Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Reciprocity

Debt

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 17:25:24 +0000

Cartoon depicting the former king of Great Britain and Ireland George III receiving funds from Prime Minister William Pitt. Authored by James Gilray in 1786.

Ryan Davey

Cardiff University

Initially published 25 Mar 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24debt

Abstract:

Debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe, but it often accompanies inequality, oppression, and unrest. Responding to this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. It considers a debate in anthropology about whether debts of money are akin to reciprocity. Anthropologists have traced the connections between debts of money and reciprocal obligations in a wider sense. Yet the business of lending, borrowing, and repaying (or not repaying) money also differs from other kinds of social interdependency in ways that merit consideration in their own right. The entry explores the violence and dispossession that so often feature in experiences of debt, considering their connection to the rise of quantified obligations in impersonal markets. The coercive quality of debt relations is often latent yet can incite responses ranging from organised collective refusal to optimistic attempts to disregard debt collectors’ demands. The multiple ways in which debts form channels for the extraction of wealth and resources, sometimes known as financial exploitation, mark important shifts in class relations along with new solidarities and divisions. Finally, the entry considers the gendered aspects of debt, which arise through the often-unrecognised labour involved in borrowing or paying on time, as well as debt’s capacity to re-work gender norms and bring new social forms into being.

Introduction

Across the globe, debt and credit are a dominant framing for many economic and political relationships. Such relationships are often extractive, restrictive, or distressing. An excess of subprime mortgage debt in the US in 2008 led to the collapse of financial markets there and subsequently many other places. From the ‘Third World’ debt crisis that started in Mexico in 1982 to 2010s austerity in southern Europe, national governments’ attempts to repay their debts to international creditors have involved structural adjustment, mass unemployment, and rising inequality (Knight 2015; Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). On the other hand, credit is often associated with the creation of new possibilities and freedoms. It has been touted as a vital means of empowering the poor. Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank, which provides small loans to groups of poor people in a type of lending known as microcredit, advocates viewing ‘credit as a human right’.^[1]

Strictly speaking, debt is meant to be about repaying what you owe. Yet while this implies an outward logic of balanced reciprocity, debts so frequently feature in situations of inequality, devastation, and unrest. Exploring this paradox, this entry explores a variety of debt relations that anthropologists have investigated, including personal and household debt, government debt, informal lending, and the collectivised debts of microfinance, as well as gifts, reciprocity, and social interdependency more widely. The entry considers a debate in anthropology about whether debts of money are akin to reciprocity, thinking about what such an analogy enlightens and what it obscures. It then explores debt’s relation to violence and dispossession, and how debts can become channels for the extraction of wealth and resources, marking shifts in class relations and in how accumulation takes place. Finally, the entry considers how gendered dynamics arise through the often-unrecognised labour involved in borrowing or paying on time.

What is debt?

On many counts, anthropologists agree about what debt is. Debt is a kind of social relation: between the debtor who owes something and the creditor who is owed it, as well as often third parties who somehow oversee the repayment.^[2]Economic and common-sense framings of debt acknowledge this simple relational point. Yet anthropologists extend it further. Debts do not merely shape or corrupt pre-existing social ties. Instead, debts powerfully constitute social relations or even sociality itself (Roitman 2003; Schuster 2015). Debt creates a temporal relation, too: it is able ‘to link the present to the past and the future’ by ‘lending concrete resources […] in the present and demanding (or hoping for) a return in the future’ (Peebles 2010, 226).

Debt often appears with credit as ‘an inseparable, dyadic unit’—the one always requiring the other (Peebles 2010, 226). ‘Giving credit’ refers to the act of putting your faith in someone. The phrase implies considering someone to be credible, honourable, and trustworthy (Gregory 2012, 384). Incurring a debt, meanwhile, refers to the idea that once you have received credit from someone, you owe them something in return. Across cultures, when people discuss credit and debt, they tend to understand credit as ‘beneficial and liberating’, yet debt as ‘burdensome and imprisoning’ (Peebles 2010, 226)—in other words, many societies consider that ‘credit is to debt as virtue is to vice’ (Gregory 2012, 386). While this may suggest a neat opposition, the relation between credit and debt is more complex: credit is ‘a shapeshifter’ that is ‘reborn as debt’ after it is obtained (Gregory 2012, 383). The word ‘credit’ can refer to lending (whose opposite is ‘debt’) or a payment into an account (whose opposite is a ‘debit’, an expense out of an account) (Gregory 2012, 382). The meanings of the word ‘debt’ subtly vary as well: usually it means owing an amount of money, yet often the word refers to problems repaying such an amount (sometimes called ‘bad debt’ or ‘debt problems’) or alternatively owing things other than money.

Debt and reciprocity

Credit and debt often operate as reciprocal relations: what is given is later returned, or so it goes. (This picture is complicated below.) Anthropologists have persistently found that debts as reciprocal relations are themselves enmeshed in wider webs of reciprocity, both including and going beyond what might conventionally be described as a debt (Peebles 2010, 228). In post-apartheid South Africa amid ‘a proliferation of credit sources’, many people were borrowers in one capacity and lenders in another (James 2012). Some people loaned out their salaries or state welfare payments at interest, at times to help with repayments on their bank loans. This web of economic relations all premised upon tapping someone else’s income formed a kind of ‘money-go-round’ (James 2012). Similarly, women in rural India, in ‘juggling with debt’, take up microcredit and ‘join it up with countless other debt ties’ including informal and familial lending (Guérin 2014, 41). Debt can thus become a ‘driving force in social life’ (Guérin 2014). Looking at debt in terms of its quality of reciprocity highlights that debts of money tend to spawn multiple versions of themselves at a variety of scales and in apparently distinct social domains.

Anthropologists have connected debts of money with reciprocity and social interdependency in a wider sense, too, including gift-giving and obligations to kin. (See ‘Gender and care’ below.) Incorporating debt into kin ties, Papua New Guineans living in North Queensland, Australia, in the early twenty-first century used mortgages and other financial products to complete the payment of their bridewealth obligations (Sykes 2013). Most typically, links between debt and reciprocity arise in studying gift exchange. Pearl divers in 1990s Eastern Indonesia, for example, participated in a system of trade and debt whereby they tended to be chronically indebted to traders who purchased the divers’ catch in exchange for credit at their stores (Spyer 1997). Entwined with this mundane system, the pearl divers also maintained gift exchange relations with supernatural undersea female spirits whom they called their ‘sea wives’. The divers considered their sea wives to provide them with pearl oysters in exchange for token offerings of food and store-bought goods. As goods cycled between the two realms, the sacred undersea relations both sustained the profane transactions on dry land and formed a utopian alternative to them. For the pearl divers, there was an implied analogy between the two sets of exchange (Spyer 1997).

Anthropologists drawing connections between debts and gifts have drawn inspiration from Bronislaw Malinowski’s analysis of the kula in the Trobriand Islands—a ceremonial practice whereby bracelets and necklaces were transported and exchanged in complementary directions between islands (Malinowski [1922] 2014; Peebles 2010).^{^[3]} Malinowski argued that the ethnographic study of a given phenomenon should involve ‘an exhaustive survey of […] the broadest range possible of its concrete manifestations’, in order to understand how they ‘functionally depend on one another’ ([1922] 2014, 515; in Candea 2019, 81). Hence Malinowski observed a dazzling breadth of interlinked relations of reciprocity. Later anthropologists described the exchange of gifts and the exchange of women (by men) explicitly in terms of debt (Lévi-Strauss [1949] 1969, 265; Leach [1954] 1977, 163), leading to the concept of ‘gift-debt’ (Gregory 2015, 13, 55). This expanded the concept of debt from ‘that simple notion of debt that the lending of money creates’ to include reciprocal obligations in general (Gregory 2012, 380). This has sometimes been seen as anthropology’s quintessential contribution to the understanding of debt (Gregory 2012).^[4] The likening of debt to reciprocity has been helped by broadening the definition of reciprocity. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins proposed a typology of different kinds of reciprocity. He distinguished ‘generalised’ reciprocity, or transactions that are putatively altruistic; ‘balanced’ reciprocity or the direct exchange of things of commensurate worth or utility; and ‘negative’ reciprocity, i.e. the attempt to get something for nothing with impunity. He thereby allowed for the idea of reciprocity, conventionally connoting a to-and-fro, to encompass one-way flows of goods as varied as unbridled generosity and theft (1972, 194–6).

Yet anthropologists have also questioned the merits of re-defining debt from owing money to reciprocity in general. Marcel Mauss’s seminal study of gift exchange ([1925] 2001) is taken by some to be ‘anthropology’s foundational text on credit and debt’ (Peebles 2010, 226). Yet the extent to which Mauss engaged with concepts of credit and debt is contentious. He wrote that ‘the origin of credit is […] the gift’ ([1925] 1974, 34), but he described the obligation to reciprocate a gift as a ‘debt’ only a handful of times and without fully developing a concept of debt per se (e.g. [1925] 2001, 126–8; see also Graeber 2009, 112–3).^[5] Debates around the relation between debt and reciprocal giving go back to the time of Franz Boas—a founder of North American anthropology—and his lesser-known contemporary Edward Curtis (High 2012). Boas studied competitive gift-giving among the Kwakiutl people in North America, a practice known as the potlatch. He wrote that ‘the gift […] is nothing but an interest-bearing loan’, thus likening it to a debt (Boas 1897; in High 2012, 367). Curtis, in his study of the Kwakiutl, came to a different conclusion. Curtis found that the Kwakiutl kept potlatch gift-giving separate from the accounting of debts owed for everyday purchases: only the latter (debts owed on purchases) could ever be explicitly enumerated and called in, whereas with the potlatch it would be considered shamelessly greedy to demand an exact amount in return. As a shorthand, we could describe as ‘Boasian’ the position that debt and reciprocal gift-giving are assimilable, and describe as ‘Curtisian’ the position that they are distinct (High 2012). Inspired by Boas, as well as Malinowski and Mauss, anthropologists have shown how debts foster bonds of solidarity, strengthen hierarchies, and demarcate wider social boundaries (Peebles 2010). They have generated insights that debt is ‘productive’ of new forms of sociality, morality, care, political subjectivity, belonging, social worth, and relatedness (Roitman 2003; Guérin 2014).

Very often the people anthropologists study liken reciprocal and other obligations to debts of money, in a Boasian fashion; or they reflect Friedrich Nietzsche who, ruminating on the likeness between ‘the moral concept Schuld (‘guilt’) [and the] material concept of Schulden (‘debts’)’ (1887, 39), described morality itself as a debt people imagined owing to ancestors, god(s), or the cosmos. (See also a critique of notions of ‘primordial debt’ in Graeber 2009, 121). In Oceania, the Americas, and South Asia, some groups frame ritual and sacred relations explicitly as debts of money (Gregory 2012, 380). In contemporary Vietnam, burning money is a commonplace activity whereby people supply money to ancestors, gods, or ghosts (Kwon 2007). This practice draws on ‘an ancient concept of life as a type of bank loan’ from ‘the treasury of the other world’ or ‘the bank of hell’ (Kwon 2007, 77). In a more profane manner, in 1990s Chile, amid an overwhelming crisis of government debt and an explosion of consumer debt and default, the national government framed its obligations to the poor as a ‘social debt’ and its obligations to those affected by torture under Pinochet as its ‘moral debt’ (Han 2012). Characterising these injustices as debts was a strategy of self-exculpation, however, as the Chilean government implied that upon payment of an amount that it decided unilaterally, those injustices should be forgiven. (Poorer households did not appear to use the word ‘debt’ in this way.) By contrast, in campaigns among Black Americans for reparations for slavery, framing what is owed as a debt is considered by some to be self-defeating (Cooper 2011).

An alternative anthropological approach that does not equate debt with reciprocity, nor even describe debt as a form of exchange, was pioneered in the early 2000s (Roitman 2003; 2005). This approach is sceptical of an unqualified proposition that debt constitutes social relations, because such a proposition without an accompanying analysis of power risks being functionalist, in the sense of presuming consensus, stability, and an overall benignness in social arrangements that may in fact lack them (Roitman 2003, 212). Debt is seen instead to be ‘at the origin of a fundamentally asymmetrical social relation, which breaks with the logic of parity in exchange’ (Sarthou-Lajus 1997, 2; in Roitman 2003, 213), a logic common to viewing debts in terms of gifts and reciprocity. By this alternative view, debt is a ‘structure of dependence’ and ‘a particular condition in human relations […] inherent to the constitution of certain forms of subjectivity and hence […] a historical phenomenon’ (Roitman 2003, 213) rather than a universal feature of human life. This position was enhanced by conceiving of reciprocity more strictly than in Sahlins’ typology, noted above: reciprocal exchange is distinguished from mutualistic relations, hierarchies, and competitive gift-giving, such as the potlatch; and the assumption that human interactions everywhere are a matter of balanced, to-and-fro exchanges is robustly challenged (Graeber 2009; 2011).

As such distinctions underscore, when defaults and non-payment are rife, insisting that credit and debt are reciprocal may be a normative, rather than descriptive, act. The same point applies more broadly when debt is a relationship between institutional creditors and lay debtors. During times of financialisation and crisis, then, Curtis’s position is arguably more fruitful than Boas’s (High 2012). A Curtisian hesitation about identifying debt with reciprocity creates space to attend to debt’s violent and exploitative tendencies, as can be seen in a wave of anthropological scholarship since 2008 (see below). This does not preclude analysis of the imbrication of debts of money with other kinds of social interdependency, but rather calls for semantic precision in how they are all described (e.g. Guérin 2014; Guérin and Venkatasubramanian 2022; Elyachar 2005). There may be ‘a temptation to apply debt reasoning to almost every other relationship one can think of’ (High 2012, 363)—framing what politicians owe their constituents as a social debt, what scholars learn from their mentors as an intellectual debt, morality as a debt to society, family relations as debts to caregivers, or culture as a symbolic debt. But doing so ‘only grinds down the vast array of human action into a single transactional logic’ (High 2012, 365; see also Sneath 2012). We might, therefore, prefer not to ‘collapse all distinctions into debt’ but instead to investigate ‘the distinctions that matter’ (High 2012) to the people in our fieldsites. This includes distinctions between debt and other kinds of obligation, as well as distinctions between different kinds of debt. It is significant that in South Africa, for instance, the term sekôlôtô connotes entrapment in debt while the term lobola refers to long-term reciprocal obligations (James 2014, 22). This underscores the value of reflecting in anthropological analysis people’s subtle uses and significations of the word ‘debt’ and of other words like it, even (or especially) if this goes against some seemingly foundational precepts.

Violence and dispossession

Efforts to distinguish debts of money from social interdependency in general have significantly influenced anthropological understandings of the relation between debt and violence. The anthropologist David Graeber defined debt as ‘an obligation to pay a sum of money’, as opposed to a ‘mere moral obligation’ (2011, 13). Unlike if ‘what was owed was a favour, or gratitude or respect’, with a debt, the human costs are often disregarded since ‘a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified’ and this act of turning ‘morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic [can] justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene’ (Graeber 2011, 13–4). In making this distinction, Graeber identified in debt ‘two elements […] violence and quantification’ that are so closely interwoven that ‘it’s almost impossible to find one without the other’ (2011, 14). While obligations in general do not necessarily have anything to do with violence (see also Englund 2008), Graeber claimed that debts of money generally do (2011). He explained this difference by contrasting market economies, which feature debts of money and where money’s primary purpose is to acquire goods, from ‘human economies’ where any currencies that exist primarily serve to ‘rework relations between people’ (Graeber 2009, 125; 2011). Unlike with human economies, in a market economy, individuals can settle their accounts and never have anything else to do with one another. Shifts from human economies to market economies have involved transitions from currencies with very specific purposes that were used only to pay lip service to something owed of immeasurable value (such as an arm lost in combat or the ability to produce new life), to the general-purpose money used today whose value is considered equal to the thing for which it is offered (Graeber 2009, 121–4). What was instrumental to this transition was violence, especially the violence that made it possible to separate human beings from their social contexts and so treat them as objects of exchange (Graeber 2011, 159). The violence of slavery in particular played a formative role in the rise of impersonal markets, for instance in converting a slave, who supposedly owed their whole life to a particular master, into a slave whose obligation to their master could be quantified so that the slave could be sold to someone else (Graeber 2009, 124–5). Hence states, with their recourse to legitimate violence, and markets, that draw equivalences between people and things, ‘were born together and have always been intertwined’ even though they are commonly assumed to be diametrically opposed (Graeber 2011, 18).^[6] Throughout the growth of impersonal markets, the language of debt has been an extremely effective way ‘to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral’ (Graeber 2011, 5).

At a more mundane level, the coercive quality of relationships between creditors and debtors often becomes patent when creditors attempt to collect or enforce unpaid debts. This includes forcibly dispossessing people of homes, belongings, land, income, or wealth. The violence is often latent and can include ‘subtle or not-so-subtle threats of physical force’ being applied if rules and commands are not followed (Graeber 2012, 105). Lenders’ ‘draconian repossession tactics’ during a nationwide farming crisis in the United States in the 1980s had traumatic effects on farmers, including suicides, social ostracism, and hospitalisation for mental ill-health (Dudley 2000, 40; see also Shah 2012 on indebted farmers’ suicides in India). As both land value and demand for US grain plummeted, lenders required additional collateral and foreclosed loans ‘not because [the farmers] were delinquent or in default, but because their loans had grown “larger” than the value of the property securing them’ (Dudley 2000, 40). Farmers were forced to auction off their land and machinery at low prices, leaving no means of production and a shortfall to repay (Dudley 2000). Likewise, microlending practices, while designed to empower the poor, often involve coercive pressures to repay. In Egypt in the 1990s, NGOs providing microfinancing could, under Egyptian law, take cases of non-payment to criminal courts (unlike the civil courts ordinary banks had to use) and so draw on the repressive apparatus of the state to recover the debt (Elyachar 2005, 199). Even without state enforcement, microfinance loan officers may use coercive pressures from embarrassment to harassment to induce repayments (Kar 2013). With the 2008 global financial crisis, dispossessions took place on a mass scale across North America, Europe, and beyond. In some jurisdictions, money could be taken straight out of household borrowers’ bank accounts if they did not repay (Mikuš 2020). Mortgage repossessions incited a variety of responses among at-risk homeowners, from defaulting to debt refusal and critiques of predatory lenders that reformulated what borrowers owed them (Stout 2019; Sabaté 2016). At times, attempts to enforce debts have been met with embodied defiance—such as with activists in Spain assembling outside the homes of potential evictees to physically obstruct debt enforcement agents and the police (Suarez 2017).

Given the violence of debt, one would be forgiven for thinking that the futures debt inspires are uniformly bleak. Yet as well as fears of being trapped in debt and anxieties about enforcement, debt and credit are also channels for and objects of optimism, hopes, and dreams. In 2010s Britain, the enforcement of household debt, including bailiffs seizing goods or landlords taking eviction proceedings, was a method of securing repayments yet also formed part of a wider structure of expropriation to which poorer working-class households were exposed (Davey 2025). The daily efforts of over-indebted people to ignore the demands made by their creditors, by stashing unopened debt collection letters away or hanging up on telephone calls, is pervasively assumed to be an irrational or irresponsible attempt to wish debts away (Davey 2025). Yet it is better seen as part of an uneven and complexly optimistic struggle against the prospect of lawful coercion, indeed one that often succeeds (Davey 2025). Credit can also render certain hopes possible when there is no obvious violence or enforcement at work. In South Africa after apartheid (James 2015), the would-be members of a new Black middle class took out credit to improve their position in society through university education, bridewealth payments, and mortgages. The expansion of lending thus ‘unleashed aspirations for upward mobility’ (James 2015) that, without credit, would remain tractionless dreams, while more egalitarian hopes fell by the wayside. A similar point holds for student debt and middle-class status in the United States (Zaloom 2019).

Extraction and class

While the ambivalence of debt means it sometimes brings increments of freedom, prosperity, or hope (Guérin and Venkatasubramanian 2022), very often debt relations entail unequal transfers of wealth or resources. These latter processes are variously known as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2009), ‘financial exploitation’ (Saiag 2020b), ‘financial expropriation’ (Lapavitsas 2013a), or ‘predatory debt extraction’ (Stout 2019, 72). The first of these is a way of accumulating wealth that relies on taking things from people rather than from exploiting their productive labour. The concept modifies Marx’s formulation of ‘primitive accumulation’ as an act of dispossessing land and property at the origins of capitalism through Rosa Luxemburg’s insight that such dispossession is on-going ([1913] 2003). Anthropologists studying state debt have explored ways in which debt can be a mechanism for accumulation by dispossession (Roitman 2005; Bear 2015). State debt, also known as government debt or sovereign debt, is what a national government owes to the various bodies from whom it has borrowed money. While state debt crises gained headlines in Europe in the 2010s, in most of the world they are longer-standing (Muehlebach 2016). The geopolitical order since World War II is one whereby international relations are mediated through debts (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). Since the 1970s, loans were often conditional on structural adjustment policies which generally did not foster prosperity in Global South countries (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998). In the 1980s, state debt was financialised, in the sense that the loans given to national governments (known as sovereign debt bonds) became capital on which commercial banks could speculate in order to accumulate wealth (Bear 2015).^[7] At the same time, the control of how sovereign debts would be repaid gradually shifted from the hands of elected politicians to technocrats in central banks, which became increasingly independent from political control. (For ethnographies of central banks, see Holmes & Marcus 2007, Holmes 2009, and Riles 2018) With national governments ever keener to appear like well-behaved debtors, ‘[e]conomic governance became newly constrained by the new public good of interest repayment’ (Bear 2015, 7).

These processes become extractive insofar as states prioritise their debt repayments over providing welfare or alleviating inequality. In 1980s India, sovereign debt transformed from a source of funds for national social investment into a mechanism by which middle-class and institutional investors could extract value from public-sector institutions (Bear 2015, 12–3). This was helped by policy-makers, trained at the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who implemented austerity measures, reducing government spending on public services or requiring governments to get more done with the same funding (Bear 2015). Austerity is a way in which governments remove resources from public ownership and transfer them to commercial banks, the IMF, and the World Bank (Bear and Knight 2017). In the 1990s, the government of Cameroon imposed extreme austerity (Roitman 2005). The once-prosperous Cameroonian economy had experienced a sharp downturn in the 1980s, which had led Cameroon’s international creditors to pressure the Cameroon government to reduce its public expenditure and prioritise its debt repayments. State debt created new channels for continuous economic extraction, in the form of debt repayments and interest payments (Roitman 2005). Hence ‘debt […] generates […] economic and political rents’: regular payments someone receives simply because of owning something (Roitman 2005, 74). This mode of economic extraction takes place through financial and commercial relations, rather than through the exploitation of labour. And yet Cameroon’s austerity did not go unchallenged, with protests and popular rejection of the government’s narrative of what it had to do domestically to service its debts (Roitman 2005).

Another form of accumulation by dispossession takes place through microcredit (Elyachar 2005). Microcredit, also known as microlending or microfinance, involves giving small loans to groups of poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. After widespread criticism of international lending to nation-states and amid state debt crises, microlending was designed to empower the poor. Egyptian microfinance providers aimed to achieve this by ‘financialising [the] social networks’ of the ‘informal’ economy, yet the microloans eventually served as capital by which Egyptian banks could trade on international markets (Elyachar 2005, 194).

Household debts can also work as channels for transfers of wealth and resources. Sometimes called personal debt, household debt includes credit cards, loans, overdraft fees, and mortgages, as well as being ‘in arrears’ (behind on bills) and student loans. Here the terms ‘financial exploitation’ and ‘financial expropriation’ have been suggested. The latter describes a process where households’ reliance on ‘the formal financial system to facilitate access to vital goods and services’ leads to a ‘systematic extraction of financial profits’ from household incomes, and so has ‘an exploitative aspect’ (Lapavitsas 2013b, 794, 801). It is only compounded by ‘securitisation’, a practice whereby banks trade and potentially profit on their loan portfolios (Palomera 2014; Langley 2009). In Argentina, a subproletariat of informal workers and unemployed people living mainly in shantytowns had long been excluded from consumer credit (Saiag 2020a). Yet thanks to a new social protection system of pensions and family allowances introduced by social democratic President Cristina Kirchner (2007-15), every household gained access to a stable monthly income. Consumer lending to this group boomed. It gave rise to a mode of exploiting labour by finance, due to

the mismatch between the time of finance (monthly instalments over the medium to long term) and the time of work (erratic and often short-term) [which] increasingly feeds financial transfers from people’s labour to financial institutions, as debtors structurally fail to honour their instalments on time. This, in turn, exacerbates the existing stratifications within the working class, because those relegated to the most precarious jobs are the most exposed to late fees and penalties (Saiag 2020a, 18).

This mismatch ‘is emblematic of a specific form of capital accumulation, in which a large proportion of the working class remains at the margins of the wage-labour nexus, but is exploited [instead] through financial mechanisms’ (Saiag 2020a, 24).

The Marxian concept of ‘money fetishism’—whereby social relations of production, exploitation, and domination are misrecognised as inherent properties of money as a commodity (as with the notion that money itself has a capacity to generate more money)—enhances the anthropological understanding of exploitation through debt (Mikuš 2019; see also Taussig 1980). Marx believed the appropriation of surplus value through lending and borrowing, as a way of converting money into capital, took place through the charging of interest (Marx 1894, 593; in Mikuš 2019). Close ethnographic attention, however, shows a greater variety and contingency in the lending-related practices involved in appropriating surplus labour (Mikuš 2019). Amid ‘peripheral financialisation’ in Croatia in the 2010s, this included: foreign-currency lenders profiting on cross-border currency differentials and/or shifting exchange rate risks onto borrowers; frequent property repossessions accompanied by bargain auction prices; lenders making it harder for the borrower not to default (e.g. by refusing to renegotiate repayment schedules, or lending to those with precarious incomes); and penalty fees (e.g. for late repayments) (Mikuš 2019). Lending is made profitable thanks precisely to this sheer variety in the forms of money fetishism, as well as from hierarchies within and between markets that allow institutional lenders to manipulate and convert between the different kinds of money fetishism: banks can ‘on-sell’ the risks of borrowing and lending, and borrow in ‘money markets’, for instance, but lay individuals with access only to ‘retail’ or ‘consumer’ credit markets cannot (Mikuš 2019, 301). Islamic finance further complicates the association between debt and interest through the observance of proscriptions on usurious interest, for example through Muslim Americans’ efforts to achieve economic and cultural citizenship with mortgages that fuse Islamic law with US ideologies of opportunity (Maurer 2006).

Processes of financial expropriation often tie closely into the reproduction or transformation of class relations, including shared experiences of (and struggles against) exploitation and domination. In the city of Ferrol, in northern Spain, the extension of personal credit and mortgages in the 2000s fuelled popular aspirations for upward mobility and eroded the city’s tradition of labour organising (Narotzky 2015). An aspirational identity gained ground of being desclasado or ‘un-classed’. And yet once prospects of upward mobility began to fade amid a contraction of credit and wider recession, borrowers who still had to service debts and maintain credit scores began to feel increasingly dominated by their debts (Narotzky 2015). In such contexts, ‘credit and debt [may become] the centre of a new form of class consciousness’ for ordinary employed and unemployed people as well as small-scale entrepreneurs against financial institutions (Narotzky 2015, 67–8). Such experiences of ‘exploitation in the realm of […] consumption’ form ‘the basis of their understanding of systematic dispossession’ (Narotzky 2015, 67–8). The anthropology of debt has thus elicited a re-thinking of class beyond exploitation in the sphere of production to also encompass extraction taking place in the sphere of circulation (Narotzky 2015, 68-9)—or even ‘in social reproduction generally’ (i.e. not limited to any one domain) (Hann and Kalb 2020, 25). Conversely, where mortgages and consumer credit have become widespread, a middle-class identity as self-reliant and enterprising, all pinned on property ownership, can reinforce a tolerance of exploitative working conditions because the imperative to repay debts is tied into status and success (Weiss 2019). Creditor-debtor relationships have arguably ‘replaced labour as the key to value extraction and, perhaps, to class formation’ (Hann and Kalb 2020, 26).

As debt reconfigures class relations, it may spawn new anti-capitalist movements and alliances, as well as nationalist populist ones (Mikuš 2019). Working-class Ecuadorian migrants in 2000s Spain were trying to become part of the global middle classes through subprime (i.e. high-interest, high-risk) mortgage borrowing. When the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, this ‘subprime middle class’ (Suarez 2016) often defaulted; half a million evictions took place in Spain within ten years. Many Ecuadorian migrants joined a social movement, called la Plataforma de afectados por la hipoteca, or ‘la PAH’: ‘the platform for people affected by the mortgage crisis’. La PAH is an example of debt-based collective political action. Its activities include debtor assemblies, in which people with mortgage debt come together to share experiences and give support. While some dismissed this movement of homeowners as middle-class and reformist, it is arguably better seen as a ‘cross-class alliance’ with revolutionary potential (Suarez 2017; see also Gutierrez Garza 2022, Ravelli 2021).

Wider social divisions than overtly class-based ones, too, may be linked to the forms of capital involved in lending. In peripheral neighbourhoods of Barcelona in the 2000s, tensions arose between working-class migrants from the Global South and longer-standing residents (Palomera 2014). The former bought apartments on predatory mortgages and then would sublet two bedrooms to other families so as to afford the repayments while struggling to cover repairs; the latter had bought apartments decades earlier to have one family per home, and thanks to house prices rising some were now moving to more affluent areas. While it may appear that the older Spanish residents were intolerant of new Black migrant neighbours, or had ‘cultural’ differences, it is more fruitful to understand the social fragmentation in terms of changing relations between real estate and financial capital, and the differing relations the two groups had to the Spanish state (Palomera 2014). Recognising finance as a form of capital (distinct from, but entwined with, real estate and productive capital) is thus relevant to understanding many debt-based practices in capitalist societies (Palomera 2014), although anthropologists differ on whether this capital is fictitious or as real as any other (Maurer 2012, 181; Graeber 2014, 75).

Gender and care

As a field of structural inequalities within capitalism, class is, as feminist anthropologists have found, ‘generated within historically shifting dynamics of gender’ as well as sexuality, kinship, and race (Bear et al. 2015). Hence understanding the inequalities of debt involves attending to the ways in which debt-related practices and experiences are often deeply gendered and even a site at which gender norms are produced in the first place or re-worked. Womanhood itself is ‘transformed through debt’ and this transformation in turn feeds financial capitalism (Guérin, Kumar and Venkatasubramanian 2023). When poor women in rural India draw on multiple sources of formal and informal credit, in addition to financial motivations they make deliberate choices to multiply their social relationships (Guérin 2014). These women’s deliberations are gendered, since norms for women to manage household budgets without control over incomes mean they often resort to emergency loans that confer a low status, while also having to anticipate accusations of prostitution for borrowing from non-kin men (Guérin 2014)—a situation that heightens the appeal of microcredit.

