Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange

Author(s): James Carrier

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Source: Sociological Forum, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 119-136
Published by: Springer
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Sociological Forum, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1991

Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations:

A Maussian View of Exchange
James Carrier1

Sociologists have drawn on anthropologicalstudies of gift exchange systems to

help develop models of exchange in social life. This paper presents a reconsideration of the relativelyneglected Maussian view of gift and commodity exchange, drawingon both Mauss's The Gift and recent work by anthropologists
who have extended his ideas. The Maussian model illustratesthe partiality of
some sociological models of exchange by showing that people, objects, and
social relations form a whole that is created and recreated in different ways
when people transact with each other in gift and commodity relations. The
paper concludes with an illustration of the utility of Mauss's model, showing
how it can extend recent sociological discussions of the social meaning of
objects.
KEY WORDS: exchange; Marcel Mauss; gifts; commodities; social nature of objects.

INTRODUCTION
Exchange is a key aspect of life. Many sociologists concerned with it
have drawn inspiration from anthropology, where exchange relations are a
core interest. These sociologists have been most influenced by the treatment
of exchange in Malinowski's work in the Trobriand Islands, especially his
discussion of the Kula ring in Argonauts of the WesternPacific (1922) and
his more general discussion in Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926).
For instance, he is a point of reference for Blau in Exchange and Power in
Social Life (1964); he is echoed in Homans's "Social Behavior as Exchange"
(1958); he is invoked in Gouldner's "The Norm of Reciprocity" (1960).
'29 University Circle, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903.
119
0884-8971/91/0300-0119$06.50/0 ? 1991 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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Malinowski was a polemical writer seeking to bury forever the idea

that "primitive economics" was irrational. One way he sought to do this
was by showing that however exotic they may have appeared, Trobriand
villagers engaged in exchange in a recognizable and sensible way. Their
transactions differed from our own primarily because their circumstances
rather than their mentalities were different. In doing this, Malinowski put
forward a model that portrayed exchange "as essentially dyadic transactions
between self-interested individuals, and as premised on some kind of
balance" (Parry, 1986:454). Thus, in Crime and Custom he criticized the
Durkheimian view that people in such societies are best seen as social persons embedded in the group and its culture: "The honorable citizen is
bound to carry out his duties, though his submission is not due to any ...
mysterious 'group sentiment', but to the detailed and elaborate working of
a system

...

[in which there] comes sooner or later an equivalent repay-

ment or counter-service" (Malinowski, 1926:42). The mysteries of primitive

life, then, were reduced to the ordinary give and take of independent individuals portrayed in liberal economics. What Marx said of bourgeois
society appears to apply as well to Melanesia, where there rules "Freedom,
Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because . .. [they] are constrained only by their free will ....
Equality, because ... they exchange

equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is

his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself" (from Capital,
chap. 6, in Tucker, 1978:343).
This view that exchange takes place between independent, calculating
transactors is echoed in the classic sociological descriptions of exchange.
Gouldner (1960:164) said that understanding a gift relationship "requires
investigation of the mutually contingent benefits rendered and of the manner in which the mutual contingency is sustained." Similarly, Blau (1964:91)
defined these sorts of transactions as "voluntary actions of individuals that
are motivated by the returns they are expected to bring and typically do
in fact bring from others."
This may not be the best way to consider exchange. In this paper I
present the other classic anthropological approach, that springing from
Mauss's The Gift. This work underlies Levi-Strauss's(1969: Chap. 5) discussion of reciprocity.Ekeh (1974) contrasts these two approaches explicitly and
at length, Granovetter (1985) contrasts their general orientations more briefly. Recently there has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in
Mauss's view of exchange and an elaboration of his ideas in light of more
modern issues. This is most pronounced in Melanesian anthropology, where
exchange has always been a core concern (see, e.g., Damon, 1983; Gregory,
1980, 1982; Weiner, 1985), but it appears as well in studies of Africa (e.g.,

