The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [58]
* A third alternative, besides sharing and separation, is deceit. In Mexican peasant communities, which are marked by similar networks of mutual aid, one finds the opposite of “conspicuous consumption”: a family that has become rich will maintain the shabbiest of adobe walls around the house so that their wealth will not be apparent. Magnolia and Calvin could have squirreled away the money, leaving the rent unpaid, the dead unburied, and the children unclothed.
* Magnolia could have turned her inheritance into commodity-money by loaning it out at interest. In the long run she would have needed loan collectors, police, and so forth to pull it off, however—the conflicts with the spirit of a kin network should be obvious.
* A gift economy allows its own form of individualism: to be able to say “I gave that.” After he had lived with the Sioux Indians for a while, Erik Erikson commented about their treatment of children: “A parent … would not touch a child’s possessions, because the value of possessions lay in the owner’s right to let go of them when he was moved to do so—i.e., when it added prestige to himself and to the person in whose name he might decide to give it away.” Individualism in a gift economy inheres in the right to decide when and how to give the gift. The individual controls the flow of property away from him (rather than toward him, a different individualism).
* A patent differs from a trade secret in a significant way. Historically a guild or trade could keep its secret for as long as it was able to. Some were kept for centuries. But patents are granted for a limited term (seventeen years in the United States), and as such they are a mechanism for rewarding private invention while slowly moving it into the public domain. Patents belong to a group of property rights, including copyright and usufruct, which grant the right to limited exclusive exploitation. Property rights of this kind are a wise middle ground between gift and commodity; they manage to honor the desire for individual enrichment and at the same time recognize the needs of the community.
* An exception that seems to prove the rule is the case of the “academic” scientist installed in an industrial research facility. “Industrial research organizations whose goals are only in the area of applied research,” Hagstrom notes, “often appoint distinguished men to do basic research, give a small amount of time to other scientists for this purpose, and publicize their research results, solely to make themselves attractive to superior scientists. If they do not permit pure research, their applied research and development efforts suffer.”
* Weitling adds the abolition of money to the older abolition of contract and debt instruments. The idea became a standard part of the program of European anarchists, who usually, like Weitling, called for cash exchange to be replaced by barter (not gift).
* The exceptions to this rule are those communities which, like the community of science, are organized around quite specific concerns. The group that does not pretend to support the wider social life of its members—feeding them, healing them, getting them married, and so forth—can be connected through gift exchange and still be quite large.
* Marcel Mauss’s essay is one of the first syntheses of true ethnography. It follows the established tradition of seeking the roots of the modern in the archaic, and its conclusions are a mixture of Hobbes and Kropotkin. On the one hand, Mauss’s explication of the spirit of the gift (the hau) makes it clear that gift contract requires the spirit, and that the spirit