The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [26]
In the present century the opposition between negative and positive reciprocity has taken the form of a debate between “capitalist” and “communist,” “individualist” and “socialist”; but the conflict is much older than that, because it is an essential polarity between the part and the whole, the one and the many. Every age must find its balance between the two, and in every age the domination of either one will bring with it the call for its opposite. For where, on the one hand, there is no way to assert identity against the mass, and no opportunity for private gain, we lose the well-advertised benefits of a market society—its particular freedoms, its particular kind of innovation, its individual and material variety, and so on. But where, on the other hand, the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of gift exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling. For where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to participate in those “wider spirits” I just spoke of— unable to enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community out of the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition. Only when the increase of gifts moves with the gift may the accumulated wealth of our spirit continue to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality beyond his or her solitary powers.
* In the fall of 1980 a group of Australian aborigines asked the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to help them protect their lands from commercial exploitation. According to a wire service report, “one of the group’s major concerns is the violation of the sacred home of the aboriginal lizard god, Great Goanna, by Amax, an American petroleum company that is under contract to the state government of Western Australia to drill there. The Yungnara tribe on the Noonkanbah pastoral station believes that if Goanna is disturbed he will order the six-foot monitor lizards, which are a source of food for the aborigines, to stop mating and thus eventually cause a food shortage.”
There may be no necessary link between scarcity and exploitation, but the connection is not unknown, either. In the North Pacific, salmon stocks actually did decline as soon as European settlers began to treat the fish as a commodity to be sold for a profit. By the end of the nineteenth century a salmon cannery sat at the mouth of every major river on the Alaskan coast; many overfished the runs and drove themselves out of business. On the East Coast the salmon essentially disappeared, although they were once so plentiful as to have been the dietary staple of the textile workers in the mill towns along the Merrimac River. (In the summer of 1974 a salmon was found in the Connecticut River; it was dead, but it was the first to appear in those waters in 150 years.)
* To say that coppers are images of zoë-life would explain why their exchange is accompanied by recitations of history and genealogy. Like the Kula articles, the passage of these gifts keeps history alive so that individuals may witness and affirm their participation in nonindividual life.
Note as well the mortuary potlatch’s connection to my opening story, the first salmon rite, which also has the bones of