Indeed, microfinance is a prime example of how gender is produced through debt. Often, microfinance loans are targeted at women with the aim of bringing about women’s empowerment through financial inclusion (Kar 2018). In India, maintaining access to this credit has become a central part of women’s domestic labour (Kar 2018). The groups organise among themselves the dispersal of credit and the gathering of repayments. The ties among the women thus act as a kind of ‘social collateral’ backing up the repayment (Schuster 2015). In Paraguay, pre-existing familial and neighbourly ties made up only a portion of this social collateral (Schuster 2015). Paraguayan microfinance providers asked relative strangers to rely on one another for credit access and repayment, thus actively shaping the social priorities of its borrowers. The relations among women that microfinance collateralises do not necessarily precede the collective debt, but may rather come into existence upon the debt’s creation and be shaped by its terms (Schuster 2015). Credit can therefore produce a social unit, rather than the social unit always pre-existing the debt (Schuster 2014), as one might assume for, say, family households. Such insights develop feminist analysis by denaturalising the ‘seemingly obvious [social] embeddedness of women’ involved in gendered practices of credit and debt (Schuster 2014, 564).

With household debts, gendered inequalities arise from the demands debt places on caring or reproductive labour. The task of managing debt repayments is often integrated into feminised activities, especially around home and family life (Allon 2014). Amid a boom in consumer credit in Chile in the 2000s, formal credit was often intertwined with familial care (Han 2011). Credit had become ‘a resource in caring’, for instance by buying time for mentally ill or drug-addicted kin to stabilise (Han 2011, 20). Support between households could also ‘mitigate the forces of economic precariousness’, for instance through women’s informal savings and borrowing associations (Han 2011). Yet caring relations also became strained or found their limit when demands for repayment induced ailments in the body of a debtor. Such situations open out ‘the rhythms of the domestic to the calendrics of debt’ (Adkins 2017, 6). Not only are kin and intimate relations central to strategies for dealing with debt, but also growing household indebtedness—such as in Greece in the late 2000s and 2010s—has transformed the household (or oikos) itself by adding credit to the gendered dynamics of dependency, exploitation, and cooperation that constitute it (Kofti 2020, 267-8). Feminist analysis of debt renders visible feminised labour and cautions against positing a universal creditor-debtor relation (cf. Lazzarato 2011), precisely because debt exploits gendered, sexual, racial, and locational differences (Cavallero and Gago 2020). It involves exploring ‘how debt is linked to violence against feminised bodies’, for instance when debt binds women to harmful relationships or is conversely the condition for fleeing (Cavallero and Gago 2020, 6). Studying the household-level processes of converting non-financial assets into more liquid, financial ones shatters assumptions that capitalism somehow occupies a realm distinct from households (Bear et al. 2015).

Conclusion

One of anthropology’s distinctive and long-held contributions to the study of debt has been to trace the social and material connections between debts of money, on the one hand, and reciprocal obligations and social interdependencies in a wider sense, on the other. The anthropology of debt is remarkable for having tended to follow a method of ‘internal comparison’ (Candea 2019, 80–1) that considers analogous phenomena, such as reciprocal relations, within a single fieldsite, rather than only between settings. Yet equally long-standing is a disagreement over whether to equate debt with reciprocity or rather to define debt as owing money. This tension is a virtue of the comparative approach anthropology takes. It is this tension between alternative conceptions of debt, rather than a habit of simply identifying debt with reciprocity irrespective of vernacular definitions and practices, that best encapsulates the value of anthropology’s engagement with debt. Considering debt and reciprocity alike, anthropological research into debt extends as far back as the start of the discipline itself through its vast record of ‘gift-debt’ (Peebles 2010). Yet if we accept that the practice of lending, borrowing, and repaying commodity-money differs in significant ways from other kinds of social interdependency, and so bears consideration in its own right, then anthropology’s inquiries into debts of money arguably begin much more recently. They may begin with ground-breaking studies of state debt emerging in the 1990s (Locke and Ahmadi-Esfahani 1998, Roitman 2003), in response to the 1980s crisis, and new work on microcredit (Elyachar 2005) and household debt (Dudley 2000, Maurer 2006, Williams 2004) emerging in the 2000s before a surge of interest in debt in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession (see the authors cited throughout this entry). As Graeber wrote in 2009, debt in this latter sense had received surprisingly little attention in anthropology (2009, 111). Attending to the specificity of debt (and of debts) enables us to ask new questions and draw new comparisons. While research in the 1990s and 2000s on debt across anthropology, the social sciences, and geography often emphasised its cultural aspects (see, as an example, MacKenzie 2006 and the ‘social studies of finance’ approach), anthropological research on debt in the last fifteen years has explored power asymmetries, accumulation, labour, and struggles, along with livelihoods, politics, kinship, and care across multiple scales (Hann and Kalb 2020, 4). Forerunners of this approach include the work of Janet Roitman (2005), Julie Elyachar (2005), and Kathryn Dudley (2000).

It is possible, when exploring the role of violence in enforcing debts of money, to identify subtle inequalities in lenders’ and borrowers’ influence over whether or not violence is exercised. We can do this by asking: how capable is the debtor of preventing violence from being done to them? Research into state debt has shown how it generates new channels for economic extraction in the realm of circulation (or ‘rents’). Household debts, too, involve not only distinctive forms of exploitation arising from mismatched temporalities between work and repayment, but also the expropriations generated by interest payments, penalty fees, predatory lending, and the like—even while fetishising money glosses over the extractive processes at work. Practices and experiences of debt are complexly gendered, as studies of microcredit schemes designed to promote women’s empowerment in the Global South show. These studies highlight the vast contingency of the social formations that constitute a ‘borrower’ or ‘lender’ in any given setting. Feminist research on debt helps to de-familiarise constructs such as ‘the household’ and draws attention to the usually unrecognised labours that go into their continual creation. Indebtedness shapes the way people imagine the future, with debt-based aspirations for household prosperity often leaving existing structures of inequality undisturbed. Yet this does not preclude struggles to envisage liberation beyond the social units in and through which borrowing, repayment, and default take place.

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Note on contributor

Ryan Davey is interested in subjectivity, lawful violence, and political economy in Britain. This includes a forthcoming book titled The personal life of debt (2025, Bristol University Press), based on several years’ work with housing estate residents in southern England. Ryan works as a lecturer in social sciences at Cardiff University.

Dr Ryan Davey, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT. Email: daveyr2@cardiff.ac.uk. Web: https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/daveyr2.

[1] Yunus, Muhammad. 1990. “Credit as a human right.” The New York Times. April 2. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/02/opinion/credit-as-a-human-right.html

[2] In financial capitalist contexts, creditors may also agree with third parties to turn the promise to repay into a tradeable asset.

^[3] Malinowski himself refers to credit, debt, or lending only once, in writing that the kula’s ‘economic mechanism […] is based on a specific form of credit’ ([1922] 2014, 164). Yet his influence on the anthropology of debt makes a brief consideration of his approach worthwhile. Personal correspondence with Marek Mikuš.

[4] While the question of anthropology’s distinctive contribution is fair, at least as much has been learned about debt through interdisciplinary dialogues, including with geography (Harker 2021; Langley 2009), sociology (Deville 2015; Adkins 2017), and political economy (Soederberg 2014).

[5] Differing views on this point may arise in part because different translations of The gift into English make greater or lesser use of the words ‘credit’ and ‘debt’. See Gregory ([1982] 2015, 13) for an account of Mauss indeed writing about credit and debt, based on Ian Cunnison’s 1966 translation (Mauss 1974), and see Graeber (2009, 112) for the alternative view that ‘Mauss never develops this connection [between gift and debt] explicitly’, based on W.D. Hall’s 1990 translation (Mauss 2001).

[6] In Ancient Greece and Rome, for instance, states minted coins, paid soldiers in silver, then demanded subjects pay tax in the same currency, forcing its uptake and enabling soldiers to buy everyday goods, while those with unpaid debts or who were defeated in combat were enslaved (Graeber 2009, 127).

[7] The term ‘financialisation’ refers to a process where ‘the reproduction of societies as a whole becomes more dependent on finance, credit and debt, and on the logic of speculative money capital’ (Hann and Kalb 2020, 1). Research on financialisation has grown in the last decade, tending to focus on the last forty-five years, although making money through lending and borrowing is nothing new (Bear et al. 2015).

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Tax

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 23:04:37 +0000

Miranda Sheild Johansson

University College London

Initially published 14 Dec 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20tax

Abstract:

Paying tax or avoiding tax is part of everyday life across the globe. But what kinds of payments are taxes, and how do fiscal systems shape society? Taxes are often conceived of as a nexus of state-citizen relations and an intrinsic part of a social contract where they are exchanged for political representation and a level of state protection. But ethnographic evidence demonstrates that separating out taxes from other payments is not straightforward, and the motivations for paying tax, or collecting tax, are far from universal. In addition to shaping national and international economies, taxes construct social and political relations which cast citizens and communities in particular roles, such as ‘contributor’ and ‘wealth creator’, or ‘dependant’ and ‘scrounger’. As such, taxes are political tools that are wielded in processes of governance. Yet fiscal systems are also crafted from the bottom up, through taxpayer action and taxpayer logics, and gain meanings from the broader historical and cultural contexts in which they exist. In recent years, and in the context of multiple financial, environmental, and health crises across the globe, discussions about how we might build better futures have put the spotlight on taxes as a tool for redistribution. The logics that drive new tax policies and laws are embedded in specific concepts of tax justice and tax competition, as well as the relation between the sovereign state and the international community. Tax is a locus of many important themes, both academic and political. Understanding tax is crucial to understanding our societies.

Introduction

Taxes are ubiquitous in the lives of people around the globe, whether they are hailed or hated, paid or evaded; they are an unavoidable part of contemporary statecraft and everyday economic exchanges. But what kinds of payments are taxes—what is being exchanged, how do taxes gain meaning within their cultural contexts, and how do they structure our economic and social relationships? Why is inheritance tax—supposedly one of the great tools of redistribution—referred to as the ‘death tax’ in the US? Why do rural-to-urban migrants in Bolivia studiously avoid paying value-added tax (or VAT), but make great efforts to pay property tax? What is the difference between paying tithes to a church and taxes to a government? What do people expect in return for their taxes paid, and how do they justify their evasion of tax?

In the simplest terms, and in theory, taxes are a legally legitimated means by which to transfer wealth from individuals and businesses to governments, and then on to targeted areas of public provision, such as education and health, or to service national debt. Taxes are commonly levied on labour (income tax), profit (corporation tax), wealth and property (inheritance tax, wealth tax, property tax), and consumption (VAT), among other things. They are divided into direct taxes, such as income tax, which are collected directly from a person and business, and indirect taxes, such as VAT, which are collected on transactions and by intermediaries. Taxes are generally progressive (higher rates for higher incomes), or flat/regressive (the same rate for all, meaning those on lower incomes end up paying a larger share of their income if the tax is indirect).

Beyond these defining characteristics, taxes exist in political and cultural contexts where they shape social relationships and take on diverse meanings. The anthropology of tax explores these processes and ultimately how people make and unmake society through fiscal relations. This includes a focus on both the oppressive and liberating effects of tax. As a tool for oppression and subject-making, tax policies and practices have been analysed as Foucauldian disciplinary technologies that mould people into self-policing taxpayers (Hobson 2004; Likhovski 2007); they have also been scrutinised as part of hegemonic colonial systems where they are, at best, out of touch with taxpayer logics (Sheild Johansson 2018), and at worst, instruments of racist oppression (Willmott 2020). But taxes are also held as tools of redistribution in a battle against growing global inequality (Maurer 2008; Piketty 2014), the key to sovereign power in the face of dominant financial logics, and the means through which economically just and environmentally sustainable futures might be built.

In anthropology, tax has been approached in broadly three different ways: scholars have investigated fiscal systems, including politics, policy, and finance; they have studied tax collectors and the state’s desire for compliant taxpayers; and they have explored the perspective of taxpayers. These three areas of focus have all benefited from other areas of anthropological concern, such as the study of the state, citizenship, financial systems, money, bureaucracy, and law, as well as from considerable cross-disciplinary efforts. For instance, the work with and on tax collectors draws on business studies, organization studies, tax administration, and science and technology studies (Björklund Larsen 2017; Boll 2014a, 2014b; Oats & Wynter 2018). Likewise, scholarship focusing on taxpayer perspectives builds on both compliance work and social psychology (Kirchler & Braithwaite 2007).

In addition to these influences, fiscal sociology is the most apparent forerunner of anthropology of tax. In fiscal sociology, as popularised by the early twentieth century economist Joseph A. Schumpeter, taxes are recognised as having power beyond that of shaping obvious areas of influence such as policy and socio-economic relations to include the ‘spirit’, ‘cultural level’, and ‘social structure’ of a nation (Schumpeter 1918: 101, in Makovicky & Smith 2020: 4). More recently, and in the face of a growing global gap between the 1% and the 99% (the wealthy few and the majority rest), fiscal sociology has focused on how tax policies may structure race, class, and gender inequalities, as well as how they can be productively employed to battles these same inequalities (Martin & Prasad 2014).

While fiscal sociology certainly addresses many of the topics that are of import to anthropologists, it approaches tax somewhat ‘narrowly’. While it looks widely and inventively for the impact of tax, fiscal sociology often takes for granted that it is clear what kinds of payments taxes are, what kind they are not, and that all this is defined by governments (Meagher 2018). By contrast, an anthropological approach to tax tackles fiscal questions both broadly and narrowly. In a broad sense, anthropology does not work with one single definition of tax. Nor does it assume how tax works or what it means in different contexts. Its starting point tends to be that people’s definitions of tax will always be informed by a larger cultural context, including, but not limited to, other financial exchanges and the diverse ways that public goods and services can be produced (Bear & Mathur 2015; Kauppinen 2020). In other words, the meanings attached to taxes, the relationships and values they produce and are produced by, are deeply cultural. In a narrow sense, anthropology often explores how an official category of tax is defined and legitimised in a particular setting, as well as the power implications of these definitions.

The social contract and governmentality

A narrower understanding of the role of taxes in society often presupposes an origin story where tax is foundational to the social contract and the making of ‘civilised’ society, as imagined by Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes (1968 [1651]) and John Locke (1988 [1689]). In this view, citizens submit to the authority of majority rule and its associated institutions, relinquish certain rights (such as total freedom and self-determination), and pay tax to their state in return for social order, protection of themselves and their property, and political representation. In theory, paying tax within the context of a social contract marks inclusion and privilege. Its core logic involves a reciprocal relationship between states and citizens who are unified in their understanding of the aim of taxes—the creation of an agreed-upon communal world. Across time and space, expectations of what this supposed social contract should include has varied, although public infrastructure, services, and the defence of some human and social rights are often expected in return for submission to authority and taxes paid.

However, not only do these Anglo-European models of state formation provide just one story of state-society relations, they also naturalise the relationship between taxation, property rights, and political representation (Guyer 1992). This raises the question of whether the social contract and taxes have to go together at all, or whether their link is a mere ‘traveling idea’, albeit persistent and far-reaching, disconnected from ethnographic realities and with limited explanatory power (Makovicky & Smith 2020: 8). One does not have to look far to find examples where tax does not function as one side of a positive social contract. In particular, work in postcolonial societies has demonstrated the multiple and at times diverging trajectories of the historical emergence of tax use, policy models, or ideas of representation and democracy (Guyer 1992; Roitman 2005, 2007).

In her work on fiscal relations in West Africa, Kate Meagher (2018) argues that taxes in colonial Nigeria were not collected to pay for public services, but instead to cover the cost of the administration that created ‘order’ and protection for a select few. As such, the tax system hinged on an extortion logic, rather than one of a fair exchange. Another example can be found in highland Bolivia. Here, a social contract framing of taxes did not resonate with Indigenous populations because tribute and taxes were historically paid not in return for services or representation, but rather for protection of land and livelihood in a context where it was the state itself that was threatening to take these away (Sheild Johansson 2018, 2020). This resonates with the work of Mohawk sociologist Kyle Willmott, which details the resistance of First Nations peoples in Canada to the assimilationist project of tax-based citizenship by the settler state, and the preposterous offer of having to pay for one’s own subjugation (2020). In these contexts, paying tax does not confer citizenship, mark inclusion, or signal a state-citizen endeavour to bring about an agreed upon collective world. In fact, the opposite is often closer to the truth.

Beyond criticism of taxation by people who feel short-changed or oppressed by their states, high taxes and high public spending are also critiqued from a different political vantage point—that of libertarianism. From this perspective, a ‘big’ state that redistributes resources is unethical as it violates individuals’ economic freedom (Venkatesan 2020). While tax on property is perhaps the most galling to classic libertarians for whom the foundational principle of self-ownership, a kind of ‘natural’ liberty, generates unassailable rights to property (Venkatesan 2020: 143), so called ‘sin taxes’—taxes placed on goods which are deemed undesirable, or considered to have a significant cost on society, such as alcohol and sugar—have recently resulted in heated public debates in many countries about the legitimate reach of government. ‘Sin’ taxes open up questions of biopolitics, the disciplining and management of bodies and life processes by the government, and the ethics of employing taxes to do this (Venkatesan 2020: 143).

These discussions dovetail with explorations of tax and governmentality (the powerful processes by which the state makes governable subjects through the shaping of habits, aspirations, and beliefs), although the latter’s approach is driven not by libertarian ideology, but by an analytical focus on power. In this body of work, tax relations are understood as both a means through which to shape citizens into governable subjects (that is, tax relations as tools for governmentality), and the goals of broader processes of governmentality which will result in compliant taxpayers (Likhovski 2007). An early Foulcauldian analysis of tax as a disciplining technology is Alistair Preston’s ethnography of a music production company in the United Kingdom (1989). Here, accounting practices became the nexus for both surveillance and self-disciplining, with the business absorbing implicit and explicit injunctions of a tax collection authority, rendering itself legible to the state. These injuctions included complex bookkeeping systems, new financial language, and the revised organization of time. A more comprehensive claim about tax as a mode of governmentality is that the taxpayer identity is, by its very nature, not just a self-governing political subject, but one that legitimises the liberal state (Wilmott 2017: 259). The ‘taxpayer’ is a political actor and an idea, one that holds the government to account through scrutinising public investments, denouncing overspending, voting, and being invested in the government. In this sense, the taxpayer supports and morally justifies a liberal state and its associated limited public spending.

Why do people pay or evade taxes, and why does the state collect them?

Within the broader tax literature, the topic of compliance, or why people pay, is a significant area of study, often connected to political projects that aim to increase fiscal revenue. It predominantly considers compliance to be a societal good, as long as it is ethically enforced. In anthropology, questions of exchange logics are motivated not by a commitment to compliance, but by an interest in understanding how fiscal logics are culturally embedded, how they relate to ethical conversations about a ‘good’ society (Venkatesan 2020: 142), and how diverse fiscal perspectives shape economic landscapes and economic subjects. The allocation and movement of resources within societies, and the political implications of this, has always been a core topic of anthropology, with the discipline exploring theories of redistribution (Polanyi 1944, 1957), sharing (Ferguson 2015; Widlok 2017), mutual taking and demand-sharing (Bird-David 1990; Peterson 1993), payment (Maurer 2008), and systems of immediate return amongst egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities who resist accumulation and property relations (Woodburn 1982). In particular, exchange and reciprocity are classic fields of study in anthropology relating to the socio-politics of resource management (Malinowski 1922, 1935; Mauss 1954 [1925]; Lévi-Strauss 1971 [1949]). Anthropologists tend to consider reciprocity as key to a pre-capitalist social contract that created stability and society itself. In this thinking, reciprocity is not simply motivated by material interests, but also by a moral order and sense of mutual dependence.

Building on anthropology’s rich scholarship on reciprocity to look at taxes, Lotta Björklund Larsen (2018) has shown how taxpayers in Sweden approach their fiscal relationship from a perspective of reciprocity and a ‘fair share’. For instance, one of her interlocutors, a self-employed plumber called Anders, justified taking occasional jobs off the books by pointing to the frivolous spending of politicians. His tax evasion was not rooted in a rejection of taxation as such, but rather concerned with a re-balancing of the fiscal relationship, ensuring it was fair. Anders thus perceived his occasional evasion as an act that protected, rather than undermined, the moral integrity of the fiscal system. Björklund Larsen’s ethnography demonstrates the centrality of reciprocal thinking in Swedish fiscal cultures, and the imagining of the fiscal system as a moral one. The taxpayer view that fiscal exchanges must be connected to a mutually-agreed-upon moral order is also illustrated by Mireille Abelin’s work on Argentine elites who justify their tax evasion by arguing that the Argentinian state gives nothing in return. Nor, they claim, has it succeeded in becoming the ‘modern’ state, or moral order, that they wish to contribute to (Abelin 2012a: 333-7). Tax evasion, or fiscal disobedience (Roitman 2005), can thus be a political act which aims to criticise a range of state behaviours perceived as falling short of the desired moral order.

Reciprocity is one fiscal logic that may undergird tax, but as anthropologists have explored, the perceived and desired character of fiscal relations can vary widely. For instance, on the Istrian peninsula, Croatian business owners lamented the introduction of a digitised VAT system, not because they did not wish to pay, but because the immediate debiting technology built into the system took control away from them over the timing of payments and credits (Smith 2020). This, in turn, left them automatically out of pocket at the moment of transaction and then vulnerable to the whims of their buyers, large businesses who often did not settle their bills for long periods of time. The Istrian business owners lost trust in the state and rejected the VAT tax, not because they did not see a return for their taxes in terms of services, but because the state was unable or unwilling to promote a fiscal structure and a wider economy which ensured larger companies honoured their debts in a timely fashion, or looked out for the small business owner. This case also shows that technology and policy design play out in socio-economic and politicial contexts, and opposition to a particular tax may be rooted in its mechanics, as opposed to whether the exchange itself is appealing.

In peri-urban, highland Bolivia, recent rural-to-urban migrants eagerly paid property tax and commercial licence tax in order to secure living and selling space in the city and the ability to pursue a livelihood beyond the state, not in exchange for representation or public services (Sheild Johansson 2020). In Nigeria, recent fiscal expansion meant that receipts of ‘land use charge’ paid became crucial to secure fragile property claims (Goodfellow & Owen 2018 ). In this case, regular payments of land use charge produced letters issued by Lagos State declaring that a citizen was ‘a good one’; these letters, which evidenced occupancy and moral standing, could be mobilised against threats of eviction as well as occasionally used to claim relocation compensation if state-enforced eviction did happen. In the examples from Bolivia and Nigeria, utilitarian desires to ensure security and make a living were the motivating logic of paying tax, as opposed to a notion of a fair return. Notably, in Bolivia and Nigeria, taxpayers disaggregated their fiscal systems and examined the different exchanges that each tax implied, as opposed to viewing their taxes as part of one overarching moral exchange with the state.

Paying tax has also been explored as a technology through which to shore up citizenship claims by migrant workers, both in order to gain legal rights in their place of residence and to satisfy a yearning to have their labour validated as productive by their host states and fellow residents (Vicol 2020). Conversely, paying tax can be experienced as a form of forced submission and inclusion into oppressive regimes, as exemplified by the relationship between First Nations peoples in Canada and the colonial settler-state (Willmott 2020). Finally, tax scholars have argued that fiscal behaviour may not just be rooted in any particular motive or exchange logic, but that it fundamentally depends on a combination of material entities, such as bureaucratic forms and IT systems, and social actors. Studying tax relations by focusing on ‘socio-material assemblages’ foregrounds that taxation is a distributed form of action that involves multiple actors, habits, character traits, accounting systems, larger structures, such as the procedures for receiving social benefits, and even popular discourses, like that on the financial crises (Boll 2014b: 300).

A crucial point for the analysis of the fiscal policy of contemporary governments and for any deeper understanding of fiscal exchange is to appreciate the fact that a state’s motive for taxing a population is not simply one of fiscal revenue. Instead, fiscal policies are employed by governments to structure and influence the national economy and a range of social relations, including those of health and education, family finances, gender and work, property ownership, consumer habits, cross-generational sharing of wealth, and many more. In the case of the UK government, for example, it has been suggested that the income that tax brings to the treasury is secondary to its role in stimulating the economy and managing demand—through re-distribution, subsidies, and levies—as well as investing citizens in their nation-state and encouraging electoral participation (Murphy 2015: 53-65). In this way, fiscal policy can be purposefully used to create both markets and citizens.

What are taxes? Meanings, imaginaries, and values

How taxes and fiscal relationships are imagined, both as real and ideal, depends on their wider economic and cultural contexts, including other ‘tax-like’ exchanges. Research on ‘informal economies’ has offered insight into the myriad unofficial payments that populations all over the world make to state and non-state actors and which are categorised by interlocutors and scholars as ‘tax-like’, as they offer representation, infrastructure, service provision, and security, amongst other things. Some examples of these payments include bribes to local state representatives (Roitman 2007: 202-3), fees to unions who offer political representation (Lazar 2008; Sheild Johansson 2020), contributions to community organizations (Meagher 2018), and tithing to churches (Kauppinen 2020; Meagher 2018). While these payments are not made directly to the state, they are made and claimed in order to finance communal worlds. As Meagher has noted in Nigeria, these payments by ‘informal’ populations to non-state actors, as well as unoficially to state-actors, contribute considerably to the public sphere, including public sector salaries (through bribes), and security (2018), and confound the state-citizen axiom of taxation by displacing the state. They also contribute to collapsing the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors as separate spheres of economic action, by showing how state insitutions rely on both ‘informal networks’ and sources of funding to produce and deliver public services and infrastructure (Owen 2018). Lastly, they challenge a narrow definition of public goods as state-delivered resources (Bear & Mathur 2015).

While these tax-like payments may not always be made with the aim of supplanting taxes, they make up a universe of monetary transfers within which taxes exist and therefore function as a contextual evaluation of official taxes (Kauppinen 2020: 39). One such payment that has been explored anthropologically is tithes in Ghana (Kauppinen 2020). The tithe payers’ assessments of the ethics of the fiscal exchange with the state was profoundly shaped by their perception of their reciprocal relationship with God, who offered divine favour and eternal life, and led them to expect the state to deliver ‘decent lives’ in a broad sense.

The vitality of these ‘tax-like’ payments begs the question: is there analytical purchase in blurring the boundary between taxes, as defined by governments, and the collective pooling of resources beyond the state? Recent work on a Catalonian anti-capitalist cooperative explores this possibility (Bäumer Escobar 2020). The cooperative was set up to create an alternative economic space, with its own banking system, currency, distribution network, and exchange of goods and services. It also supported tax evasion by allowing members to use the cooperative’s tax registration number when conducting business. In this way, self-employed people could exchange a hefty minimum tax payment to the state for a far lower fee to the cooperative. Vinzenz Bäumer Escobar introduces the concept of ‘fiscal commons’ to talk about the common pooling of resources beyond the purview of the state, arguing for the recognition of multiple and interconnected fiscal systems.

What kind of payment a tax is, and what kind of activity should be taxable, is in part a question of values. The indeterminacy of values (Guyer 2004), and the inherent problem of commensuration in tax systems—that is, the problem with making different activities and values equivalent with one another—is explored in Matti Eräsaari’s study on Helsinki timebanks (2020). In the Helsinki timebanks, time was accumulated and exchanged. Here, one hour of work of any sort was ‘worth’ one ‘while’, and the local marketplace was constituted by ‘whiles’. Thereby, labour was demonetised and re-valued through the measure of time. In a move to formalise the timebanks, the Finnish government demanded the whiles be converted to a taxable form (such as labour or traditional currency) and calculated according to what the associated professional service might cost on the labour market, arguing that by exchanging whiles of professional services, the timebank members were in fact evading tax. This example demonstrates that what and who is deemed as taxable is a question of negotiation—when does a favour in return for a favour become a job ‘off the books’? It also reveals that governments need fixed values in order to tax, such as a currency, and a common mode of commensuration, such as a market, to manage a fiscal system.

Tax policy, tax payment, and tax evasion are all acts that create and reflect state-society relations, financial flows, and imaginaries of them. As Viviana Zelizer (1994) has shown in relation to household budgets, people experience money differently depending on where it comes from and where it is going—money is ‘earmarked.’ In the same way, larger flows of money are named and variably understood, with different moral and social elements attached to them. For instance, direct and indirect taxation produce very different sets of relationships and responses. Paying ‘sin’ taxes, such as VAT on alcohol, tobacco, or sugar might be experienced as very different from paying income tax, which is a tax on a person’s labour. The taxes paid by a small business, a so-called ‘wealth creator’, may be viewed as a different money flow from the income tax paid by a health worker in the public sector (whose wages can be construed as being paid for by the taxpayer).

Inheritance tax is another emotive example of how taxes are experienced as more than just flows of money. While inheritance has been shown to be a key driver for wealth inequalities (Piketty 2014), and clearly counters societal aims of meritocracy, it is often referred to in the United States as the ‘death tax’ (Yanagisako 2018: 5). This is because it is experienced as a levy on the moment of death, rather than the wealth itself. Its critics also claim that inheritance tax intervenes inappropriately in the unity of the family (Hegel 1991 [1821]: 178, in Beckert 2008: 254). For instance, at a moment of death, a house, which may already be experienced by the deceased’s family members as their home, is suddenly ‘in transfer’, taxed, and then re-ascribed as belonging to the heir/s, or lost if the tax bill cannot be paid. In this way, inheritence tax individualises property relations. While all these taxes are just movements of money, plusses and minuses on a ledger, the money flows are experienced through broader values such as productivity, bodily autonomy, work, and kinship—as Zelizer (1994) argues, the notions of provenance and acts of earmarking matter.

Fiscal landscapes are not just imagined by taxpayers, but also by collectors, both the policy-makers and the enforcing officers. Tax collection depends on legibility, and as tax collectors often navigate partially blind through fiscal landscapes, with much of the informal economy hidden from them, they need to construct representations which allow them to act (Boll 2014a). The constructions of these representations, which are both utilitarian and ideological, matter to how these collectors then conduct their jobs, such as which buinsess sectors they choose to investigate (Boll 2014a). This in turn shapes fiscal behavior by creating a greater opportunity to evade tax within certain sectors (Kirchler & Braithwaite 2007).