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121

Kiernan, 1988), India (e.g., Parry, 1986), and classical Greece (e.g., Morris,
1986).
MAUSS'S APPROACH TO EXCHANGE
Mauss approached exchange in terms of a web of questions: What is
the social understanding of the nature of people and their relationship with
each other? How does the transaction of objects reflect and recreate those
people and their relationships? How does this transaction reflect and
recreate the social understanding of the nature of objects? Because of its
broad scope, Mauss's model can be used to address a number of sociological topics.
Mauss did not share Malinowski's unitary view that exchange in the
Trobriands is like exchange in industrial societies, rational and interested
transactions by independent individuals. Instead, he saw two different sorts
of exchange. One is gift exchange, associated with societies such as those
of eastern Melanesia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. These
societies are dominated by kinship relations and groups, which define transactors and their relations and obligations to each other. In gift transactions,
objects are inalienably associated with the giver, the recipient, and the
relationship that defines and binds them. The other form of exchange is
commodity exchange. This is associated with industrial societies, dominated
by class and the division of labor. Commodity transactors are self-interested, independent individuals who exchange with people with whom they
have no enduring links or obligations. In commodity transactions, objects
are alienable private property defined primarily in terms of use value and
exchange value rather than the identity of the transactors. Although Mauss
saw gifts and commodities as characteristic of different sorts of societies,
some later Maussians treat them as two kinds of relations coexisting, albeit
perhaps uneasily, in the same society (e.g., Gregory, 1980; Kiernan, 1988).
In this paper I will adopt a similar approach.
This model of exchange is more than just the observation that in some
societies transactions are more deeply embedded in social relations than
in others. Instead, it entails a theory of people, objects, and social relations,
and the ways they are made and remade, understood and reunderstood in
everyday transactions. From this perspective, people are not always the independent, calculating beings of Malinowskian individualism; they are
made and experienced that way in some transactions but not in others.
Objects are not inevitably neutral things that are circulated or bartered
away; they are made and experienced that way in some transactions but
not in others. Relationships are not always impersonal under modern

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capitalism; they are made and experienced that way in some transactions
but not in others. Social relationships, people, objects, and transactions
form an interlocking whole. If we want to understand any of them, we have
to take cognizance of the ways that all of them are involved in creating
and recreating each other (Strathern, 1988).
For Mauss, "gift" has a meaning different from that of common
usage. There the word calls up images of presents, usually nonutilitarian
objects (Schudson, 1984:137; but see Cheal, 1987), given consciously and
with some degree of ceremony as "a gift," the sort of transaction analyzed
in detail by Cheal (1988). For Mauss, a gift is any object or service,
utilitarian or superfluous, transacted as part of social, as distinct from more
purely monetary or material, relations. This departs from conventional
usage in that it includes labor, which can be a gift (just as it can be a
commodity), although it is not normally a present. In fact, in many cases
it is not clear that there is a distinction between giving an object and labor:
does the cook give the meal or the labor of preparation? This question
becomes acute in societies where people do not make the objects of their
own subsistence.
Thus gifts are more pervasive than presents, especially among friends
and household members. "Gift" does not identify either the object or service itself, or the forms and ceremonies of giving and getting. Instead, what
makes a gift is the relationship within which the transaction occurs. If
friends go out together, they may go in one car: the person who drives
transports the other as a gift, as what is expected among people related
as friends. The person who prepares a family's dinner gives the effort involved in preparing the meal, as what is expected of that person's membership in a common household.
Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities resembles a number of Marxian distinctions-between precapitalist and capitalist societies,
between use value and exchange value, between productive consumption
and consumptive production-and some anthropologists have produced
Marxian interpretations of Mauss (especially Gregory, 1982). The Maussian
approach, however, differs in its greater concern with circulation and consumption as opposed to production (Lojkine, 1989), and in its greater concern with social identifications and understandings of people, objects, and
social relations.
Gift and commodity exchange may be contrasted by describing the
elements that underlie the Maussian view of gifts (see Gregory, 1980: especially 640). These are that gift exchange is (1) the obligatory transfer of
(2) inalienable objects or services between (3) related and mutually
obligated transactors. These elements identify the key dimensions in terms
of which transactions are understood. These are the degree and manner

