David Egan Philosophy

The coming month will see a bonanza of gift giving, whether in celebration of Christmas, Hanukkah, or, in my family, three birthdays (not mine). That’s all well and good in practice, as they say at the University of Chicago, but how does it work in theory?

Suppose you give me a gift (a book you know I’d love, say) and I react with gratitude and thanks—and then pull out my wallet and hand you the cash equivalent of what the gift cost. To put it mildly, that would be obtuse. Handing you the cash nullifies the gift—rejects it even. It turns an occasion of gift-giving into a commercial exchange and turns your act of kindness into a deed of sale. Giving a gift is an act of generosity that doesn’t expect repayment.

But then consider another form of misfire. You give me a gift (that same book!) and I just take it from you and put it on my shelf without a word of thanks. Suppose you’ve been good at remembering me every year on my birthday with greetings and gifts and I don’t even bother asking when your birthday is. Again, I’m violating a code of behaviour we all understand even if it isn’t written down anywhere.

A gift is only a gift if I don’t pay you back for it in kind. But a gift does demand some form of repayment—expressions of thanks, reciprocal gift-giving, and so on. What is this strange economy of gift-giving?

As it happens, gift exchange has long been a subject of interest to anthropologists. Bronisław Malinowski brought attention to the phenomenon in 1922 in what is generally regarded as the first modern ethnography. Marcel Mauss published an influential analysis of gift exchange a few years later. Both of them explored the complex ways in which gift exchange builds relationships and structures power relations.

Think of gift exchange as a way of binding people together through debt. When you give me a gift, you’ve placed me in your debt. I know, this isn’t a warm-and-fuzzy way of thinking about gift-giving but hear me out. What’s ostensibly an act of generosity also creates an obligation.

Let’s go back to my two examples of gift-giving gone awry: the case where I offer you the cash equivalent of your gift and the case where I don’t reciprocate at all. In both of these cases, I’m refusing to be put in your debt.

In the latter case, the one where I don’t reciprocate, I’m acting as if your gift creates no obligation. And, on the surface, it doesn’t. After all, the gift is given freely and you’d undermine its value as a gift if you were to state explicitly that you expect something in return. But clearly you do expect something in return, even if just an expression of thanks. And what is thanks if not an expression of indebtedness? This is clear in the French word for “thank you”: merci is a way of saying, “I am at your mercy.”

The former case, the one where I offer you a cash equivalent, is a way of cancelling the debt. The cash payback amounts to a settling of accounts. I’m no longer in your debt because I’ve paid you for your service to me. The act is doubly offensive. Not only does it negate the debt but it makes explicit the fact that the gift created a debt in the first place. Part of what’s peculiar about gift-giving is that it puts the recipient in the gift-giver’s debt but it’s taboo to talk about gifts in terms of debts. Gift-giving is the debt-making that dare not speak its name.

Indebtedness creates a bond between two people by promising future interaction. If I’m in your debt, we’re going to have to interact again sometime—at least enough for me to settle my debt to you. For this reason, it’s important that gifts passed between people are never exactly equivalent. Each new gift creates a new debt rather than simply cancelling the debt that had been incurred before.

This way of thinking about indebtedness points to a less cynical understanding of gift-giving. When we exchange gifts, we’re expressing a commitment to the perpetuation of our relationship. When you give me a gift, you place me in your debt, but this needn’t be a calculated power move. It can be an expression of connectedness, a way of saying, “I want this relationship to continue.” As long as one of us is indebted to the other, we can’t walk away from the relationship.

That’s why healthy relationships involve reciprocal, and often playful, exchanges of gifts. The creditor holds a certain power over the debtor but that power needn’t feel unbalanced if the two people constantly switch roles of creditor and debtor. When gift-giving becomes a repeated and reciprocal ritual, people show a comfort and ease with the way that their relationship binds them in layers of mutual obligation to one another.

One of the most impressive analyses I’ve ever read of status relationships comes not from a philosopher or a psychologist or an anthropologist but from one of the great masters of improvisational theatre. Keith Johnstone, who died last spring, first published the lessons he learned over decades of teaching improvisation in Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. It’s one of those classics that’s relevant far beyond its immediate subject area. I read it as an aspiring playwright and I think I learned more from it about storytelling than I did from any how-to book about storytelling.

One of Johnstone’s insights is that status is everywhere in human relationships. He shows how even the most innocuous exchanges are rife with subtle power moves. (One insight here for aspiring playwrights: you can track the movement of a scene through changes of status. That’s why a scene with two people sitting in chairs talking can be electrifying if their power relationship constantly changes while another scene of busy running about can feel flat if none of the action changes anyone’s status.)

On Johnstone’s analysis, it’s naïve, utopian, and aesthetically bland to wish for a world in which everyone is always of equal status. A happy world isn’t a world that’s free of status. It’s a world in which status is fluid and in which people change status willingly and playfully. Think of the charm of someone who’s able to laugh at herself when she takes a fall and the prickliness of someone who insists on maintaining his dignity even in embarrassing moments.

In this light, gift exchange at its best is a playful form of status exchange. It acknowledges that relationships always involve imbalances of power, but shows that both parties to the relationship are comfortable enough with one another that they can switch between the roles of creditor and debtor with ease and grace. 

1. Contrary to its reputation as a greener alternative, natural gas is in many respects worse for the climate than coal. (source)
2. After Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia stopped screening Soviet films. But Yugoslavia lacked a home-grown film industry and they also didn’t want to show films from imperialist America. Instead, Yugoslavia started importing films from Mexico, which became very popular, kicking off a “Yu-Mex” craze. Yugoslav musicians would don sombreros and play Mexican-styled music, sometimes with Spanish lyrics, and sometimes with lyrics in Serbo-Croatian. (source)
3. Lebanon hasn’t had a census since 1932. (source)
4. If you buy a pet rabbit in the UK, you don’t have to pay the 20% sales tax you would pay for any other pet because rabbits are considered edible, and there’s no sales tax on food. (source)
5. When a person flips a coin, there’s a 50.8% chance that it will land with the same face up as when it was flipped. Those are better odds than a casino has with blackjack. (source)
6. As late as the Middle Ages, there were more Christians in Asia than in Europe. (source)
7. Half of Americans who buy vinyl records don’t own a record player. (source)
8. Costa Rica has no military. They abolished the military in 1948 and since then have employed a national law enforcement agency to handle policing and border control. (source)
9. Microplastics aren’t just polluting the oceans; they’re also polluting the air. It’s literally raining plastic: a study of 11 protected areas in the western United States found that, during a 14 month period, over 1000 metric tonnes of plastic fell with the rain. That’s the equivalent of dropping 120 million plastic water bottles from the sky. (source)