The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [61]
At this point, if we are to make our way back to the woman given in marriage, we shall have to distinguish male life from female life, for even though both are taken to be a bestowal at birth, their paths invariably diverge, particularly in groups that figure descent through only one sex. In Africa they say, “Bridewealth is childwealth,” an aphorism that we may take as another response to the question, If the life of a child is a gift, who is the donor?—the answer in this case being that the mother’s clan has given the child to the father’s clan. In other words, the gifts given in marriage are not a return gift for the bride so much as for her eventual children. In patrilineal groups in particular (the primary case in Africa), a woman’s clan, when she marries, must give up its interest in her offspring and so receives the “childwealth” in return. The children then belong to their father’s clan (as, in a sense, they do in our own society, where they carry the father’s name). Looked at structurally, in a patrilineal group, males do not become gifts when they grow up because they do not circulate: a young man stays in his group when he marries, and so does his virility, his potential offspring. But a young woman moves when she marries, and the gifts given for her stand witness to the fact that both she and the rights of her fertility (rights in gentricem) have passed to her husband’s clan.
Again, if we look only at the structure of things, we could say that in a matrilineal group a husband (and his virility) is bestowed upon his wife’s lineage. Her family group receives his contribution to the creation of the children. No gift institution has arisen to recognize this, however (although matrilineal groups do treat bridewealth differently, a point to which I shall return). As far as I know, there are no groups in which the men are given in marriage.* As the anthropologist Jack Goody puts it, “The mirror opposite of bridewealth would be groomwealth; and of bride-service, groom-service. But there is little to put in these two boxes by way of actual cases, except perhaps the payments of ‘borrowed man’ of the Menangkabau of Sumatra.” But if a borrowed man is all we have, and only one at that, we may as well say that men are not given in marriage.
What does happen to male children, then? If the life of a child is a gift, does the right of bestowal in that gift pass automatically to a boy as he becomes a man? Can he just take the car keys and go as soon as he gets his license?†
There is one general situation in which male children are given as gifts, or used to be. Our earlier discussion of the “rites of the first fruits” indicated that in the Old Testament all natural increase—the harvest, the calves, the lambs, and so forth—is treated as a gift from God, and its first fruits are consequently sacrificed as a return gift. Exodus records Yahweh’s clear statement as to the gender of these fruits: “All that opens the womb is mine, all your male cattle, the firstlings of cow and sheep.” The males are the gift from the Lord to the people, and the people pass the first one back.
The exchange was not always confined to animals, apparently. There is some indication that in antiquity the first male child was also sacrificed to the Lord. The Old Testament implies the rite by making the exception: “All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem.” Thus it was permitted to substitute certain ritually pure animals for the male child. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a drama of such a substitution. The New Testament repeats the motif: the Lord gives His son and the life of that firstborn is sacrificed as a gift to reconnect man and God (the story being told in the Old Testament terms: “the blood of the lamb.”)*
In Polynesian mythology we find men, gifts, and sacrifice brought together in a manner similar to that of the Old Testament. Polynesian tribal chiefs were equated with gods, and as such they received two gifts from their people: women in marriage