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of the obligation to transact, of the link between what is transacted and

those who transact it, and of the link between transactors.
Obligatory Transfer
Transactions of buying and selling are formally free, while gift transactions are obligatory, albeit in a special way. In Mauss's classic formulation
(1969:10-11), parties to a gift relationship are under "the obligation to
repay gift received

. . . the obligation to give presents and the obligation

to receive them." Denying these obligations denies the existence of a social

relationship with the other party, and hence violates public expectation and
private belief. Gifts are freely given only in the sense that there is no institution monitoring performance and enforcing conformity.
This contradicts an important element of the Western academic view
of the gift, "that (a) it is something voluntarily given, and that (b) there is
no expectation of compensation" (Belk, 1979:100). Thus, Cheal (1988:12)
says that gift giving occurs when "the incumbents of roles go beyond their
recognized obligations and perform gratuitous favors." Parry (1986:466)
calls this concept of the gift as "free and unconstrained" the "elaborated
ideology of the 'pure gift."' This stress on liberality in gift transactions is
in contrast to the constraint and concern for equivalence in commodity
transactions (Silver, 1990, describes the emergence of this distinction in the
Scottish Enlightenment in the late 18th century). In this view, gifts represent spontaneous and unconstraining expressions of the affection of free
and independent people. Noonan (1984:695) says the donor
does not give by way of compensation or by way of purchase. No equivalence exists
between what the donee has done and what is given. No obligation is imposed
which the donee must fulfill. . . . That the gift should operate coercively is indeed
repugnant and painful to the donor, destructive of the liberality that is intended.

Mauss's point that giving is obligatory does not mean that gifts are
never free. Some are, particularly when people are creating a new relationship or modifying an old one. For example, Simmel (1950:392) said that
the first gift given between two people "has a voluntary character which
no return gift can have. For to return the benefit we are obliged ethically;
we operate under a coercion." Mauss himself (1969:25) described the
preliminary gift of the Kula relationship among Trobriand Islanders as one
of freedom. He said the Kula partnership
starts with a preliminary gift, the vaga, which is strenuously sought after by means
of solicitory gifts. To obtain this vaga a man may flatter his future partner, who is
still independent, and to whom he is making a preliminary series of presents. ...
[O]ne can never say whether the vaga will be given in the first place or whether
even the solicitory gifts will be accepted.

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Gift transactions within stable relationships are obligatory, however.

Family and household members are expected to do things willingly for
other members and to accept willingly what other members do for them,
as Komarovsky (1987) describes for Glenton and as Young and Willmott
(1986) describe for Bethnal Green. Those who are under this obligation
are unhappy when they are denied the chance to transact. Thus one young
man reported to Bell (1969:93), "My father was hurt I think when he knew
I went to the bank rather than him for a down payment on a new car."
Similarly, Murcott (1983:182-183) found that the housewives she studied
frequently defined "cooking" in a way that made it their own obligation
rather than something their husbands could do, thus protecting their ability
to give in the marriage (see also Schudson, 1984:141). The obligation to
give and receive among those who are related to each other within certain
degrees is exemplified positively by the strong regularities in gift giving
among kin in Middletown at Christmas described by Caplow (1984: especially 1315-1317) and is exemplified negatively in Ellis's (1983) description
of how the violent breakdown of marriage is associated with the wife's
failure to cook and the husband's failure to accept the meal. Even when
there is little affection among close kin, they are obligated to continue to
transact with each other, and generally they do so (e.g., Allan, 1979:94-95).
Fulfilling the obligation to give does not discharge it; it recreates it
by reaffirming the relationship of which the obligation is a part. If one
neighbor helps another move some stones, and if later the second loans
the first a tool, this does not simply discharge the obligation. It also reaffirms the neighborly relationship, and so reaffirms the obligation to continue to give and receive in this way (see Bulmer, 1986: especially chap. 4,
presenting the work of Abrams).
Commodity relations are different. There, transacting as one ought dissolves the obligations that link the parties. This reflects the cultural understanding that free and independent people bind themselves only temporarily
when they contract to transact commodities. The purchaser is obligated to
pay the seller for what is bought, but that paying ends the obligation and
dissolves the relationship: buyer and seller owe each other nothing and can
go their own ways. Indeed, there is the assumption that actors should engage
in commodity transactions only if they are free and independent of each
other, for only then will they be free of undue influence and so able to
protect their own interests. But with gift relations people should give and
receive only if they are not independent of each other.
Doubtless, if one party to a gift relationship feels regularly and unjustly slighted, he or she will consider ending the relationship. But this does
not mean that the transactor is calculating debts and credits, emotional or
material - Gouldner's mutually contingent benefits, Blau's expected returns,

