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Sociological Forum, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1991

Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: AMaussian View of Exchange

James Carrier1

Sociologists have drawn on anthropological studies of gift exchange systems to help

develop models of exchange in social life. This paper presents a reconsideration of the

relatively neglected Maussian view of gift and commodity exchange, drawing on both

Mauss's The Gift and recent work by anthropologists who have extended his ideas. The

Maussian model illustrates the 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; Marcc! 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 inArgonauts of

the Western Pacific (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.

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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

repayment 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 ofindividuals 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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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 sociologi-

cal topics.

Mauss did not share Malinowski's unitarv 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, vvhich define

trans-actors 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-inter-ested, independent individuals who exchange vvith people with

whom they have no enduring links or obligations. In commodity transactions, objects are

alienable private property defined primarih/ 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 uneasilv, 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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122

Carrier

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 ali 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, especialh/ 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 vvithinwhich 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 mem-bership in a common household.

Mauss's distinction betvveen gifts and commodities resembles a num-ber of Marxian

distinctions betvveen precapitalist and capitalist societies, betvveen use value and

exchange value, betvveen productive consumption and consumptive production and

some anthropologists have produced Manrian interpretations of Mauss (especially

Gregory, 1982). The Maussian approach, hovvever, differs in its greater concern vvith

circulation and con-sumption as opposed to production (Lojkine, 1989), and in its greater

concern vvith 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 vievv of gifts (see Gregory, 1980: espe-cially 640). These are that gift

exchange is (1) the obligatory transfer of (2) inalienable objects or services betvveen (3)

related and mutually obligated transactors. These elements identify the key dimensions in

terms of vvhich transactions are understood. These are the degree and manner


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Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations 123

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

it, and of the link betvveen transactors.

Obligatory Transfer

Transactions of buying and selling are formally free, while gift trans-actions 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 in-

stitution 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 repre-sent spontaneous and unconstraining expressions of

the affection of free and independent people. Noonan (1984:695) says the donor

does noi givc by way of compensation or by way of purehase. No cquivalcncc exists

betwecn what the donee has done and what is given. No obligation is imposed which the

donee must fulfill. . . . That the gift should operate cocrcively is indced repugnant and

painful to the donor, destruetive of the libcrality 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 betvveen two people "has a

voluntary eharacter 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 thepreliminary 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 scrics of presents. . . . [0]ne can

never say whether the vaga will be given in the first place or vvhether even the solicitory

gifts will be aecepted.


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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 thatrelationship, 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 free-ly acting

independent individuals who give because they rationally expect an equivalent return or in

order to spontaneously express their personal sentiments. People may behave this way in

some situations, but gift trans-actions cannot be explained in terms of economic or

emotional in-dividualism, hovvever 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). In-alienably 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 continualh/ 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 giftis 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 heir-looms.) Because the degree of association bervveen 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 berween object, giver, and recipient is particularlv visible when formalgift giving goes wrong, when a gift is rejected. Around Christmas every year

newspaper articles appear on what to do with un-suitable gifts (e.g., New York Times

News Service, 1988), evidence that dis-posing of useless objects that were acquired as

gifts causes an embarrassment that no one vvould 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 Caplovv's observation (1984:1314) of

a marked association in Middletovvn 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 unhappv 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 vvallpaper 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 pos-sibility 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

Rochberg-Halton, 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 (Loj-kine, 1989:166-156). Even an ordinary object becomes unique when it isgiven 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 exchang-ing 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 preciseh/ 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 commodityrelations 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 ali, is a goal of mass production and the basis of product advertising

and mail-order catalogues.

The distinction bervveen unique and inalienable gifts and fungible and alienable

commodities parallels another important distinction that be-tween the way vve 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 posi-tion 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 com-pletely 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

ov/nership of an object in a commodity system, speaks not of a "close relationshipbetvveen 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 ovvner,

owner-ship per se marks neither the object with the personhood of the owner nor the

person vvith the identity of the property.

Once the purchase of a commodity is completed, the object trans-acted 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, ali \vithout


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regard for those involved in the commodity's production or in the trans-action in vvhich it

was purchased. Alternatively, the inalienability of the gift gives the giver a continuingclaim on the object, in extreme cases a claim on vvhatever accrues to the recipient through

the use of the object. Thus, in a famous passage Mauss reported the words of a Maori

inform-ant, 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 pirit of what you gave me. If I fail to

do so, "I might become ili or even die,'" (Mauss, 1969:9). (This passage has sparked

considerable debate. See Sahlins, 1974: chap. 4, and the rebuttals of Lojkine, 1989:155-