Debt and credit

Imaginaries and value-inflected meanings of taxes gain character through their roles in relationships of debt and credit. Talking about taxes in terms of credit and debt, benefits, and the broader national economy, tends to invoke moral acts and positionalities. For instance, public employees may be cast as indebted to private sector taxpayers. Similarly, benefit recipients might be viewed as receiving a credit from the taxpayer (private and public sector ones), while in a monarchy, the royal family could be said to owe their standing to the taxpayer, as they are funded by ‘taxpayer money’, a morally charged flow of money which signals a demand for frugality and virtuous spending (Willmott 2017: 256). At first glance, relations of credit and debt appear to be the opposite of reciprocity as they are about the prolonged absence, or the deferring, of exchange. But are these exchange relations really materially different to those that get labelled as reciprocal, such as paid income tax for access to public health service, or is this difference a product of power and imagination? Self-employed day labourers may argue that it is in fact they who are owed, due to their provision of cheap labour or their continued payment of VAT, a regressive tax. Alternatively, large business owners often use the logic that they produce wealth and jobs and therefore should not be excessively taxed. In their mind, in fact, the government or society owes them. One does not have to think long to realise that debt and credit are not natural, clear-cut categories but instead defined through government policy and enforced through law. The designation of debt, therefore, requires power-laden stories to make clear who owes whom (Graeber 2011).

As well as creditors and debtors often being interchangeable, it is not obvious that one position is desirable and the other undesirable. Whether and what kind of debt is cast as ‘bad’ depends on the social context. As Janet Roitman argues, there is socially sanctioned wealth that has its roots in debt, while other types of debt are just seen as a negative economic indicator (2003: 212). Additionally, the notion that the debtor is the subjugated and the creditor the one in power is simplistic. As Marcel Mauss (1954 [1925]) showed almost a century ago, the ability to borrow can be a sign of being enmeshed in social relations and of holding a certain status. Moreover, debt is often linked to investment—a wealth generator with positive connotations. Since debt and credit are thus social categories, rather than purely financial ones, the study of tax tracks how some actors in a fiscal relationship come to be marked as debtors and others as creditors, as well as investigating the moral baggage, and political impact, of this.

These discussions about the moral character of debt can equally be applied to the debt relations of nations. While the popular debate in many countries indicates that national public debt is currently viewed as a failure of proper budgeting, this has not always been the case; at times, state endebtedness has enjoyed the reputation as a positive cornerstone of society. In the wake of the British ‘Financial Revolution’ in the late seventeenth century, when the Bank of England was established and public debt was first created through the issuing of government bonds, the ‘national debt was not only positively valued but celebrated’ (Daunton 2001: 119, in Abelin 2012b: 76). Public debt gave birth to public credit, which allowed investment in society, and agreed upon ‘goods’. Taxes were fundamental to international debt relations, as they paid the interest of public debt, not because they financed public goods directly (Brantlinger 1996). Public and political attitudes to national debt have thus shifted through history, and the labelling of debt relations in moral terms always need to be examined as partially political acts.

Global flows

In the face of powerful global financial markets and growing economic inequalities, both within and between countries, cross-disciplinary conversations about how we organise and how we should organise our economies have become increasingly poignant (Ferguson & Li 2018; Haskel & Westlake 2018; Piketty 2014). As a powerful tool for redistribution, tax plays a central role in these conversations. A series of recent events have brought international attention to systemic failures of contemporary capitalism, and the inadequacies of fiscal systems to redress them. Amongst them are the bailouts of large banks by taxpayers after the 2008 financial crisis; the public scrutiny of large multinationals such as Apple, Microsoft, and Google in 2012 and 2013 who had to defend their unfeasibly low tax bills and creative accounting in televised hearings; and the 2016 leak of the Panama Papers, which exposed the tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance of high-net individuals. These events laid bare the extent to which the wealthy evade taxes, and the complicity of much fiscal policy that in the last four decades have protected financial markets through deregulation and the cutting of multiple taxes (Piketty 2014, 2019; Stiglitz 2012). Indeed, governments have long been instrumental in the making of offshore tax havens. For instance, British colonial authorities, backed by London money markets and the British civil service, created the first offshore tax havens in the Pacific in the early 1970s (Rawlings 2004: 340).

Tax is one obvious technique by which governments may intervene in global financial flows, ensure wealth redistribution, and close loopholes to battle the ‘paper games’ of the very rich. But while fiscal complicity between governments and the rich has often been the norm, fiscal intervention, and policing tax behaviour, is also not so simple in the twenty-first century. The fundamental problem with taxing our way to more just economies is that taxes are levied by national governments, whilst capital moves swiftly beyond borders. Concerns about how national governments can feasibly tackle large scale ‘tax avoidance’, ‘tax havens’, international ‘tax competition’, and the fear that these phenomena would erode governments’ abilities to reallocate resources for public benefit are not new. But digitalised, contemporary capitalism make these challenges even more significant.

To respond to the demand by nations to share taxing rights, whilst also protecting businesses and organizations from being doubly taxed, international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been tasked with developing global approaches to tax policy (Mugler 2019: 381-2). The OECD’s work, such as the Harmful Tax Competition initiative, which attempted to name-and-shame, peer pressure, and ‘blacklist’ tax havens—including small, postcolonial non-OECD states—into compliance with international norms, has became a fruitful object for anthropological investigations (Grinberg 2016; Maurer 2008; Mugler 2019; Rawlings 2007). This work asks questions about the making of ‘soft law’ (non-binding norms, agreements, and standards of practice), the relationship between private arbitration, international norm-making, fiscal sovereignty, and democracy. It also explores how international tax experts negotiate new rules and regulations for an increasingly digitalised economy (Mugler 2019). As part of analysing and implementing new tax rules, these international experts need to accommodate the demands of structurally privileged actors that shape the international tax debate, such as tax professionals working in multinational enterprises. Yet they are also tasked with curbing such privileges in an increasingly politicised field and under the scrutiny of the international community. While tax debates have long focused on the relationship betweent the nation-state and its citizens, this emerging work asks the important question: what do people owe each other beyond the state?

Conclusion: an anthropology of tax

Tax plays a powerful role in organising national economies and shaping social relationships. Fiscal systems also shape peoples’ perceptions regarding who contributes to society; where wealth is created; the place of the state in the lives of people; the place of people within money flows; and the moralities of profit, debt, and sharing. The anthropology of tax has only recently consolidated as a field of study and all these themes offer fertile avenues of further exploration. This line of research will produce both a deeper understanding of tax itself and a chance to use tax as a lens through which to explore wider state-society relations. As an ethnographic object, tax involves the explorations of multiple scales, from the individual taxpayer’s perspective, and the logics of policy makers, to the functioning of large financial systems. As such, the discipline of anthropology uniquely brings these different scales of fiscal life into the same conversation, enabling us to understand tax as a simultaneously personal, political, economic, and ethical aspect of our social lives.

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Note on contributor

Miranda Sheild Johansson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL Anthropology and holds a PhD in anthropology from The London School of Economics. Her work explores the dynamics of fiscal systems and the sociality of tax, with a particular emphasis on the Andean region. Miranda is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the anthropology of tax.

Dr Miranda Sheild Johansson, UCL Anthropology, 14 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW, 07540 581 975, m.johansson@ucl.ac.uk

Gifts

Felix Stein — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 12:47:55 +0000

Yunxiang Yan

University of California, Los Angeles

Initially published 7 Jul 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20gifts

Abstract:

As one of the oldest forms of social actions that bind people together and as an arresting example of the universality and diversity of humanity, gift exchange has long been a focus of anthropological inquiry. This entry starts with the distinction between individual gifts and collective gifts which explains some cross-cultural misunderstandings, and moves on to review the two basic theoretical models on the engine of gifting—the spirit of the gift and the principle of reciprocity. While revealing that the highly diversified patterns of gift exchange derive from different perceptions of the relationship between culturally-constructed notions of personhood and material objects in the larger social setting, the anthropology of the gift also unpacks the nuances of social life by examining patterns of gift-giving behaviour all over the world.

Introduction

When Europeans first arrived in North America and received presents from the Native Americans they encountered, they could not understand why an equivalent return was expected by their hosts. Many Europeans believed they owed nothing in return, because a gift should be free and with no strings attached. They also assumed the Native Americans were merely pretending to be generous; hence the expression of ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ for objects and people given merely in hopes of future returns (Wilton 2009: 166-7). The famous American explorers Lewis and Clark, for example, often suspected such motivations to be guiding their Native hosts when being presented with gifts. They even rudely refused to accept them, referring to the Native Americans as impertinent and thievish in their journals (see Slaughter 2004). Yet the Native Americans considered gifts to be initiating cycles of social exchange. They felt insulted by the Europeans who either refused to accept gifts in the first place, or who did accept them but did not want to reciprocate. In their eyes, both stances proved their unfriendliness and untrustworthiness.

Thanks to the anthropological study of gifts and gift-giving, we can now see clearly that beneath the racist expression ‘Indian gift’ or ‘Indian giver’ lies the European settlers’ imposition of a culturally specific understanding of gifts onto Native Americans, who saw their function and meaning in a quite different light. To somewhat simplify the matter for the sake of clarity, I hereafter refer to the former as the individual gift that is imagined as a token of a person’s affection with no strings attached, and to the latter as the collective gift that is part and parcel of a series of collective actions with wider and profound social implications. At surface level, they represent two different prototypes of gifts and two different systems of social exchange, which are often diametrically opposed to each other. The individual gift emerged in the modern West along with the rise of individualism and the expansion of the capitalist market economy, while the collective gift has been a major system of social exchange all over the world that creates sociality through a sense of indebtedness (see Graeber 2011) and can be found in various forms in different cultures. At a deeper level, their differences are actually more rhetorical than behavioural, and more in degree than in kind. Behind the discourse of the individualised pure gift in modern times, there are still rules of gifting, expectations of returning gifts, and the social function of strengthening social ties through gift-giving, all of which are similar to their counterparts in systems of traditional collective gifts. Yet, without knowing the cross-cultural differences and similarities between the two basic types, we may be biased to place one against the other, or to misunderstand both of them.

In the following pages, this entry briefly introduces two well-known examples of the traditional and collective gift—the Kula ring and yam exchange, which both occur in the Trobriand Islands—highlighting their features in contrast to the widely-held assumption of modern individual gifts. It then introduces two major theoretical models—the spirit of the gift and the reciprocity principle—that emerged out of scholarly efforts to better understand the origin and driving force of gift exchange. The scholarship shows the main commonalities between the two basic types of gifts, as well as some important differences which in turn lead our inquiry to a deeper level: the cultural understanding between persons and things. In the last section, the entry demonstrates the richness and complexity of the world of gifts that has been explored by scholars from different academic disciplines in recent decades.

Obligatory gifts

A striking feature of collective gifts is their obligatory circulation among the same group of givers and recipients, as illustrated in the Kula ring and yam exchange in Melanesian society. Kula is a ritualised form of intertribal exchange of red shells necklaces (soulava) and white shells armbands (mwali) carried out among men of influence in the Trobriand Islands, a region now part of Papua New Guinea. Predefined partners exchange these gifts in a closed circle across several islands, and they always circulate the gifts of necklaces clockwise and exchange armbands in the opposite direction. These gifts are made for exchange only and have their own names, identities, and histories. The exchange relationship is a lifelong one, but the gifts of necklaces and armbands always flow among fixed partners. Kula exchange voyages from one island to another customarily take place twice a year, and it will take one or two years for a given Kula object to return to its original owner. More importantly, each Kula voyage is highlighted by the interisland trade of many other objects, and in this sense the Kula ring also reflects the economic system in this region (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Leach & Leach 1983).

An equally important form of collective gift exchange in the Trobriand Islands involves yams. Trobriand men spend a great deal of time and energy cultivating yams, but local people normally eat other fresh produce, including sweet potatoes, greens beans, squash, fruits, and taro. The yams are mainly used by men as gifts to their married-out daughters and sisters who will display them publically in a special yam house. The obligation to participate in gift-giving is in this instance dictated by the local kinship system. People in the Trobriands traditionally adhere to matrilineal descent and patrilocal post-marital residence. This means that when a woman gets married to a man, she moves to his village but her husband continues to belong to his mother’s lineage. The woman who married him will in turn belong to her own mother’s lineage. The gift of yams from a man to his sister or daughter brings the woman prestige and status because it shows how many strong supporters she has from her matrilineal kin. The gift of yams thereby recognises the woman as the actual owner of the matrilineal group. In return, her husband, who will receive some of the yams that she is given, will similarly be obligated to produce and send yams to the house of his married-out sister or daughter who, again, will be living in her husband’s matrilineal community.

These interlocking exchange relationships between men and their married-out sisters or daughters do not stop at the exchange of yams. By giving yams to one’s sister and thereby to her husband, one obligates one’s brother-in-law to give a return gift. This must come in a particular form—bundles of banana leaves given by women. When a man dies in a matrilineal village, all female descendants of this matrilineal lineage who are already married must come back to participate in the funeral as the kinswomen of the deceased. More importantly, they return as the true owners of the matrilineal group. During the funerary ritual, these women give away their special wealth—bundled banana leaves or banana-leaf skirts—to funeral guests. They also mourn the deceased and contribute to the ritual with labour. The woman who gives away the largest number of bundles and skirts is recognised as a ‘wealthy woman’ (Weiner 1992).

Here the links among a woman, her husband, and her brother are made visible and embodied in the flow of yams and banana leaves. The production of yams and banana leaves is in fact so important that it occupies a central place in the local economy, keeping both men and women busy all year around. Importantly, they are not busy for their own consumption needs; rather, they work hard in order to have more gifts for others and expect to receive return gifts as well.

On the surface, gift-giving in both the Kula ring and the exchanges of yam and banana leaves is an obligatory act with specific expectations about the time of return and the volume of the returning gift that takes place between persons as representatives of their own familial/kin groups. These gifts serve socio-political functions while forming an important part of the local economy, motivating economic behaviour and ‘making the world go around’. This contrasts sharply with contemporary understandings of individual gifts, which should be non-obligatory and have no strings attached, especially not specific expectations of return gifting.

Yet this difference become less striking in some customary gift exchanges in the modern West, for example the exchange of holiday greeting cards. More importantly, the expectation to offer gifts but also to receive them and then to make counter-gifts is clearly present in the family tradition of Christmas gift exchanges. This is similar to the yam exchange among Trobriand Islanders, although the value and content of Christmas gifts should be individualised. Truly free gifts seem only to exist in discourse. As Marcel Mauss notes (1967 [1925]), the three obligations of giving, receiving, and returning gifts constitute the foundation of gift-exchange systems all over the world, notwithstanding special cultural and temporal differences.

The engine of gifting: the spirit of the gift or the principle of reciprocity?

Anthropologists have been debating for many years about what motivates gift-giving around the world. Although not the first to explore the subject, Mauss offered the first theory on various gift-exchange systems in non-Western cultures that continues to provide inspirations for the study of the gift. He highlighted the paradoxical and ambiguous nature of gifts being simultaneously obligatory and free, material and spiritual, with interest and disinterested. He started this intellectual journey by asking the fundamental question, ‘What force is there in the thing given which compels the recipient to make a return?’ (Mauss 1967 [1925]: 1). Mauss finds his answer in the Maori concept of hau—a mystic power that lies in the forest and in the valuables (taonga) given by one person to another. According to studies of the Maori that Mauss had access to, the hau always wishes to return to its place of origin, but can only do so through the medium of an object given in exchange for an original gift. Failure to return a gift can result in serious trouble, since not returning the hau can cause the death of gift recipients. It is the hau in the gift, Mauss asserts, that forces the recipient to make a return, and he calls this ‘the spirit of the gift’ (1967 [1925]: 8-9). According to the Maori, to receive a gift is also to receive a part of the gift-giver’s own spiritual essence. Thus, one must make a return gift to keep the original giver intact.

The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift, however, did not convince Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founding figures of modern anthropology. Prior to the appearance of Mauss’ classic 1925 work, The gift, Malinowski had already published the famous ethnographic account of Kula exchange in Melanesian society (summarised above) and had described in detail the local system of transactions, ranging from ‘pure gifts’ to ‘real barter’ (1984 [1922]). Rejecting Mauss’ interpretation of the spirit of the gift, Malinowski retracted his category of the ‘pure gift’ in a later book (1962 [1926]) and articulated the principle of reciprocity to explain the Trobriand system of economic transactions. Malinowski argued that the binding force of economic obligations lies in the sanction, which either side may invoke to sever the bonds of reciprocity. One gives because of the expectation of return, and one returns because of the threat that one’s partner may stop giving. He thus concluded that the principle of reciprocity serves as the foundation of the Melanesian social order (Malinowski 1962 [1926]: chapters 3, 4, 8, and 9).

Inspired by Malinowski's work, Raymond Firth argues that among the Maori in New Zealand, exchange is driven by reciprocity (locally called utu). The Maori attach great importance to the idea of ‘compensation’ or ‘equivalent return’ (Firth 1959: 412ff). According to Firth, Mauss misinterprets the hau by imputing active qualities to its social construction, which Maori people do not recognise; Mauss also allegedly confuses the hau of the gift with the hau of the gift-giver (Firth 1959: 419-20). In a similar vein, Claude Levi-Strauss went so far as to call the spirit of the gift a mystification:

Mauss strives to construct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau. Are we not dealing with a mystification, an effect quite often produced in the minds of ethnographers by indigenous people? (1987: 47).

The most effective advocate for the accountability of the principle of reciprocity, however, is Marshall Sahlins, who introduces a tripartite division of exchange phenomena—generalised reciprocity, balanced reciprocity, and negative reciprocity. He identifies three variables as critical to determining the general nature of gift-giving and exchange: kinship distance, sociability, and generosity (1972:191-210).

The principle of reciprocity was so frequently employed to explain various patterns of gift exchange that it quickly became something of a cliché, as Geoffrey MacCormack warns: ‘the description of all types of exchanges as reciprocal easily leads to an obscuring of the significant differences between them’ (1976: 101). Ultimately, the principle of reciprocity is nothing more than saying that no one will do anything for nothing. As Annette Weiner commented, such a rational and overly general notion of reciprocity is deeply rooted in Western thought and has been used to justify theories of a free market economy since Thomas Hobbes (1992: 28-30).

To truly understand what motivates various systems of gift exchange in non-Western cultures, therefore, one must go beyond Western assumptions of economic rationality and the notion of Homo economicus, which is exactly what Mauss did in 1925 (see also Graeber 2001). The Maussian notion of the spirit of the gift was therefore revitalised from two directions. First, in South Asia studies, anthropologists have explored the Hindu idea of giving without expectation of material return. As early as the 1970s, Ved Prakash Vatuk and Sylvia Vatuk (1971) noted some asymmetric gift-giving relationships in the context of caste hierarchy. Here, people of low castes were generally not expected to return the dan gifts they receive from their superiors. Further investigations reveal that the dan gifts, which are offered by the dominant caste to lower castes during various secular and religious rituals, serve to transfer dangerous and inauspicious elements, such as illness, death, and misfortune, from the donor to the recipient. The acceptance of these gifts is intended as a vessel of evil and inauspiciousness, like swallowing poison. The recipients of lower castes are required by caste ideology to receive this type of poisonous gift without returning it. As a result, the institutionalised flow of poisonous gifts from the dominant caste to subordinate castes creates a mode of cultural domination (Raheja 1988). These findings seriously challenge generalised models of reciprocity. They led Jonathan Parry (1986) to interpret the absence of reciprocity in the Indian dan in terms of an ‘evil spirit’ of the gift. This denies Mauss’ original argument that the spirit of the gift elicits a return gift. Realising this difficulty, Parry writes: ‘Where we have the “spirit,” reciprocity is denied; where there is reciprocity there is not much evidence of “spirit.” The two aspects of the model do not hang together’ (1986: 463). James Laidlaw argues that the notion of the non-obligatory pure gift exists in all world religions, albeit often in obscured forms, such as the case of the dan gift to Shvetambar Jain renouncers in India, and it carries as many important social meanings as the obligatory gifts (2000).

A solution to the tension between motivating spirits and merely secular reciprocity is found in studies of Pacific island societies. One can see both the ‘spirit’ and the social obligation to return. Rather than accepting Mauss’ interpretation of the Maori hau, many anthropologists have employed the notion of inalienability to explain the existence of spiritual, non-utilitarian ties between giver and recipient. Frederick Damon discovered that not all Kula objects are in the endless circle of exchange; the Muyuw islanders, for example, separate particular types of conus shell valuables known as kitoum from other Kula gifts. They may take the kitoum gifts in or out of the circle at their individual choice. This is because they represent the ‘congealed labor’ of their individual owners and because ‘no matter where a kitoum is . . . it can be claimed by its owner’ (Damon 1980:282). All Kula valuables are brought into exchange by the labour of specific individuals whereby they constitute one’s inalienable kitoum (Damon 1980: 284). Similar views are developed by Christopher Gregory in his analysis of the difference between gift-debt relations and commodity-debt relations, positing that gift-debts involve a transfer of inalienable objects between mutually dependent persons, whereas commodity debts result from the exchange of alienable objects between independent transactors (Gregory 2015). Interestingly, the inalienability of certain valuables may explain not only the motivation to return but also the original motivation for participating in competitive exchange such as the Kula (Feil 1982).

The inalienability of gifts is at the core of an innovative theory of exchange by Weiner (1992), arguably the sharpest critic of standard anthropological studies of the gift which routinely rely on the principle of reciprocity. She maintains:

[w]hat motivates reciprocity is its reverse—the desire to keep something back from the pressures of give-and-take. This something is a possession that speaks to and for an individual’s or a group’s social identity and, in so doing, affirms the difference between one person or group and another (1992:43).

It is this principle of keeping-while-giving, rather than the norm of reciprocity, that can explain the obligation to return a gift (Weiner 1992: 46). Weiner also believes that Mauss is right about the Maori hau: ‘[t]he hau as a life force embedded in the person is transmitted to the person’s possessions and thus adds inalienable value to the objects’ (Weiner 1992: 63; see also Godelier 1999; Graeber 2001; Thompson 1987).

Weiner’s theory of the inalienable gift may be hard to apply to gift-giving practices in some complex societies, where most gifts are purchased commodities and where gifts are often individualised. For example, in China, money plays an important role in ceremonial gift-giving, and most material gifts are consumer goods, such as wine, cigarettes, or canned food. Altogether the monetary expenditure on gifts among Chinese villagers costs about twenty percent of household income, making it literally a gift economy (Yan 1996). Moreover, in contrast to the Melanesian and Polynesian cases, which involve the endless circulation of valuable shells, fine mats, or cloaks, the commodities-turned-gifts exchanged among the Chinese are rarely recycled as return gifts; instead, it is expected that gifts will be consumed by their recipients soon after their acceptance. In this sense, not only is a gift alienable, it must be alienated; to return the same gift would be considered a gesture of insult and rejection (Yan 1996).

While posing a challenge to the notion of inalienability, the Chinese case suggests that the spirit of the gift can be understood at two levels. Inalienability as elaborated by Weiner, among others, can be seen in the Melanesian case, where gifts are believed to contain hau or some similar spiritual essence and thus cannot be disposed of freely by the recipient. This is the empirical evidence upon which Mauss bases his argument; but, as an empirical observation, it may not be true in other societies. Therefore, the key issue in any society is to determine what people think about the message conveyed by the gift—love, friendship, caring, obligation, competition, or a supernatural spirit—and the essential implication is that a bond between individuals or groups can be created through the association between persons and things.

The person in the gift

Indeed, the underlying theme in almost all anthropological discussions of the gift and the gift economy is the relationship between persons and material objects. The bonds created by gifts (inalienable objects) are often considered to be the same as the mutually dependent ties between persons. Here we can see that the fundamental issue in Mauss’ analysis of the gift is to determine how people relate to things, and, through things, how people relate to each other. As John Liep notes, both Karl Marx and Mauss are concerned with the alienation of people from the products of their labour, which correlates to the development of a world capitalist market economy (1990: 165). But unlike Marx, who focuses on the system of commodity exchange in modern societies and discovers the secret of surplus value, Mauss concentrates on gift exchange in pre-capitalist societies and seeks answers from indigenous belief systems. To compare the archaic, personalised gift economy with the modern, impersonalised system of commodity exchange, Mauss draws a three-stage, evolutionary scheme: social exchange begins with ‘total prestations’, in which the materials transferred between groups are only part of a larger range of noneconomic transfers. The second stage is gift exchange between moral persons who represent groups, leading finally to commodity exchange between independent individuals in market societies (see Mauss 1967: 68-9).

Jonathan Parry (1986) pushes Mauss’ thesis further by first showing that the Maori and Hindu ideologies of gift exchange represent fundamentally opposite types: the former requires the reciprocity of every gift given, while the latter denies reciprocity. However, the Maori gift and the Indian gift share one thing in common: namely, the absence of an absolute disjunction between persons and things. The separation between persons and things is, according to Parry, a product of Christian cosmology: ‘Christianity—with its notion that all men are fashioned equally in the image of God—has developed a universalistic conception of purely disinterested giving’ (Parry 1986: 468, italics in the original). Furthermore, the strong faith in freedom and rational choice also leads to the belief that ‘those who make free and unconstrained contracts in the market also make free and unconstrained gifts outside it’ (Parry 1986: 469).

In line with Parry’s view, James Carrier argues that the ideology of the perfect gift in the West is shaped by the rise of industrial capitalism:

Free and disinterested givers and recipients who transact unobligating expressions of affection come into cultural existence with the shift of production out of the affective and substantial relations that exist in the household to the impersonal relations of wage labor and capital (Carrier 1990: 31).

This ideology, however, does not always guide everyday practice. Instead, modern American gifts are often predictable and socially regulated (see Caplow 1984; Cheal 1988). The obligatory gift relations characterised by Mauss for traditional societies also exist in capitalist societies (for a further discussion of these themes, see Sanchez et al. 2017).

One important implication of Parry’s and Carrier’s works is that, although gift exchange exists in all human societies, the form it takes varies greatly depending on the particular culture within which it is rooted. Hence we may find multiple ‘forms’ of the gift—the Melanesian gift, the Indian gift, the Japanese gift, the American gift, and so on. At a deeper level, different forms of gifts tend to reflect different customs in the cultural construction of personhood. In Melanesian societies, for example, the person is relationally constructed and in turn represents a set of social relations in his or her social acts, including gift-giving. A primary feature of relational personhood is that ‘persons simply do not have alienable items, that is, property at their disposal; they can only dispose of items by enchaining themselves in relations with others’ (Strathern 1988: 161). By contrast, the free, autonomous individual defined in neoclassical economics has nothing intrinsic to his or her personhood but the ‘bare undifferentiated free will’; everything else is alienable (Radin 1996: 62). In other words, the differences in personhood provide us with a key to better understanding why the Melanesian pure gift is inalienable and thus obligatory, while the Western perfect gift is free and thus must be unconstraining. Moreover, personhood also explains the idiosyncratic differences between the two prototypes of gifts and gift-exchange systems: the modern individual gift and traditional collective gifts.

Particularly noteworthy is that a Western-centric understanding of personhood may easily contribute to the misunderstanding of the gift in non-Western societies. At the core of the debate about the nature of the gift is its essential ambiguity; that is, gifts are at once free and constraining, self-interested and disinterested, and are motivated by both generosity and calculation or expectation of return. Although Mauss initiated the anthropological discourse on the gift by taking a both/and approach in examining its ambiguous nature, most subsequent studies focus on one side or another. As a result, the principle of reciprocity, the inalienability of the gift, and the dichotomy of gifts vs. commodities have taken turns dominating the study of the topic. Underneath all these theories, there is a Western notion of a pure gift based on the belief of the autonomous and free individual that has been used as the ultimate measurement to examine gift-giving activities all over the world. As Mark Ostern points out:

We have met the enemy and he is us: the perfect altruist is nothing more than the obverse face of Homo economicus…[w]e will achieve no deeper understanding of gift exchange and their relationships to economic and social behavior until we discard or at least modify the notion of persons as free, unconstrained transactors (2002: 240, italics in the original).

The inability to think beyond Western economic rationality is precisely what caused cultural misunderstandings between the early European settlers and Native Americans, discussed at the outset of this essay.

The multifaceted gift in the real world

Anthropologists have explored a great number of social functions of gifts as well as the explicit and implicit rules governing gift exchange, which in turn help us to better understand a wide range of social phenomena. The enigma of the gift continues to draw more scholars to such an intellectual endeavour, and the study of gifts has gone far beyond anthropology to become an interdisciplinary enterprise in its own right. This section can only make a few brief observations thereof, barely scratching the surface.

Gifts are commonly exchanged in ritualised contexts and can even constitute a rite in and of themselves, such as the presentation of a wedding ring. Thus we can make a distinction between ceremonial and non-ceremonial gifts. The most common examples of the former include gift-giving activities in rites of passage and holidays, such as weddings, funerals, and the Christmas holiday. An occasional gift offered to a helper to express gratitude or some regular exchange of presents among family members or friends may be considered as the latter.

Yet, one possible classification is to see the social identity symbolised by the gifts. Do two persons exchange gifts on behalf of the respective group that they belong to, such as family, lineage, or village community? Or is the gift exchanged between two autonomous individuals? The custom of bridewealth and dowry constitutes a good example of collectivist gift-giving; by contrast, most gift-giving activities in contemporary Western societies occur between two autonomous individuals.

In general, most collective gift-giving activities are institutionalised and ceremonial because collective identities and group interests are at stake, while most individualistic gifts occur in non-ceremonial occasions. But there are exceptions. The exchange of Kula valuables is an institutionalised ceremonial activity but remains a highly competitive enterprise whereby individuals act as free agents. On the other hand, the offer of an engagement ring in contemporary Western societies is a highly ritualised and institutionalised act of individual gift-giving.

Once we place gift exchange in the larger social context, we can see the difference between horizontal and vertical gift exchanges. Horizontal gift exchange occurs among social equals, while vertical exchange cuts across the boundaries of social status. Both types of gift-giving activities may coexist on some occasions. Taking Christmas gift-giving as an example, the horizontal exchange of gifts among friends, classmates, or coworkers goes side by side with vertical exchange of gifts between employers and employees, patrons and clients, hosts and service providers, and to a lesser degree, between senior and junior generations in a family or kin group. Because the obligation to return a gift places its recipient in the inferior position of being indebted, gift-giving is often used as a way to create political authority and dominance, such as in cases of the Melanesian big-man and the Polynesian chieftainship (Sahlins 1972). It may even become a weapon to fight against one’s political opponents, such as in the cases of potlatch among Native Americans on the Northwest Pacific coast.

This superiority of the gift-giver, however, may not work in complex societies with a clearly defined class hierarchy and/or a centralised state authority. For example, in her study of the repayment of Japanese on gifts (benevolent favours from superiors), Takie Sugiyama Lebra (1969) demonstrates that, given the hierarchical context of Japanese society, the gift-donor who is in a subordinate position can never balance what has previously been received from a superior. In Chinese society, a particular type of gift known as xiaojing, which is rooted in the cultural promise of filial piety, unilaterally flows up the ladder of social status and no equivalent return is expected. Recipients remain socially superior because their acceptance is already regarded as a favour to the gift-giver, showing that the principle of hierarchy overshadows the principle of reciprocity in this context (Yan 2002).