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or Malinowski's equivalent repayment or counterservice. Instead, the

repeated imbalance itself marks a repeated violation of the obligation to
give, receive, and repay in that relationship, and hence marks the end of
the relationship as it had been. Openly ending such a relationship is just
a formal recognition that the relationship has already ended.
Thus, Mauss dissents from the view that transactors typically are freeacting
independent individuals who give because they rationally expect
ly
an equivalent return or in order to spontaneously express their personal
sentiments. People may behave this way in some situations, but gift transactions cannot be explained in terms of economic or emotional individualism, however much they may have important economic and
emotional correlates and consequences. When I prepare a meal for my
family it has an emotional dimension: it expresses the fact that I love my
wife and child; it has an economic dimension: we can eat better for less
at home than in a restaurant. But emotional expression and economic
utility are not adequate explanations of why I cook, what each of us thinks
of it, or the relationships that link us to each other and to the meal.
Inalienable Objects
The second element of the Maussian model is that gifts are inalienable, "are to some extent parts of persons" (Mauss, 1969:11). Inalienably linked to the giver, the gift generates and regenerates the
relationship between giver and recipient. The many everyday objects that
married partners buy for each other as part of the routine of keeping house
continually remind them of each other, and so affirm and recreate the
relationship that links them. In contrast, the commodity is alienated; it
bears no substantial relationship to the person who sold it. (Lojkine
[1989:149] makes the point that this is truer of material commodities than
of intellectual property and services traded as commodities.)
In Mauss's interpretation, the bond between person and thing in
societies of the gift is strong and hence inalienability is pronounced. (A case
of pronounced inalienability in modern society, treated as archaic, is in
McCracken's, 1988: chap. 3, description of Lois Roget and her family heirlooms.) Because the degree of association between object and person will
vary according to situations and societies, however, inalienability does not
mean that the giver always has the right to reclaim the object or that such
a right could be exercised in practice. Nor does it mean that the recipient
never has the right to dispose of the object. The existence of the ability to
recover a gift and of other possible rights and typical practices are empirical
questions. What is important is that people think of the object as bearing

