last few decades, the need to secure a job has certainly accounted for a fair amount of the useless material that’s been published, both as literature and as criticism.) A contractual theory of the organization of science, Hagstrom concludes, “accounts not so much for its organization as for its disorganization.”

  I have not tried here to cover all the ways in which one might speak of science as a community. There is competition in science, of course, as well as gift exchange, and there is individualism as well as teamwork. But I think it right to begin, as Hagstrom does, with the emergence of community through the circulation of knowledge as gift. After community has appeared, we may speak of dissent, segmentation, differentiation, dispute, and all the other nuances of intellectual life. But it would be difficult to work in the other direction—to begin with ideas exchanged in a way that stressed particularity, individuality, and personal profit—and then move toward a
coordination of effort and a harmony of theory. A contractual theory may well account for effective organization in business, even in businesses that hire scientists. But as long as the goals of science require an intellectual community congenial to discourse and capable of integrating a coherent body of theory, gift exchange will be a part of its commerce.

  Science makes for a somewhat anomalous example of community emerging through a circulation of gifts because ideas exchanged between intellectuals are “cool” gifts. Not that there aren’t passionate scientists, but ideas printed in journals can never really have the emotional immediacy of most gifts. Moreover, the fragmentation that results from the conversion of ideas to commodities doesn’t seem as marked as that which follows in less abstract and specialized groups, such as a family or kin network. To take one of innumerable examples, the gifts given in marriage on one Polynesian island are shown in the chart reproduced below. There is no need at this point to go into the exchanges in detail; the sheer complexity of the chart is what I want to present. There are nine major transfers of goods between the kin of the groom and those of the bride, with more than that number of subsidiary transfers. After a marriage like this, everyone is connected to everyone else in one way or another. Imagine what it must be like after half a dozen marriages and as many initiation ceremonies and funerals (whose exchanges are even more complicated than those of marriage). There will be an ongoing and generalized indebtedness, gratitude, expectation, memory, sentiment— in short, lively social feeling. As with the simple exchange of wine in the restaurant, constant and long-term exchanges between many people may have no ultimate “economic” benefit, but through them society emerges where there was none before. And now imagine what would happen were all the gifts in this chart to be converted to cash purchase. There would be no wedding, of course, but more than that, as with the Bushmen, the residents of the Flats, or scientists doing research, if every exchange were to separate or free the participants from one another there would also be no community.

  To close this discussion of community, I want to add a brief suggestion as to what might be the political form of a gift economy. Gifts are best described, I think, as anarchist property. The connections, the “contracts,” established by their circulation differ in kind from the ties that bind in groups organized through centralized power and top-down authority. Marcel Mauss’s original “Essay on the Gift” was in part a speculation on the origins of modern contract and will serve, therefore, as a useful entry to the point I have in mind. Is gift exchange, Mauss wondered, a primitive form of ensuring those unions that are today made secure by legal, written agreement? He gives two replies. On the one hand, it seems correct to see the felt bond of gift exchange—“the obligation to return”—as an archaic form of the legal nexum. But in tracing the shift from primitive to modern, Mauss underscores a loss as well. As I mentioned in the introduction, his essay focuses on gift exchange as a “total social phenomenon,” one in which religious, legal, moral, economic, and aesthetic institutions appear simultaneously. And it is only as these several threads are differentiated that legal contract develops as a discrete institution.

  To take one of Mauss’s own examples, a time of such differentiation was marked by the development of the distinction between “real” and “personal” law—between, that is, a law of things and a law of persons. In a gift economy, as we have amply seen, such a distinction is blurred, for things are treated in some degree as persons and vice versa. Person and thing, the quick and the dead, are distinguished spiritually, not rationally. Such was the case, Mauss surmises, in ancient Italy. In the very oldest Roman and Italic law, he contends, “things had a personality and a virtue of their own. Things are not the inert objects which the laws of Justinian and ourselves imply. They are a part of the family …” In antiquity the Roman familia was not simply people but the entire “household,” including the objects in the home down to the food and the means of livelihood. Later Roman law, however, increasingly distinguished economic and ritual interest; it divided the familia into res and personae, into things and persons, and in so doing, “passed beyond that antiquated and dangerous gift economy, encumbered by personal considerations, incompatible with the development of the market, trade and productivity—which was, in a word, uneconomic.” The distinction between thing and person is as much a feature of the modern world as it was of later Roman law, of course. As Mauss comments elsewhere, “This distinction is fundamental; it is the very condition of part of our system of property, alienation and exchange. Yet it is foreign to the customs we have been studying.”

  Marriage gifts among the Tikopia. From Primitive Polynesian Economy by Raymond Firth (London, 1939).

