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By Root 811 0

involved—the goodwill of each transaction—is more clearly embodied in the excess, the extra blankets thrown in at the end by each new recipient. And certainly it makes sense to say that the increase is the real gift in those cases in which the gift-object is sacrificed, for the increase continues despite (even because of) that loss; it is the constant in the cycle, because it is not consumed in use. The Maori elder who told of the forest hau distinguished in this way between object and increase, the mauri set in the forest and its hau which causes the game to abound. In that cycle the hau is nourished and passed along, while the gift-objects (birds, mauri) disappear.

Marshall Sahlins, when he commented on the Maori gift stories, asked that we “observe just where the term hau enters into the discussion. Not with the initial transfer from the first to the second party, as well it could if [the hau] were the spirit in the gift, but upon the exchange between the second and third parties, as logically it would if it were the yield on the gift. The term ‘profit’ is economically and historically inappropriate to the Maori, but it would have been a better translation than ‘spirit’ for the hau in question.”

Sahlins’s gloss highlights something that has been implicit in our discussion, though not yet stated directly—the increase comes to a gift as it moves from second to third party, not in the simpler passage from first to second. This increase begins when the gift has passed through someone, when the circle appears. But, as Sahlins senses, “profit” is not the right word. Capital earns profit and the sale of a commodity turns a profit, but gifts that remain gifts do not earn profit, they give increase. The distinction lies in what we might call the vector of the increase: in gift exchange it, the increase, stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit. (These two alternatives are also known as positive and negative reciprocity.)

With this in mind, we may return to a dictum laid out in chapter i—one man’s gift must not be another man’s capital—and develop from it a corollary, saying: the increase that comes of gift exchange must remain a gift and not be kept as if it were the return on private capital. Saint Ambrose of Milan states it directly in a commentary on Deuteronomy:

“God has excluded in general all increase of capital.” Such is the ethic of a gift society.*

I have explained the increase of gifts in three ways in this chapter: as a natural fact (when gifts are actually alive); as a natural-spiritual fact (when gifts are the agents of a spirit that survives the consumption of its individual embodiments); and as a social fact (when a circulation of gifts creates community out of individual expressions of goodwill). In each of these cases the increase pertains to an ego or body larger than that of any individual participant. Thus to speak of the increase of gifts is to speak of something simultaneously material, social, and spiritual. Material wealth may be produced in the course of a commerce of gifts (in the cases at hand, for example, food is gathered and preserved for the winter, canoes are constructed, lodges are built, blankets are woven, banquets prepared, and so forth and so on). And yet no material good becomes an item of commerce without simultaneously nourishing the spirit (of the salmon, of the tribe, of the race). To reverse the vector of the increase may not destroy its material portion (it may even augment it), but the social and spiritual portions drop away. Negative reciprocity does not feed the hau. To say, then, that the increase of a gift must itself be a gift is to ask that we not abandon the increase-of-the-whole in favor of a more individual and more plainly material growth.

To restate this choice in slightly different terms, a circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, the group, the race, or the gods. Furthermore, although these wider spirits are a part of us, they are not