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the identity of the giver and of the relationship between the giver and the
recipient.
The link between object, giver, and recipient is particularly visible
when formal gift giving goes wrong, when a gift is rejected. Around
Christmas every year newspaper articles appear on what to do with unsuitable gifts (e.g., New York Times News Service, 1988), evidence that disposing of useless objects that were acquired as gifts causes an embarrassment
that no one would feel about disposing of useless objects that were acquired
as commodities, such as boring paperback books or sour milk.
This is because rejecting the gift rejects as well the giver and the
giver's relationship to the recipient. This is apparent in extreme form in
Caplow's observation (1984:1314) of a marked association in Middletown
between open criticism of a spouse's Christmas gift and later rejection of
the spouse in separation or divorce. Mauss's point (1969:10) that "to give
something is to give a part of oneself" is expressed by the unhappy parents
who wrote to Miss Manners, an advice columnist, of their "concern when
a gift [to an adult child] of hand-woven place mats was opened and held
up to the wallpaper to ensure that it was a perfect color match.... It was,
but our hearts were in our throats." These parents go on to ask the obvious
question: does this mean "a rejection of us or our values?" Your children,
Miss Manners replied, "ought at least to conceal from you even the possibility that your presents might not match their tastes" (Martin, 1988). Because the gift is a token of the giver's concern and affection, rather than
just a bundle of impersonal utilities in the way that commodities are, the
recipient cannot simply throw it out (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi and RochbergHalton, 1981:66).
Just as the object given as a gift is inalienable, so it is unique. As
Mauss (1969:25) said of Kula valuables, they "are not indifferent things;
they are more than mere coins. . . . [They] have a name, a personality, a
past, and even a legend attached to them." It is this individuality that makes
these valuable, as distinct from abstract bearers of value like money (Lojkine, 1989:166-156). Even an ordinary object becomes unique when it is
given as a gift because it is marked by the tie that links the giver and
recipient to each other, and by the occasion of the given. As Baudrillard
(1981:64) puts it, "once it has been given-and because of this-it is this
object and not another. The gift is unique, specified by the people exchanging it and the unique moment of the exchange." The gift that is lost cannot
be replaced, for the replacement would be a cheat. It would not really be
the same, and the recipient would know, even if it were a secret from the
giver.
In contrast, in commodity relationships people think of objects as
abstract bundles of utilities and values that are precisely not unique. The

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company envelope that is lost can be replaced by getting another from the
supply room, for in this situation the two envelopes are the same. In other
words, objects in commodity relations are "fungible," a legal term that
means capable of replacing or being replaced by another item meeting the
requisite definition. The buyer of a thousand barrels of Brent crude oil,
an ounce of gold, a Baby Ruth candy bar, is satisfied with any item that
meets the requisite criteria, because each is freely substitutable within its
class and hence is fungible. This, after all, is a goal of mass production
and the basis of product advertising and mail-order catalogues.
The distinction between unique and inalienable gifts and fungible and
alienable commodities parallels another important distinction-that between the way we think about people in gift relations and in commodity
relations. In gift relations people are thought of or identified in terms of
their fundamental, inalienable attributes and relationships, and hence are
unique. Brothers are brothers because of their very biological substance
(as our culture understands these things) and neither can be replaced by
anyone else. On the other hand, in commodity relations people are identified in terms of alienable attributes. The buyer pays the person behind
the counter, not because of any alienable attribute or link with the buyer,
but because that person occupies a position in an organization. That position is alienable, because the person can quit, be promoted or fired, and
still be the same person. If a new face appears behind the counter, the
buyer will transact with the new person and not the old one. In commodity
relations it is not only objects that are fungible; people are fungible too.
Thus, in gift relationships people and objects are thought of as being
unique and inalienably linked to each other: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them; the communion and
alliance they establish are well-nigh indissoluble" (Mauss, 1969:31). On the
other hand, in commodity relationships the people and objects are fungible
and alienable: they are linked to each other in no enduring personal way.
The consequence is that commodities are alienated not only from the
people who transact them, but even from the people who own them. Private
property, the form of ownership of an object in a commodity system, speaks
not of a "close relationship between person and thing," says Daniel Miller,
but of "abstract relationship between anonymous people and postulated
objects" (Miller, 1987:120-121). Any person can own any thing. While the
object as property may come to be inalienably linked with its owner, ownership per se marks neither the object with the personhood of the owner nor
the person with the identity of the property.
Once the purchase of a commodity is completed, the object transacted is alienated from the people who were part of its past. The buyer
can destroy it wantonly, consume it, or use it to create wealth, all without

