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BOOK CLUB: The Gift Intro - Ch2
🕑 Added 2025-06-09 22:46:29 +0000 UTC"unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved.* Furthermore, when gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges."
* It is this element of relationship which leads me to speak of gift exchange as an "erotic" commerce, opposing eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular). A market economy is an emanation of logos.
Introduction to The Gift by Lewis Hyde
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This is the first week of reading The Gift by Lewis Hyde, which was featured in my Kiki's Delivery Service video essay.
Commerce, ritual, community, art, relationship, ways to understand the things you are inside of and ways to make them where they aren't. Yeah it's book club.
The following are just a few quotes and my reactions to them.
Intrinsic Value, Luxury, Religion
Malinowski calls the Kula articles "ceremonial gifts" because their social use far exceeds their practical use. A friend of mine tells me that his group of friends in college continually passed around a deflated basketball. The joke was to get it mysteriously deposited in someone else's room. The clear uselessness of such objects seems to make it easier for them to become vehicles for the spirit of a group. (13)
Much of my instincts in aesthetic philosophy were first extremely opposed to any dualistic distinction between "Real Art" which is ART FOR ARTS SAKE, as opposed to "Not Art" which is compromised somehow, as it is used for some functional purpose or it is created with limitations on what it can and should be. There are so many reasons I oppose this distinction that you would have to follow my career for my whole life to get all of them out of me, but I've become much more sympathetic to the idea of "uselessness" being somewhat divine.
"Imagine utopia where we've solved all our practical problems. What would we do with all our time? We would play games or we would die of boredom. So if games are all we do in utopia then they must be the meaning of life."
This lines up with the notion that intrinsic activity is sacred, while instrumental activity is profane. Labour is activity that you would remove from your life if you could, and play is activity that you would not remove from your life.
Again, I disagree that these things are easily distinguishable, but in part 5 of my 6 Shapes of God video I find that some activities seem to be lightning rods for sacred intrinsic community experience. Creating and enjoying art, playing games and structured conversation are examples of "instrumental" social activities that tend to result in heavenly sacred experience.
Byung-Chul Han argues in The Disappearance of Rituals that rituals of abundant luxurious waste serve a similar function. By acting totally against rational material ends, the intrinsic "for its own sake" activity seems to work as a portal into the sacred. When something "useless" is held up as sacred, deep social and personal connections seems to manifest around it.
A Secret Third Thing
The Maori have a word, hau, which translates as "spirit," particularly the spirit of the gift and the spirit of the forest which gives food. In these tribes, when hunters return from the forest with birds they have killed, they give a portion of the kill to the priests, who, in turn, cook the birds at a sacred fire. The priests eat a few of them and then prepare a sort of talisman, the mauri, which is the physical embodiment of the forest hau. (18)
Related to the first point, expanding an otherwise rational transactional relationship into the realm of ritual and mystery seems to sustain the circle, animating it with spirit and meaning and intrinsic value, rather than soul killing value capture and cancerous optimization.
The salmon harvesting ritual also features a similar element, where the first salmon of the season is honoured with personal welcome, ritual celebration and respectful treatment, on the belief that if they offend the salmon then they will cease to be in good relations, the gift of food will cease to flow.
The Potlatch
Status and generosity were always associated: no man could become a man of position without giving away property. (28)
The potlatch is something I am featuring heavily in my next lecture in Vancouver, and is something that captured my imagination all the way back in 2022, when I first encountered it in Royal BC Museum in Victoria.
This was a tradition common amongst native american tribes, wherein they'd mark major events with long celebrations that included public redistribution of wealth. Those with great riches, resources and rank would give gifts to other members of the community correspondent to their good fortune. Honour was earned through the giving of gifts, while their mere accumulation was looked down upon.
This was immediately inspiring to me. The bit in the museum ended with a short sentence explaining that the Westerners made this practice illegal and violently enforced the ban, due to the potlatches being raucous, irrational, and wasteful.
Years later, I am coming into contact with the idea again. There are differing accounts, some of which sharply diverge from the idyllic noble socialist savage depiction I first encountered. W. David Marx's Status and Culture led me to George Batailles The Accursed Share, which instead interprets the practice of Potlatch as something that could be wielded by powerful members of the tribe to challenge and humiliate their rivals.
Marcel Mauss's seminal essay on Gifts paints a similar cynical tale, emphasizing also the function of conspicuous waste, like a king setting money on fire to demonstrate his wealth.
Now Lewis Hyde complicates it all just a bit further for fun, suggesting that the most wasteful and socially toxic versions of the potlatch were the consequence of colonial capitalist forces merging with tribal life, morphing the potlatch into something confusing and unsustainable.
