In 1925, French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote the classic of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange, arguing that gifts create and reproduce social relations. Mauss noticed three obligations in societies practicing the so-called gift economies: to give, to accept, and to return the gift (Mauss 1967[1925]). Since every gift carries with it a set of obligations, it presents a materialization of social relations. When there is a significant temporal delay between the gift and the countergift, or when there are many people linked into a network (Lévi-Strauss 1969), participants can avoid recognizing their participation in a gift exchange.
Anthropologist Anette Weiner suggests that there are forms of giving that contribute to the reproduction of whole societies, not just of relations between particular individuals. In such forms of giving, an obligation is created not just between the giver and the receiver, but also between their relatives and non-kin, allowing for “long term regeneration of intergenerational (and intragenerational) social relations” (Weiner 1980: 79).
This view of the gift as productive of social relations has sparked a discussion among various social theorists on the possibilities of a “free gift”–one that requires no answer, and thus is not implicated in the creation and reiteration of social relations. For instance, French philosopher Jacques Derrida claimed that a true gift must not be linked with any acknowledgment. Any sort of a response–even saying “thank you”–moves the gift into a domain of exchange: “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift or debt” (Derrida 1992: 13). In his reading, the only real gift can be the gift of time.
Anthropologist James Parry has critically assessed the urge of Western scholars to find the free gift, noticing that “the ideology of disinterested gift emerges in parallel with an ideology of purely interested exchange” (Parry 1986: 458). In other words, an assumption that there is something corrupt about gifts intertwined with reciprocity or interest is the product of an ideology that first appeared in modern states with an advanced division of labor. Exchange of commodities and gifts in modernist societies works in a specific conceptual frame, where gifts and exchange, persons and things, interest and disinterest need to be clearly kept apart.
Theories of gift exchange have influenced humanitarian studies. Humanitarianism presents a distinct form of a transnational gift that cannot be reciprocated (Bornstein 2012). As Didier Fassin argues, there is an assumption of ontological inequality between the givers and the recipients of humanitarian aid. Those who need saving “are those for whom the gift cannot imply a counter-gift, since it is assumed that they can only receive. They are the indebted of the world” (Fassin 2007: 512). Although it precludes reciprocity, humanitarian aid is not quite a “free gift.” Following Weiner’s argument (that gift giving is not necessarily about reciprocity between particular persons, but about regeneration of the wider social order), we can analyze how obligations created through humanitarian aid reproduce geopolitical links and social relations on a global scale. Finally, there is an ongoing tension in humanitarianism between the spontaneous and fleeting impulse to save lives and the regulation of this impulse through attempts to bureaucratize humanitarian aid (Bornstein 2009). Very often, this tension results in adhocracy, “a system that used rough-and-ready ways of knowing to quickly arrive at improvised solutions” (Dunn 2012: 15) creating along the way “chaos and vulnerability as much as it creates order” (Dunn 2012: 2).
References
Bornstein, E. (2009) The Impulse of Philanthropy. Cultural Anthropology, 24(4): 622–651.
Bornstein, E. (2012) Disquieting Gifts. Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (1992) Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. The University of Chicago Press.
Dunn, E.C. (2012) “The Chaos of Humanitarian Aid: Adhocracy in the Republic of Georgia.” Humanity, 3(1): 1–23.
Fassin, D. (2007) Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life. Public Culture, 19(3): 499–520.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969) [1949] The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Beacon Press.
Mauss, M. (1967) [1925] The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. W.W. Norton & Company.
Parry, J. (1986) The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift.” Man, 21: 453–473.
Weiner, A.B. (1980) Reproduction: A Replacement for Reciprocity. American Ethnologist, 7(1): 71–85.