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Is everything a gift? Really?
Mauss argues that every exchange is a gift, and every gift comes
with three obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate
You may be skeptical. That’s good. Stay skeptical.
In the contemporary world, every one of us, and most people on
Earth, will meet some needs by buying and selling. Typically buying
and selling does not involve ongoing ties of interdependence.
Then again, we should not assume that self-interested economic
transactions are universal either, and that every exchange is also an
example of rational maximization by individuals.
Karl Marx’s theory of capitalism gives us a new perspective on
markets
Like Mauss, Marx also challenges the idea that economic
self-interest and rational maximization are part of a universal human
nature.
Mauss tells us to think globally. Marx tells us to look at history.
People have used money and currency of some kind for 1000s of
years. That’s not new.
What is new is the idea that owning also gives the owner a
right to deny its use to other people. Private property is
exclusive ownership. This is a new invention.
When a society protects private property, then rich
people can own all of the productive resources (capital) that
a society needs to meet everyone’s needs. One class owns all the
capital; everyone else has no say over a society’s means of
production.
The new ruling class—the owners of capital, or the bourgeoisie—produce commodities with other people’s
labor.
The logic of capitalism is antithetical to a system of total
services
Under a capitalist system, the main form that value takes is as a
commodity.
Valuable, useful things are packaged so they can
bought and sold for a profit.
With the rise of capitalism, people are also influenced by the
culture of the bourgeoisie, based on individual
choice, freedom, and the right to own capital as private property.
When you meet your own needs by consuming commodities, you also
pretend you are an individual who is making rational
choices.
Even if you are opposed to private property and commodification of
value, it’s easy to assume that these changes are inevitable.
Not so fast. In practice, capitalism is neither a utopia nor a
dystopia.
What is Mauss really saying?
When you first hear Mauss’s ideas, it may sound like there are two
types of society:
Societies based on gifts and reciprocity
Societies based on private property, capitalism, and markets
This is how Mauss sounds if you look at the world through the
lenses that bourgeois culture gives you.
No. Mauss is arguing for a new view of all societies.
The pull of reciprocity, and of the social whole, is still there
even as commodification challenges it.
Is everything for sale?
What did you write about for this week?
Share with each other.
If something cannot be sold, what can you do with it?
An editorial decision
Portland, Oregon, 1997. The Reed College Quest editors
meet to discuss an inquiry about a classified ad.
Nobody involved can remember what it said. It was something like
this:
“WANTED Healthy female student to help bring joy to an
infertile couple. Will pay $3000 plus all medical expenses for a
donation of several eggs. Candidates should have a minimum GPA of 3.5
and minimum combined SAT scores of 1600.”
(GPA: grade point average, 3.5 is approximately a WAM of 80. SATs
are college entrace exams. Under the old system, 1600 would have been
close to an ATAR of 95.)
Meanwhile…
Wendie Wilson was a student at the University of Washington around
the same time. She volunteered to give several eggs for $5000.
“It seemed a relatively small amount of my time for what
seemed to be pretty decent compensation.” It was empowering
(Tuller
2010).
She later founded an egg donor registry, Gifted Journeys.
Human trafficking?
A friend recalls similar ads in student publications at a
university in Vancouver, British Columbia. “We had ads at my
college in Canada too, even though selling eggs isn’t legal there. I
guess they would ship you to the US for the procedure”
(personal communication, 2014).
What the ads ask for
University students (women who have more and better-quality
ova).
Preferred hair and eye color.
Preferred race.
Preferred school. Ivy-league (Harvard, Yale, etc.) schools are
especially popular, as are Berkeley and Stanford.
Not for sale?
Unlike many countries, the sale of gametes is largely unregulated
in the US, and the US has generally looser regulations on IVF and
surrogacy. (PDF
version.)
Table: A comparison of the legal status
of the commercial sale of different kinds of human tissue and
surrogacy services in several different countries and jurisdictions.