Gender constitutes another important dimension in the world of gifts. Many earlier studies of gift-giving in non-Western societies seemed to be gender-blind because they tended to focus on institutions of ceremonial exchanges in public life where women were thought to play only a trivial role. Annette Weiner’s 1976 book, Women of value, men of renown: new perspectives in Trobriand exchange, represents one of the first significant breakthroughs in this regard. Weiner argues that women in the Trobriand Islands are by no means the object of gift exchange by men; on the contrary, women play an autonomous and crucial role in certain ceremonial gift exchanges in public, such as the mortuary exchange described above. In it women reclaim their unique role in the matrilineage and restate matrilineal solidarity (Weiner 1976, 1992). Marilyn Strathern pushes the theme further by pointing out that, in Melanesian culture, women and men not only have their own domain in gift exchange but also separate realms of power and domination which are gendered by the gendering of gift exchange (Strathern 1988, see chapters 2, 4, 5 and 11). In contemporary Western societies, women not only give more but also receive more gifts than their male counterparts, and gift-giving is regarded as an essential part of a feminised ideology of love (Cheal 1988; Caplow 1984). How to assess women’s dominant role in gift-giving, however, remains to date a debatable issue (Komter 1996).

If we look at the purpose of gift-giving, we can see that a gift may serve an expressive or an instrumental function, or both. In expressive gifts, the existing status relationship between the giver and the receiver determines the conditions of gift exchange (the kind and value of gifts to be given), and gift-giving supports the status relationship. By contrast, if the conditions of exchange (the nature and value of the gift) determine or alter the respective statuses of a giver and recipient, we are likely dealing with instrumental gifts. In other words, expressive gifts are ends in themselves and thus often reflect a long-term relationship between a giver and a recipient; instrumental gifts are a means to some utilitarian end and ordinarily indicate a short-term relationship. Nevertheless, in practice, the pure types of expressive and instrumental gifts never exist; rather, elements of expressivity and instrumentality coexist in almost all gift-giving activities, but in different ratios and combinations. In post-socialist Ukraine, for instance, a small payment of cash presented to a doctor is regarded as a gift instead of bribery, as long as the recipient did not explicitly demand it (Polese 2008).

In a broader sense, the exchanges of greetings, assistance, and moral support are often regarded as gifts from one party to another. Their nonmaterial nature often makes the giving a more disinterested act and thus closer to the idealism of the pure gift. In this connection, donations, charities, and especially online gifting to strangers are particularly noteworthy gifts that build impersonalised ties between the givers and the often-unknown recipients. The best example is the donation of human blood, tissues, organs and bodies, which are more often than not transacted from anonymous donors to unknown recipients. These altruistic yet unconventional gifts also raise new ethical issues in both Western and non-Western societies (Bolt 2012; Simpson 2004).

The economic implications of gift-giving are enormously far-reaching in post-modern and developed countries, as well as in small-scale and pre-industrial societies. Malinowski had long argued that the work incentives of the Trobriand Islanders could not be explained in terms of materialistic self-interest. Instead, they produce extra yams so that the harvest may be given to exchange partners and chiefs and eventually rot in storehouses for the sake of earning prestige. Similarly, they actively participate in the inter-island Kula exchange primarily to obtain the armbands and necklaces that have no practical value except to become renowned (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Weiner 1992; Graeber 2001). The exchange of Kula valuables therefore constitutes the very foundation of this prestige economy in Trobriand society. The cattle complex in Africa is another example in which the production and exchange of cattle mostly serve social, political, and ritual purposes, and people have an exaggerated and emotional personal attachment to their animals (Evens-Pritchard 1940). Gift exchange may be seen as a different type of economy even in the narrowest sense of the term: Christmas gifts alone amount to a multi-billion-dollar business in contemporary American society (Waits 1993). The global expansion of the capitalist market economy and consumerist ideology has pushed the gift economy to a higher level, leading to new ceremonial occasions like Mother’s Day and more convenient ways of gift-giving like gift cards (Otnes & Beltramini 1996). The most intriguing and perhaps excessively individualistic invention is the gift given to oneself, known as self-gifts (Mick 1996).

Riding the tidal wave of global consumerism, self-gifts can be found all over the world and are more popular among millennials. In the village community where I conducted a systematic study of gift exchange (Yan 1996), I found that the emergence of self-gifts is part of the much larger and important trend among young villagers to embrace the modern individual gift in their practice of gift exchange. Most of these individual gifts are not offered through ritualised family ceremonies; neither do many of them lead to long-lasting cycles of giving-receiving-returning between the donor and recipient. The occasions of individual gift-giving are not only personal but often ad hoc or situational, such as celebrating a friend’s promotion in the workplace or bringing something nice or exotic to family members from a trip back home. More intriguingly, the motivation of offering such a personal gift is also highly personal—as villagers put it, they did it because they had good feelings toward the recipient and they felt good after offering the gift as a token of their fondness toward the recipient. The influence of consumer individualism is obvious here, as all kinds of commercials and products of pop culture promote the importance of affection and emotional ties in the context of commodification. An emphasis on feeling good may have replaced past requirements of being or doing good; hence, personal gifts for feeling good replace obligatory gifts for being good. The implication here is that the two prototypes of gifts that we examined at the outset of this essay not only coexist in our time, but also influence and transform each other, creating new possibilities in the world of gifts.

The give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens social bonds—be they cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define the identities of persons. Scrutinising gifts and gift economies may therefore provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations in a given society. Lastly, although gifts are given and received among peoples all over the world and throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Gift exchange thereby crystallises the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Conclusion

To conclude, the anthropology of the gift is particularly important for understanding social life for several reasons. Gift-giving has long been one of the major forms of social exchange, along with redistribution and market exchange. Yet, unlike the other two, it encompasses multiple domains of social life and carries rich meanings above and beyond the economy. Moreover, the study of gift-giving reveals the social origins of economic institutions and provides insights about the value of human labour that have long been obscured by modern economic theories. They include the relationship between persons and things, or what drives people to work beyond their basic consumption needs. Gift-giving basically debunks the cornerstone assumption in neoliberal economics that human beings only aim to maximise individual utility, and thus has greatly enriched social theories. Additionally, the give-and-take of gifts in everyday life creates, maintains, and strengthens various social bonds—cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic—which in turn define personal identities. An examination of the gift and the gift economy, therefore, will provide us with an effective and unique means of understanding the formation of personhood and the structure of social relations. Furthermore, although gifts are universal and are given and have been received throughout human history, the specific rules of gift exchange vary from one culture to another. Therefore, gifts represent a crystallization of the universality and diversity of human cultures.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the gift is no longer the preserved subject of anthropology. Scholars of humanities and social sciences alike have joined forces to explore the dynamic, complicated world of gifts from different disciplinary perspectives and approaches, such as antiquity study, history, literary critics, philosophy, sociology, law, economics, and marketing research (see Cheal 1988; Davis 2000; Davies 2010; Hyland 2009; Kolm & Ythier 2006; Marion 2011; Osteen 2002; Otnes & Peltramini 1996; Satlow 2013). The growing literature also shows that, as the human interest in and capacity of doing gift exchange are consistently changing in response to a rapidly shifting environment of social life at large, the enigmatic gift will likely remain to be an attractive subject in anthropology and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers and Felix Stein for their insightful comments on early drafts and advice for improvement.

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Note on contributor

Yunxiang Yan is professor of anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles and adjunct professor of anthropology at Fudan University, China. His research interests include family and kinship, social change, and the anthropology of moralities. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village.

Prof. Yunxiang Yan, Department of Anthropology, 366 Haines, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States. yan@anthro.ucla.edu

Charité

Felix Stein — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 18:35:27 +0000

Jonathan Benthall

University College London

Initially published 17 Aug 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18charite

Abstract:

Cet article aborde la charité comme un terme «étique» qui facilite la comparaison entre des traditions différentes. Les bases théoriques en ont été posées par deux grands anthropologues au début du XXe siècle: Marcel Mauss, dont L’essai sur le don a suscité des interprétations très variées sur le thème de l’échange et de la réciprocité; et Edvard Westermarck, chez lequel, derrière les préjugés sur une hiérarchie des «races», on peut discerner quelques idées durables au sujet de la relation entre charité et religion. Le simple avis selon lequel tout don charitable est simplement une avance sur des bénéfices à percevoir ultérieurement (dans ce monde ou dans l’au-delà) doit être nuancé par le fait que la «mutualité» est un aspect de la coexistence humaine complémentaire à la réciprocité.

Vers la fin du XXe siècle, certains anthropologues ont jeté un regard critique sur les agences d’aide occidentales. Mais la réflexion sur la charité a été en grande partie laissée aux historiens. Une fois l’intérêt anthropologique pour la charité retombé, ce sont d’abord les religions dharmiques du sous-continent indien, puis l’Islam qui l’ont ravivé et ont stimulé le processus de «déprovincialisation» de l’opinion courante selon laquelle la charité est un monopole de la tradition euro-américaine. Si les anthropologues sociaux ont étudié de nombreuses autres manifestations de la charité, nous prêterons ici une attention particulière aux prescriptions coraniques relatives aux bonnes œuvres et aux différentes manières par lesquelles elles ont renforcé la formation d’organisations caritatives islamiques, dont l’efficacité pratique et potentielle a été compromise par une réaction vraisemblablement excessive aux attaques du 11 septembre 2001 contre les États-Unis.

Les anthropologues ont contribué à la critique de l’humanitarisme en tant qu’idéologie et nous donnons ici des exemples de projets de recherche de terrain productifs qui en ont tiré parti. Enfin, une synthèse d’aide méthodologique holistique pourra être utile afin de structurer l’étude de la charité et il est rappelé que la nature problématique de la charité que les anthropologues tentent de résoudre aujourd’hui a été soulevée par l’auteur de la Bhagavad Gita, plusieurs siècles avant notre ère.

Introduction

Le terme «charité»^[1] désigne l’aumône et l’offrande volontaire, mais il possède aussi des connotations d’amour spirituel, la première vertu chrétienne. Il a été utilisé dans certaines versions de la Bible pour traduire, via le latin caritas, le terme grec du Nouveau Testament, agapè. Certains défenseurs du Christianisme, par exemple dans la Catholic Encyclopedia, confondent les deux sens de ce terme. Dans l’Angleterre élisabéthaine, «charité» acquiert aussi une définition juridique restrictive qui reste essentielle dans le droit britannique et américain. Une distinction est souvent opérée dans les langues européennes entre «charité» et «philanthropie». Pour les Grecs de l’Antiquité, la «philanthropie» était «l’amour du principe d’humanité». Mais elle s’est confondue, pendant le siècle des Lumières, avec l’idée de bienfait public dépouillé de connotation religieuse et, aujourd’hui, elle est particulièrement associée à la générosité des riches et au patronage de la culture savante (et, plus récemment, à la promesse de financement du développement d’une grande partie des pays du Sud).

Jusqu’à présent, toutes les tentatives d’étude comparative de notre sujet se sont dispensées de cette distinction entre charité et philanthropie, notamment du fait qu’il n’existe pas de parallèle dans les langues majeures non européennes, comme l’arabe ou le hindi. Un autre terme largement utilisé, «l’action humanitaire» pose problème, parce que le mot «humanitaire» peut être couramment interprété comme englobant toutes formes d’action philanthropique ou altruiste; mais l’humanitarisme en tant que mouvement peut être défini comme une idéologie qui remonte au XIXe siècle (Davies 2012). (Plus précisément, le droit humanitaire international est l’ensemble des mesures visant à limiter les effets d’un conflit armé, et n’entre pas dans le cadre de cet article.) Si nous recherchons un point de comparaison, c’est-à-dire un terme «étique», par opposition aux catégories dépendant d’un ancrage culturel (ou «émiques»), alors le terme de «bonnes œuvres» est tout à fait convenable; mais dans cet article, le terme de «charité» sera utilisé au sens inclusif.

Fondements théoriques

Deux géants de l’anthropologie ont posé les bases, au début du XXe siècle, de notre compréhension théorique de la charité. Le premier est Marcel Mauss, dans son essai sur la réciprocité et la solidarité sociale, Essai sur le don (2016 [1925]^[2]). L’argument de Mauss selon lequel le principe d’échange touche tous les aspects de la vie sociale, dans une «atmosphère du don, de l’obligation et de la liberté mêlées» (2016: 177), a stimulé un débat productif mais parfois confus (Testart 1998; Guyer 2016). L’autre pionnier, peut-être moins largement reconnu en la matière, était Edvard Westermarck. Il adhérait aux idées victoriennes sur l’existence d’une hiérarchie entre les «races» civilisées et sauvages, mais sa comparaison globale des traditions de charité (1909), toujours impressionnante à ce jour, explique comment l’aide mutuelle est couramment influencée par des motifs égoïstes et, de façon plus surprenante, comment la charité dans toutes les «religions supérieures» est associée au sacrifice.

On peut se demander pourquoi l’anthropologie socio-culturelle n’a pas tiré parti des points de vue de Mauss et de Westermarck sur la charité avant le dernier quart du siècle. L’explication vient peut-être du fait que la plupart des anthropologues se sont positionnés politiquement sur un spectre situé entre un réformisme social qui dénigrait la charité comme une solution tentant de soigner les symptômes plutôt que le mal, légitimant les privilèges des riches, et un marxisme rigoureux, fermement opposé à la charité, frein à l’inévitable révolution prolétarienne. Mais la conséquence du rejet de la charité privée est le placement de tout le pouvoir entre les mains de l’État. L’hostilité pure et simple envers la charité, complément aux droits acquis par le paiement de l’impôt, est beaucoup moins fréquemment exprimée par les sociologues aujourd’hui, notamment du fait de la prévalence des accords de partenariat entre les organisations caritatives et les gouvernements. De plus, le rôle de la charité privée pour compenser le recul de l’État-providence, avec les conséquences particulièrement désastreuses que cela entraîne dans les anciens pays communistes comme la Russie (Caldwell, 2016), est un thème fréquent dans les travaux de recherche récents.

Le commentaire de Jonathan Parry sur l’Essai sur le don de Mauss (1986) a provoqué trente ans de débat académique sur ce texte. L’argument quelque peu provocateur de Parry consistait à présenter le don pur ou gratuit, associé aux religions de salut (renoncement volontaire à des ressources sans rien attendre en retour) comme une sorte de complément dialectique à la marchandisation des biens qui domine les sociétés industrielles occidentales. Peu après, Mary Douglas (1990), sans faire aucune référence à Parry dans son introduction à une traduction en anglais de l’Essai sur le don, dénigrait la notion même de don gratuit. Pour ce qui nous concerne aujourd’hui, nous pouvons extraire deux suggestions liées de l’essai de Mauss.

D’abord, lorsqu’un don ne peut pas être réciproque, le donateur bénéficie d’un crédit moral, mais le bénéficiaire s’en trouve offensé. D’où la réputation de «froideur» souvent attribuée à la charité organisée en Europe depuis le XIXe siècle, notamment lorsqu’elle évite les relations en face-à-face entre donateurs et bénéficiaires. Les réformateurs sociaux ont cherché à la remplacer par l’État-providence. L’ethnographie indienne révèle une interprétation du don charitable particulièrement sinistre: les dons non réciproques faits aux prêtres et aux renonçants peuvent porter malheur et transmettre ce mauvais sort du donateur au bénéficiaire si de soigneuses précautions ne sont pas prises.

Ensuite, un «don gratuit» ne peut admettre aucune dimension de réciprocité. Lorsque je fais un don, je dois le faire de façon à ce que personne (moi y compris) n’y voie aucun aspect transactionnel ou ne s’attende à ce que j’en sois récompensé, dans ce monde ou dans «l’économie céleste» de l’au-delà. Bien que ce paradoxe soit marquant dans les trois religions abrahamiques, c’est en Inde qu’il est le plus élaboré. La Bhagavad Gita (17.20-22, voir aussi Bornstein 2009: 624-5, 644) distingue la «charité en signe de bonté» (le don sans rien attendre en retour), la «charité en signe de passion» (avec intention de récompense, ou le don à contrecœur) et la «charité en signe de noirceur» (un don effectué au mauvais moment ou au mauvais endroit, à un bénéficiaire indigne ou avec mépris). James Laidlaw décrit comment, dans la secte Shvetambar («vêtus de blanc») du jaïnisme indien, lorsque les renonçants célibataires itinérants font l’aumône de nourriture auprès des familles laïques, ils affichent une «indifférence revêche» plutôt que leur gratitude ou leur appréciation, le but étant de ne pas créer de relation sociale et d’atteindre une perfection spirituelle éternelle (Laidlaw 2000: 632). D’après Hilal Alkan-Zeybek (2012), le bénévolat islamique des femmes des classes moyennes et supérieures auprès des pauvres dans une ville d’Anatolie centrale, poursuit un objectif exactement contraire: renforcer la solidarité par le contact physique et la «transformation éthique» du donateur, afin que les hiérarchies de classe soient atténuées. La monographie d’Erica Bornstein basée sur son travail de terrain à Delhi montre en quoi les croyances et pratiques regroupées dans un «hindouisme» moderne interagissent avec les traditions séculières, bouddhistes, islamiques et chrétiennes, pour former un paysage caritatif diversifié, à la fois au plan international et en Inde (Bornstein 2012).

Les interprétations de Mauss sont compliquées par le fait qu’il considérait tous les dons comme impliquant métaphoriquement un sacrifice: lorsque je fais un don, je donne une part de moi-même. Westermarck soulignait pour sa part que, dans les enseignements chrétien et juif, l’aumône venait remplacer les offrandes sacrificielles à Dieu. La charité en général est habituellement saluée comme une expression d’empathie ou, à l’inverse, dénigrée comme apaisant la conscience des donateurs et maintenant le statu quo. Mais Westermarck suggère une troisième voie dans la façon de la concevoir: il l’envisage comme un acte de dévotion. Les prières adressées par les bénéficiaires sont, dans les traditions abrahamiques, une manière d’offrir en retour (le revers étant les malédictions murmurées par ceux qui sont injustement traités). Ilana Silber affirme que de subtils «échos» des idéologies et pratiques sacrificielles perdurent au fil du temps, comme le commandement chrétien selon lequel le don charitable est un moyen pour les fidèles d’imiter le don de Dieu que constitue le sacrifice de Jésus (Silber 2000: 305, 310). Elle affirme que trois types de don religieux doivent être distingués dans l’Ancien Testament: les dons à Dieu, ceux aux représentants religieux et ceux aux nécessiteux. La doctrine chrétienne de la diakonia, ou service, insiste toutefois sur le fait que tout acte au profit des affamés, des assoiffés, des sans-abri, des démunis, des malades ou des prisonniers équivaut à rendre le même service à Dieu (Mathieu 25: 31-46). Amira Mittermaier, dans un article sur le bénévolat islamique en Égypte (2014) suivant Fassin (2012), associe étroitement la tradition chrétienne et post-chrétienne de la charité avec la compassion, contrairement à l’obéissance religieuse qu’elle avait observée dans la pratique de certains de ses interlocuteurs musulmans du Caire. Mais l’histoire des institutions caritatives, parmi les nombreuses institutions et dénominations chrétiennes, est si variée qu’il existe un risque de généralisation abusive au sujet de leurs motivations, qui incluent la renonciation, l’abnégation et l’expiation, ainsi que la compassion.

Dans la droite ligne d’une tendance générale des sciences sociales à reconnaître la porosité de la distinction entre le religieux et le «séculier», un caractère «quasi-religieux» peut être attribué à certaines des agences humanitaires et de développement séculières les plus performantes (Barnett et Stein 2012), dans la mesure où elles sont guidées par des principes moraux fortement internalisés, un respect pour leurs fondateurs charismatiques et un engagement pour le monde dans son ensemble. Philip Fountain, motivé par son étude ethnographique auprès du Mennonite Central Committee, une agence de développement chrétienne d’Amérique du Nord, s’est intéressé à ce problème conceptuel, en partant de la réflexion selon laquelle tout développement, qu’il soit marqué comme religieux ou non, est peut-être inévitablement prosélyte en ce qu’il cherche à modifier les pratiques sociales d’autrui (Fountain 2015).

Réciprocité et mutualité

Des études ethnographiques suggèrent que l’analyse de la charité limitée aux équations de l’offre et de la récompense est peut-être trop monodimensionnelle. Elles nous renvoient aux débats anthropologiques non résolus sur la relation entre réciprocité et mutualité et sur la nature de l’altruisme.

Mittermaier, dans un autre article (2013), en se basant sur son travail de terrain en Égypte en 2011-2012, met une économie de la grâce (baraka), qui insiste sur la générosité, en contraste avec une économie de la récompense (thawab) qui vise à s’assurer une place au paradis: ce dernier modèle, selon elle, a été accentué par la marche du capitalisme dans les sociétés arabes. Emanuel Schaeublin, dans son étude de l’aumône à Naplouse en Cisjordanie palestinienne (2016) avance, suite à un article riche mais difficile à saisir de Paul Dresch (1998: 114-16), que pour ses interlocuteurs musulmans, la richesse est l’expression d’une abondante générosité divine (en arabe, rizq) et qu’avec Dieu, il ne peut pas y avoir de réciprocité. Mittermaier comme Schaeublin dans leurs ethnographies fines nous renvoient à la théologie islamique et s’abstiennent de toute comparaison «étique». Mais en avançant la primauté du don, ils nous indiquent un nexus de concepts qu’on pourrait qualifier de contre-sujet en musique, complémentaire au thème de la réciprocité. Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992) a proposé le concept de grâce non seulement comme fondement du christianisme, mais aussi comme un terme «étique» associé à l’idée de charité: «La grâce est toujours quelque chose de plus, au-dessus de "ce qui compte", de ce qui est obligatoire ou prévisible».

Meyer Fortes affirmait (2004 [1969]: 231-2) que la parenté trouve ses racines dans un principe de «concorde» («amity») ou «d’altruisme prescriptif», qui s’étend au-delà de la famille dans des domaines plus larges. Pour James Woodburn (1998), spécialiste des sociétés de chasseurs-cueilleurs, la réciprocité n’est pas universelle à tous les groupes humains: les Hadza de Tanzanie ne comprennent pas le concept de générosité ou de charité car ils sont profondément et fermement engagés dans le partage égalitaire. David Maybury-Lewis cite un ancien du peuple Gabra, des nomades du nord du Kenya: «Même le lait de nos propres animaux ne nous appartient pas. Nous devons le donner à ceux qui en ont besoin, parce qu’un homme pauvre est une honte pour nous tous» (Maybury-Lewis 1992: 85, d’après le travail de terrain d’Aneesa Kassam).

Les anthropologues sociaux s’intéressent aux valeurs ou principes conduisant à l’altruisme. Les biologistes, à l’inverse, classent un comportement comme altruiste dans la mesure où il réduit le succès de reproduction d’un organisme A en augmentant celui d’un organisme B. Le paradoxe de l’altruisme, l’une des plus grandes énigmes de l’évolution, a été exprimé pour la première fois par Darwin dans ses réflexions sur l’existence d’insectes stériles, et a suscité une vaste littérature scientifique (largement évitée par les anthropologues sociaux). Marshall Sahlins, cependant, s’appuyant sur les travaux du psychologue cognitif et développemental Michael Tomasello, déduit que «l’intentionnalité partagée» ou intersubjectivité est une capacité à la mutualité propre à l’être humain, non discernable chez les primates non humains (Sahlins 2001, Tomasello 2009). Dans la mesure où la science post-darwinienne a détrôné pratiquement tout autre indicateur présumé d’unicité humaine flagrante, le débat semble rester ouvert. La biographie d’un excentrique génie, George R. Price (1922-75), collègue du célèbre sociobiologiste W.D. Hamilton), explique comment il a tenté de démontrer mathématiquement qu’un comportement ostensiblement altruiste respecte en fait une échelle précisément calibrée d’intérêt personnel dépendant du degré de proximité entre le bienfaiteur et le bénéficiaire (Harman 2010).

Pour le primatologue Frans de Waal, cependant, l’altruisme humain n’est pas un problème théorique. N’en déplaise à Tomasello, il fait remonter son évolution au moment où les femelles mammifères ont commencé à nourrir leurs petits. L’empathie est associée à la libération de l’hormone ocytocine: de Waal et ses collaborateurs ont même émis le postulat que les humains et les campagnols des prairies ont en commun les mécanismes biologiques du comportement de consolation (Burkett et al. 2016). Parce que l’ocytocine nous fait nous sentir bien, la distinction entre le soin des autres et l’amour-propre, de ce point de vue, s’évanouit.

Étude de la charité avant 2000

Au cours des années 1970 et 1980, l’essor des organisations non gouvernementales (ONG) (terme non satisfaisant qui pourtant perdure) a progressivement provoqué une vague de projets d’étude dans lesquels les anthropologues ont joué un rôle significatif. L’ouvrage Imposing aid (1986) de Barbara Harrell-Bond a marqué un tournant: il s’agit d’une monographie iconoclaste sur le travail des agences d’aide internationale, basée sur son travail de terrain avec les réfugiés ougandais dans le sud du Soudan. Les institutions occidentales étaient de plus en plus dépendantes des financements gouvernementaux et soumises à la pression du respect des politiques étrangères des gouvernements; leurs idéaux caritatifs élevés les avaient largement immunisées contre la critique. Elle leur reprochait notamment le fait qu’elles ne s’efforçaient pas de donner aux «victimes» les moyens de prendre le contrôle de leur propre vie. Les critiques d’Alex de Waal (1989) étaient elles aussi très dures à l’encontre de la réponse des organisations de secours à la famine dans la Corne de l’Afrique, qui évitaient le dialogue avec les pauvres des régions rurales qu’elles étaient censées servir; quelques années plus tard, il s’attaqua à la complaisance reproduite par ce qu’il appelait «l’Internationale humanitaire». Parmi les autres ouvrages marquants d’anthropologie publiés à la même époque, on trouve The anti-politics machine de James Ferguson (1990), qui expose l’incapacité des bureaucraties de l’aide à fournir de véritables avancées aux supposés bénéficiaires du «développement».

Certains publications se sont concentrées sur l’élément marketing du travail des agences d’aide internationale, et sur le processus par lequel les catastrophes sont «érigées» en produits consommables par un oligopole d’organisations médiatiques à des fins de publicité et de collecte de fonds caritatives, afin qu’aux représentations de la souffrance de la périphérie du globe réponde constamment un flux d’aide (p. ex. Benthall 1993, Lidchi 1999). Mais la réflexion sur la charité en elle-même a été largement absente de la littérature de recherche florissante sur le développement et l’aide humanitaire. Les historiens ont comblé cette lacune: Paul Veyne sur la munificence des particuliers de la période gréco-romaine env. 300 av. J.-C. (1990 [1976]); Frank Prochaska sur la «philanthropie des pauvres envers les pauvres» en Grande-Bretagne et la «générosité royale» qui permet à la monarchie britannique de rester crédible (1988); et nombre des contributeurs au premier recueil d’essais comparatifs sur la charité à paraître (Ilchman et al., 1998), dont aucun des vingt-deux auteurs n’est anthropologue.

Il apparaît que le stimulus qui a conduit les anthropologues à réfléchir sur la charité est venu des traditions non chrétiennes, avant qu’ils commencent à se tourner vers ses manifestations chrétiennes et séculières. Cela reste cohérent avec le retard plus général de l’anthropologie à étudier le christianisme, à l’exception de l’Afrique (comme l’affirmait Cannell 2006: 1-14). Parmi les quelques exceptions trouvées avant la fin du siècle dernier, on peut citer un essai de Claudia Fonseca (1986) basé sur son travail de terrain dans un petit centre caritatif à Paris qui distribuait gratuitement des vêtements aux sans-abri. Elle y décrit le «pacte implicite» de bienveillance et de politesse établi entre certaines dames bénévoles et leurs «clients», et la transition entre l’ancienne aspiration chrétienne à gagner sa place au paradis par la charité et l’objectif plus moderne de réinsertion des pauvres dans la vie active. L’étude d’Erica Bornstein sur les ONG protestantes transnationales au Zimbabwe a rapidement rattrapé le retard et elle fut le premier chercheur sur les organisations caritatives à suivre le «traffic in meaning», la contradiction entre les attentes d’un donateur transnational individuel et les réactions des bénéficiaires finals (en l’occurrence, par l’intermédiaire du programme international de parrainage d’enfants World Vision) (Bornstein 2005).

Décentrage de la charité via l’Islam

Les réflexions susmentionnées de Jonathan Parry sur le «don gratuit» ont été inspirées par les religions dharmiques du sous-continent indien; et Katherine A. Bowie a publié un premier article sur la charité bouddhiste dans le nord de la Thaïlande, qualifiant le paradigme prévalant de «gain de mérite» bouddhiste en insistant sur la stratification des classes (1998). Mais le principal élan vers la déprovincialisation des hypothèses «occidentales» au sujet de la charité en tant que monopole euro-américain est venu de l’étude du monde musulman et de son abondant héritage de commandements religieux à la générosité, ainsi que de ses institutions caritatives. Une fois encore, les historiens ont été en première ligne (Arjomand 1998, Kozlowski 1998, Weiss (éd.) 2002, Bonner et al. 2003, Singer 2008, Fauzia 2013).

Christian Décobert, historien de l’Islam ancien, a eu l’originalité de faire le lien entre le terme coranique clé de zakat (aumône obligatoire comme la dîme hébraïque, et l’un des cinq «piliers» de l’Islam) et la théorisation de la pureté de Mary Douglas (son premier ouvrage Purity and danger de 1966,^[3] plutôt que son travail ultérieur sur la Bible), le terme zakat ayant des origines communes avec l’hébreu-araméen zakut, qui a des connotations de pureté, de rectitude et d’épanouissement, mais pas d’aumône (Décobert 1991: 198ss). Il existe aussi un chevauchement sémantique clair entre l’idée d’aumône et celle de rectitude via le mot ṣadaqa (aumône volontaire). Décobert a aussi tiré des conclusions (1991: 196) sur l’autoreprésentation et les systèmes de parenté des premières sociétés musulmanes à partir des règles établies dans le Coran à propos de la distribution de la zakat, et leur huit catégories de bénéficiaires possibles (Coran 9.60), et il a proposé un lien avec la tradition agricole d’offrande des prémices à Dieu, ouvrant ainsi des possibilités d’étude comparative qui restent à explorer plus avant (Benthall 1999, Benthall et Bellion-Jourdan 2003: 19-25).