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regard for those involved in the commodity's production or in the transaction in which it was purchased. Alternatively, the inalienability of the
gift gives the giver a continuing claim on the object, in extreme cases a
claim on whatever accrues to the recipient through the use of the object.
Thus, in a famous passage Mauss reported the words of a Maori informant, Tamate Ranaipiri. Ranaipiri said, If you give me a valuable item that
I then give to someone else, and if that other person then reciprocates
with a second time, I must return that second item to you, for it embodies
the spirit of what you gave me. If I fail to do so, "I might become ill or
even die,"' (Mauss, 1969:9). (This passage has sparked considerable
debate. See Sahlins, 1974: chap. 4, and the rebuttals of Lojkine, 1989:155156, and Parry, 1986:462-466.)
Although commodities are anonymous, not everything we buy is a
perfect commodity, wholly impersonal. Some do bear a personal identity.
Works of design, art, and craft fall most easily into this category, and it is
appropriate that they usually bear the maker's name or mark. The special
relationship of creator and object is recognized in patent and copyright
law, as well as in continuing claims that creators should have a say in what
they create even after it is sold: artists and writers should have a say in
the use of their art, architects should have a say in the extension or
modification of their buildings, and so forth (see, e.g., Morrison, 1988; this
point is extended in Lojkine, 1989).
The point that a gift relationship involves inalienable objects, while
a commodity relationship involve alienable and impersonal objects and
even people, leads to a more general point. Mauss said (1969:46) that
the evolution of society involves an increasing cultural separation of objects from people and social relationships: "We live in a society where
there is a marked distinction . . . between things and persons." With
this evolution, people increasingly think of objects in terms of abstract
and impersonal frames of value, particularly exchange value, of which
money is the definitive, anonymous marker. In the extreme form of commodity transaction, the circulation of capital, only exchange value matters and the actual object that is transacted is immaterial: a check, a
bank draft, cash, debentures, and electronic interbank transfer for the
same amount all are the same. This does not mean that a customer seeking a loaf of bread will be satisfied with any commodity of an equal
cash value. The customer is increasingly concerned, however, with the
exchange value of the loaf of bread and is increasingly able, and
predisposed, to reduce all loaves of bread to this single measure of
value: money cost. This, after all, is the point of consumer-oriented

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reforms like unit pricing in food stores: products of different qualities

are reduced to the uniform measure of pennies per pound. Money is
the great leveler, good for all debts, public and private. And as Marx
observed in Capital, "every one knows, if he knows nothing else, that
commodities have a value-form common to them all ....
I mean their
money-form" (Tucker, 1978:313). In this sense, in this orientation
toward exchange value, the transactors are indifferent to the concrete
identity of the object used to meet an obligation.
Related and Mutually Obligated Transactors
I turn now to the last element of gift relations: transactors are related
in terms of their inalienable attributes, and as part of that relationship are
obligated to give, receive, and repay gifts in appropriate ways. In other
words, gift transactors are not individuals who are defined independently
of their social relationships, but social persons defined in significant ways
by their inalienable positions in a structure of social relations that encompasses them (Bernstein, 1971; Turner, 1976). This is why Parry says that
for Mauss "It is not individuals but . . . moral persons who carry on exchanges" (Parry, 1986:456; see Mauss, 1985). In societies dominated by gift
exchange the structure of kinship typically provides the basis for people's
identities, relations, and obligations. In industrial societies dominated by
commodity relations the structure of the household and family, and to a
lesser extent friendship and neighborhood, typically does these things (Barnett and Silverman, 1979; Schneider, 1979, 1980).
In commodity relations people may also be linked and obligated to
each other, but these linkages are very different from those of gift relations. Because commodity systems rest on "the social conditions of the
reproduction of things" (Gregory, 1980:641), the parties to commodity
transactions are defined and linked by their complementary positions in
the system of production and distribution, which is to say the class system
and the division of labor. Thus, they are linked to each other only in an
abstract and general sense. Culturally the transaction between buyer and
seller reflects nothing fundamental about either, but bears only on their
accidental and alienable aspects. The failure to make mortgage payments
may mean that the bank will seize the defaulter's property to recover its
money, but the bank has no claim on the defaulter as a free and independent person. Similarly, completing the mortgage contract does not bestow upon the customer or the bank (or any of the people who work there)