See Bencharif
(2022); Birmingham (1998); Brandt, Wilkinson,
and Williams (2021); Burkitt (2011); Cattapan and
Baylis (n.d.); Caulfield et al. (2014);
Davis and
correspondent (2022); Jaworski (2020); Klitzman and
Sauer (2015); Legislative
Services Branch (2020); Nagarajan (2022); “Assisted
Reproductive Technology (Regulation) Act, 2021” (2021);
“Surrogacy (Regulation)
Act, 2021” (2021); Pollack (2015); Smith, Cohen, and
Cassidy (n.d.); Yadav (n.d.); Zheng
(2017)
Why do some people exchange breastmilk? Why do some societies
prohibit its exchange?
There are many different ways that people circulate breastmilk,
both in exchange for money and without exchanging money.
In many societies, mothers offer the service of breastfeeding to
each others’ children.
This even creates “milk kinship” among children fed by the same
woman. Nursing makes a baby your child, and two children of the same
nurse are siblings (Clarke 2007).
For that reason, Islamic teachings forbid milk banking.
Donated milk can’t be anonymous. What if the
recipients get married? (Ghaly 2012)
There are groups in Australia who want to promote voluntary,
unpaid wet nursing (Zillman 2019).
The Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) calls milk sharing
“cross-feeding” and considers it and other kinds of sharing risky
(“Donor
Milk” 2022).
They promote “milk banking” which accepts donations of milk which
are sterilized. Donating is OK only if it is
anonymous and entails no social embeddedness or ongoing
obligations.
In 2017, the Cambodian government banned the sale of breastmilk in
response to the arrival of a US corporation which produces milk
products (Wong
2017).
The influence of Marcel Mauss is wide, even if people depart from
his words
Spheres of exchange are moral boundaries in a double sense:
The difference between two spheres is a collective representation,
a social construct thought by the collective mind of society.
As a social construct, it is also intimately tied to and
reinforces the society’s existence as a system of total services, a
state of total interdependence among all people in one group.
Mauss’s ideas cast a long shadow across many fields
The question of whether and why there are limits of capitalist
commodification is something all social scientists want to understand,
and legal scholars like Kara Swanson as well.
Swanson is influenced by sociologists who want to know why moral
ideas influence social institutions, and these sociologists draw on
Durkheim and Mauss’s ideas.
Like Mauss and Durkheim, Swanson wants us to see the invisible
boundaries constructed by the collective consciousness of society
because this, she would say, is where a society’s laws come from.
She wants to challenge the bourgeois ideological fiction
now reflected in law that things are either
altruistic gifts or commodities. In this respect, she
agrees with Mauss. Everything shares in the logic of reciprocity.
Her point, in my reading, is that US culture strips the
obligations from the gift.
A better phrase for Swanson would be the
altruism–self-interest dichotomy.
Every society is a product of history, and the incorporation of
commodity exchange is a big part of every contemporary society’s
story
In a bourgeois way of thinking, one can either give something
freely with no obligations of reciprocity or one can buy and sell
things.
For this reason, US social and medical institutions are very
anxious about exchanging breastmilk. They can’t tell what it
means, so they create rules that prevent commercialization.
The same ideology can lead people to see alternative economies in
ethnocentric terms
In a bourgeois perspective, Tiv society lacks something that
modern societies have: They have spheres of exchange because they have
not learned how to act like rational individuals in a market.
Reciprocity and commodification exist in every society, but they
resist each other
No society exists in isolation. Every society has a history.
For that reason a society is not one single essence, and cannot be
classified as either one kind or another kind of society.
The encounter between reciprocity and capitalist commodification
is a major part of every society’s contemporary history.
When they come together, they push against each other, like two
opposed magnets.
Tiv spheres in a colonial context
According to Guyer (2004), the Tiv spheres
of exchange are not a tradition, and not frozen in time. They are a
historical phenomenon.
Brass rods work like a kind of currency (noted also by Bohannan),
but this a medium of exchange that Tiv keep out of the hands of
banks.
Cash transactions are morally judged, but not because spending
money is prohibited or sinful. Money-exchange means a loss of control
over Tiv people’s collective wealth as a community.
Suspicion of money is a political statement, not by an individual
ideologue, a political party, or an organization—but by the social
whole itself.