Le lien entre le don à Dieu et le don aux nécessiteux ne s’est jamais distendu dans le monde musulman où les sacrifices d’animaux sont encore couramment pratiqués, la viande étant donnée aux pauvres (bien que dans les pays industrialisés il s’agisse souvent de viande en conserve importées commercialement des élevages de moutons néo-zélandais). Dans le Coran, les sacrifices majeurs de chameaux et de bétail retenus dans l’Islam sont représentés non seulement comme des cérémonies, mais aussi comme des moyens pratiques de nourrir les personnes dans le besoin. Les sacrifices comme la zakat sont associés à la prière et à l’affirmation de l’unicité de Dieu et de l’Islam. La pratique de la zakat a connu de nombreuses variations au cours de l’histoire de l’Islam, allant d’un contrôle total par les gouvernements, jusqu’aux dons informels par des connaissances privées pendant le mois saint du Ramadan, avec de nombreux cas intermédiaires. Mais le domaine discursif auquel elle appartient reste une réalité pour les musulmans pratiquants.

L’étude des traditions caritatives de l’Islam est particulièrement intéressante pour deux raisons. La première est que, dans pratiquement tous les pays, on trouve soit des donateurs soit des bénéficiaires musulmans, soit les deux, ce qui révèle des pratiques religieuses aussi variées que dans le monde chrétien. Ceci revêt une importance pratique en matière de politiques d’aide et de développement.

La deuxième raison est plus intellectuelle, mettant en question la prétention européenne à un universalisme séculier. D’autres traditions de charité et d’humanitarisme ont été largement ignorées. Toutes les traditions religieuses incluent des commandements de «bonnes œuvres» et on peut penser à l’essence de la charité comme à un acte physique, comme le bon Samaritain tendant la main à un voyageur en détresse ou, dans la tradition islamique, même sourire à un voisin. Mais il existe des différences subtiles. La charité chrétienne, associée à l’agapè, ne se confond pas exactement avec le champ lexical islamique, qui inclut zakat, ṣadaqa et waqf (la fondation caritative islamique). Les règles de distribution de la zakat ont attiré l’attention des érudits de l’Islam et peuvent être considérées historiquement comme ayant posé les principes d’un proto-Trésor public. Elles ont, par exemple, été interprétées comme autorisant le financement du djihad militaire. Mais le soutien aux pauvres est aujourd’hui couramment considéré comme la priorité de la zakat, voire son objet exclusif, et elle est devenue un outil de financement extrêmement efficace pour les organisations caritatives islamiques contemporaines, qui ont notamment actualisé l’insistance du Coran sur les droits des enfants orphelins.

Les auteurs d’une analyse rétrospective remarquablement approfondie d’un épisode de famine et de l’inadaptation de la réponse internationale, Famine in Somalia: competing imperatives, collectives failures, 2011-12, en arrivent à la conclusion suivante:

«Depuis la fin des années 1990, il est devenu à la mode dans la communauté de l’aide humanitaire occidentale de promouvoir les droits et d’écarter la charité en tant que solution paternaliste et avilissante. Les acteurs non occidentaux (notamment islamiques) replacent la question de la charité et de l’action volontaire au centre de l’action humanitaire, au moins en termes d’intentions» (Maxwell et Majid 2016: 196).

Ces auteurs ont été impressionnés par leur observation de la solidarité du personnel humanitaire islamique avec la communauté touchée. Les anthropologues peuvent bien convenir qu'attendre de ceux qui souffrent de la famine qu'ils comptent sur l'application de leurs droits alors qu'ils ne bénéficient d'aucun cadre juridique, n'est rien de plus qu'un trope rhétorique.

Les études basées sur des données ethnographiques de la charité islamique sunnite se sont multipliées ces dernières années. Comme les études sur les sociétés arabes menées par Mittermaier et Schaeublin (auxquelles on peut ajouter celles de Harmsen en 2008, Roy en 2011, Atia en 2013, Challand en 2014 et Juul Petersen en 2015), un ensemble de travaux sur l’Afrique de l’Ouest a émergé (Kaag en 2007, de Bruijn et van Dijk en 2009, LeBlanc et Gosselin en 2016). Les centres d’intérêt de ces études reflètent la croissance des ONG islamiques, qui remonte aux années 1980, en partie dans le sillage de la croissance des ONG en général, et en partie en conséquence de la «résurgence islamique», un effort international pour rétablir les valeurs et les pratiques islamiques. L’un des sujets qui a des implications pratiques est la question de la «proximité culturelle»: dans quelle mesure une organisation confessionnelle peut-elle améliorer son efficacité par un accès privilégié aux bénéficiaires de l’aide qui partagent les mêmes traditions religieuses (de Cordier 2009, Palmer 2011)? La réponse à cette question est globalement positive si l’on considère le travail des agences d’aide chrétiennes parmi les populations chrétiennes en Afrique et en Amérique latine. Mais ce qui aurait pu être une augmentation constante de l’acceptation et de l’influence des organisations caritatives islamiques dans le monde a été sérieusement compromis par l’ombre qui plane sur elles: les allégations persistantes d’implication dans des activités «terroristes». Une certaine responsabilité limitée des organisations caritatives du Golfe dans les années qui ont précédé le 11 septembre 2001 ne peut pas être niée, mais l’une des racines du problème remonte à la détermination des puissances occidentales à soutenir les moudjahidin pendant la guerre entre l’Union soviétique et l’Afghanistan dans les années 1980, quand l’aide humanitaire était ouvertement mêlée au soutien militaire des États-Unis à travers l’Arabie saoudite et le Pakistan (Benthall 2010: 115-18). En conséquence de quoi, de nombreuses ONG islamiques ont été blacklistées par le gouvernement américain, qui a une grande influence mondiale, ou obligées de fermer, et même celles qui présentaient un dossier irréprochable ont dû faire face à des obstacles juridiques et financiers. Malgré la publication d’avis contraires, la domination des experts du «contre-terrorisme» aux États-Unis reste forte, et ils semblent souvent (ainsi que raisonnent Schaeublin en 2008, James en 2010, 2011, de Goede en 2012, Benthall en 2016) s’attendre au pire de la part des donateurs caritatifs musulmans. Des présomptions défavorables sont aussi diffusées sur tous les musulmans «pas à leur place», ces volontaires exprimant une solidarité musulmane transnationale qui voyagent dans des régions lointaines et troublées (Li en 2010, Kassem en 2010-11).

À l’inverse, au Royaume-Uni, une autorité régulatrice ouverte aux organisations caritatives des diasporas de toutes sortes, la Charity Commission, a encouragé le développement du secteur caritatif islamique qui a établi des relations de coopération fructueuses avec l’establishment dans le domaine de l’aide, notamment en adoptant le principe de non-discrimination en raison de la religion. Le seul autre pays dans lequel les organisations caritatives islamiques se développent vigoureusement avec relativement peu d’intervention politique est l’Indonésie, qui a une longue tradition d’institutions d’assistance sociale confessionnelles (Latief 2012, Fauzia 2013). Organisation islamique majeure, la Muhammadiyah, fondée en 1912 à Yogyakarta, avait adopté explicitement le principe de non-discrimination dans ses œuvres caritatives. Mais elle est devenue plus religieusement exclusive pendant la période de libération du régime néerlandais, et son engagement à l’inclusivité n’a pas encore été formellement réaffirmé (Fauzia 2017).

Dans son ethnographie aux nombreuses facettes sur les musulmans Hui en Chine, Matthew S. Erie explore en quoi les principes islamiques traditionnels du don charitable sont négociés dans une sorte de «compétition de valeur» avec les pratiques de don dominantes des Han et avec les anxiétés sécuritaires du parti-État officiellement athée (Erie 2016). Le terme désignant le don volontaire musulman, nietie, est dérivé du terme coranique niyyah, intention ou motivation, sans distinction en chinois entre l’objet du don et l’acte de don. Conformément à la pratique Taoïste, mais contrairement au commandement coranique selon lequel le don charitable confère un mérite supplémentaire lorsqu’il est effectué en toute discrétion, les dons individuels et familiaux du nietie sont affichés nommément sur les murs des mosquées. Des collectes de nietie sont organisées pour les secours soutenus par le gouvernement après les tremblements de terre (Erie 2016: 276-9).

Le débat au sein du monde islamique sur l’éthique du don charitable s’est notamment concentré sur les règles de la zakat. Le point de vue traditionnel de la plupart des oulémas était que seuls des musulmans pouvaient en être les bénéficiaires. Libérées de cette restriction, certaines organisations caritatives islamiques ont pu faire cause commune avec les principales ONG séculières et chrétiennes. Cette différence d’interprétation des règles de la zakat, comme d’autres (telles que la mesure dans laquelle elles autorisent le prosélytisme) peuvent être vues comme intégrant des concepts qui sont au cœur des débats actuels plus larges au sein de l’Islam aujourd’hui (Benthall 2016: 18). Elles ont aussi un certain rapport avec la réflexion anthropologique sur la charité en général, dans la mesure où l’Islam, avec son histoire missionnaire et expansionniste, présente un universalisme alternatif à celui souvent pris pour acquis du Christianisme et de son héritier, l’universalisme séculier post-Lumières.

La critique de l’humanitarisme

L’étude de la charité par les anthropologues sociaux du monde entier s’est étendue ces dernières années. Ils ne s’intéressent pas tous aux mêmes questions. Par exemple, la monographie de C. Julia Huang sur le mouvement d’assistance sociale internationale Tzu Chi (fondé par une modeste nonne bouddhiste taïwanaise, la vénérable Cheng Yen – née en 1937 – et qui compte aujourd’hui des millions de sympathisants) est principalement axée sur le thème wébérien du charisme et de sa bureaucratisation (Huang 2009). Ce modèle peut notamment être applicable aux institutions caritatives de toute sorte lorsqu’elles s’étendent, du fait qu’elles sont chargées de valeurs morales fortes tout en étant obligées d’entrer en concurrence comme des entreprises. L’engagement séculaire spécifique des organisations caritatives chrétiennes dans les soins aux personnes atteintes de la lèpre (et plus récemment, dans la lutte contre leur stigmatisation) a attiré l’attention (Gussow 1989, Staples 2007). Mais ces approches semblent marginales par rapport à la tendance actuelle d’analyse des agences humanitaires.

Les professionnels des secours et du développement (parfois affublés du sobriquet de «citoyens d’Aideland») contestent souvent le fait que leur action ait quoi que ce soit à voir avec la charité. Leur position pourrait bien être un exemple de déformation professionnelle. Des initiatives multinationales ambitieuses ont appelé l’entreprise humanitaire à passer de la motivation charitable à une motivation poussée par l’impératif de «solidarité mondiale» (World Humanitarian Summit 2016: 13). Mais ce concept noble est confronté à l’évidence des inégalités internationales flagrantes, au mieux légèrement atténuées par l’action humanitaire, et manque de soutien dans la tradition usuelle. Les récents travaux des anthropologues et autres se sont ralliés à interroger l’idéologie de l’humanitarisme (p. ex. Bornstein at Redfield (éds) 2010).

Le concept de «raison humanitaire» exprimé par Didier Fassin a eu une large influence (Fassin 2011). Il entend par là une idéologique omniprésente dans le monde, moralement intouchable. En la confrontant, il cherche à faire se chevaucher les deux sens normalement contradictoires de l’idéologie: d’un côté un voile insidieux masquant des intérêts économiques brutaux (comme dans les travaux de Karl Marx) et, de l’autre côté, un système culturel qui donne un sens aux relations sociales (comme dans les travaux de Clifford Geertz). Renforcé par une ethnographie rigoureuse (il a une formation de médecin et a été vice-président de Médecins Sans Frontières) son argument selon lequel l’humanitarisme est une forme de gouvernance occidentale, dépendant de l’existence illusoire d’une «communauté internationale», apparaît comme une application de la science sociale dans toute sa splendeur. Sans aucun doute (et Fassin s’inscrit dans la droite ligne de la critique beaucoup plus ancienne de la «charité»), l’humanitarisme présente des aspects nettement conservateurs et peut même déshumaniser, en réduisant les survivants à la «vie nue» ce qu’Agamben (1995) a diagnostiqué, par exemple dans de nombreux camps de réfugiés (Agier 2014). L’ethnographie remarquable de Peter Redfield sur Médecins Sans Frontières s’appuie sur la critique d’Agamben et de Fassin tout en détaillant les réussites uniques de cette agence et en la reconnaissant comme l’une des ONG les plus autocritiques (Redfield 2013), même s’il remet par ailleurs en question l’argument excentrique de MSF selon lequel elle n’est pas une organisation «caritative», malgré le succès de ses collectes de fonds publiques (Redfield 2012: 454-7).

Entre les mains d’analystes en chambre, une approche revenant sur le concept de «biopouvoir» de Foucault (la subjugation des corps et le contrôle des populations) peut être exagérée, notamment lorsque la brutalité de nombreux régimes non occidentaux aussi bien que occidentaux est sous-estimée. Mais la critique de la «gouvernance humanitaire» a animé de nombreuses publications fondées sur l’ethnographie et portant sur la charité. Les occupants des camps de réfugiés (estimés à environ six millions de personnes en 2014 et dont le nombre a rapidement augmenté depuis) peuvent être considérés comme des objets de charité (même lorsque les administrateurs sont des agences gouvernementales ou internationales) dans la mesure ou leurs droits en tant que citoyens sont suspendus dans des espaces qui sont «hors limites» et régis par des règlements spéciaux (Agier 2014). Edward Simpson dresse le portrait intense, quoique impressionniste, des conséquences d’un tremblement de terre majeur dans l’État du Gujarat, en Inde, en 2001: dégradation du tissu social avec la complicité d’organisations philanthropiques de toute sorte (le pire exemple étant celui d’une école pour orphelins montée par un pédophile britannique). Simpson innove en y incluant des organisations indiennes locales et de la diaspora du Gujarat, de sorte que les organisations caritatives qu’il critique ne sont pas seulement celles d’origine occidentale (Simpson 2013). Maurizio Albahari a publié son ouvrage complet sur la crise des migrants en Méditerranée (2015) juste avant qu’elle n’atteigne son point d’ébullition. Même si Albahari est sensible à tous les autres aspects de la crise après une décennie de recherches, c’est son travail bénévole en 2005 dans un centre de demandeurs d’asile dans une petite ville côtière du talon de la botte italienne qui confère à son livre toute son autorité. Albahari y montre comment une myriade d’organisations caritatives religieuses et séculières, soi-disant indépendantes, ont assumé de facto un rôle de gendarme. Sa monographie soutient l’argument selon lequel les critiques les plus approfondies des efforts caritatifs restent aujourd’hui celles renforcées par l’observation participante, comme dans les premiers travaux d’Harrell-Bond et Alex de Waal. Liisa H. Malkki (2015) diagnostique un «besoin» chez les professionnels de la Croix Rouge finlandaise qui ont servi à l’étranger: ils sont frustrés par la routine de la vie de classe moyenne, rendue plus difficile à supporter par les longs hivers, et recherchent une sorte d’épanouissement personnel qu’ils ne peuvent pas obtenir chez eux. Les anthropologues de l’hémisphère Nord reconnaîtront peut-être ce sentiment.

Un modèle holistique

L’école germano-néerlandaise d’anthropologie présente un modèle méthodologique dans lequel l’étude des initiatives caritatives peut être insérée. Ce modèle s’appuie sur un concept étendu de sécurité sociale, décrit par Franz et Keebet von Benda-Beckman comme la «dimension de l’organisation sociale s’agissant de tous les aspects de sécurité non considérés comme dépendant exclusivement de la responsabilité individuelle» (Thelan et al. 2009). L’un des mérites de cette démarche méthodologique est qu’elle prête totalement attention aux points de vue des bénéficiaires de la charité et à la question de l’évaluation de son efficacité. Cinq «couches» de description sont identifiées: les notions idéologiques et culturelles de risque et de soin; la prise en charge institutionnelle, basée sur des droits clairement définis; les relations sociales existant entre les fournisseurs et les bénéficiaires; les actions concrètes telles que l’assistance de personne à personne, et le transfert de ressources; et enfin, les conséquences des interventions pour les fournisseurs comme pour les bénéficiaires. Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (2009) applique cette méthode dans un article sur le changement des réponses caritatives face à l’effondrement des structures étatiques en ex-Yougoslavie. Dans la ville croate ethniquement mixte de Knin en 2001, au lendemain de la guerre serbo-croate, la branche locale de l’organisation catholique Caritas a lancé une campagne caritative émouvante pour les «Croates affamés» de la ville, adoptant ce que Leutloff-Grandits appelle une «politique offensive d’ingénierie ethnique» par d’autres moyens. Une préférence a été affichée pour les Croates nouvellement arrivés de Bosnie, causant un ressentiment à la fois parmi les catholiques croates et les orthodoxes serbes de retour. Parmi les quelques publications détaillées qui prennent en compte toutes les «couches» de l’analyse émise par les von Benda-Beckman (même si elles ne se rangent pas à leurs suggestions), on peut distinguer Famine in Somalia (2016) de Maxwell et Majid et Crimes of peace (2015) d’Albahari, toutes deux déjà mentionnées.

Conclusion: du progrès dans la charité?

Au cours de la parenthèse de la moitié du XXe siècle susmentionnée, entre les écrits de Mauss et Westermarck et les contributions innovantes d’Harrell-Bond, Alex de Waal et Parry, un anthropologue a fait figure d’exception en portant un intérêt soutenu au thème de la charité: R.R. Marett. Il écrit ainsi: «le vrai progrès est le progrès de la charité, toutes les autres avancées lui étant secondaires» (Marett 1935: 40). Il considérait les soins maternels comme la source première de la charité (Marett 1939: 141, 147). Même si son style peut sembler sentimental aux lecteurs d’aujourd’hui, il peut être considéré comme annonciateur de Fortes sur la concorde et Frans de Waal sur l’ocytocine. Cependant, une réflexion sur la charité ne peut ignorer la présence de la réciprocité qui plane et menace toujours la pureté du don gratuit. La Bhagavad Gita reconnaissait ce dilemme moral il y a plus de deux millénaires.

La phrase de Marett sur le progrès résonne aujourd’hui et nous invite à nous questionner sur ce que nous devrions considérer comme le progrès. Depuis les années 1960, un mouvement informe connu sous le nom de «responsabilité sociale d’entreprise» peut être considéré comme une variante moderne de la charité, et ses manifestations font l’objet d’une attention ethnographique, par exemple en Afrique du Sud (Rajak 2011) et en Arabie saoudite (Derbal 2014: 146-53). Parmi les innovations plus récentes méritant d’être étudiées, on peut citer l’apparition de cabinets de consultants qui donnent aux jeunes héritiers des conseils sur la meilleure façon de devenir des donateurs philanthropes.

Quoi qu’il en soit, ce qui fut qualifié avec condescendance «d’anthropologie appliquée» semble aujourd’hui reprendre de la vigueur au sein de la discipline. Les opportunités sont nombreuses pour les anthropologues de s’appuyer sur les travaux précédents en matière de charité d’une façon à la fois utile sur le plan pratique et sophistiquée sur le plan théorique, à un moment où la demande de don volontaire et de bénévolat est plus importante que jamais.

Notes de l’auteur

Cet article utilise du matériel déjà publié par l’auteur dans trois autres articles de synthèse: ‘Charity’ dans Fassin, D. (éd.) 2012. A companion to moral anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell); ‘Religion and humanitarianism’, dans MacGinty R. & J.H. Peterson (éds) 2015. The Routledge companion to humanitarian action (London: Routledge); ‘Humanitarianism as ideology and practice’ dans Callan H. (éd.) 2018. The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of anthropology. Je présente mes remerciements aux éditeurs pour les opportunités de réflexion qu’ils m’ont données. Cet article doit beaucoup à Felix Stein comme éditeur de mise en service, et à deux examinateurs anonymes.

Bibliographie

Les publications qui sont possiblement les plus utiles comme lecture introductoire sont marquées avec un astérisque.

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Auteur

Jonathan Benthall est chercheur honoraire affilié au département d’anthropologie du University College London et directeur émérite de l’Institut Royal d’Anthropologie de Grande-Bretagne. Son livre le plus récent s’appelle Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times (2016).

Jonathan Benthall, Downingbury Farmhouse, Pembury, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 4AD, United Kingdom. jonathanbenthall@hotmail.com

[1] Cet article est une traduction de l’original intitulé “Charity” (Benthall 2017)

[2] Traduction anglaise, The Gift. Texte original français en version numérique: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/2_essai_sur_le_don/essai_sur_le_don.html

[3] Traduction française: De la souillure: Essai sur les notions de pollution et de tabou (Paris: Maspéro, 1971).

Relations

Felix Stein — Wed, 30 May 2018 12:07:48 +0000

Marilyn Strathern

Initially published 30 May 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18relations

Abstract:

To make a topic from one of anthropology’s principal means and objects of study, investigating relations through relations, is offered in the spirit of reflexive enquiry. The entry is not confined to anthropological works, touching briefly on certain philosophical dimensions and drawing in writers from other fields. However, it is organised around the way anthropologists have refined and expanded the application of relations through their diverse usages. Emphasis is thus on showing how the concept is used, rather than on prescribing particular versions. Attention is paid equally to the relations through which arguments and analysis are pursued and to the subject matter of anthropological investigation as the relational life of persons and things. The entry also notes a long-standing debate between English-speaking and continental European thinkers in the priority they give to terms (the ‘terms’ of a relation: what a relation holds together) or to the relation as an encompassing totality (of which the terms are a part). This one concept thus embraces whole different sets of assumptions about the nature of social life. Its own relations to other concepts are also relevant, as are changing emphases on what it might purport in a changing world.

Introduction

The English-language concept of relation is so ubiquitous, is entailed in such a range of applications, there might seem a good case for leaving it to commonsense to sort out what is meant on this or that occasion. But many anthropologists would also claim it as a signature concept for their discipline, and their usages have taken its potential forward in some very specific ways. Although there is no special anthropological definition, there is broad agreement about the privileged place it has both in structures of argumentation and in what are understood as social anthropology’s principal objects of study, and about the way it is often introduced into discussion to signal a critical (in the sense of probing and questioning) move. There is much to be learnt from its role in the framing of anthropological accounts.

Anthropological notions of description, analysis, and theory, above all in the distinctive terrain it has marked out as cross-cultural comparison, take for granted that one’s job is to show relations between phenomena. Thus one may demonstrate the extent to which religious precepts uphold or challenge values promulgated by the state or hypothesise correlations between new technologies and changing senses of the self. That taken for granted status is built into the way scholarly narratives are organised. Most of the time it is indistinguishable from the perception that relations inhere in the object of enquiry, and the observer is drawing them out. The commitment of twentieth century anthropology to the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ presented the world with what were above all bundles of relations. People’s actions and behaviour were to be described (analysed, theorised) in the context of the diverse relations in which they were enmeshed. Anthropologists continue to show the logical or functional relations between entities they abstract, such as religion or the state, and create new fields of enquiry by emphasising the relational nexus of phenomena, a notable case being that of personhood and the entanglements imagined between self and other, individual and collective. But at the same time, they take it as self-evident that everywhere people too are drawn into relations with the things, beings, and entities that form their environment. Above all, the specific capacity of persons to relate to one another is taken as a fundamental truth of human existence. Social life is what goes on between them.

Relations between and within

However, the Latin term relatio, from which ‘relation’ came into English, did not connote that state of ‘betweenness’, and there lies a history about what gets to be articulated. Classically, relatio referred to what was carried back (to someone) as in a reply or report; indeed, it was a substantive for a ‘motion’ (as in a proposal) or narration (producing a narrative). Medieval philosophers used relatio as an alternative for ad aliquid, an inclination ‘towards something’, a disposition, directionality, order (Brower 2015). They drew from Aristotle’s disquisition on categories (for an anthropological comment, see Allen 2000): the idea that such an inclination was a property (‘accident’) inherent in one entity in the way it pointed towards another.^[1] Their reflections addressed common linguistic differences, as in the differentiation of absolute and relative terms, the latter arising from the comparison of things. An attendant concern about the way things bore on one another, through (say) correspondence or resemblance, with respect to the role of their own intellectual activity, through (say) comparison, continued to bother European thinkers into early modern times. As for an articulation of how entities, such as intervals, might lie between other entities, it would seem that philosophical discourse lagged behind ordinary usage. It was in terms of how relations could be formally represented that ‘betweenness’ was a relative late-comer. That this might have anything to do with the scientific revolution is a matter of speculation (Strathern 2005: 33-49). But possibly an emerging worldview that rested on explaining discrete phenomena by reference to the forces, logics, or structures that held them together had found in an old term a new one – relations – for that holding together.

This worldview was not uncontested. If this is a development traceable in English, there were early modern continental thinkers who took relations in a different direction. Descombes (2014) rehearses Gottfried Leibniz’s specific objections to the definition of relations proposed in 1690 by the English philosopher, John Locke: the referring or comparing of two things to one another. The German thinker’s famous dictum,

there is no term which is so absolute or so detached that it does not involve relations and is not such that a complete analysis of it would lead to other things and indeed to all other things. Consequently we can say that “relative terms” explicitly indicate the relationship which they contain (from Leibniz, written in 1704; Descombes’ [2014: 204] emphasis)^[2]

suggests that everything participates in a turning towards another. Caught up in a debate about the real and the unreal – or mental – status of phenomena as these thinkers were, Descombes spells out the implications of their arguments for the empiricist view that social relations are exterior to individual entities and the idealist view that social relations are constitutive of individuals. The part of Locke’s thesis relevant here – the suggestion that, as a mental exercise of comparison, relations are external to phenomena – diverges from that of his German critic, which denies that there is any wholly extrinsic denomination because of the ‘real [in the above sense] connections amongst all things’ (quoted by Descombes [2014: 204]); everything combines extrinsic and intrinsic relations.

Although the distinction between external and internal relations was to have a very mixed future in philosophy, it has sometimes been taken in anthropology to reflect a truth about the priority to be given to the already existing and thus discrete nature of entities, not in essence affected by their relations, as against the view that it is only through relations that entities are constituted. These tenets become visible, for instance, in the way anthropologists organise the frameworks of their accounts and thus decide what they think needs explaining. From the perspective of modern anthropology, both positions may stimulate a stance of criticality.

First, ‘some descriptions of a thing by its [external] relations with its surrounding milieu have a real scope, [in] that they allow us to know the reality of that thing’ (Descombes 2014: 204-5). Putting things into context – seeing the larger picture, showing the implications, effects and outfalls (‘unintended consequences’) between actions, events, structures, assumptions, and so forth – was always the aim of the traditional ethnographic monograph. Thus the reality of Zande witchcraft divination was to be grasped through a relational nexus that included princely politics, how kin are connected, and the logic of cause and effect (Evans-Pritchard 1950 [1937]). Here too lies the force of imagining ‘merographic connections’ (Strathern 1992), a phrase that formalises what is commonplace in English usage: the fact that nothing is simply part of a whole insofar as another view or perspective may redescribe it as part of something else. Religion and state, for example, may be shown to relate to each other in this or that respect, while the analytical discreteness of each is retained by the fact that either may also be related to quite other segments of social life, as when mystical beliefs (or population statistics) are regarded as part of the one but not of the other.

Second, assuming relations are always and already everywhere has furnished anthropological discourse with a vocabulary that challenges the kinds of essentialist categorizations that rest precisely on the discreteness of phenomena. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participationhas drawn Sahlins’ (2013) attention: we take it for granted ‘that beings are given beforehand and afterwards participate in this or that relation; whereas, for Lévy-Bruhl, participations are already necessary for beings to be given and exist’ (33-4). Kinship connections are Sahlins’s prime example, in which the difference between kin positions are internalised by or resolved into the mutuality of their being: a mother’s brother exists as such through the existence of his sister’s son (for an ethnographic example, see Bonnemère 2018). A distinctive theory of ‘internal relations’ has been attributed to Karl Marx: the political scientist, Ollman (1976), points to Marx’s notion that things function because of their spatio-temporal ties with other things, and to conceive of things as relations interiorises this interdependence.^[3]

Descombes (2014: 197) summarises his own view of the problematizations here by observing that a theory of external relations supposes that every change something has in its relations with other things is a change in its world, and not a change in what that thing intrinsically is, while in the case of internal relations every such change is a change that affects the thing itself. It goes without saying that sensitivity to these conceptual usages underlines the interest anthropologists have shown, though all too rarely, in other vernacular concepts of or counterparts to relations (e.g. Corsín Jiménez & Willerslev 2007).

Relations … and terms; relations … and connections

As they are articulated for analytical purposes, relations evidently occupy a conceptual field along with other substantives. This section enlarges on certain indicative usages. Perhaps it is the juncture to emphasise that I am reporting on various anthropological usages, for example between epistemic and interpersonal relations, and not filtering everything through one lens or another.

Both the apprehension of already-identifiable phenomena being brought into (external) relations with one another and that of phenomena (internally) constituted by relations may be built into the very definition of relation. Thus a relation-between may be imagined as itself composed of terms and relations (the relation only works with reference to something other, the ‘terms’ it links). Either the term or the relation can then be internally differentiated. Within the term, the conception of an entity’s self-referential ‘identity’ becomes modified when that entity is thought of ‘in respect to’ another, some degree of interdependence implied. This happens in the course of specification, for instance whether the magic one is thinking about refers to witchcraft or to oracles (all three are in the title of Evans-Pritchard’s monograph). Within the relation, there may be reason to distinguish relation from relationship, or relation from connection, as we shall see in a moment.

These manoeuvres, including imagining alternatives to the terms-plus-relation model, may be deployed with critical intent. Recently translated works of Descola (2013) and Viveiros de Castro (2014) are exemplary here. Considering identification and relationship as fundamental axes of individual and collective behaviour, Descola develops an intriguing theoretical possibility latent in the interplay between terms and relations: the very manner in which specific cosmologies privilege the one over the other. He thus offers a wide-ranging, ‘combinatory analysis of the modes of relations between existing entities’, which is how he introduces his emphasis on external relations between beings and things as opposed to the internal links that pertain between abstract concepts; his criticism of earlier models remains largely implicit. On the other hand, Viveiros de Castro deliberately writes against a formula that depends exclusively on ‘a connection or conjunction of terms’.^[4] Adopting Gilles Deleuze’s vocabulary, he states ‘that the future of the master concept of anthropology – relation – depends on how much attention the discipline will end up lending to the concepts of difference and multiplicity, becoming and disjunctive synthesis’ (2014: 170). These alternative coordinates for thinking about relations explicitly challenge the presumption that the primary values to which relations lead are those of binding ties or attachments.

