The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [27]
* A confusion between organic liveliness and cultural or spiritual liveliness is inherent in a discussion of gift exchange. As Mauss first pointed out, in an exchange of gifts, “things … are to some extent parts of persons, and persons … behave in some measure as if they were things.” In the case of the mortuary potlatch, a material thing symbolizes a biological fact, the survival of the group despite the death of the individual. But it may be that the group would not survive as a group (and individual life would not survive, then, either) if these “biological” facts could not be expressed symbolically. We are social and spiritual beings; at some level biological, social, and spiritual life cannot be differentiated.
* In a typical example from a book of Russian folk tales, a woman walking in the woods found a baby wood-demon “lying naked on the ground and crying bitterly. So she covered it up with her cloak, and after a time came her mother, a female wood-demon, and rewarded the woman with a potful of burning coals, which afterward turned into bright golden ducats.”
The woman covers the baby because she’s moved to do so, a gratuitous, social act. Then the gift comes to her. It increases solely by its passage from the realm of wood-demons to her cottage.
† Barnett’s language, the language of gift exchange, has procreation at its root. Generosity comes from genere (Old Latin: beget, produce), and the generations are its consequence, as are the gens, the clans. At its source in both Greek and Sanskrit, liberality is desire; libido is its modern cousin. Virtue’s root is a sex (vir, the man), and virility is its action. Virtue, like the gift, moves through a person, and has a pro-creative or healing power (as in the Bible story about the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’s garment in the faith that it would heal her: “And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him turned about in the press and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’”).
* Capitalism is the ideology that asks that we remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth. To move away from capitalism is not to change the form of ownership from the few to the many, but to cease turning so much surplus into capital, that is, to treat most increase as a gift. It is quite possible to have the state own everything and still convert all gifts to capital, as Stalin demonstrated. When he decided in favor of the “production mode”—an intensive investment in capital goods—he acted as a capitalist, the locus of ownership having nothing to do with it.
CHAPTER THREE
The Labor
of Gratitude
My vocation [his sense, as a child, that he would be a writer]
changed everything: the sword-strokes fly off, the writing
remains; I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be
transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance
had made me a man, generosity would make me a book.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The old engraving reproduced here shows gifts being given out at a funeral, a custom common in Wales a century or more ago. The coffin was placed on a bier outside the house near the door. One of the deceased’s relatives would then distribute bread and cheese to the poor, taking care to hand the gifts over the coffin. Sometimes the bread or cheese had a piece of money inside it. In expectation of the gift, the poor would have earlier gathered flowers and herbs to grace the coffin.
Funeral gifts belong to a general class I call “threshold gifts,” gifts that mark the passage from one place or state into another. The gifts passed over the coffin in this instance reflect a particular image of what it is to die. Bodily death is not a final death, they say, but a change, a passage that benefits from the protection of gift exchange. The Welsh believed that the dead who were not properly laid to rest would be left to walk ceaselessly on earth. They would become the restless dead, never bound up in the spirit of their race. Similar myths are