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By Root 856 0

them as gifts. The inverse might be the old institution of “professional courtesy” in which professionals discount their services to each other (an optical physicist visiting an ophthalmologist may find $15 knocked off his bill when he leaves, for example). The custom is the opposite of a “fee for service” in that it changes what would normally be a market transaction into a gift transaction (removing the profit) as a recognition of the fact that the “buyer and seller” are members of the same community and it is therefore inappropriate to profit from each other’s knowledge. We are seeing here the same sort of double economy that characterized tribal groups, from the Old Testament to the Uduk. Any exchange, be it of ideas or of goats, will tend toward gift if it is intended to recognize, establish, and maintain community.

In communities drawn together by gift exchange, “status,” “prestige,” or “esteem” take the place of cash renumeration. No one will deny that one reason scientists contribute the results of their research to journals is to earn recognition and status. Sooner or later the question arises: Wouldn’t we do better to speak of these contributions in terms of ambition and egotism? Might not a theory of competition better account for scientific publication? To begin with, we should notice that the kind of status we are speaking of is achieved through donation, not through acquisition. The distinction is important. The Indians of the Northwest American coast also give gifts in order “to make a name” for themselves, to earn prestige. But notice: a Kwakiutl name is “raised” by giving property and “flattened” by receiving it. The man who has emptied himself with giving has the highest name. When we say that someone made a name for himself, we think of Onassis or J. P. Morgan or H. L. Hunt, men who got rich. But Kwakiutl names, first of all, are not the names of individuals; they are conferred upon individuals, yes, but they are names on the order of “Prince of Wales,” meant to indicate social position. And here are some of them:

Whose Property Is Eaten in Feasts

Satiating

Always Giving Blankets While Walking

For Whom Property Flows

The Dance of Throwing Away Property

Some names, it is true, are agonistic (Creating Trouble All Around), but the majority refer to the outflow of property. A man makes a name for himself by letting wealth slip through his fingers. He may control the goods, but it is their dispersal he controls. Just as the anthropologist may say of the Indians, “virtue rests in publicly disposing of wealth, not in its mere acquisition …,” so Hagstrom writes that “in science, the acceptance by scientific journals of contributed manuscripts establishes the donor’s status as a scientist—indeed, status as a scientist can be achieved only by such gift-giving—and it assures him of prestige within the scientific community.” A scientist does contribute his ideas in order to earn status, but if the name he makes for himself is He Whose Ideas Are Eaten in Conferences, we need not call his contributions meretricious. This status is not the status of the egotist.*

It is true that many people in science will scoff if you try to tell them about a scientific community in which ideas are treated as gifts. This has not been their experience at all. They will tell you a story about a stolen idea. So-and-so invented the famous such and such, but the man down the hall hurried out and got the patent. Or so-and-so used to discuss his research with his lab partner but then the sneaky fellow went and published the ideas without giving proper credit. He did it because he’s competitive, they say, because he needed to secure his degree, because he had to publish to get tenure—and all of this is to be expected of departmentalized science in capitalist universities dominated by contractual research for industry and the military.

But these stories do not contradict the general point. I am not saying science is a community that treats ideas as contributions; I am saying it becomes one to the degree that ideas move as