So let us return to some of the ways in which relation has been differentiated. A case has been argued for distinguishing relations from ‘relationships’. Moutu (2012) wishes to get away from an obsession with epistemological understandings of relations, insofar as, in the case of persons, they occlude the ontological character of ‘relationships’. A thinker’s relational practices, such as connection, association, resemblance, comparison, do not touch on the necessity and transcendence that, in his words, give relationships the character of an infinite being.^[5] This is the lesson of his Iatmul ethnography. There is nothing contingent about how Iatmul elder brother and younger brother are related as a pair, hence the necessity of their connection; insofar as each is also the other in another form, it is their relationship that transcends both the externality of their relating (if one wants to put it that way) and their identification as self-similar beings. Such relationships never cease; this is partly because of their processual nature.^[6]

In other hands, it may seem equally crucial to split relation from ‘connection’ (here, differentiating epistemic [relations] from interpersonal [relationships] drops from view). Although, following eighteenth century English usage, anthropologists (this author included, and in this text) often use connection as a synonym for relation, the distinction yields further critical purchase. Feldman (2011) argues for a difference between relations and connections as methodological constructs in the study of global processes. Unconnected actors (not in direct communication with one another) may nonetheless be related though ‘indirect social relations’, mediated through apparatuses or some ‘variety of abstract mechanism’, such as the surveillance systems, detention centres, and statistical operations that track a migrant’s path. In other words, relations have an effect on – and pose problems for – actors far beyond the scope of their connections. Imagining an extra-terrestrial perspective on the world, one that invokes the potential of cross-world communication, may invite enquiry into a different discrimination between connection and relation. Pondering instead how people can mistake connection for relation, Battaglia (2005) draws a comparison with the envisioning of information networks so dense that they cover for the ‘work of relationality’ – singular acts of connection fantasised as instances of social exchange. In her rendering, social relations and the work they entail are set in apposition to otherwise uninflected contact or encounter, and refer to a specific order of reality.

Social relations

This phrase (social relations) is found frequently in twentieth century British social anthropology. Sometimes it is used to distinguish relations of sociability (the tenor of interactions, transactions, obligations between persons) from relations of an institutional or systemic kind: economic, political, gender relations, as when Douglas (1970) talks of ‘relating’ beliefs to dominant aspects of social structure. On other occasions it summons the totality of social life, whether it is encompassed by the concept of society or, shorn of certain connotations of society, rendered as sociality. Such relations may be imagined as in the first place relations between persons, human implied. A seminal text is Radcliffe-Brown’s homonymous 1940 address on social structure.

Radcliffe-Brown (1952: [1940]: 188-204) famously defined social structure as a network of actually existing relations. Thus he was at pains to differentiate a non-social entity, such as the ‘individual’, from the entity that could be (analytically speaking) a node in this network, the ‘person’. His reference point was the concrete human being; as a person such a being was ‘a complex of social relationships’. The person was thereby a unit of social structure. A structural point of view, he said, requires studying how social phenomena such as religion or government have direct and indirect relations to social structure, here understood as ‘relations between persons and groups of persons’.^[7]Pointing to kinship, an area anthropologists most readily cite as exemplifying internal relations,^[8]Radcliffe-Brown asserted that kinship structures consist of numbers of dyadic relations ‘as between a father and son, or a mother’s brother and his sister’s son’. These were the building blocks of society. His emphasis on the dyad, through which he focused on an interplay between two genealogical positions, was to puzzle later anthropologists precisely for its privileging of genealogical thinking, but we can see it as an attempt to clarify just how one might construct persons as the terms (here equivocally external) to a relation.

Now Radcliffe-Brown’s specification of social relations had critical purchase against what in retrospect seemed the random reporting of diverse customs, as exemplified in early twentieth century accounts. Particular instances of behaviour or practices could be put into wider contexts, such contexts invariably consisting of the way relations were organised, a procedure that had long accompanied the analysis of kin terminologies. This assumption about organization (‘structure’) fed the ability to correlate, quite explicitly, numerous dimensions of social life. Goody (1962) offered an extended example from West Africa with respect to descent group formation, inheritance, and funeral practices. West African mortuary institutions were concerned with the reallocation of rights and duties, after death, precisely insofar as a ‘social person’ is defined through the mutual expectations that constitute his or her relationships.

Finding correlations between social institutions within a society was accompanied by cross-cultural comparison between societies. Under the rubric of the latter, it was possible to compare institutions such as matriliny or witchcraft in terms of their local social configurations. Here, the notion of ‘relations between’ at once facilitated the comparison of discrete phenomena, invariably along the axes of their similarities and dissimilarities (‘differences’ in this sense), and produced as objects of study ‘societies’ and ‘cultures’ in this mould, to be criticised in turn for the presumption of discreteness. Comparison across discrete contexts – disjunctive comparison (Lazar 2012) – emerged as an anthropological practice. We may see critical purchase here being levered against arbitrary evaluations of what was or was not significant as an object of study.^[9] However, there is also a sense in which any comparative move creates the potential of a critical outcome, insofar as social or cultural phenomena being brought into conjunction with one another shifts the observer’s perspective. Comparison was elemental in Locke’s definition of a relation; for the medieval philosophers comparatio had been almost more or less synonymous with relatio.

Needless to say, a re-formulation of relations came to Lévi-Strauss’s assistance in his notable quarrel with Radcliffe-Brown, beginning in 1945 (Lévi-Strauss 1963), and its consequences for British social anthropology. Take, for example, the reversal in the visualization of descent groups. What to the latter (Radcliffe-Brownian social anthropology) may have appeared the interdependency of genealogically discrete kin groups upon one another, through marriage alliance and other relations, from a Lévi-Straussian perspective would have appeared like a description of external relations (not his term). Lévi-Strauss’s own folding of affinity within the fundamental atom of kinship was instead a way of showing how such alliances were also presupposed (internally) by the total organization of relations. ‘[A]nalysis can never consider the terms only but must, beyond the terms, apprehend their interrelations’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 83). The whole is given before the parts, so one must begin with the whole, that is, with the relations among the parts.^[10]

It is entirely possible to insist on linkages and the associational quality of the lives of collectives without explicit attention to the concept of relations (see Latour 2005). Indeed the ethnographic record affords numerous other ways of imagining the entailments or enrollments of all kinds of entities in one another’s circumstances. Of course the observer may gather these up as species of relations even when there is no vernacular counterpart, just as an anthropologist might use the terms ‘culture’ or ‘system’ to describe social configurations that actors conceive otherwise or do not conceive at all. It then becomes a theoretical choice, with every shade along the way, to decide whether relations are articulated in all but name or are being named because of the anthropologist’s discerning apparatus. For where anthropologists do take it as a master concept – as in those English contexts where the invocation of relations is an invocation of the facility to ‘bring together’ entities of any order – demonstrating relations is seen as probing beyond what is immediately accessible.^[11] To reveal the relational dimension of this or that can also be empirical criticism of those worldviews that cannot comprehend or else devalue the way phenomena entail one another.

The compulsion of relations

Emphasised by some present-day anthropologists more than others, the uncovering of relationality – in whatever system or circumstance – may be understood as confronting a positivism that focuses on the intrinsic nature (self-identity) of things. A critical stance is particularly obvious here. It is no surprise that scholars in general, whose business is in the narrational art of relating, deliberately pursue epistemological relations; it is not trivial to add that, for anthropologists who are also ethnographers, this is consonant with a value placed on social relations in particular, not forgetting their engagement with persons as interlocuters. A disciplinary disposition to uncover the significance of relations is thereby broader than the controversial use of cross-cultural ethnography to point up the identitarian bias built into the (Anglophone) anthropologist’s native language.^[12]

When anthropologists talk about relations, it is persons who most often come first to mind; that is, beings inevitably enmeshed in a relational world. This holds regardless of whether, in any specific social configuration, people take relations as already there or as endlessly needing to be created.^[13]In whatever manner people assume they are parts of the lives of others, they also put in relational work to support, deny, reconfigure, or transform their relations with one another. It is the transformative, or transcendental, nature of interpersonal relations that leads Pina-Cabral (2017) to suggest that they are a bad analogy for the more general condition of being-in-relation or relationality.^[14]Rather, interpersonal (‘social’) relations are a special case to the extent that they are inevitably constituted through interaction and recognition, by contrast with relations that are mere affordances.^[15] This offers, in effect, a perspective on vernacular usage.

In English ‘relation’ and its pair ‘relative’ are also colloquial terms for kin. This is an idiomatic support or crutch for the tendency of ‘relation’ to connote connection and attachment before it also embraces disconnection or detachment, just as familial ties are normatively embued with positive rather than negative affect.^[16] We have already seen that such values bear on the anthropologist’s work practices, notably strong in the positive sense of accomplishment with which relations, ‘between’ or ‘within’ phenomena, are uncovered; to accumulate relations – as in putting entities and beings of all kinds into larger contexts – is interpreted as an incremental activity. This is simply a cultural comment. We may also underscore the tendency of the English phrase ‘kin relations’, so prevalent in anthropological discourse, to elide the analytical conceptualization of relations (close to Pina-Cabra’s general relationality) with the reciprocals or reflexivity implied in interaction between kinspersons. Inevitably, different argumentative positions emphasise relations as lying between kinsfolk as discrete persons, or as pointing to their mutual self-definition, or as some mix of the two. That said, such theoretical heterogeneity may strengthen rather than weaken the force of relations as a general concept.

One argument for holding on to the anthropologists’ strong vocabulary of relations is that it joins the few languages we have, from the life sciences and elsewhere, for dealing with the present ecological mess. A new sense of the fragility of the world, as a bio-physical-social entity, accompanies a new necessity to apprehend the interdependence of entities and beings of all kinds.^[17] An appeal to ‘relations’ is crisp and all-embracing. Indeed, it is relations all the way down. And in every quarter: dispensing with the internal-external axis in which much of this account is couched, Barad (2007) argues that no phenomenon exists apart from the ‘intra-action’ of phenomena. An anthropologist might add there are still too many imagined worlds that ignore such realities, and there is much work of criticism still to be done. For, among other things, what such an appeal to relations does not do is dispatch the spectre of an underlying presumption of similarity (between terms) entailed in imagining terms to a relation. This is relevant to activist dimensions of remedial politics, anthropogenically-speaking (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2017). Relations so conceived fail to challenge prevailing Anglophone requirements of political action, namely that it proceed through demonstrating similarity or convergence of interests (‘connections’ in this sense) when parties are brought together. Such requirements cannot deal with those social encounters to which, of all disciplines, anthropology has specialist access, namely those based on the collective work of difference and division.^[18]The relation, observes Haraway (2003), is about significant otherness at every scale. Her conception of what relating entails is implicitly political in tenor.

Non-relations and post-relations?

This entry has indicated some of the ways anthropologists have used ‘relations’ in the course of their practice, now taken for granted, now explicitly differentiated for this or that purpose. Those ways both cross other currents in social thought and are given prominence in the discipline’s traditional concern with the collective or associational dimension of people’s lives. Attention has been paid to divergences between views, and the manner in which they recur. One thread through these usages is the critical edge that being explicit about relations has brought to debate.

A remark attributed to the twentieth century anthropologist and ecologist, Gregory Bateson, is that one cannot not relate.^[19]Interesting, therefore, is recent critical writing that challenges how relationality, in a social or interpersonal sense, appears to suffuse anthropological accounts. Two examples must serve.^[20]Candea et al. (2015) take up the positive affect attributed to relations as inevitably implying the desirability of close ties between people or the mutuality of engagement. These essays seek to re-evaluate detachment and disconnection in social life, analyzing strategies of separation and distancing – relations from another point of view – for their political and ethical interest. In different vein, Holbraad and Pederson (2017: 242-81) ask what comes after the relation. They suggest that by intensifying it beyond recognition one can develop examples of apparently ‘non-relational’ ethnographic moments to sketch what a ‘post-relational’ shift might look like. In the course of this they uncover a renewed vernacular or indigenous (in their examples, Christian) interest in the individual, a connection-cutting entity, which holds out the critical potential of modifying the concept of the relation itself, such that it is no longer ‘owned by’ or ceases ‘to be about’ social relations. As these narratives imply, there is more still to relate.

References

Allen, N.J. 2000. Categories and classifications: Maussian reflections on the social. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe half-way: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Battaglia, D. 2005. Insiders’ voices in outer spaces. In E.T. culture: anthropology in outerspaces (ed.) D. Battaglia, 1-37. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bonnemère, P. 2018. Acting for others: relational transformations in Papua New Guinea. Chicago: HAU Books.

Brower, J. 2015. Medieval theories of relations [revised]. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (ed.) E.N. Zalta (available on-line: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relations-medieval). Accessed 4 February 2016.

Candea, M., J. Cook, C. Trundle & T. Yarrow (eds) 2015. Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking. Manchester: University Press.

Carsten, J. (ed.) 2000. Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge: University Press.

Corsín Jiménez, A. Willerslev, & R. Willerslev 2007. ‘An anthropological concept of the concept’: reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13, 527-44.

Danowski, D. & E. Viveiros de Castro 2017 [2014]. The ends of the world (trans. R. Nunes). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Descola, P. 2013 [2005]. Beyond nature and culture (trans. J. Lloyd). Chicago: University Press.

Descombes, V. 2014 [1996]. The institutions of meaning: a defense of anthropological holism (trans. S.A. Schwartz). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Douglas, M. 1970. Introduction. In Witchcraft confessions and accusations (ed.) M. Douglas, xiii-xxxviii. London: Tavistock Publications.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1950 [1937]. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Frankenberg, R. 1957. Village on the border: a social study of religion, politics and football in a North Wales community. London: Cohen & West.

Frankenberg, R. 1982. A social anthropology for Britain. In Custom and conflict in British society (ed.) R. Frankenberg, 1-35. Manchester: University Press.

Faubion, J.D. (ed.) 2001. The ethics of kinship: ethnographic enquiries. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefeld.

Feldman, G. 2011. If ethnography is more than participant observation, then relations are more than connections: the case for non-local ethnography in a world of apparatuses. Anthropological Theory 11(4), 375-95.

Goody, J. 1962. Death, property and the ancestors: a study of the mortuary customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa. London: Tavistock Publications.

Haraway, D. 2003. The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Holbraad, M. & M.A. Pederson 2017. The ontological turn: an anthropological exposition. Cambridge: University Press.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-network theory. Oxford: University Press.

Lazar, S. 2012. Disjunctive comparison: citizenship and trade unionism in Bolivia and Argentina. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18(2), 349-68.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963 [1945]. Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology. In Structural anthropology, vol. 1, (trans. C. Jacobson & B.G. Schoepf), 31-54. New York: Basic Books.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1978 [1973]. Reflections on the atom of kinship. In Structural anthropology, volume 2, (trans. M. Layton), 82-112. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Moutu, A. 2013. Names are thicker than blood: kinship and ownership amongst the Iatmul. Oxford: OUP for The British Academy.

Ollman, B. 1976 [1971] Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society. Cambridge: University Press.

Pina-Cabral, J. de 2017. World: an anthropological examination. Chicago: HAU Books.

Rabinow, P. 2011. The accompaniment: assembling the contemporary. Chicago: University Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952 [1940]. On social structure. In Structure and function in primitive society, 188-204. London: Cohen & West.

Sahlins, M. 2013. What kinship is – and is not. Chicago: University Press.

Strathern, M. 1992. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: University Press.

Strathern, M. 2005. Embedded science. In Kinship, law and the unexpected: relatives are always a surprise, 33-49. Cambridge: University Press.

Strathern, M. 2017. Persons and partible persons. In Schools and styles of anthropological theory (ed.) M. Candea, 236-46. London: Routledge.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2014 [2009]. Cannibal metaphysics for a post-structural anthropology (trans. & ed. P. Skafish). Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal Publishing.

Wagner, R.1975.The invention of culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Note on contributor

Marilyn Strathern is a former William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, and currently Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Her ethnographic forays are divided between Papua New Guinea and Britain. Apart from gender and kinship, she has written on reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property, and audit culture.

Prof. Marilyn Strathern, ms10026@cam.ac.uk.

[1] It took time before the Aristotlean conviction that one property cannot belong to more than one subject was left to the side.

[2] All terms lead to other terms, but relative terms show this explicitly: ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ are relatives terms, as are ‘parent’ and ‘child’, each implying the other. Leibniz’s overall argument was consonant with his objection to Isaac Newton’s idea of space as something in itself, within which other objects move; for Leibniz, space was simply the ‘order’ (another word for ‘relation’), in which celestial bodies move in respect of each other.

[3] Thus, ‘the relation between capital and labor is treated ... as a function of capital itself’ – capital is a (social) relation (Ollman 1976: 13).

[4] The full passage reads: ‘Multiplicity is a system defined by a modality of relational synthesis different from a connection or conjunction of terms. Deleuze calls it a disjunctive synthesis or inclusive disjunction, a relational mode that does not have similarity or identity as its (formal or final) cause, but divergence or distance; another name for this relational mode is “becoming”’ (2014: 112, emphasis ignored). Disjunctive synthesis is a difference understood as positive rather than oppositive. Deleuze’s specific debt to Leibniz is mentioned.

[5] With reference to his field material from Melanesia. Moutu’s (2012: 202) observation extends from the proposition that Melanesians take relationships as the implicit ground of being, by contrast with the Euro-American impetus to see ‘making relations / relationships’ as a matter of social agency.

[6] In some senses, this anticipates an observation from Pina-Cabral (below).

[7] Elsewhere in this address he takes ‘relations of person to person’ as simply a part of social structure, the other part being the differentiation of individuals and classes by their social role.

[8] For example, ‘[T]he terms of kinship are inherently linking terms; … they render the self in and through its relation to certain others’ (Faubion 2001: 3). (Self and other is an axis often taken as fundamental to people’s conceptualization of relations.) However, Radcliffe-Brown seems to have something more like external relations in mind (social structure as ‘actually existing relations’ that ‘link together certain human beings’ [1952: 192]).

[9] To offer just one example, Frankenberg’s (1957) focus on the politics of a Welsh village sprang from then-burgeoning interests in African village politics, a comparative agenda carried through in his posing a social anthropology for Britain (1982).

[10] As Descombes in his discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s work puts it. ‘Structural holism asks us to practice structural analysis as a form of holistic analysis, i.e., as a search for the relations that ground the system’ (Descombes 2014: 157). His own account develops the proposition that no social interaction takes place without a third term, that is, the taken for granted, instituted meanings of collective life. Thus in gift exchange between persons, the whole is given before its parts in that a ‘gift’ is already following the conventions of ‘gift giving’.

[11] Whether or not causation is involved.

[12] Controversy lies in the way that last usage is criticised in turn for the implication, from a ‘western’ perspective, that relations flourish in other, invariably ‘non-western’, places more heartily than at home.

[13] Whether of whole cultural orientations or within the dynamics of specific interactions. On the extent to which people do or do not take a relational world as having to be ‘made’, see Wagner (1975); Note v., above.

[14] Contrast the purpose Carsten (2000) has for the general term ‘relatedness’, an analytical placeholder to avoid pre-empting assumptions about the nature of kinship.

[15] Because of the ontogenetic – ever developing– character of persons. Per contra, Rabinow (2011) sees a transcendental quality in the relational interactions of ‘assemblages’, insofar as any kind of entity has the capacity to be open to another.

[16] The oppositional mode of connection / disconnection is not the same as the disjunctive synthesis noted above (Note iv.).

[17] This very phrasing is positivist, but there is some (political) advantage in it being one of the positions accommodated by a portmanteau appeal to relations. Within anthropology, it should be added, there is much present interest, from a ‘human’ perspective, on (variously) human and animal, human and nonhuman, or human and other-than-human, relations.

[18] The case is argued apropos concepts of personhood in, for example, Strathern 2017.

[19] Explicitness about present or absent relations can be evidence of relational thinking; however, an enacted relation (anthropologist speaking) emptied of engagement or attachment may be rendered as a ‘non-relation’ in the English vernacular.

[20] Both volumes point to a wave of twenty-first century arguments, stimulated by diverse theoretical perspectives, about the limits of the relation as an anthropological analytic. As the connotations of relation shifts, so do the terms around it. Thus the individual person, as a logical concept always relationally constructed with respect to other concepts, may be identified as a relational configuration socially speaking, in which individualism is a knowing strategy.

Animals

Felix Stein — Wed, 23 May 2018 14:55:51 +0000

Thomas White Matei Candea

University of Cambridge

Initially published 23 May 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18animals

Abstract:

What role do nonhuman animals play in human social life? This question has long interested anthropologists, who have provided various answers, themselves reflective of broader theoretical trends within the discipline. For much of the twentieth century, animals were regarded as material and/or conceptual resources for humans, with different anthropologists regarding one or the other aspect as more important. More recently, anthropologists have sought to incorporate animals into their accounts as participants in human social life, rather than merely resources. Such approaches question the human exceptionalism of conventional social scientific thinking. Given the roots of sociocultural anthropology in this exceptionalism, however, attempts to move beyond it within the discipline encounter certain methodological and analytic problems, the proposed solutions to which have taken a variety of forms.

Introduction

Humans and other animals have lived in close proximity, and in some cases, in symbiosis, for the entire history of our species. Reflecting on this phenomenon, anthropologists have asked a range of questions about the diversity of ways in which nonhuman animals feature in human lives: as sources of food or labour, as divine beings, as workmates, friends or bitter enemies. Yet, hovering on the edge of these questions is a more fundamental one. Anthropology, its name suggests, is the study of one particular animal: anthropos, the human. But what, if anything, makes humans distinctive? An entire branch of anthropology, biological anthropology, has been investigating that question by focussing on humans as one animal amongst others. Sociocultural anthropology, by contrast, has until recently taken the distinctiveness of humans for granted as a starting point, and proceeded to investigate social and cultural phenomena which were broadly assumed to be distinctive of our species. In particular, the human capacity for complex linguistic and symbolic communication was often a key reference point. It served in anthropology both to set apart humans from other animals, and to explain the role animals play for us, namely as resources for human symbolic activity. As we discuss in the second part of this essay, this division of labour – between the biological study of humans as animals and the social study of humans as radically unlike other animals – is beginning to show signs of strain. On the one hand, biologists have been studying nonhuman society and culture; on the other, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have increasingly sought to study nonhumans as persons or subjects. These two developments are hardly comfortable bedfellows, either for anthropology as classically conceived or for each other.

Until recently, however, the discipline’s interest in nonhuman animals ran along one or both of two very broad thematic axes. One asked about the role of animals as material, economic, and political resources for humans in society. Another investigated the role of animals in human cultural, symbolic, and conceptual schemes. The opposition between the two was famously cast by Claude Lévi-Strauss, a prominent proponent of the second line of enquiry, as one between seeing animals as ‘good to eat’ and seeing them as ‘good to think’ with (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 89). The oscillation between the two approaches and their recombination can be seen by briefly scanning the role of animals in successive anthropological paradigms.^[1] Around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, a number of approaches emerged which sought to add a new parameter – the consideration of animals not as resources (whether material or conceptual) for human society, but as actual participants in human sociality. In this light, animals are not just good to eat or good to think with, but also good to live with (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010: 552). The second part of this entry takes up this second set of questions, and considers the attractions and tensions inherent in attempts to take account of the active role that animals play in human social life.

Good to eat, good to think

Anthropologists have shown an interest in the importance of nonhuman animals for human society and culture since the earliest days of the discipline. Two nineteenth-century notions – ‘totemism’ and ‘animism’, formed the mainstay of those early discussions. Both terms were used to describe what nineteenth-century anthropologists understood to be social and cognitive practices common amongst non-western peoples. Totemism (derived from an Ojibwa term totam or totem) was used to describe the association of a species of animal or plant with a clan or subsection of society. Animism described the broader worldviews in which nonhuman entities, including objects, plants, and animals, were considered to have souls akin to those of humans. These general categories, derived from more or less loosely interpreted accounts of non-western people’s behaviour by missionaries and travellers, became the focus of enduring debates about the origins of religion. Following a now-discredited evolutionist logic, these societies were thought to represent a more ‘primitive’ stage in a singular progressive historical path leading to the ‘advanced’ or ‘modern’ societies of Europe (Kuper 2005). Totemism and animism were thus imagined by nineteenth-century anthropologists as the earliest prefigurations of modern religious organization and religious sentiment. For some, like McLennan or Frazer, religion originated in totemism, understood loosely as a worship of animals and plants as gods. For others, like Tylor, the origins of religion lay in animism – a more general propensity to see the nonhuman world as endowed with spiritual forces (McLennan 1869-70; Frazer 1887; Tylor 1871, 1899; Bird-David 1999).

Leaving behind the evolutionist question of the historical origins of religion, Emile Durkheim (1915) drew on some of these earlier works to a different effect. He noted, like Tylor, that the key feature of totemism was the way it marked out different groups within the same society by associating each of them with a particular totemic emblem. In this way, as Tylor had pointed out, totemism regulated the relationships within and between different subsections of a social group. For Durkheim, totemism played a functional role in the maintenance of social solidarity: members of a clan would unite around their totemic emblem through collective rituals which created a powerful sense of togetherness. This grounded Durkheim's broader functionalist theory of religion. In worshiping god(s), Durkheim suggested, people unknowingly worshipped and maintained the structure of society itself: totems reflected and maintained the sub-divided structure of clan-based societies, just as monotheistic gods became a single focus for a broader, undivided church.

Returning to the earlier distinction between ‘good to think’ and ‘good to eat’, it is important to note that for all of their many disagreements over the nature and import of totemism, the anthropologists above were primarily concerned not with actual flesh-and-blood animals, but with mythical, symbolic, or ritual animals – in other words, with animals as imagined by non-western peoples. It went without saying that they considered these imaginations and conceptions to be erroneous, whether in a crude sense, as when Tylor suggested that ‘primitive animism’ denoted a childlike naivety, or in Durkheim’s more sophisticated suggestion that animal totems (and indeed God(s) more generally) derived their power not from some inherent mystical qualities but from the social groups they stood for (Bird-David 1999).

An attention to animals as material resources was introduced by British functionalist authors such as Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. They combined Durkheim’s insights on the social functions of totemism with an attention to the rationality and pragmatism of non-western people’s concern with the natural species which surrounded them. This was a particularly important lesson for Malinowski:

In totemism we see therefore not the result of early man's speculations about mysterious phenomena, but a blend of a utilitarian anxiety about the most necessary objects of his surroundings, with some preoccupation in those which strike his imagination and attract his attention, such as beautiful birds, reptiles and dangerous animals (Malinowski 1925: 4).

Radcliffe-Brown’s primary focus was on totemism’s role in ordering social arrangements, but he shared the Malinowskian idea that particular species became totems in the first place because of their pragmatic utility to humans.^[2] Radcliffe-Brown thus envisioned totemism as a complex sociological device for weaving nature into human society. Through classification and personification, natural objects would come to find a place within the human moral order, thereby anchoring human society within its surroundings. Totemism, for Radcliffe-Brown, wove together practical ecological relationships (hunting and the exploitation and management of natural resources) and human social organization. In effect, the relations between people and the natural objects which surrounded them became social relations (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 131).

Radcliffe-Brown’s concern with the pragmatic utility of animals (and plants) in totemism – the sense in which they were, as it were, ‘good to eat’ – was thus a very small part of a much more complex picture. This structural-functionalist approach stands in contrast, for instance, to the later ‘cultural materialist’ arguments of Marvin Harris about the ecological and economic roots of the sacredness of cows in India. As Harris put it, the essence of his theory is that ‘[t]he practice arose to prevent the population from consuming the animal on which Indian agriculture depends’ (Harris 1978: 208).^[3]

While structural-functionalists such as Radcliffe-Brown were attentive to the material and economic basis of social arrangements, they were not directly seeking to explain cultural phenomena through economic ones. Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) analysis of the role of cattle in Nuer society is a case in point. His classic account of Nuer politics begins with a chapter on cattle, noting that cows are the Nuer’s main means of subsistence, and represent the economic bedrock of Nuer life. The daily round of the Nuer people’s activities, and their broader patterns of movement and residence, are driven by the cows and bulls around which their economy gravitates. Evans-Pritchard examined the way in which this then came to shape a particular sense of space and time (the famous ‘cattle clock’) for the Nuer; the aesthetics of cattle colours and names and the ways these became interwoven with appreciations of individuals; and, most crucially, the role of cattle as mediators of social relationships. From marriage payments to compensations for homicide, cattle played a key role as a medium of exchange in the establishing and repairing of social relations. In sum, it is hard to speak of a primacy of the economic. Rather, as Radcliffe-Brown had suggested for totemism, animals as natural entities are interwoven into human social relations. Evans-Pritchard writes memorably of the Nuer that ‘[t]heir social idiom is a bovine idiom’ (1940: 19).

It is in the context of his extended review of existing arguments on totemism (1963: 89) that Lévi-Strauss made his famous quip about animals being chosen as totems because they were good to think with and not because they were good to eat. It is important to stress, as explained above, that the functionalist approaches Lévi-Strauss was critiquing cannot be reduced to a mere utilitarianism. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss’s own structuralist interpretation of totemism owed much to Radcliffe-Brown’s. However, where the latter had insisted on multiple kinds of functional interrelations, the former picked out and focused on the conceptual structure of totemism. The key thing about animals in totemic systems, Lévi-Strauss noted, was that they formed a series of natural entities which corresponded to a series of social entities, in the same way that flags, for instance, form a series of colours and patterns which stands for a series of nations. To bring this picture into view, one had to stop looking for relationships between particular clans and particular totems – be it in terms of use value or aesthetic proclivity. Totemism had nothing to do, for Lévi-Strauss, with a privileged relationship between particular people and a specific animal – such as that maintained, for example, between the Nuer and their cows. He noted that in many totemic systems, the list of entities invoked as totems included animals, plants, and objects of no discernible value or even aesthetic significance, while many such ‘pragmatically’ significant animals were omitted. Once the particular relationship between individual totems and individual groups of people was seen as entirely arbitrary, one could suddenly bring a broader logic into view: it was the entire system of totems and the entire system of clans which related to one another.

His vision was directly inspired by then-current theories of structural linguistics. Language, in this view, was similarly made up of natural elements (a range of noises made by humans) of which some were arbitrarily selected as particularly significant, then arranged into patterns to create a grid which could in turn be used to convey meanings. Totemism was a language whose words were animals (and plants and objects): it allowed people to ‘speak’, or rather – more profoundly – to think, about the complex relations of difference and similarity between subsets of their societies. For Lévi-Strauss, totemism was just a particular instance of a much broader phenomenon, which he termed ‘the logic of the concrete’:

[the] use of one concrete phenomenon to talk about another, more abstract, realm is part of a much more widespread aspect of human thought; by means of analogy, the complexity, fluidity and inaccessibility of the real world can be visualised and approached through various 'as if' devices (Bloch 1996: 532).