156, 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 fali

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

vvhere 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,

particularh/ exchange value, of vvhich money is the definitive, anonymous marker. In the

extreme form of com-modity transaction, the circulation of capital, only exchange value

mat-ters and the actual object that is transacted is immaterial: a check, a bank draft, cash,

debentures, and electronic interbank transfer for the same amount ali are the same. This

does not mean that a customer seek-ing a loaf of bread will be satisfied vvith anycommodity of an equal cash value. The customer is increasingly concerned, hovvever,

vvith the exchange value of the loaf of bread and is increasingly able, and predisposed, to

reduce ali loaves of bread to this single measure of value: money cost. This, after ali, 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 ali 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 ali . . . . 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 Obiigated 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 obiigated to give, receive,

and repay gifts in appropriate ways. In other words, gift transactors are not individualswho 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 encom-

passes them (Bernstein, 1971; Turner, 1976). This is why Parry says that for Mauss "It is

not individuals but . . . moral persons who carry on ex-changes" (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 (Bar-nett and

Silverman, 1979; Schneider, 1979, 1980).

In commodity relations people may also be linked and obiigated 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 svstem of production and distribution, which is to say the class svstem 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 pavments 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 inde-pendent person.

Similarly, completing the mortgage contract does not be-stow 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 com-modity relations generalh/ have

been oriented to the mobilization and command ofobjects.

I have described how commodity transactors are free and inde-pendent, vvhile

gift transactors are related and mutually obligated. Although we assume that certain

kinds of relationships fali 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 generalh/ 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. Likevvise, 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 ore biological

being.

Hindered by asthma since I was six weeks old, I had begun experimenting wiih mydict and discovered a disquieting correlation. When I stoppcd eating the norma!American diei of sugar, fats, alcohol, chemicals, and additives, I felt better . . . . Iwas Ieft with a most depressing conclusion: if I wanted to be healthy, I'd have tobecome a food nut. I bid a fond farevvcll to my junk foods . . . .

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

bond bervveen work and worker. Like Hawken's explanation, hovvever, it is important todistinguish betvveen the sort of work one does (calling or occupation) and the specific

institution in which and the specific people vvith whom one does the work (job).

Most people, especialh/ wage workers, are much less likely to be bound to their jobs than

to their oc-cupations.

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 ore relationships that link them inalienabh/ 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" vvithin 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 in-heritance by children born out of vvedlock (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 ex-pression of the

consequences of sexual intercourse; the relationship con-tains 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 phvsical 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 bervveen substance and

code favors substance, while under other conditions . . . it is code vvhich . . . takes

precedence" (Schneider, 1979:159). For example, parents can behave so poorly tov/ard

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 bervveen particular adults and children. Thus, the relationship betv/een gift

transactors is inextricably linked to the transactions that take place vvithin 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 vvritten of

the systemic properties of societies of the gift and of the commodity (e.g., Gregory, 1982;

Lojkine, 1989). Here, hosvever, I have preferred to see gifts and commodities as defining

sorts of relationships vvithin 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-


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ference, hovvever, 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 tovvard 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).

Generalh/, vvriters 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,

vvhich focus on how people interpret an object by linking it to the common symbols with

vvhich 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 endovv vvares vvith

"glamor, romance, and, therefore, consumer appeal" by cloaking them vvith exoticimagery. Here, as in studies of advertising, the meaning of objects derives from their

association vvith common symbols of exoticism, sexuality, vvealth, or the like.

Mauss's model suggests, hovvever, that there is more involved than general cultural

meaning. Objects derive identity or meaning from the specific personal relationships in

vvhich they are transacted or in vvhich they feature. A particular variety of vvine may

have a general cultural meaning, but vvhen vve drink it at dinner it also has an identity

that reflects our relationship vvith each other.

Thus, objects exist in tvvo distinct spheres that may overlap in particular cases. One

is the sphere of the commoditv, the sphere of the im-personal meanings that have

concerned students of advertising and material


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and consumer culture. These meanings can be important, even for some-thing 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, hovvever, 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 vvhich they are transacted. This

is expressed most succinctly by one vvoman, 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 ali because the people who have given them to me love me or

they vvouldn'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 dif-ferent sorts of relationships and

transactions in vvhich they are involved, for these entail different meanings and identities.

This brief concluding discussion of the social nature of objects shovvs 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 vvhich they are

transacted, just as vve cannot separate the relationship from the people vvho 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 Malinovvskian assumption that exchange is "essentially dyadic transactions betvveen

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.

ACKNOVVLEDGMENTS

I vvant to thank Achsah Carrier for her continued personal and professional interest

in this vvork, and an anonymous referee for bringing Jean Lojkine's vvork to my attention.


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