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ceremony recognizes that we sometimes have rights in the lives of our friends and relations, and that the union occurs within an “ego” wider than the couple’s “ego-of-two.” For the feminist wary of the father’s right to bestow his daughter, but wary as well of what I earlier called the perfect freedom of strangers—that pure individualism which is corrosive to social life—we might, rather than drop all sense of persons as gifts, extend a “female” submersion in the group to the groom, instead of a “male” indivudualism to the bride. We could, in other words, add the bestowal of the man to the ceremony and—a necessary corollary—recognize that mothers share in the donation of their offspring. In fact, if Freud is right that the most difficult attachment to resolve is the one we have to the parent of the opposite sex, it might be useful for the mother of the groom to stand and declare that she, too, is willing to allow her interest in the life of her son to pass to another woman; that she, like the father of the bride, is letting go of a gift.

* Gift exchange is not aboriginally, nor yet universally, a “female” commerce. There have always been times and there are still places where both men and women are sensitive to the functions of gift exchange, and where a man in particular may acquire his masculinity, or affirm it, through the bestowal of gifts. For a fascinating discussion of gender and exchange in a tribal group, see Annette Weiner’s recent book on the Trobriand Islands, Women of Value, Men of Renown.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Usury:

A History of

Gift Exchange

Unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury, that the Lord

thy god may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to.

DEUTERONOMY 23:20

What ye put out at usury to increase it with the substance of

others, shall have no increase from God.

THE KORAN, SÛRA 30:38

I • The Law of the Gate

In an earlier chapter, speaking of gifts that must be refused, I suggested that a young person leaving home might well be wary of that parental largesse which tends to reinforce the bond between parent and child. A look at the same situation in terms of money loans will illustrate what I take to be the ancient meaning of usury, as well as the connection between gift exchange and the old debate over the morality of charging interest on a loan. Wherever there is the potential for wealth to increase over time, an interest-free loan amounts to the gift of the increase. Imagine, then, a young woman recently out of college who approaches her parents for a loan. And imagine these different responses: (1) the family immediately gives her $1,000, nobody says a thing about it, if she ever needs more she should just ask, and so on; (2) they loan her the money and they insist (or she does) on her signing a note promising to repay the loan at such and such a date, along with an interest payment at the prime rate.

The first response makes the woman part of the family, which may be good for her or it may be bad. (Maybe it’s a large family where she will be able to give and get support all her life; or maybe if she takes the gift she’ll have to go on being a child and never establish herself in the world. It depends.) Either way, the gift creates a psychic bond to the family and its specific structure, while the interest-bearing loan says to all concerned that though she may be on good terms, she is psychologically separated from the family. Usury and interest are sisters to commodity; they allow or encourage a separation.

Several senses of “usury” precede the modern one. The term took on its current meaning (an excessive or illegal rate of interest) during the Reformation. Before that it simply meant any interest charged on a loan, and its opposite was a form of gift, the gratuitous loan. A phrase of Marcel Mauss’s first brought me to the connection between “ancient usury,” as I shall call it, and gift exchange. Mauss speaks of how Maori tribesmen insist that the hau of a gift “constrains a series of users” to make a return gift, “some property or merchandise or labor, by means of