Gifts, Reciprocity, and Power
PROF'S CHOICE
Bronisla Malinowski, Argonautsof the Western Pacific (Wave land Press, 1984) First published in 1922, this is probably the best-known ethnography (cultural description) in the anthropological literature. The author describes in fine detail the practice of kula, the ceremonial exchange of ornamental shell valuables throughout the Trobriands and neighboring islands off the northeast coast of New Guinea. He shows how the drive to possess famous ornaments, even though they must eventually be passed on to partners, obsesses the participants and provides the basis of their prestige system. To carry out these exchanges, people made perilous long-distance voyages by ocean-going canoe and used magic to induce their partners to give them their most treasured objects.
Marcle Mauss, The Gift: Formsand Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (Norton, 1990) This classic comparative study, written in 1925, explores the many ways in which reciprocity obligatory giving, receiving, and repaying infuses social relations in societies around the world, from ancient times to the present. The author claims that reciprocity is the basis not only of economic transactions, but also of such diverse practices as making offerings and sacrifices to the gods and giving "bridewealth" valuables to a bride's family in exchange for rights over her labor and children a procedure mis understood by Westerners as "buying a wife."
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Aldine de Gruyter,1972) This insightful investigation of how non-industrial, non-monetary economies work distinguishes among "generalized reciprocity," in which things are freely shared without calculation or expectations of equivalent returns; "balanced reciprocity," in which people expect an equivalent return immediately or in the foreseeable future; and "negative reciprocity," in which both parties in an exchange seek to come out ahead of the other. Interestingly, these ideas also apply to Western society. For example, in American society, generalized reciprocity abounds in the family, balanced reciprocity occurs between more distant relatives and friends, and negative reciprocity takes place between strangers.
Sergei Kan, Symbolic Immortality:The Tlingit Potlatch of the NineteenthCentury (Smithsonian Institution, 1989) he most recent in a series of major studies of the potlatch, the competitive feast-giving of the Indians of the coast of Washington, British Columbia, and southern Alaska, in which hosts try to gain prestige and humiliate their rivals by giving them more valuables such as furs, blankets, and ornamental copper sheets than they can possibly repay. Kan, a professor of anthropology at Dartmouth, shows how the Tlingit Indians even incorporate potlatching in their mortuary rituals, mourners giving feasts and distributing lavish gifts both to honor the dead and to raise their own prestige.
Kirk Endicott
