The Gift Economy

[Steve Tall]

An exchange from a recent thread, and I'm moving my response to here in the Cantina so I don't take that thread way off topic:

Qeth: ...How does it chop when compared to an AK of either 15 or 18"...?

Steve Tall: Couldn't say, I bought it to give to a friend and didn't really use it before sending it off to him.

moogoogaidan: Ho man, I wish i had friends like you!

My response is that this is part of my forays into the "gift economy". Greatly simplified, I had three and my friend had none, so I gave one to him.

From a related article I just found:

"Throughout over 90 percent of our species’ history, we humans lived by hunting and gathering in what anthropologists call gift economies. People had no money, and there was neither barter nor trade among members of any given group. Trade did exist, but it occurred only between members of different communities.

"It’s not hard to see why sharing was the norm within each band of hunter-gatherers, and why trade was restricted to relations with strangers. Groups were small, usually comprising between 15 and 50 persons, and everyone knew and depended upon everyone else. Trust was essential to individual survival, and competition would have undermined trust. Trade is an inherently competitive activity: each trader tries to get the best deal possible, even at the expense of other traders. For hunter-gatherers, cooperation—not competition—was the route to success, and so innate competitive drives (especially among males) were moderated through ritual and custom, while a thoroughly entangled condition of mutual indebtedness helped maintain a generally cooperative attitude on everyone’s part.

"Today we still enjoy vestiges of the gift economy, notably in the family. We don’t keep close tabs on how much we are spending on our three-year-old child in an effort to make sure that accounts are settled at some later date; instead, we provide food, shelter, education and more as free gifts, out of love. Yes, parents enjoy psychological rewards, but (at least in the case of mentally healthy parents) there is no conscious process of bargaining, in which we tell the child, “I will give you food and shelter if you repay me with goods and services of equivalent or greater value.”

"For humans in simple societies, the community was essentially like a family. Freeloading was occasionally a problem, and when it became a drag on the rest of the community it was punished by subtle or not-so-subtle social signals—ultimately, ostracism. But otherwise no one kept score of who owed whom what; to do so would have been considered very bad manners.

"We know this from the accounts of 20th-century anthropologists who visited surviving hunter-gatherer societies. Often they reported on the amazing generosity of people who seemed eager to share everything they owned despite having almost no material possessions and being officially listed by aid agencies as among the poorest people on the planet. Anthropologists routinely felt embarrassed by this generosity, and, in one instance after another, after being gifted some prized food or a painstakingly hand-made basket, immediately offered a manufactured knife or ornament in return. The anthropologists assumed that natives would be happy to receive the trinkets, but the recipients instead appeared insulted. What had happened? The natives’ initial gifts were a way of saying, “You are part of the family; welcome!” But the immediate offering of a gift in return smacked of trade—something only done with strangers. The anthropologists were understood as having said, “No, thanks. I do not wish to be considered part of your family; I want to remain a stranger to you.” It was the ultimate faux pas!

"Here is all of economic history compressed into one sentence: As societies have grown more complex, larger, more far-flung and diverse, the tribe-based gift economy has shrunk in importance, while the trade economy has grown to dominate nearly every aspect of people’s lives, and has expanded in scope to encompass the entire planet..."

from "Economic History in 10 Minutes" by Richard Heinberg
http://richardheinberg.com/215-economic-history-in-10-minutes

 

[Howard Wallace]

Biologists speak of "reciprocal altruism.” I think that there are deep accounting structures in our brains that do keep accounts, even if we do not do so consciously. Probably most social creatures have these accounting mechanisms.
Notions of fairness and cheating are also probably rooted in these accounting systems.

The native inhabitants of the region where I live had the potlatch. These were ritualized gifting occasions where status was gained by giving away almost everything. Sometimes precious things were destroyed to gain status. I read of people who received so much they committed suicide, thinking they would never be able to regain status. Gift economies can have elements of selfishness and ugliness also. They just look a little different than our own.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

I don't look on the NW Coast potlach as an aspect of a gift economy. It was much more like a forced trade; I give you so much, you need to give me more to retain status. It's like bargaining in a bazaar. Seller states a price, buyer offers much less, seller says oh, well, take it for free then, I didn't realize you were so impoverished. This is meant to embarrass the buyer into making a fair offer.

As for reciprocal altruism, I don't know. The essential element in classical altruism is a feeling of consanguinity. As long as we are members of a family, we have no personal property, as the old saying goes, he'd give you the shirt off his back. Because the shirt belongs to all of us, it goes to whoever needs it right now.

So those anthropologists should not have returned a gift for a gift. They should have been ready to share a tool when they saw someone needed one. They should have said, I see you're going hunting, here's a knife. Tribal economies are driven by handing around material possessions held in common to strengthen bonds that assure mutual protection and access to food.

 

[Nicholas]

I really sympathize with the thoughts behind this thread, and for reasons tying right in to HI: recently, I traded one of my HIs (a rusty SD, which I'd received as a gift in the first place), in part because I felt it improper to keep a "using" knife that I wasn't actually using (my R6 has pretty much won me over). It's one thing to have a decorative piece, but to keep a working tool, unused, is disrespectful both to the item's purpose, and to other people's needs. Now THAT'S an economic principle!