When Mauss read through Boas's published field notes, he declared potlatch "the monster child of the gift system." So it was. As first studied, the potlatch was the progeny of a European capitalism mated to an aboriginal gift economy, and with freakish results: sewing machines thrown into the sea, people embarrassed into sitting in houses set afire with fish oil, Indians dancing with pink silk parasols or stooped under layer after layer of cheap wool blankets, and as the sun set the Canadian Royal Mounted Police riding off with coppers and other ritual property to suppress the potlatch, which their government had declared illegally wasteful. (30)
My conclusion? Indeterminate. I am sure that the potlatch was a mix of all of these things! and i find it fascinating in structure. I'm looking forward to reading and re-reading all of these sources and continuing to render my own interpretation.
I do think that the flow and shape of status is an essential way to understand cultures and rituals and societies, and if we are to build new cultures and create sustainable communities and carve out our communal values, it makes sense to use Art and Worldbuilding to make high status such things that we desire to see.
I'm reading Conflict Is Not Abuse in preparation for my lecture on accountability and conflict between people. That book argues we've developed a highly, HIGHLY carceral and punitive idea of conflict resolution, one that enthusiastically thrusts power over to the state and creates toxic communities, where individuals who are uncomfortable and hurt and in conflict with others are incetivized to escalate the conflict rather than seek resolution or continued relationship.
The "insult" of the potlatch, in this case, is a much more productive and beautiful way to express your desire for status, and to seek higher status, than trying to validate yourself at the expense of others reputations, or destroy those that make you feel small.
When someone in one of these tribes was mistakenly insulted, his response, rather than turning to a libel lawyer, was to give a gift to the man who had insulted him; if indeed the insult was mistaken, the man would make a return gift, adding a little extra to demonstrate his goodwill, a sequence that has the same structure (back and forth with increase) as the potlatch itself. (35)
Much to fucking Think about.
ok,. time to make dinner.
Reading Chapters 3 & 4 for next monday!~
Thoughts & Feelings below
Comments
Seoyoung Park
I'm so so so fucking late!!! Who will even read this comment! These are the prices I pay for the crimes of being late... In my marxist anthropology class where I first learned about gift economies and potlaches, one of the things we talked about ENDLESSLY was manufactured scarcity. This shit is lichrally everywhere. Every single aspect of capitalist life is constructed by the intent for manufactured scarcity: this makes an abundance mindset near impossible and also, at times, delusional. As a huge supporter of abundance mindsets, I found this part of the book extremely moving. The idea of gift always moving towards vacuum, of lack being a beckoning for more, and the idea that movement is the essence of wealth, were all SO intuitively true for me. I often find it to be true as well... I loved the ideas of negative and positive reciprocity. The idea of the "increase" by movement of the gift v. the profit being left behind by a commodity were such visceral descriptions of the two forms of accumulation.
Matt The Fyrm
So I’m going to be playing a bit of catchup. I started reading on time but then for several reasons I just simply could not afford to have bookclub on my mind and I never finished the bits of writing that I did already have into a (semi-)coherent comment. Anyways, I was (/am) very excited to share these thoughts so here goes. ___ To start with, I absolutely adore this book. Hyde manages to put into words things that I feel very passionate about, but haven’t until now been able to completely pin down. I love it when that happens. All my life I have been incredibly uncomfortable around dealing with money in social settings. I haaaaate having to ask friends and family to pay me back whenever I paid for something. I can’t help but feel anxious about whether they could feel pressured, that I am shallow for asking, that they must hate me now that I’ve introduced money into our relationship, yadayadayada. Doing this has always felt retroactively destructive to me. Like I’m ruining what at the time might’ve been an intrinsically valuable moment in which we strengthened our relationship, whatever it may be. By reminding myself and the other person of the profane reality of the situation, the bill that came at the end of said activity, I always feel I am dishonoring the reason why we did that activity in the first place. I would do anything to be able to just pay for things and not worry about getting the money back, but alas as a broke student, that luxury is not afforded to me. A system where everyone just pays for each other sometimes and we can just trust that that gesture will be reciprocated at some point in the future would be even better of course, and I do try to initiate that sometimes, but since my friends too are all broke students, that luxury is not always afforded to us. A nice compromise that we have found is an app in which we can all keep track of expenses and that can then balance everyone’s ‘debts’ to each other in one fell swoop at some point later in time. It seems to me this sooths the issues I described before because it aligns with at least the first of the ethics in the Kula gift-circle: the prohibition on discussion. With the app, no one ever has to specifically ask another to pay them back; the math is done automatically and when inbalances get consolidated (usually after a trip or some big event) and everything goes right, you only have to send one or two payments to the people who took on the most debt. The way the app works means that if you are generous enough, maybe you won’t have to pay anything back at all, which incentivises people to contribute. I think that this is a beautiful way to manage our economic insecurities while still maintaining something of that social fabric creating gift circle. ___ Also, even though I couldn't make sense of these notes after the fact i just cannot help but highlight this passage because I think the imagery is so incredibly beautiful: "We stand before a bonfire or even a burning house and feel the odd release it brings, as if the trees could give the sun return for what enters them through the leaf." p. 20 That's one I'm gonna remember whenever I sit around a fire with my friends and family.
