The Gift (12 page)

In the early 1950s Lorna Marshall and her husband lived with a band of Bushmen in South Africa. When they left they gave each woman in the band enough cowrie shells for a short necklace, one large brown shell and twenty smaller gray ones. (The shells came from a New York dealer, Marshall remarks, “perhaps to the confusion of future archaeologists.”) There had been no cowrie shells among the Bushmen before the Marshalls gave their going-away present. When they returned a year later, they were surprised to find hardly a single one left in the band where they had been given. “They appeared, not as whole necklaces, but in ones and twos in people’s ornaments to the edges of the region.”

This image of the seashells spreading out in a group like water in a pool takes us from the simple, atomic connections between individuals to the more complicated organization of communities. If we take the synthetic power of gifts, which establish and maintain the bonds of affection between friends, lovers, and comrades, and if we add to these a circulation
wider than a binary give-and-take, we shall soon derive society, or at least those societies—family, guild, fraternity, sorority, band, community—that cohere through faithfulness and gratitude. While gifts are marked by motion and momentum at the level of the individual, gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability. We can also say, to put the point conversely, that in a group that derives its cohesion from a circulation of gifts the conversion of gifts to commodities will have the effect of fragmenting the group, or even destroying it.

To take a modern illustration rather than another tribal tale, Carol Stack, in her book
All Our Kin
, presents an instructive description of the commerce of goods in the Flats, an urban ghetto south of Chicago. The Flats is a black neighborhood characterized by networks of cooperating kin. “Kin” in this context are not just blood relations, they are “those you count on,” related or not. Each kinship network in the Flats is composed of as many as a hundred individuals, all of whom belong in one way or another to one of several interlocking households.

Stack tells a sad but instructive story about an influx of capital into one of the families she knew. One day Calvin and Magnolia Waters inherited some money. One of Magnolia’s uncles in Mississippi had died and left them $1,500. It was the first time they’d ever had a cash reserve, and their immediate hope was to use the money as a down payment on a house.

Here’s what happened to it.

Within a few days the news of their good fortune had spread throughout the kin network. One of Magnolia’s nieces soon came to ask if she could borrow $25 to pay a bill so the phone would not be turned off. Magnolia gave her the money. The welfare office heard about the inheritance and cut off medical coverage and food stamps for Magnolia’s children, telling her that she would get no more until the money
was gone. Then Magnolia’s uncle in the South became seriously ill, and she and her older sister Augusta were called to sit by his side. Magnolia bought round-trip train tickets for herself, her sister, and three of her children. After they had returned, the uncle died, and she and her sister had to go south again. Soon thereafter Augusta’s first “old man” died, leaving no one to pay for his burial. Augusta asked Magnolia if she would help pay for the digging of the grave, and she did. Another sister’s rent was two months overdue; the woman was ill and had no source of income. Magnolia paid the rent. It was winter and the children and grandchildren (fifteen in all) were staying home from school because they had neither winter coats nor adequate shoes. Magnolia and Calvin bought all of them coats, hats, and shoes. Magnolia bought herself a winter coat and Calvin bought a pair of work shoes.

The money was gone in six weeks.

The only way this couple could have capitalized on their good fortune would have been to cut themselves off from the group.
*
To make a down payment on a house, they would have had to cease participating in the sharing and mutual aid of their kin. One of Magnolia’s sisters, Lydia, had done just that at one time. She and the man she married both had steady jobs. They bought a house and furniture. Then, for ten years, they cut themselves off from the network of kin cooperation, effectively preventing their friends and relations from draining their resources. In our modern symbology, they “moved to the suburbs.” Then the marriage began to break up. Lydia started giving clothes to her sisters and nieces. She gave a couch to her brother and a TV to a niece. By the time her marriage had fallen apart, she had reincorporated herself into the network.