Taro gardening in Wamira, PNG and Luo land ownership in Kenya
One of the ways societies respond to market forces is by placing
limits on individual choices
Wamira (Papua New Guinea) taro gardens can’t be tended with metal
tools (Kahn
1986)
When Luo (Kenya) people sell land, they earn “bitter money” (Shipton
1989)
Potlatch: Giving and global trade
In the 18th and 19th centuries, and after a revival in the 20th
century, Indigenous societies of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North
America celebrated huge feasts known as potlatch (which means
to give)
Gifts exchanged between different communities’ leaders were
competitive in nature, each trying to give more than the other could
give back (Mauss [1925]
1990, 6–7, 38–40; Eriksen 2015, 224–25).
European presence in North America after 1800 gave people more
sources of wealth for potlatch gifts, and potlatch prestations grew
(Wolf 1982,
184–92).
Colonial contact did not compel people to abandon potlatching, but
stimulated its growth and expansion, until it was banned by Canadian
law as a political threat (which was repealed in 1951).
The efflorescence of exchange
“The first commercial impulse of the local people is not to become
just like [the West], but more like themselves” (Sahlins 1992, 13).
As a Kewa leader once told an anthropologist (paraphrase): “You
know what we mean by ‘development?’: building a hauslain [a village
community], a men’s house, and killing pigs. This we have done (quoted in
Sahlins 1992, 14).
Change in a society may look like what bourgeois culture says is
development, but it could be that you mistake what you are seeing
In rural PNG societies to develop is really the enrichment of
their own ideas of what mankind is all about (Sahlins 1992, 14).
Ongka’s “big moka” is an example of
efflorescence in PNG. Is there an example of
develop-man in Sydney or where you live?
Recap: What happens when reciprocity and commodification
meet?
A society may attempt to strip away the
obligations of the gift (or impose an altruism–self-interest dichotomy
on all exchanges).
It might segregate reciprocal exchange and
market trade to different spheres.
It might subordinate commercial profit to the sphere of
competitive reciprocity, leading to an efflorescence
of a society’s total system of reciprocal ties.
AI acknowledgement
Portions of the reading script were generated by Google Gemini, an
LLM, from an audio transcript based on the following prompt: “This is
an audio transcript. Please correct it to use full sentences in
connected prose, correcting errors of grammar, spelling, and
punctuation, but preserving all of the original text. Correct
spellings of these names and phrases: Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss,
Auhelawa, Karl Marx,”gift/commodity dichotomy” and
“altruism/self-interest dichotomy.” Add an acknowledgement of AI use
at the end including the text of this prompt.” The text was then
extensively corrected and edited by the original author.
Brandt, Reuven, Stephen Wilkinson, and Nicola Williams. 2021.
“The Donation and Sale of Human Eggs and Sperm.” In
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N.
Zalta, Winter 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/gametes-donation-sale/.
Burkitt, Laurie. 2011. “Chinese Mothers Have Breast Milk, Will
Sell. Anyone Buying?”Wall Street Journal, June 14,
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Caulfield, Timothy, Erin Nelson, Brice Goldfeldt, and Scott
Klarenbach. 2014. “Incentives and Organ Donation: What’s
(Really) Legal in Canada?”Canadian Journal of Kidney
Health and Disease 1 (May): 7. https://doi.org/10.1186/2054-3581-1-7.
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015. “Exchange and
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Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed.,
217–40. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.16.
Kahn, Miriam. 1986. Always Hungry, Never Greedy: Food and the
Expression of Gender in a Melanesian Society. Cambridge:
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Klitzman, Robert, and Mark V. Sauer. 2015. “Creating and Selling
Embryos for “Donation”: Ethical Challenges.”American
Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 212 (2): 167–170.e1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2014.10.1094.
Mauss, Marcel. (1925) 1990. “Selections from introduction,
chapters 1-2, and conclusion.” In The Gift: The Form and
Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D.
Halls, 1–14, 39–46, 78–83. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Shipton, Parker. 1989. Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some
African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities. Washington, D.C.:
American Anthropological Association.
Swanson, Kara W. 2014a. “Feminine Banks and the Milk of Human
Kindness.” In Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood,
Milk, and Sperm in Modern America, 159–97. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674369481.
———. 2014b. “Introduction: Banking for Love and for
Money.” In Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk,
and Sperm in Modern America, 1–14. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
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