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the right to make further claims upon each other, however much they may
come away with good opinions of each other. This distinction underlies
Lojkine's point (1989) that in societies of the gift, gift relations are oriented
to the mobilization and command of labor, while in capitalist societies commodity relations generally have been oriented to the mobilization and command of objects.
I have described how commodity transactors are free and independent, while gift transactors are related and mutually obligated. Although
we assume that certain kinds of relationships fall into one or another
category, there are important exceptions. For example, although we think
that married people typically are related and mutually obligated, we agree
that some are not: those in a marriage of convenience are a prime example.
Conversely, we generally see people in their jobs as free and independent,
and we expect people to change jobs much more freely and self-interestedly
than they change spouses. We think some people are different, however.
For example, we see artists as having a "vision" or "gift" that binds them
to their work. Likewise, some people in mundane fields see themselves as
bound to work that is an expression of their inalienable identity. A striking
example is provided by an entrepreneur, Hawken (1987:9), who says that
he started a health-food store because of his core biological being.
Hindered by asthma since I was six weeks old, I had begun experimenting with my
diet and discovered a disquieting correlation. When I stopped eating the normal
American diet of sugar, fats, alcohol, chemicals, and additives, I felt better .... I
was left with a most depressing conclusion: if I wanted to be healthy, I'd have to
become a food nut. I bid a fond farewell to my junk foods ....

Of course the notion of a calling (e.g., Weber, 1958: chap. 2) points to an

older bond between work and worker. Like Hawken's explanation, however,
it is important to distinguish between the sort of work one does (calling
or occupation) and the specific institution in which -and the specific people
does the work (job). Most people, especially wage
with whom-one
workers, are much less likely to be bound to their jobs than to their occupations.
While a gift relationship entails inalienable identities and obligations,
the transactions within it are not the unproblematic consequence of those
identities and relationships. Instead, the transactions create and maintain
them. For most people in industrial society, the core relationships that link
them inalienably to others are those of household and family, and we see
transaction as central to these relationships. This is most obvious in marriage. The couple must transact, must give and take in an appropriate way,
for doing so creates a communal existence, a structure that encompasses

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and defines the two people and makes them "moral persons" within the
marriage (Mansfield and Collard, 1988). In fact, the give and take and the
creation of a "we" that combines and redefines two individuals is, in some
regards, more important than the legal form of marriage. The rights to
"palimony" by a de facto spouse (Oldham and Caudill, 1984) and to inheritance by children born out of wedlock (Anderson, 1987) show that such
relationships generate legal rights and obligations indistinguishable from
those in formal marriage.
Transactions are even important in creating relations of parenthood.
Schneider argues (1984) that in most societies parentage is not just an expression of the consequences of sexual intercourse; the relationship contains transactional elements as well. As Barker (1972:585) put it in her
analysis of the give and take between parents and their older children, in
these transactions "material goods and physical services are translated into
lasting relationships." While Americans see kin relations as reflecting
biological substance, they also see them as reflecting a code of conduct
that cannot be ignored: "under certain conditions the hierarchical relationship between substance and code favors substance, while under other conditions ... it is code which . . . takes precedence" (Schneider, 1979:159).
For example, parents can behave so poorly toward their children that a
court will sever the relationship. At the same time, a couple can adopt a
child, and if they behave well, they can become just like parents to the
child. In such cases, the code of conduct is invoked to modify the overall
understanding of the relationship between particular adults and children.
Thus, the relationship between gift transactors is inextricably linked to the
transactions that take place within it, for those transactions express and
recreate the relationship, and thus the identities of the people and even
the objects that are encompassed by it.
CONCLUSIONS
Much of the work using The Gift has echoed the way Mauss saw gifts
and commodities as characterizing entire societies, and much of interest has
been written of the systemic properties of societies of the gift and of the
commodity (e.g., Gregory, 1982; Lojkine, 1989). Here, however, I have
preferred to see gifts and commodities as defining sorts of relationships
within capitalist societies, even though the dominance of commodity relations means that gifts in these societies have different meanings from those
in societies of the gift (see, e.g., Parry, 1986:458; Gregory, 1980). This dif-

132

Carrier

ference, however, is, in important ways, quantitative rather than qualitative.