This structuralist approach gave rise to some classic anthropological arguments, such as Mary Douglas’s famous analysis of the logic of the food prohibitions in Leviticus (Douglas 1966). As with Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of totemism, Douglas begins by challenging the various utilitarian (economic or medical) explanations for these food prohibitions. Instead, behind the seemingly random list of prohibited animals – the pig, but also the camel, shellfish, and so on – Douglas detected (or devised) a logical structure according to which excluded animals were each in their own way being singled out as anomalies from a broader type or rule. If typical sea-creatures were fish, this made shellfish (scale-less and fin-less sea creatures) atypical, and if typical ungulates (sheep, cows, goats) had split hooves and chewed cud, animals which had one but not the other of those features (such as pigs or camels) were anomalies. The master logic of the entire system was one of categorization and perfection – a setting apart of the perfect from imperfect, which echoed the setting apart of the chosen people to whom Leviticus was addressed, from the other people surrounding them. Thus without being ‘totemic’, this system also used animal categorizations to reflect on and symbolise human sociological ones. Whatever the merits or otherwise of this particular analysis,^[4] it clearly illustrates the generative possibilities which open up once animals are read as symbolic tokens within a broader pattern.^[5]

Another very different approach to animals as symbolic resources for the human imagination came from American symbolic anthropology. Clifford Geertz’s famous essay on the Balinese cockfight (1973a) showcased the way in which cultural performances could be read and interpreted as one might interpret texts, namely as multi-layered, symbolically rich narratives (1973b). Geertz described actions, listed plays-on-words, innuendos, and jokes, and divined affective attitudes of his Balinese informants, to put together an interpretation of the meaning of the Balinese cockfight as ‘a story the Balinese tell themselves about themselves’ (Geertz 1973a: 448): a rich drama of explosive violence and meticulous control, animality and human prowess, equality and status, challenge and response. Unlike structuralist analyses, of which he was quite critical, Geertz’s interpretivism was not committed to formally elegant structural schemes. The symbolic meanings of cocks, and of cockfights, were as messy, complex, and multi-layered as meanings usually are. Geertz also claimed to be operating in a realm of public signification – picking out the sorts of interpretations which his own informants might generate and recognise – rather than delving deep beneath the visible surface to find (or conjure up) hidden patterns. However, this was still an account of animals as essentially ‘good to think with’. A key point for Geertz, as for Lévi-Strauss or Douglas, was that the Balinese cockfight cannot be explained in functional terms:

The cockfight […] makes nothing happen. An image, a fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them […] but in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds and money, to display them (Geertz 1973a: 443-4).

Good to live with

‘Symbolic’ and ‘materialist’ analyses of the role of animals have occasionally been pitted against each other, as in some of Lévi-Strauss’s critiques of the functionalists, or in the above-mentioned ‘sacred cow controversy’. More often, however, and increasingly in the final decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists chose to study animals as both conceptually and materially significant in a number of ways. One might cite, for instance, Michael Stewart’s complex account of the economic and symbolic role of horses in the lives of Hungarian Roma (1997), or Sharon Hutchinson’s elaborate analysis of the shifting meanings of cattle, and their changing roles as social mediators and instruments of power, as the Nuer economy became monetarised (1996).

Nevertheless, these approaches, however richly ethnographic, still treated animals as secondary in an important sense. Human beings and their social relations sat at center stage. Animals featured as resources (conceptual and/or material) for the humans about whom these anthropological stories were written. A bevy of self-consciously critical interventions around the turn of the twenty-first century identified this as a problem of perspective. As John Knight put it, many felt the time had come to treat ‘animals as parts of human society rather than just symbols of it’ (2005: 1); to treat animals, in other words, as actual participants in social interactions, or, quite simply, as persons.

This reconceptualization of the place of the animal echoed a broad interdisciplinary conversation at the turn of the century within the social sciences and humanities. In anthropology, this ‘animal turn’ has become particularly associated with the idea of ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). The term ‘multispecies’ refers to the broader range of organisms considered by these ethnographers, including insects (Raffles 2010), fungi (Tsing 2015), and microbes (Paxson 2008), and represents an attempt to move beyond the human-animal binary which has long structured western thought. Where, as we have seen, animals featured in earlier anthropology insofar as they were ‘good to think’ or ‘good to eat’, scholars associated with multispecies ethnography (a term they do not necessarily themselves employ)^[6] coalesce around a focus on animals (and other nonhumans) as ‘entities, and agents, “to live with”’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010: 552). Here many anthropologists have been particularly influenced by the writings of the feminist philosopher of science and technology, Donna Haraway (2008), who has used her own relationship with her dog to think about the ways in which humans and animals are shaped by interactions across species boundaries. In thinking about the agency of nonhumans, anthropologists have also been influenced by the work of Bruno Latour (e.g., 2005).^[7] It is possible to delineate various strands to this emergent paradigm, the tensions between which can sometimes be occluded by a shared sense of excitement. In what follows, we discuss some of these strands, and the ways in which they both complement and diverge from one another.

One might find an unexpected precursor to these recent concerns in Radcliffe-Brown’s suggestion that, through totemism,‘a system of social solidarities is established between man and nature’ (1952: 131). But where anthropologists once sought to explain away the ‘erroneous’ ideas of social solidarity between humans and nonhumans, recent work often regards such thinking as a timely corrective to the ‘dualism’ characteristic of western thought, which allegedly lies behind contemporary environmental catastrophe, as well as the brutalities of the ‘animal industrial complex’. For some scholars (e.g. Best et al. 2007), however, much work done under the rubric of ‘animal studies’ is flawed because of its political quietism, and the ways in which its practitioners ‘[remain] wedded to speciesist values’.^[8] Recently, multispecies ethnography has itself been taken to task for failing to address ‘multispecies injustice, suffering, and unidirectional violence’ (Kopnina 2017: 351). In this section we thus also touch on the ways anthropologists have thought about the political and ethical stakes of multispecies ethnography.

Taking animism seriously

In the 1990s, several anthropologists (e.g. Descola 1992; Bird-David 1999) returned to the concept of ‘animism’ which had preoccupied an earlier generation. However, rather than interpreting this phenomenon as a form of primitive religion or a metaphorical projection of human society, they argued that in order to be faithful to the conceptions of the people they studied, they had to abandon the nature-society (or nature-culture) dualism which had oriented earlier work. This sense that anthropologists have to allow the worlds of their informants to challenge existing categories of analysis nourished what has become known as the ‘Ontological Turn’.

Perhaps the most celebrated exposition of the precepts of this turn has come from the anthropologist of Amazonia, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), who has coined the notion of ‘Amerindian Perspectivism’ to describe the way in which ‘humans’ and ‘animals’ alike are thought by many Amazonian peoples to be ‘subjects’ (to have a perspective), and to share a singular ‘human culture’ made up of villages, longhouses, beer, manioc, etc. What beer is, however, will depend on the perspective of the entity in question, determined by its particular bodily form. What a human sees as its own blood, for example, a jaguar is thought to see as beer. This perspectivism has important implications for hunting and warfare in Amazonia. Hunting is a perilous activity for humans, because from the animals’ perspective, it can appear as warfare, prompting revenge (warfare conducted by animals appears as disease in humans). Hunters take care, through the use of particular language and weapons, to make a distinction between hunting and warfare, in order to prevent the animals from taking revenge (Fausto 2007). Human-animal relations in Amazonia, then, are seen to be characterised by predation as well as perspectivism.

Outside of Amazonia, the peoples of the circumpolar regions have also prompted anthropologists to think again about animism. Here, however, it is reciprocity rather than predation which is thought to be the hallmark of the interactions between humans and their prey. A number of ethnographers have suggested that for hunting peoples in circumpolar regions, the prey animal intentionally presents itself to the hunter to be killed (Hallowell 1960; Nadasdy 2007). According to this conception, hunting is not a violent act but rather part of a trusting social relationship between human and nonhuman persons (including a spirit master who often owns the animals), which is characterised by reciprocity. By performing certain ritual activities, and by ensuring that animals are killed and consumed in the proper manner so that their souls will then be reclothed in flesh, hunters can trust that animals will in turn continue to present themselves to be killed.

Paul Nadasdy (2007) notes the historical tendency of anthropologists to treat such notions of animal reciprocity as purely metaphorical, rather than considering that they might be literally true. Nadasdy conducted ethnographic fieldwork with hunters from the Kluane First Nation in the Yukon. He describes how his own personal experience of hunting what appeared to be animals able to engage actively in reciprocal relations with humans forced him to question this metaphorical reading, and along with it the accounts of animal behaviour provided by wildlife biologists. Other multispecies ethnographers agree that ‘[t]he natural sciences are far from being the only way to know and understand the lives of other species’ (Van Dooren et al. 2016: 9). As we shall see, however, it is not only by way of contrast that anthropologists have related indigenous knowledge to scientific thought.

Some anthropologists have looked to indigenous ontologies to question the primacy afforded to animals over other nonhumans as the subjects of academic attention, ethical deliberation, and political activism. Kim TallBear (2011) writes that ‘Aboriginal thinkers [help to] extend the range of nonhuman beings with which we can be in relation’: trees, stones, and thunder are here held to be sentient beings too. As such, might these beings not also require incorporation into political communities (Nadasdy 2016)? Indeed, some scholars (e.g. Avelar 2013; Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2016) would suggest that it is the continued elevation of indigenous thought beyond the analytical level to that of the political which offers the best hope of salvation in a time of environmental crisis and multispecies extinction.

From trust to domination?

Drawing on ethnographies of circumpolar hunters, Tim Ingold (2000) contrasts the ‘trust’ which these hunters feel towards their prey to the ‘domination’ which he argues characterises pastoralists’ mastery over their animals. Hunters respect the autonomy of these nonhuman persons, who have the capacity to refuse to give themselves up if the hunter mistreats the animals (by wasting their meat or by killing them with unnecessary cruelty, for instance). Ingold juxtaposes this with the status of livestock in pastoralist societies. Here the autonomy of animals is curbed by means of force (whips, bits, hobbles), and the relationship is characterised by the exercise of human will over the animal, rather than by reciprocity. Are reciprocal, trusting, interpersonal relations between humans and animals then the sole preserve of hunter-gatherer societies? On this point there has been significant debate. Some anthropologists have suggested that Ingold’s hunters appear to cultivate relationships with animals in general rather than as individual persons; we cannot then speak of ‘interpersonal’ relationships (Knight 2005; 2012). What is more, the flight response of wild animals, and the one-off nature of the hunter-prey encounter, appears on the face of it to militate against the establishment of enduring interpersonal relationships between particular humans and animals. It is for this reason that several writers have proposed that we look instead to herders and their livestock for instances of what they call ‘human-animal co-sociality’ (Knight 2005, 2012; Willerslev et al. 2014).

Studies of such societies have in turn suggested that ‘domination’ might not in fact be the best way to characterise the relationship between herders and their animals. They have highlighted the fact that herders often live in close proximity to their livestock, resulting in everyday interactions defined not only by human control but also by care, conviviality, and intimacy (Knight 2005: 5; Theodossopoulos 2005; Fijn 2011; Govindrajan 2015).^[9] The contemporary relationship between Mongolian pastoralists and their herds, for example, can be thought of as ‘co-domestic’, based on interspecies reciprocity rather than human domination (Fijn 2011). In a similar vein, studies of reindeer husbandry in Siberia (Beach & Stammler 2006; Vitebsky & Alekseyev 2014) have recently stressed the ‘symbiosis’ that characterises the relationship between humans and domesticated reindeer. Reindeer actively seek the care and protection from predators offered by herders, while the herders in turn benefit from animal products and labour. There exists a ‘circularity of wills’, as reindeer internalise the patterns of movements dictated by herders, who then follow the reindeer across the landscape (Beach & Stammler 2006). The attachments that are fostered between humans and free-ranging reindeer have an intimate, bodily quality, since reindeer are attracted by the presence of salt in human urine (Stépanoff 2012). Interspecies association here is at least in part a product of mundane micturition and not merely human mastery.

Anthropologists and archaeologists have argued that domestication should not be seenas a one-off event for which humans alone are responsible, but as an ongoing process of mutual adaptation in which other species also exercise agency (see also Cassidy & Mullin 2007; Franklin 2007; Francis 2015). For insight into the two-way nature of the relationship between domestic animals and humans, and the imbrication of care and control involved, many multispecies ethnographers have turned to Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, which she has developed in relation to her own experience of dog training in the U.S. (Haraway 2008). In contrast to those who would condemn those who herd animals by reducing all human relationships with domestic animals to the violence which characterises factoring farming (e.g. Nibert 2013), some anthropologists have suggested that we can look to ethnographic accounts of pastoralist interspecies communities, which show how ‘in the interstices of power and violence, spaces for love, care, and mutuality flourish’ (Govindrajan 2015: 507). It is here that we might find resources for thinking about sustainable and responsible animal agriculture (Haraway, in Franklin 2017).

Taking animals (and scientists) seriously

As we saw above, some anthropologists have contrasted indigenous explanations of animal behaviour with those of scientists, regarding the articulation of the former as the proper subject of anthropology. Ingold argues that ‘explaining the behaviour of caribou is none of [anthropologists’] business’; their concern is rather with the hunters’ ‘direct experience of encounters with animals’ (2000: 14). However, the close engagement with the lives of domestic animals that fieldwork in pastoralist communities often requires has led some writers to criticise this exclusive focus on the experiences of human informants, and on their conceptualizations of animals, rather than on the animals themselves (Stépanoff 2017).

Like Viveiros de Castro and Nadasdy, Stépanoff also wants to take animism seriously and reject the nature-culture divide. However, he suggests that this might be best achieved by changing the way that anthropology is practiced, by ‘challenging our supreme divide between the natural and social sciences’ (2017: 378), and incorporating insights from the natural sciences into our accounts of human-animal relations. Rather than contrasting indigenous accounts to those of natural scientists, Stépanoff shows how that they can in fact be complementary. In according an active role to animals in the process of domestication, he suggests, scientists are finally catching up with descriptions of animal behaviour in the myths of Siberian peoples. Indeed, ethnographic studies of scientists themselves can reveal unexpected similarities between, say, Amerindian perspectivism and behavioural ecology (Candea 2012). And both biologists and Amazonian peoples, for example, at times take steps to avoid treating animals as subjects: the scientists in the interests of objectivity, the Amazonians in order to avoid being transformed into those animals (Kohn 2007; Fausto 2007; Candea 2010). Such comparisons work against the tendency to posit a radical contrast between western and Amerindian ontologies.

Other scholars have questioned the human exceptionalism that they find to be embedded within the ethnographic method, in which (human) language plays a dominant role. This has led to methodological innovation; some, for example, have sought to combine ethnography with the close observation of animal behaviour characteristic of ethology (Fuentes 2006; Lestel et al. 2006; Fijn 2011). Piers Locke writes of the transformative experience of doing ethnography in an elephant stable in Nepal, which led to him regarding the elephants not only as ‘subjective actors but also as participating research informants’ (2017: 356). Crucially, while Locke notes the complementarity with developments in animal behavioural sciences, this realization came not from a knowledge of this literature, but from everyday immersion in an ‘interspecies apprenticeship’ as he learned to work together with a sentient nonhuman being. Locke suggests that ethnography must be attuned to the embodied, affective quality of this interspecies relationship (see also Parreñas 2012; Dave 2014). This attunement might involve cultivating new modes of sensing across species boundaries, as in the case of the synaesthetic blending of vision and touch, which Eva Hayward (2010) terms ‘fingeryeyes’ in her ethnography of cup corals.

While the turn to affect suggests a move away from anthropology’s longstanding focus on linguistic semiosis (which involved thinking of animals as symbolic resources), Eduardo Kohn (2013) has recently argued that semiosis should remain at the heart of a new ‘anthropology of life’, which still succeeds in moving beyond human exceptionalism, since the living world is in fact engaged in constant non-linguistic meaning making.^[10] Here he is influenced by, among others, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who also produced innovative work on animal communication (e.g. 1972), in a way that sets him outside the ‘good to eat/good to think’ approaches which were contemporary with his work. Some, however, have argued that Kohn’s account remains ‘all too human’, since his analysis still appears to be guided by the conceptualizations of his human informants, in the manner of the proponents of the Ontological Turn (Descola 2014). This is indicative of some of the tensions within what we have been referring to as ‘multispecies ethnography’.

Conclusion: multispecies multiethnography

We can now delineate, for the sake of clarity, three ways in which anthropologists have suggested that ethnography can be ‘multispecies’. These are sometimes in tension, while at other times they overlap in the project of a single anthropologist. For the sake of argument, we will refer to these as the elevating, complementing, and expanding of ethnography. (1) Ethnography can be ‘elevated’ by raising the conceptualizations of informants to the level of analysis, in order to destabilise the ‘Euroamerican’ naturalist ontology. This is what is proposed by the anthropologists associated with the Ontological Turn. (2) Ethnography can be ‘complemented’ with accounts of animal behaviour by colleagues working in the traditions of natural science. (3) Ethnographic methodology can be expanded to include nonhuman research participants.

In sum, if ‘multispecies ethnography’ has multiplied the entities that ‘count’ in anthropology, it also involves a multiplying of ethnography itself. What we might now think of as ‘multispecies multiethnography’ contains within it a host of organisms and a variety of approaches, some of which thrive together, while others exist in a more antagonistic relationship. Whatever their differences, and the unresolved tensions between them, these various approaches have helped to shine new light on the diversity of relationships between humans and animals.The participation of animals in human social lives has been thought of variously in terms of predation, reciprocity, trust, domination, care, and intimacy (to take but a few salient examples). At the same time, these recent approaches have also problematised the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘animal’, and concomitant notions of human exceptionalism, which sociocultural anthropology had long taken for granted. Such problematization appears to strike at the root of the discipline. Perhaps it will lead to the wholesale reconceptualization of what it means to do anthropology; or, perhaps, the challenges it poses will be quarantined within a specific subfield and within a single encyclopedia entry.

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Note on contributors

Thomas White is an Affiliated Lecturer and Teaching Associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Inner Mongolia, China, his research focusses on pastoralism, human-animal relations, and political ecology.

Dr Thomas White, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. trew2@cam.ac.uk

Matei Candea is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Corsican fragments (2010) and Comparison in anthropolgy: the impossible method (2018), and editor of The social after Gabriel Tarde (2010) and Schools and styles of anthropological theory (2018). He has written a number of articles on the anthropology of animals in science. See www.candea.org.

Dr Matei Candea, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. mc288@cam.ac.uk

[1] For good overviews of the twentieth century literature, see Shanklin 1985; Mullin 1999.

[2] “I was led to formulate the following law: Any object or event which has important effects upon the well-being (material or spiritual) of a society, or anything which stands for or represents any such object or event, tends to become an object of the ritual attitude. I have given reasons for rejecting Durkheim's theory that in totemism natural species become sacred because they are selected as representatives of social groups, and I hold, on the contrary, that natural species are selected as representatives of social groups, such as clans, because they are already objects of the ritual attitude on quite another basis, by virtue of the general law of the ritual expression of social values stated above” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 129).

[3] See Shanklin 1985: 386-88 for a discussion of the ensuing ‘sacred cow controversy’.

[4] Gellner scathingly but not entirely unfairly noted that ‘the structuralist method consists of a somewhat arbitrary extraction of polar patterns at the whim of the individual structuralist virtuosos’ (Gellner 1987: 157).

[5] For otheranalyses in this vein, see Leach 2000.

[6] Indeed, they are sometimes actively critical of it (e.g. Ingold 2013). However, we have found it productive to use ‘multispecies ethnography’ in a capacious way to capture a loosely shared orientation among these anthropologists, and an explicit sense of rupture from earlier approaches to animals.

[7] Though, note the critique by Ingold (2013).

[8] Speciesism denotes a form of prejudice, comparable to racism or sexism.

[9] Such intimacy can also be present in encounters with ‘wild’ animals, such as in orangutan rehabilitation centres, where it is commodified as part of the transnational ‘voluntourism’ industry (Parreñas 2016).

[10] One example of what Kohn means here is the way in which the form of an anteater’s snout can be said to ‘represent’ something about an ant colony (its long tunnels) (2013: 74).

Charity

Felix Stein — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 16:34:20 +0000

Jonathan Benthall

University College London

Initially published 22 Dec 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17charity

Abstract:

This entry considers charity as an ‘etic’ term that facilitates comparison between different traditions. Theoretical foundations were laid by two great anthropologists at the beginning of the twentieth century: Marcel Mauss, whose The gift has elicited a wealth of varied interpretations on the theme of exchange and reciprocity; and Edvard Westermarck, behind whose dated assumptions about a hierarchy of ‘races’ we may discern some lasting insights into the relationship between charity and religion. The simple view that all charitable giving is merely a down payment on benefits to be received later (in this world or in the hereafter) has to be qualified by evidence of ‘mutuality’ as an aspect of human coexistence complementary to reciprocity.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, some anthropologists turned a critical eye on the work of Western aid agencies. But it was largely left to historians to reflect on charity per se. After the cooling of anthropological interest in charity, it was first the dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent and then Islam that reignited it and stimulated the process of ‘deprovincialising’ the common assumption that charity is a monopoly of the Euro-American tradition. Though social anthropologists have studied many other manifestations of charity, detailed attention is given here to the Qur’anic prescriptions relating to good works and to the ways in which they have empowered the formation of organised Islamic charities, whose practical and potential efficacy has been thwarted by an arguably excessive political reaction since the 11^th September 2001 attacks on the United States.

Anthropologists have contributed to the critique of humanitarianism as an ideology, and examples are given here of productive field-based research projects that have drawn on this critique. Finally, a holistic methodological aid is summarised which may be helpful in structuring research on charity, and it is recalled that the problematic nature of charity which anthropologists try to resolve today was noticed by the author of the Bhagavad Gita some centuries before the contemporary era.

Introduction

The word ‘charity’ in English refers to almsgiving and freewill offerings, but it also has connotations of spiritual love, the highest Christian virtue. It was used in some Bibles to translate, via the Latin caritas, the Greek New Testament word agapē. Some Christian apologists, for instance in the Catholic Encyclopedia, conflate the two senses of the word. In Elizabethan England, ‘charity’ also acquired a restrictive legal definition that is still an essential part of British and American law. A distinction is often made in European languages between ‘charity’ and ‘philanthropy’. For the ancient Greeks, ‘philanthropy’ was ‘love of the principle of humanity’. But it became fused, during the century of the Enlightenment, with the idea of public benefactions shorn of religious connotations, and today it has come to be associated particularly with the munificence of the rich, and patronage of high culture (also more recently with the promise of funding for development in much of the Global South).

All attempts so far to study our subject comparatively have dispensed with the charity/philanthropy distinction, one good reason being that it has no parallels in major non-European languages such as Arabic or Hindi. Another widely used term, ‘humanitarian action’, is problematic because the word ‘humanitarian’ can be taken colloquially to encompass all forms of philanthropic or altruistic action; but humanitarianism as a movement can be defined as an ideology traceable back to the nineteenth century (Davies 2012). (More tightly, International Humanitarian Law is the body of measures intended to limit the effects of armed conflict, and is outside the scope of this entry). If we look for a comparative, i.e. ‘etic’ term, as opposed to the above culturally embedded or ‘emic’ categories, then ‘good works’ is as serviceable as any; but in this entry, the term ‘charity’ will be used in an inclusive sense.

Theoretical foundations

Two giants of anthropology laid the foundations, at the beginning of the twentieth century, for our discipline’s theoretical understanding of charity. Foremost has been Marcel Mauss’s essay on reciprocity and social solidarity, The gift (2016 [1925]). Mauss’s claim that the principle of exchange penetrates every aspect of social life, in the ‘atmosphere of the gift …, of obligation and of liberty mixed together’ (2016: 177), has stimulated productive but sometimes confusing debate (Testart 1998; Guyer 2016). The other pioneer, though less widely remembered in this field, was Edvard Westermarck. He adhered to Victorian assumptions about a hierarchy of savage and civilised ‘races’, but his global comparison of charitable traditions (1909), still impressive today, explains how mutual aid is commonly influenced by egoistic motives, and, more arrestingly, how charity in all the ‘higher religions’ has been associated with sacrifice.

It may be asked why social-cultural anthropology failed to build on Mauss’s and Westermarck’s insights on charity until the last quarter of the century. The explanation may be that most anthropologists positioned themselves politically on a spectrum between a social reformism that disparaged charity as addressing symptoms rather than causes, legitimating the privileges of the rich, and strict Marxism, firmly opposed to charity as a brake on the inevitable proletarian revolution. But the consequence of rejecting private charity is to place all power in the hands of the state. Out-and-out hostility to charity, as an adjunct to entitlements paid for by taxation, is much less frequently expressed by social researchers today, especially because of the prevalence of partnership arrangements between charitable organizations and governments. Moreover, a frequent theme in recent research literature is the role of private charity in compensating for the retreat of the welfare state, most damagingly in former communist countries such as Russia (Caldwell 2016).

Jonathan Parry’s commentary on Mauss’s The gift (1986) sparked three decades of academic debate about this text. Parry’s somewhat provocative argument was that the pure or free gift, associated with salvation religions – a voluntary surrender of resources without expectation of return – is a kind of dialectical complement to the commodification of goods that dominates Western industrial societies. Shortly afterwards, Mary Douglas (1990), making no reference to Parry in her introduction to an English translation of The gift, deprecated the very notion of a free gift. For our present purpose, we may extract two linked suggestions from Mauss’s essay.

First, when a gift cannot be reciprocated, moral credit accrues to the donor but the recipient suffers a wound. Hence the reputation for ‘coldness’ that organised charity in Europe has often acquired since the nineteenth century, especially when it evacuates face-to-face relationships between donors and recipients. Social reformers sought to replace it with the welfare state. Some Indian ethnography reveals an interpretation of charitable giving as especially sinister: unreciprocated gifts made to priests and renouncers can bring misfortune that migrates from donor to recipient unless careful precautions are taken.

Second, a ‘free’ gift cannot admit any dimension of reciprocity. When I make a gift, I must do so in such a way as to deny to others – and indeed, to myself – that it has a transactional aspect or that I will be rewarded, whether in this world or in the ‘celestial economy’ of the hereafter. Though this paradox is salient in all the three Abrahamic religions, it is in India that it is worked through with most sophistication. The Bhagavad Gita (17.20-22, see also Bornstein 2009: 624-5, 644) distinguishes ‘charity in the mode of goodness’ (given with no expectation of reward) from ‘charity in the mode of passion’ (with intent of recompense, or given grudgingly) and ‘charity in the mode of darkness’ (given at the wrong place or time, to an unworthy recipient, or with disrespect). James Laidlaw describes how in the Shvetambar (‘white-clad’) sect of Indian Jainism, when itinerant celibate renouncers collect food in alms bowls from lay families, they show ‘surly indifference’ rather than showing thanks or appreciation – their aim being not to create social relations but to achieve a timeless spiritual perfection (Laidlaw 2000: 632). According to Hilal Alkan-Zeybek (2012), Islamic volunteering by middle and upper class women to assist poor people in a city in central Anatolia aims at exactly the opposite: enhancing solidarity through bodily contact, and ‘ethical transformation’ of the giver, so that class hierarchies are mitigated. Erica Bornstein’s monograph based on fieldwork in Delhi shows how the beliefs and practices aggregated as modern ‘Hinduism’ interact with Buddhist, Islamic, Christian and secular traditions to form a diversified charitable landscape, both international and intra-Indian (Bornstein 2012).

Interpretations of Mauss are complicated by the fact that he saw all gifts as metaphorically entailing sacrifice: when I make a gift, I give a part of myself. Westermarck stressed that in both Jewish and Christian teaching, almsgiving came to replace sacrificial offerings to God. Charity in general is habitually either praised as an expression of empathy or else depreciated as appeasing the conscience of donors and maintaining the status quo, but Westermarck suggests a third way of conceiving it: as an act of devotion. The prayers offered by beneficiaries are, in the Abrahamic traditions, one way in which they can offer a return – the obverse being curses uttered by those who are unjustly treated. Ilana Silber has argued that subtle ‘echoes’ of sacrificial ideologies and practices still reverberate across long stretches of time, as in the Christian injunction that charitable giving is one way for the faithful to emulate God’s free gift of Jesus’s self-sacrifice (Silber 305, 310). She argues for the need to distinguish three kinds of religious giving in the Hebrew Testament: gifts to the gods, to religious officials, and to the needy. The Christian doctrine of diakonīa or service, however, insists that anything done to benefit the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick or imprisoned is equivalent to performing the same service for God (Matthew 25: 31-46). Amira Mittermaier, in an article on Islamic voluntarism in Egypt (2014) following Fassin (2012), strongly associates the Christian and post-Christian tradition of charity with compassion, as opposed to religious dutifulness such as she observed in the practice of some of her Cairene Muslim interlocutors. But the history of charitable institutions across all Christian denominations and institutions is so varied that there is a danger here of over-generalization about their motivations, which include renunciation, self-denial and expiation, as well as compassion.

In keeping with a general trend in the social sciences towards recognising the porosity of the distinction between the religious and the ‘secular’, a ‘quasi-religious’ character may be attributed to some of the most successful secular humanitarian and development agencies (Barnett & Stein 2012), inasmuch as they are empowered by strongly internalised moral principles, reverence for charismatic founders, and an engagement with the world as a whole. Philip Fountain, stimulated by his ethnographic research with the Mennonite Central Committee, a North American Christian development agency, has pursued this conceptual problem, starting from the reflection that maybe ‘all development, whether labelled religious or otherwise, is incurably proselytizing’ in that it sets out to rework the social practices of others (Fountain 2015).

Reciprocity versus mutuality

Some ethnographic studies suggest that analysis of charity confined to equations of offerings and rewards may be too one-dimensional; and they point us to unresolved anthropological debates about the relationship between reciprocity and mutuality, and the nature of altruism.

Mittermaier, in another article (2013), draws a contrast, based on her fieldwork in Egypt in 2011–12, between an economy of blessing (baraka), which stresses generosity, and an economy of recompense (thawāb) aimed at securing a place in paradise: the latter model, according to her, has been accentuated by the march of capitalism in Arab societies. Emanuel Schaeublin, in his study of almsgiving in Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank (2016), argues, following a rich but elusive article by Paul Dresch (1998: 114-16), that for his Muslim interlocutors wealth is an expression of abundant divine provision (in Arabic, rizq), and with God there can be no reciprocity. Both Mittermaier and Schaeublin in their fine-grained ethnographies refer us to Islamic theology and abstain from ‘etic’ comparison. But in arguing for the primacy of giving they point us to a nexus of concepts that may be thought of as like a countersubject in music, complementary to the theme of reciprocity. Julian Pitt-Rivers (1992) proposed the concept of grace not only as fundamental to Christianity but also as an ‘etic’ term associated with the idea of charity: ‘Grace is always something extra, over and above “what counts”, what is obligatory or predictable’.