It isn’t easy to say which is the “better” sister, the hardhearted one (“far-hearted,” the Bushmen say) who separates herself from a community that would pull her down or the soft-hearted one who dreams of getting ahead but in fact distributes her wealth and stays in the group. There’s no simple moral because there’s no simple way to resolve the conflict between community and individual advancement, a conflict that accounts for so much of our political and ethical life. But the story nonetheless illustrates our general point, that a group may form, cohere, and endure when property circulates as gift, and that it will begin to fragment when the gift exchange is interrupted or when gifts are converted to commodities.
*
Both this story and the one about the Bushmen treat people who are so poor that one hesitates to praise the virtues of “community,” lest it seem to romanticize oppression and privation. These are groups who adopt a necessary mutual aid, not a voluntary poverty. And the rewards of community lose some of their luster when they are not a matter of choice. I want to turn from the ghetto and the desert, therefore, to see how this vision of “gift community” might be filled out using a less thorny, more subtle case, that of the community of science.

In order to proceed within the terms of our wider argument, we will need to ask not just how scientific community emerges and endures, but specifically what happens to it when scientific knowledge circulates as a gift, and what happens when knowledge is treated as a commodity, for sale at a profit. The man who has done the most work on the organization of
science in the United States is a sociologist from the University of Michigan, Warren Hagstrom. Hagstrom’s point of departure is similar to mine. He begins his discussion of the commerce of ideas in science by pointing out that “manuscripts submitted to scientific periodicals are often called ‘contributions,’ and they are, in fact, gifts.” It is unusual for the periodicals that print the work of scientists to pay their contributors; indeed, the authors’ institutions are often called upon to help defray the cost of publication. “On the other hand,” Hagstrom says, “manuscripts for which the scientific authors do receive financial payments, such as textbooks and popularizations, are, if not despised, certainly held in much lower esteem than articles containing original research results.” (The same is true in the literary community. It is the exception, not the rule, to be paid for writing of literary merit, and the fees are rarely in accord with the amount of labor. There is cash in “popular” work—gothic novels, thrillers, and so forth, but their authors do not become bona fide members of the literary community.)

Scientists who give their ideas to the community receive recognition and status in return (a topic to which I shall return below). But there is little recognition to be earned from writing a textbook for money. As one of the scientists in Hagstrom’s study puts it, if someone “has written nothing at all but texts, they will have a null value or even a negative value.” Because such work brings no
group
reward, it makes sense that it would earn a different sort of remuneration, cash. “Unlike recognition, cash can be used outside the community of pure science,” Hagstrom points out. Cash is a medium of foreign exchange, as it were, because unlike a gift (and unlike status) it does not lose its value when it moves beyond the boundary of the community. By the same token, as Hagstrom comments elsewhere, “one reason why the publication of texts tends to be a despised form of scientific communication
[is that] the textbook author appropriates community property for his personal profit.” As with the Cubans who say, “literary property cannot be private,” when and if we are able to feel the presence of a community, royalties (like usury) seem extractive.

Scientists claim and receive credit for the ideas they have contributed to science, but to the degree that they are members of the scientific community, such credit does not get expressed through fees. To put it conversely, anyone who is not a part of the group does “work for hire”; he is paid a “fee for service,” a cash reward that compensates him for his time while simultaneously alienating him from his contribution. A researcher paid by the hour is a technician, a servant, not a member of the scientific community. Similarly, an academic scientist who ventures outside of the community to consult for industry expects to be paid a fee. If the recipients of his ideas are not going to treat them as gifts, he will not give them as gifts. The inverse might be the old institution of “professional courtesy” in which professionals discount their services to each other (an optical physicist visiting an ophthalmologist may find $15 knocked off his bill when he leaves, for example). The custom is the opposite of a “fee for service” in that it changes what would normally be a market transaction into a gift transaction (removing the profit) as a recognition of the fact that the “buyer and seller” are members of the same community and it is therefore inappropriate to profit from each other’s knowledge. We are seeing here the same sort of double economy that characterized tribal groups, from the Old Testament to the Uduk. Any exchange, be it of ideas or of goats, will tend toward gift if it is intended to recognize, establish, and maintain community.