Gift giving does occur in capitalist societies, just as buying and selling occurs
in societies of the gift (Mauss, 1969:20; Carrier and Carrier, 1989: especially
156-159). Therefore gifts and commodities represent not exclusive
categories, but poles defining a continuum. Many gift transactions contain
an element of alienation and individualism, just as many commodity transactions are tinged by mutual obligation (e.g., Dore, 1983; Granovetter, 1985).
This perspective offers more than a theory of exchange. It is as well
a theory of transactions, objects, people, and social relations, and of the
variations within and the links between these things. As a consequence,
it is an approach that facilitates a reorientation toward a number of areas
of interest to sociologists. I will conclude by illustrating this reorientation
briefly with regard to the social nature of objects, an important aspect
of studies of consumer culture (e.g., Baudrillard, 1981; Campbell, 1987;
McKendrick et al, 1982), advertising (e.g., Ewen, 1976; Fox and Lears,
1983), and material culture (e.g., Forty, 1986; McCracken, 1988; Miller,
1987).
Generally, writers in these fields relate the way people think of objects to general cultural meanings and social structures, much as Veblen
argued in his theory of conspicuous consumption. This is clearest in the
many semiological studies of advertising, which focus on how people interpret an object by linking it to the common symbols with which it is
associated in the advertisement (see Leiss et al., 1986). In semiological
terms the commodity (the signifier) becomes charged with the meaning
of the associated symbols (the signified), and so becomes a sign. This
orientation also appears in studies of consumer culture. For instance,
Williams (1982:71) argues that displays in Parisian department stores in
the second half of the 19th century sought to endow wares with "glamor,
romance, and, therefore, consumer appeal" by cloaking them with exotic
imagery. Here, as in studies of advertising, the meaning of objects derives
from their association with common symbols of exoticism, sexuality,
wealth, or the like.
Mauss's model suggests, however, that there is more involved than
general cultural meaning. Objects derive identity or meaning from the
specific personal relationships in which they are transacted or in which they
feature. A particular variety of wine may have a general cultural meaning,
but when we drink it at dinner it also has an identity that reflects our
relationship with each other.
Thus, objects exist in two distinct spheres that may overlap in particular cases. One is the sphere of the commodity, the sphere of the impersonal meanings that have concerned students of advertising and material

Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations

133

and consumer culture. These meanings can be important, even for something seemingly so personal as the ways individuals define themselves and
their position in society (see, e.g., Baudrillard, 1981; Miller, 1987). But even
though people may use them to define themselves, these meanings are part
of impersonal frames of reference (Schudson, 1984:210-218). In addition,
however, objects exist in a second, more personal sphere, made of the web
of personal relations in which each of us is bound and through which we
transact gifts with each other. These gifts bear a general cultural meaning,
but they also bear the particular personal meaning of the relationship in
which they are transacted. This is expressed most succinctly by one woman,
who explained to Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981:143) the
meaning she saw in some of the objects that people had given to her: "love
covers it all because the people who have given them to me love me or
they wouldn't have given me such things." To grasp fully the social nature
of objects is to consider the different ways that objects exist, and the different sorts of relationships and transactions in which they are involved,
for these entail different meanings and identities.
This brief concluding discussion of the social nature of objects
shows how the Maussian model links people, objects, and social relations. These elements are not static, for they create and recreate each
other in transactions over time. We cannot separate the objects from
the people who transact them and the social relationships in which they
are transacted, just as we cannot separate the relationship from the
people who are in it, the objects they transact, and the ways they transact
them. And this is as true of the personal and enduring relationships of
the family as it is of the impersonal and transient relationships of the
supermarket and the factory. Because no element is prior to any other,
the Malinowskian assumption that exchange is "essentially dyadic transactions between self-interested individuals . . . premised on some kind
of balance" (Parry, 1986:454) is inappropriate. Gift exchange is not like
this. If commodity exchange is, it is not because it reflects some universal
essence of exchange or fundamental feature of human nature, but because it is made that way by the people, objects, and transactions that
constitute it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Achsah Carrier for her continued personal and
professional interest in this work, and an anonymous referee for bringing
Jean Lojkine's work to my attention.

134

Carrier

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