  Legal contract bears a vestige of the gift “contract,” but gift exchange must be placed in a separate sphere because, while contract sanctioned by law may formalize the union of gift exchange, it does so by disengaging it from the other components of a “total social phenomenon.” It sheds the emotional and spiritual content. Indebtedness and obligation become simply economic and legal relationships. Contract in law is a rationalization of the gift bond, just as usury (or interest), as I shall argue later, is a rationalization of the increase of gift exchange. Both contract and usury imitate the structure of a gift economy, but both drop the feeling, the “uneconomic” feeling.

  If we are to speak of gift exchange politically, we must derive the politics from the nature of the gift contract. I have opened with Mauss’s story of Roman law because it sets the terms for a group of political tales with a similar theme. We may begin, as historians of anarchism commonly do, with the story of the Anabaptists’ brief tenure over the Westphalian city of Münster in the early sixteenth century. The various religious movements that emerged in Europe during the Reformation were a reaction not only against the papacy but against a new (and Roman) concept of property that allowed, for example, local princes, through the invisible magic of statutory law, to turn the “commons”—common fields, woods, and streams—into private preserves.

  Of the many movements that rose in opposition to such “Roman” ideas, the Anabaptists are usually taken as antecedents to the political revolutionaries of later centuries. There were many Anabaptist factions, but all agreed in denying power to civil authority. Since the baptized were in direct contact with the Lord, any intermediary (state or church) was not only unnecessary but frankly faithless. Nothing should stand between a person and the inner light which informs his actions.

  The town of Münster had suffered a series of tribulations (the plague, an economic recession, heavy state taxes), and a good portion of its citizens converted to the new Anabaptist creed and took control of the town. They expelled both Catholics and Lutherans. The bishop of Westphalia, the town’s nominal ruler, laid siege to it with an army of mercenaries. The citizens held the bishop off for almost a year, surviving on communal stores of food and clothing. To the faithful it seemed clear that Münster would soon become the new Jerusalem. As an initial ceremonial act, marking their control of the town and the start of the new age, the Anabaptists burned all written records of contracts and debts.

  In 1842, more than three hundred years later, the German anarchist Wilhelm Weitling took the Anabaptist leaders as his inspiration in writing a proclamation: “A time will come when … we shall light a vast fire with banknotes, bills of exchange, wills, tax registers, rent contracts and IOUs, and everyone will throw his purse into the fire …”* Thirty years later we find the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta acting on Weitling’s idea. In 1877 he and a band of compatriots took to the woods near Naples and began to move from town to town, abolishing the state as best they could. As the historian James Joll describes it,

  At the village of Lentino the column arrived on a Sunday morning, declared King Victor Emanuel deposed and carried out the anarchist ritual of burning the archives which contained the record of property holdings, debts and taxes.

  We do not know if they also threw their purses into the fire.
/>   These are all stories of a struggle between legal contract and what might be called “contracts of the heart.” Anarchists, like the Anabaptists before them, have always sought to declare null and void those unions that do not carry with them a felt cohesiveness and therefore tend toward coercion. It is a rare society that can be sustained by bonds of affection alone; most, and particularly mass societies, must have as well those unions which are sanctioned and enforced by law that is detached from feeling. But just as the Roman saw the familia divided into res and personae, the modern world has seen the extension of law further and further into what was earlier the exclusive realm of the heart. Law has sought to strengthen those bonds that in former times were secured through faithfulness and gratitude, however indeterminate these may have been. But the law is limited in its ability to bring people together and secure order. Not only does law tend to shed the emotional and spiritual content of a total social phenomenon, but the process of law requires a particular kind of society—it requires, to begin with, adversaries and reckoning, both of which are excluded by the spirit of gift exchange. Because the spirit of the gift shuns exactness and because gifts do not necessarily move reciprocally (and therefore do not produce the adversary roles of creditor and debtor), courts of law would be rightly perplexed as to how to adjudicate a case of ingratitude. Contracts of the heart lie outside the law, and the circle of gift is narrowed, therefore, whenever such contracts are converted to legal relationships.

  These stories, at any rate, from Anabaptist to anarchist, reflect a felt and acted-upon belief that life is somehow diminished by the codification of contract and debt. The opposition has been not only to those codified debts that secure the position of class, but to any codification that encourages the separation of thing and spirit by abandoning total social phenomena to a supposedly primitive past and thereby enervating felt contract. The burning of written debt instruments is a move to preserve the ambiguity and inexactness that make gift exchange social. Seen in this way, their destruction is not an antisocial act. It is a move to free gratitude as a spiritual feeling and social binder. If gratitude is, as Georg Simmel once put it, “the moral memory of mankind,” then it is a move to refreshen that memory which grows dull whenever our debts are transformed into obligations and servitudes, whenever the palpable and embodied unions of the heart— entered into out of desire, preserved in gratitude, and quit at will—are replaced by an invisible government of merely statutory connections.