In communities drawn together by gift exchange, “status,” “prestige,” or “esteem” take the place of cash renumeration. No one will deny that one reason scientists contribute the
results of their research to journals is to earn recognition and status. Sooner or later the question arises: Wouldn’t we do better to speak of these contributions in terms of ambition and egotism? Might not a theory of competition better account for scientific publication? To begin with, we should notice that the kind of status we are speaking of is achieved through donation, not through acquisition. The distinction is important. The Indians of the Northwest American coast also give gifts in order “to make a name” for themselves, to earn prestige. But notice: a Kwakiutl name is “raised” by giving property and “flattened” by receiving it. The man who has emptied himself with giving has the highest name. When
we
say that someone made a name for himself, we think of Onassis or J. P. Morgan or H. L. Hunt, men who got rich. But Kwakiutl names, first of all, are not the names of individuals; they are conferred upon individuals, yes, but they are names on the order of “Prince of Wales,” meant to indicate social position. And here are some of them:

• Whose Property Is Eaten in Feasts
  

• Satiating
  

• Always Giving Blankets While Walking
  

• For Whom Property Flows
  

• The Dance of Throwing Away Property
  

Some names, it is true, are agonistic (Creating Trouble All Around), but the majority refer to the outflow of property. A man makes a name for himself by letting wealth slip through his fingers. He may control the goods, but it is their dispersal he controls. Just as the anthropologist may say of the Indians, “virtue rests in publicly disposing of wealth, not in its mere acquisition …,” so Hagstrom writes that “in science, the acceptance by scientific journals of contributed manuscripts establishes the donor’s status as a scientist—indeed, status as a
scientist can be achieved
only
by such gift-giving—and it assures him of prestige within the scientific community.” A scientist
does
contribute his ideas in order to earn status, but if the name he makes for himself is He Whose Ideas Are Eaten in Conferences, we need not call his contributions meretricious. This status is not the status of the egotist.
*

It is true that many people in science will scoff if you try to tell them about a scientific community in which ideas are treated as gifts. This has not been their experience at all. They will tell you a story about a stolen idea. So-and-so invented the famous such and such, but the man down the hall hurried out and got the patent. Or so-and-so used to discuss his research with his lab partner but then the sneaky fellow went and published the ideas without giving proper credit. He did it because he’s competitive, they say, because he needed to secure his degree, because he had to publish to get tenure—and all of this is to be expected of departmentalized science in capitalist universities dominated by contractual research for industry and the military.

But these stories do not contradict the general point. I am not saying science
is
a community that treats ideas as contributions; I am saying it becomes one
to the degree
that ideas move as gifts. Each of these stories demonstrates the general point, though by way of exception. In each case the personal aggrandizement—the theft of an idea, the profiteering— breaks up the group. No one will talk over nascent ideas with
a fellow known to have a hot line to his patent attorney. The man whose ideas were stolen stops talking to his lab partner. Where status is bestowed according to the contribution of original ideas, a thief may survive for a while, but in the long run someone smells a rat, notoriety replaces prestige, ill repute replaces esteem, and the crook is out in the cold.

We should now face the question of exactly why ideas might be treated as gifts in science. To answer it we shall be obliged to speak first of the function of the scientific community. Let us say briefly that the task of science is to describe and explain the physical world, or more generally, to develop an integrated body of theory that can account for the facts, and predict them. Even such a brief prospectus points toward several reasons why ideas might be treated as gifts, the first being that the task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each individual thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of “group mind” develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person. The commerce of ideas—donated, accepted (or rejected), integrated—constitutes the thinking of such a mind. A Polish theoretical physicist who had once been isolated from science by anti-Semitism testifies to the need to be in the stream of ideas: “Like the Jewish Torah, which was taught from mouth to mouth for generations before being written down, ideas in physics are discussed, presented at meetings, tried out and known to the inner circle of physicists working in the great centers long before they are published in papers and books …” A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must “fit,” and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate
medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.