The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [28]
Threshold gifts belong to a wider group we might call “gifts of passage.” I have adapted these terms from Arnold Van Gennep’s classic work, The Rites of Passage. Van Gennep divides rites of passage into three groups: rites of separation, rites of transition, and rites of incorporation. He also calls these “preliminal,” “liminal,” and “postliminal rites”—that is, before the doorway, on the threshold, and in the house. Rites of separation are not so commonly marked by gifts, but even a quick survey of Van Gennep’s work will show that rites in his other two categories are.* Threshold gifts may be the most common form of gift we have, so well known as to need little elaboration here. They attend times of passage or moments of great change. They are with us at every station of life, from the shower for the coming baby to the birthday parties of youth, from graduation gifts (and the social puberty rites of earlier times) to marriage gifts, from the food offered newcomers and the sick to the flowers placed upon the coffin. Once in my reading I came across an obscure society that even gave gifts to celebrate the arrival of a child’s second teeth—only to realize later that of course the writer meant the tooth fairy!
Threshold gifts mark the time of, or act as the actual agents of, individual transformation. In a recent book on the Trobriand Islands, Annette Weiner presents an interesting idea about these gifts that mark the various stages of the life cycle. Weiner tells us that in the Trobriands at least, “at each important phase in the cycle (i.e., conception, birth, marriage, death, and rebirth), a transformation of a person occurs as artifacts are detached from others and invested in ego.” She means that there are two sides to each exchange and to each transformation: on the one hand, the person approaching a new station in life is invested with gifts that carry the new identity; on the other hand, some older person—the donor who is leaving that stage of life—disinvests himself of an old identity by bestowing these same gifts upon the young. Weiner’s main contribution to the ethnography of the Trobriand Islands has been to describe a sexual division of labor within this series of transformations. Men’s gifts organize the social and political identities of middle life, while women’s gifts are more concerned with birth, death, and rebirth. Women especially are in charge of collecting and disbursing the gifts given away at a mortuary ceremony during the course of which it is understood that the deceased is released not from any particular station in life but from his or her entire social being. “Symbolically,” Weiner writes, “women untie the dead person from all reciprocal claims, thus securing a [soul] that is pure ancestral essence.”
Giving food over the coffin.
I have taken death gifts as my example of threshold gifts not as an exceptional case but as the type, for I would like to speak of all transformations as involving death.* Spiritually, at least, the old life must leave before the new may enter. Initiation ceremonies make a good illustration because they commonly include a symbolic death. A man who was to be initiated into the priesthood among the Sabians (a Gnostic sect) would confine himself to a reed hut for a full week. During this time he was not allowed to sleep. Each day he would change his clothes and give alms to the poor. After seven days a funeral would be held for him, as he would then be considered dead. After the funeral he would be taken to a river and baptized. For the