Meyer Fortes argued ([1969] 2004, 231-2) that kinship is rooted in a principle of ‘amity’ or ‘prescriptive altruism’, which is extended outside the family into wider domains. For James Woodburn (1998), an authority on hunter-gatherer societies, reciprocity is not universal to all human groups: the Hadza of Tanzania would not understand the concept of generosity or charity, being profoundly and assertively committed to egalitarian sharing. David Maybury-Lewis quotes from an elder of the Gabra people, pastoral nomads in northern Kenya: ‘Even the milk from our own animals does not belong to us. We must give to those who need it, for a poor man shames us all’ (Maybury-Lewis 1992: 85, based on fieldwork by Aneesa Kassam).

Social anthropologists are concerned with values or principles conducing to altruism. Biologists, by contrast, categorise behaviour as altruistic insofar as it decreases the reproductive success of organism A while increasing that of organism B. The paradox of altruism, one of evolution’s greatest riddles, was first articulated by Darwin in his reflections on the existence of sterile insects, and has elicited a vast scientific literature – largely bypassed by social anthropologists. Marshall Sahlins, however, drawing on the work of the developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello, deduces that ‘shared intentionality’ or intersubjectivity is a uniquely human capacity for mutuality, not discernable among non-human primates (Sahlins 2011, Tomasello 2009). Inasmuch as post-Darwinian science has dethroned almost every other presumed indicator of stark human uniqueness, the debate should be assumed to be still open. The biography of an eccentric genius, George R. Price (1922–75, a colleague of the more famous sociobiologist W. D. Hamilton), explains how he set out to prove mathematically that ostensibly altruistic behaviour actually conforms to a precisely calibrated scale of self-interest depending on the benefactor’s degree of relatedness to the beneficiary (Harman 2010). For the primatologist Frans de Waal, however, human altruism is not a theoretical problem. Pace Tomasello, he sees it as having evolved when female mammals began to nurture their young. Empathy is associated with the release of the hormone oxytocin: de Waal and his co-workers have even postulated that biological mechanisms for consolation behaviour are conserved between prairie voles and humans (Burkett et al. 2016). Because oxytocin makes us feel good, the sharp line between care for others and self-love, according to this view, falls away.

Research on charity pre-2000

During the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – an unsatisfactory term which has nonetheless stuck – gradually provoked a spate of research projects in which anthropologists played a significant role. Barbara Harrell-Bond’s Imposing aid (1986) was a landmark: an iconoclastic monograph on the work of international aid agencies, based on her fieldwork with Ugandan refugees in southern Sudan. Western institutions were increasingly dependent on government funding and pressured to comply with government foreign policies; their high charitable ideals had largely immunised them from criticism. She faulted them specially for failing to make the effort to empower ‘victims’ to take control of their own lives. Equally hard-hitting was Alex de Waal’s criticism (1989) of relief organizations’ response to famine in the Horn of Africa, which avoided dialogue with the rural poor whom they were supposed to serve; a few years later he attacked the self-reproducing complacency of what he called the ‘Humanitarian International’. Among other influential books by anthropologists published at about the same time was James Ferguson’s The anti-politics machine (1990), which exposed the failure of aid bureaucracies to deliver real benefits to the supposed beneficiaries of ‘development’.

Some publications focussed on the element of marketing in the work of overseas aid agencies, and on the process whereby disasters are ‘constructed’ as consumables via an oligopoly of media organizations for the purpose of campaigning and charitable fundraising, so that the flow of representations of suffering from the global periphery is continuously reciprocated by aid flows (e.g. Benthall 1993, Lidchi 1999). But reflection on charity per se was largely absent from the burgeoning research literature on development and disaster relief. Historians made up for this gap: Paul Veyne on munificence by private individuals in the Greco-Roman period from c. 300 BC ([1976] 1990); Frank Prochaska on the ‘philanthropy of the poor to the poor’ in Britain, and the ‘royal bounty’ that enables the modern British monarchy to remain credible (1988); many of the contributors to the first collection of comparative essays on charity to be published (Ilchman et al., 1998), with not a single anthropologist among its twenty-two authors.

It appears that the stimulus for anthropologists to reflect on charity came from non-Christian traditions, before they began to turn to its Christian and secular manifestations. This would be in keeping with anthropology’s more general tardiness in studying Christianity, except in Africa (as argued by Cannell 2006: 1-14). Among the few exceptions to be found before the end of the last century is an essay by Claudia Fonseca (1986) based on her fieldwork in a small charitable centre in Paris that distributed free clothing to down-and-outs. She describes the ‘implicit pact’ of goodwill and politeness established between some of the lady volunteers and their ‘clients’, and the transition between the older Christian aspiration of gaining a path to paradise through charity and the more modern aim of reinserting poor people into the workforce. Erica Bornstein’s study of transnational Protestant NGOs in Zimbabwe made up quickly for lost ground, and she was the first researcher on charities to follow through the ‘traffic in meaning’ arising at cross purposes between the expectations of an individual transnational donor and the reactions of eventual recipients – in this case through World Vision’s global child sponsorship programme (Bornstein 2005).

Decentring of charity via Islam

Jonathan Parry’s aforementioned reflections on the ‘free gift’ were inspired by the dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent; and Katherine A. Bowie published an early article on Buddhist charity in northern Thailand, qualifying the prevailing paradigm of Buddhist merit-making with her stress on class stratification (1998). But the main impetus towards deprovincialising ‘Western’ assumptions about charity as a Euro-American monopoly came from studying the Muslim world and its abundant legacy of religious injunctions to generosity, as well as actual charitable institutions. Again, historians have been well to the fore (Arjomand 1998, Kozlowski 1998, Weiss (ed.) 2002, Bonner et al. 2003, Singer 2008, Fauzia 2013).

One historian of early Islam, Christian Décobert, had the originality to make a connection between the key Qur’anic term zakat – mandatory almsgiving, like the Hebraic tithe, and one of the five ‘pillars’ of Islam – and Mary Douglas’s theorising on purity (her early Purity and danger (1966) rather than her later work on the Bible). For zakat has common origins with the Hebrew-Aramaic zakut, which had connotations of purity, rectitude and thriving, but not of almsgiving (Décobert 1991: 198ff). There is also a clear semantic overlap between the idea of alms and that of rectitude via the word ṣadaqa (voluntary almsgiving). Décobert also drew inferences (1991: 196) about the self-representation and kinship systems of early Muslim societies from the rules laid down in the Qur’an about the distribution of zakat, with their eight categories of eligible beneficiaries (Qur’an 9.60), and he proposed a link with the agricultural tradition of offering firstfruits to God, thus opening up opportunities for comparative study which have yet to be fully explored (Benthall 1999, Benthall & Bellion-Jourdan 2003: 19-25).

The connection between giving to God and giving to the needy has never slackened throughout the Muslim world, in many parts whereof animal sacrifice is still routinely practised, with the meat given to the poor (though in industrialised countries it is as likely today to be canned meat imported commercially from New Zealand sheep farms). In the Qur’an, the major sacrifices of camels and cattle that were retained in Islam are represented as not only ceremonies but also a practical means of feeding the needy. Both sacrifice and zakat are associated with prayer and with affirming the oneness of God and Islam. The practice of zakat has undergone many variations during the history of Islam – ranging between, on the one hand, complete control by governments, and, on the other, informal gifts through private connections during the holy month of Ramadan, with many intermediate cases. But the discursive field to which it belongs remains a reality for devout Muslims.

Studying Islamic charitable traditions is of particular interest for two reasons. First, in almost all countries there are either Muslim donors or Muslim recipients or both – revealing as much variety of religious practices as may be found within Christendom. This is of practical importance for aid and development policies.

The second reason is more intellectual, calling into question European claims to secular universalism. Other traditions of charity and humanitarianism were generally disregarded. All religious traditions embody injunctions to ‘good works’, and we may think of the essence of charity as a bodily act, such as reaching out with a hand like the Good Samaritan to a traveller in distress, or, in the Islamic tradition, even smiling at a neighbour. But there are subtle differences. Christian charity, with its association with agapē, does not overlap exactly with the Islamic lexical field, which includes zakat, ṣadaqa and waqf (the Islamic charitable foundation). The rules for the distribution of zakat have been given much attention by Islamic scholars, and may be seen historically as having set out the principles of a proto-state treasury. They have, for instance, been interpreted as authorising finance for military jihad. But support for the poor is usually today regarded as zakat’s primary or even exclusive purpose, and it has been turned into a highly effective fundraising tool by contemporary Islamic charities, especially in actualising the Qur’an’s insistence on the rights of orphaned children.

The authors of a remarkably thorough retrospective analysis of a famine and the inadequate global response to it, Famine in Somalia: competing imperatives, collective failures, 2011–12, conclude:

‘Since the late 1990s, it has become fashionable in the Western humanitarian aid community to promote rights, and to dismiss charity as paternalistic and demeaning. Non-Western actors – particularly Islamic actors – put the issues of charity and of voluntary action squarely back in the centre of humanitarian action, at least in terms of intentions’ (Maxwell & Majid 2016: 196).

These authors were impressed by their observation of Islamic aid workers’ ‘solidarity with the affected community’. Anthropologists may well concur that it is no more than a rhetorical trope to expect those suffering from famine to rely on their rights when they have no juridical entitlements.

Ethnographically grounded research on Sunni Islamic charity has accelerated in recent years. As well as studies on Arab societies by Mittermaier and Schaeublin – to which may be added Harmsen 2008, Roy 2011, Atia 2013, Challand 2014, and Juul Petersen 2015 – a body of work on West Africa has emerged (Kaag 2007, de Bruijn & van Dijk 2009, LeBlanc & Gosselin 2016). Research interest has reflected the growth of Islamic NGOs, which took off in the 1980s partly in line with the growth of NGOs in general, and partly as a result of the ‘Islamic resurgence’ – the worldwide endeavour to re-establish Islamic values and practices. One topic with practical implications is the question of ‘cultural proximity’: to what extent can an international faith-based organization improve its effectiveness through privileged access to aid recipients who share the same religious tradition (de Cordier 2009, Palmer 2011)? The answer to the question is mainly positive when we consider the work of Christian aid agencies among Christian populations in Africa and Latin America. But what could otherwise have been a steady increase in the acceptance and influence of Islamic charities worldwide has been seriously compromised by a shadow hanging over it: persistent allegations of implication in ‘terrorist’ activities. Some limited culpability on the part of Gulf-based charities in the years leading up to 11^th September 2001 cannot be denied, but one root of the problem goes back to the determination of the Western powers to back the mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan war of the 1980s, when humanitarian aid was blatantly mixed with military support by the USA through Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (Benthall 2010: 115-8). The outcome is that many Islamic NGOs have been blacklisted by the US Government with its global reach, or forced to close down, and even those with an impeccable record have had to face legal and financial obstacles. The dominance of ‘counter-terrorist’ experts in the USA remains strong despite the publication of contrary views, and often seems (as argued by Schaeublin 2008, James 2010–11, de Goede 2012, Benthall 2016) to assume the worst of Muslim charitable donors. Adverse presumptions are also disseminated about all ‘Muslims out of place’, volunteers expressing transnational Muslim solidarity who travel in distant and troubled regions (Li 2010, Kassem 2010–11).

By contrast, in the United Kingdom a government regulator sympathetic to diaspora charities of all kinds, the Charity Commission, has encouraged the growth of an Islamic charity sector that has established fruitful cooperative relations with the mainstream aid establishment – especially by embracing the principle of non-discrimination with regard to religion. The only other country where Islamic charities can be said to flourish vigorously with relatively little political intervention is Indonesia, which has a long tradition of faith-based welfare institutions (Latief 2012, Fauzia 2013). A major Islamic organization, the Muhammadiyah, founded in 1912 in Yogyakarta, came to adopt explicitly the principle of non-discrimination in its charitable works. But it became more religiously exclusive during the period of liberation from Dutch rule, and the commitment to inclusivity has not yet been formally reaffirmed (Fauzia 2017).

In his many-faceted ethnography of Hui Muslims in China, Matthew S. Erie explores how traditional Islamic principles of charitable giving are negotiated in a kind of ‘value competition’ with mainstream Han Chinese gift practices and with the security anxieties of the officially atheist Party-State (Erie 2016). The term for Muslim voluntary giving, nietie, is derived from the Qur’anic term niyyah, intent or motivation, without distinction in Chinese between the thing given and the act of giving. In conformity with Daoist practice, but contrary to the Qur’anic injunction that charitable giving gains extra merit when it is given discreetly, individual and family donations of nietie are posted on walls in mosques by name. Collections of nietie are organised for government-sponsored relief aid after earthquakes (Erie 2016: 276-9).

Debate within the Islamic world about the ethics of charitable giving has focused especially on the rules of zakat. The traditional view of most ulama was that only Muslims could be beneficiaries. When released from this restriction, Islamic charities have found common cause with the mainstream of secular and Christian NGOs. This and other differences on how to interpret the zakat rules – such as to what extent they authorise proselytism – may be seen as encapsulating concepts that go to the heart of wider current debates within Islam today (Benthall 2016: 18). They also have a bearing on anthropological reflection about charity in general, in that Islam, with its missionary and expansionary history, presents an alternative universalism to the often taken-for-granted universalism of Christianity and its legatee, post-Enlightenment secular universalism.

The critique of humanitarianism

Research by social anthropologists on charity all over the world has expanded in recent years. They are not all interested in the same questions. For instance, C. Julia Huang’s monograph on the international Tzu Chi social welfare movement – founded by an unassuming Taiwanese Buddhist nun, the Venerable Cheng Yen (b. 1937) and now numbering millions of supporters – is primarily concerned with the Weberian theme of charisma and its bureaucratization (Huang 2009). This model may be specially applicable to charitable institutions of every kind as they expand, in that they are empowered by strongly held moral values while also obliged to compete as corporate bodies. The specific centuries-old commitment of Christian charities to the care and healing of leprosy sufferers – and latterly to opposing their stigmatization – has attracted attention (Gussow 1989, Staples 2007). But these approaches seem marginal to the current trend in the analysis of humanitarian agencies.

Practitioners in relief and development – sometimes mocked as citizens of ‘aidland’ – habitually deny that what they are doing has anything to do with charity. This may be an instance of déformation professionnelle. Ambitious multinational initiatives have called for the humanitarian enterprise to change from one driven by charity to one driven by the imperative of ‘global solidarity’ (World Humanitarian Summit 2016: 13). But this high-minded concept is at odds with the actual evidence of gross global inequalities, never more than slightly mitigated by humanitarian action, and it lacks the underpinning of any vernacular tradition. Recent work by anthropologists and others has turned to holding the ideology of humanitarianism up to the light (e.g. Bornstein & Redfield (eds) 2010).

Didier Fassin’s concept of ‘humanitarian reason’ has been widely influential (Fassin 2011). By this he means a globally pervasive, morally untouchable idéologique, in confronting which he seeks to straddle the two normally contradictory senses of ideology: on the one hand, an insidious veil obscuring brutal economic interests (as in the works of Karl Marx), and, on the other hand, a cultural system that makes sense of social relations (as in the works of Clifford Geertz). Complemented by careful ethnography – he was trained as a physician and served as a vice-president of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, aka Doctors Without Borders) – his contention that humanitarianism is a form of Western governance, dependent on the fantasy that an ‘international community’ exists, seems an application of social science at its best. Without doubt – and this follows on from the much older critique of ‘charity’ – humanitarianism has markedly conservative aspects and can even dehumanise, reducing survivors to the ‘bare life’ diagnosed by Agamben (1995) as in many refugee camps (Agier 2014). An impressive ethnography, Peter Redfield’s monograph on MSF, draws on the Agamben–Fassin critique while also recognising and detailing this agency’s unique achievements as one of the most effective and most self-critical NGOs (Redfield 2013), though he has incidentally questioned MSF’s eccentric contention that it is not a ‘charity’ despite its famous successes in public fundraising (Redfield 2012: 454-7).

In the hands of armchair social scientists, an approach dwelling on Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ – the subjugation of bodies and control of populations – can be overdone, especially when the brutality of many non-Western as well as Western regimes is underestimated. But the critique of ‘humanitarian governance’ has animated many recent ethnographically grounded publications bearing on charity. The occupants of refugee camps – estimated at about six million persons in 2014, and fast growing in numbers since then – may be seen as objects of charity (even when the administrators are state or interstate agencies) in that their rights of citizenship are suspended in spaces that are ‘off limits’ and governed by special regulations (Agier 2014). Edward Simpson provides a searing, if impressionistic, study of the aftermath of a major earthquake in Guajarat, India, in 2001: a degradation of the social fabric in which philanthropic organizations of all kinds connived – the worst case being a school for boy orphans set up by a British paedophile. Simpson breaks new ground by including coverage of local Indian organizations and Gujarati diasporas, so that the charities that he criticises are not only those of Western origin (Simpson 2013). Maurizio Albahari went to press with his comprehensive book on the Mediterranean migrant crisis (2015) just before it reached boiling point. Though Albahari is sensitive to all other aspects of the crisis after a decade of research, it is his voluntary work in 2005 at a reception centre for asylum seekers in a small coastal town on the heel of Italy that gives his book a first-hand authority. Albahari shows how a myriad of religious and secular charities, nominally independent, assumed a de facto policing role. His monograph supports the contention that the most searching critiques of charitable endeavours are still today those that are fortified by participant observation, as in the earlier work of Harrell-Bond and Alex de Waal. Liisa H. Malkki (2015) diagnoses a ‘neediness’ among Finnish Red Cross professional staff who have served abroad: they are frustrated by the routines of middle-class life, made less bearable by the long winters, and look for a kind of personal fulfilment unobtainable at home. Anthropologists from the Global North may recognise the feeling.

A holistic template

The German–Dutch school of anthropology contributes a methodological template into which research on charitable initiatives may be inserted. The template relies on an expanded concept of social security, described by Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckman as ‘the dimension of social organization dealing with the provision of security not considered to be an exclusive matter of individual responsibility’ (Thelan et al. 2009). One merit of this methodological démarche is that it pays full attention to the viewpoints of the recipients of charity and to the question of evaluating efficacy. Five ‘layers’ of description are identified: ideological and cultural notions of risk and caring; institutional provision, based on clearly defined rights; actual social relationships between providers and recipients; concrete actions such as person-to-person assistance, and the transfer of resources; and finally the consequences of interventions for both providers and recipients. Carolin Leutloff-Grandits (2009) applies this method in an article on changing charitable responses in the face of the breakdown of state structures in former Yugoslavia. In the ethnically mixed Croatian town of Knin in 2001 during the aftermath of the Croat–Serb war, the local branch of the Catholic Caritas organization launched an emotive charity campaign for ‘hungry Croats’ in the town, adopting what Leutloff-Grandits calls a ‘war policy of ethnic engineering’ by other means. Preference was shown to Croatian settlers from Bosnia, causing resentment among both the Catholic Croat and the Orthodox Serb returnees. From the few full-length published studies that do justice to all the ‘layers’ of analysis specified by the von Benda-Beckmans (though independently of their suggestions), we may single out Maxwell and Majid’s Famine in Somalia (2016) and Albahari’s Crimes of peace (2015), both mentioned above.

Conclusion: progress in charity?

During the mid-twentieth century hiatus, noted above, between Mauss’s and Westermarck’s writings and the innovative contributions by Harrell-Bond, Alex de Waal, and Parry, one anthropologist was exceptional in taking a sustained interest in the theme of charity: R. R. Marett. He wrote: ‘real progress is progress in charity, all other advance being secondary thereto’ (Marett 1935: 40). He saw maternal nurturing as the fountainhead of charity (Marett 1939: 141, 147). Though his phrasing will strike readers today as sentimental, it might be seen as adumbrating Fortes on amity and Frans de Waal on oxytocin. Yet no reflection on charity can ignore the lurking presence of reciprocity, which always threatens the purity of the free gift. The Bhagavad Gita recognised the moral dilemma over two millennia ago.

Marett’s dictum about progress has resonance today, and it prompts questions as to what should be recognised as progress. Since the 1960s, an amorphous movement known as Corporate Social Responsibility may be seen as one modern variant of charity, and ethnographic attention has been given to its manifestations, for instance in South Africa (Rajak 2011) and Saudi Arabia (Derbal 2014: 146-53). Among more recent innovations deserving of study is the formation of commercial consultancy firms to advise young people who have inherited wealth on how best to become philanthropic donors.

In any case, what used to be condescended to as ‘applied anthropology’ seems to be gathering some strength within the discipline. There are many opportunities for anthropologists to build on previous work relating to charity in ways that are practically useful as well as theoretically sophisticated, at a time of unprecedented demands on voluntary giving and volunteering.

Notes

This entry makes some use of material already published by the author in three other overview articles: ‘Charity’ in Fassin, D. (ed.) 2012. A companion to moral anthropology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell); ‘Religion and humanitarianism’, in MacGinty, R. & J.H. Peterson (eds) 2015. The Routledge companion to humanitarian action (London: Routledge); ‘Humanitarianism as ideology and practice’ in Callan H. (ed.) forthcoming. The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of anthropology. Gratitude is due to all these editors for the opportunities they have given for reflection. The present article owes much to Felix Stein as commissioning editor, and to two anonymous referees. Expert copy-editing was provided by Rebecca Tishler.

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Note on contributor

Jonathan Benthall is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, University College London, and Director Emeritus, Royal Anthropological Institute. His most recently published book is Islamic charities and Islamic humanism in troubled times (2016).

Jonathan Benthall, Downingbury Farmhouse, Pembury, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN2 4AD, United Kingdom. jonathanbenthall@hotmail.com

Feasting

Felix Stein — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 09:01:32 +0000

Chloe Nahum-Claudel

University of Cambridge

Initially published 12 Oct 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16feasting

Abstract:

Feasts are special meals (food out of the ordinary in kind or quantity) shared among an enlarged circle of people. They are occasions for many kinds of activities, not only eating and talking, but musical performances, formal speech, prayer and sacrifice, politicking and commerce. Feasts are ubiquitous throughout the world and human history: consider museums filled to brimming with the knives, jugs, cups and platters of past feasts. Archaeologists have dominated the study of feasting over the last thirty years, using it as a means to approach the most important questions of their discipline in new ways. In socio-cultural anthropology by contrast, the study of feasting as a discrete and clearly defined phenomenon does not exist. This means that insights into feasting are buried in the ethnographic record and tangled up with theorizations of more prominent themes like ritual, ceremonial exchange, and sacrifice. This essay is a dig for some of this buried treasure. It takes a semiotic approach to show that feasts have world-making effects because they both achieve concrete goals – mobilising resources, exciting passions, negotiating political positions – and realise deeply held values.

Introduction

Feasts are ‘total social phenomena’: complex happenings that are at once religious, mythological, economic, social, and aesthetic in nature (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 49, 101). This opening assertion immediately suggests similarities between feasts and rituals. Both are highly structured events that are densely meaningful and intensely memorable to participants. They involve a high degree of social coordination (bringing people together and organising their work) and the accumulation and expenditure of significant resources. They shape the arrangements in which we live and the values we live by. This makes them windows onto everything that is of prime interest to anthropologists; what better way to understand a people than to attend a feast or a ritual? Unlike rituals, however, about which anthropologists continue to publish reams and reams, never tiring of proposing new definitions and disputing ritual’s significance within wider human experience, ‘feasting’ does not exist as a defined area of study in socio-cultural anthropology.

Where feasts have received attention is in literatures about parts of the world where they are the exemplary form of ritualised sociality. This is the case with Chinese banquets and associated guanxi practices (e.g. Yang 1994; Kipnis 1997; Yang 1994) and Georgian supra – sumptuous meals presided over by a toast-master (e.g. Manning 2012; Mars and Altman 1987). It is worth noting that both are relatively similar to historical European feasts: luxury foods and alcoholic drinks are consumed at laid tables and gender distinctions and social hierarchies are marked. However, we need to begin by defining feasting in a way that encompasses greater diversity than these relatively kindred forms, whilst remaining specific enough to distinguish feasts from other important events.

Let’s start with the obvious features that distinguish a feast from other events: feasts always involve the sharing and eating of food, even when it may be underemphasised compared to the other activities going on around it such as gifting, music-making, dancing, and oration. It is useful to keep the specific – edible, drinkable – materiality of feasts in mind. Especially apt, therefore, is the archaeologist Brian Hayden’s definition of the feast as ‘any sharing of special food (in quality, preparation, or quantity) by two or more people for a special (not every day) event’ (Hayden 2001). Many rituals contain a feasting element but at the centre of the feast is always food and drink.

Even a review essay must take some theoretical perspective and so I will start by making explicit three propositions that define my approach. First, as mentioned above, we need to pay attention to food and eating to make space for the feast within the wider frame of ritual. Second, feasting is universal: it is found worldwide and throughout human history. It is both ‘primitive’ in the sense that it is there at the origin of human culture, and booming today when restaurant expenditure in the USA and the UK is soaring at the expense of meals cooked and eaten at home, and programmes like ‘Come Dine with Me’ highlight the risk and excitement of food-mediated interactions with strangers, and ‘Bake Off’ unites the British nation.

Of course, whether you think feasting is universal or not depends on how you define it in the first place. I like the archaeologist’s roomy definition because it allows us to explore what is shared even with primates and hominid ancestors; what is specifically human; and then the myriad cultural variations within this. Writing in this vein I distance myself from the idea that feasting only exists in certain kinds of societies and historical epochs. For example, some anthropologists define feasting in a more limited way and argue that it arrived in human history with forms of social stratification (see Hayden 2014: 44), flourished in Classical and Medieval Europe and was then crushed by a subsequent history of rationalization and secularization so that today ‘feasting is no longer part of our experience’ (Valeri and Hoskins 2002: 6). In order to counter this view, in the first section of this essay I draw briefly on biological anthropology and archaeology to explore the evolution of feasting behaviour and throughout I freely compare examples from various historical epochs and parts of the world.

The third and final proposition is that feasting is better understood as ‘foundational’ rather than ‘functional’, and this requires a little explanation. ‘Functionalist’ perspectives tend to see feasts as responsive to pre-existing conditions in the world which feasts uphold or reproduce. So hierarchy may be supported by status competition between feast sponsors, or stratified seating arrangements among guests; communitarianism by the sharing of food from a common pot; or ecological balance by the resource-control that cyclical feasts enable. In contrast, the foundational perspective suggests that feasts make rather than reflect qualities of the world. The organization of labour, resources, time, relationships, and pleasure in feasting generates particular kinds of social arrangements, values, economies, and temporalities. This reorientation from function to foundation is associated with symbolic anthropology, which in general terms assumes that every time we speak or act as humans, our specific and concrete actions evoke the wider categories that organise social life and therefore have the capacity to recreate and transform them (see e.g. Stasch 2011). In the second section of this essay I will show that many anthropological accounts can be read as either making functional or foundational claims. Finally, I show how the foundational lens accounts for various aspects of feasts: the moral and political contestation they provide an arena for; the work and resources they marshal; and the invisible powers they engage. Because feasts are important at multiple levels of experience simultaneously (biological, economic, political, cosmological, social), they tend to realise fundamental characteristics of the world.

Preparations for a feast in rural Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea in October 2015[1]

The earth oven is opened and the food is displayed prior to speech-making and careful distribution

The cultural nature of feasting

Scholars of human evolution suggest that feasting is shared by primates, hominid ancestors, and humans. Just as a Cambridge College feast has its alpha male (usually ‘the Master’ even if he is a she) who sits surrounded by an elite group and eats and rises first, so too during chimpanzee feasts, such as that observed by Jane Goodall in the late 1960s, rank and status are acknowledged and displayed, with meat passing from higher to lower ranking males (Jones 2008: 34). Contemporary primates nonetheless lack fire with which to cook food and this is a limitation they share with our more distant hominid ancestors who also feasted on raw meat. At the site of Boxgrove, near Chichester in southern England, archaeologists uncovered evidence of a feast on 400 kg of raw wild horse meat, held half a million years ago by Homo heidelbergiensis, a hominid predecessor of Neanderthals, who were probably the first hominids to control fire and cook, at least as long as 80,000 years ago (Jones 2008: 78). Jones suggests that it was when our ancestors began to share food face-to-face around glowing hearths that feed became food and the threat and danger of fire, direct eye contact, and the exposure of teeth, was turned into a sociable event (Jones 2008: 1–2).

This takes us to the influential sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, who suggested in a 1910 essay on the ‘Sociology of the meal’ that it was in meal-taking that humans rose above their identities as selfish organisms to become social persons. Simmel noted that, strictly speaking, food could not be shared because the same food cannot be put into two mouths. However, if eating is an inherently exclusionary and selfish activity, humans, he said, had transformed it into a habit of gathering together to take common meals (Simmel 1997 [1910]: 130). Simmel’s juxtaposition of selfish organism and social person is an early example of how the meal has served as a paradigm for human culture. This argument was elaborated in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas in the 1960s and 1970s. Lévi-Strauss showed that cookery was a language-like system (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 1968), Douglas’s focus was on the structure of meals. She stressed that unlike grazing cows who ruminate constantly, human’s meals are routinised and ritualised, marking the passing of time and drawing spatial boundaries and social distinctions. In short, ‘food is not feed’ (Douglas 1977: 7). To take Douglas’s best known example, the American family has a daily cycle of three meals with allotted times and formats for each, as well as an annual cycle marking festive occasions and a third, longer-term cycle, marking the life-cycle transitions of family members. Additionally, there are seating arrangements, dress codes, and tacit rules about the order in which foods should be consumed (Douglas 1972). Imitating Douglas’s style of analysis, archaeologist Martin Jones observes that feasts in his Cambridge College involve especially elaborate boundary mechanisms. He counts thirty-three items of food-sharing technology arrayed for his use at a feast; notes that his body is encased in seven items of extra attire, which he wears only on feasting occasions; observes the panels which separate areas of food preparation, service, and consumption; and comments on the seating arrangements, which carefully mark his status relative to others, many of whom are strangers (Jones 2008: 32).

In summary, anthropologists have long argued that the sociable sharing of carefully cooked food, in delimited times, spaces, and social circles, is at the heart of what makes us human.

Function versus foundation

The hardiest assumption about feasts is that they are functional in some social or biological way: they create social solidarity, enhance the feast-giver’s status, or help humans adapt to their environment. This was an important argument for anthropologists to make in the colonial era when other people’s feasts were often perceived to be irrational and wasteful and were sometimes even prohibited. Various functional explanations for feasting behaviour flourished in the decades after World War Two when anthropologists flocked to the densely populated highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and documented the devotion of massive resources to periodic pig feasts. Reflecting the Australian colonial administration’s disapproval (and anticipating the attitude of her readers), anthropologist Marie Reay introduced the Kuma ‘Pig Ceremonial’ thus:

People hoard and fatten their pigs for years in preparation for the Pig Ceremonial … A clan kills practically all its pigs at once, and people who are starved of pork and fat then stuff themselves with it to the exclusion of other foods … Few opportunities for eating pork remain for two or three years after this orgy (Reay 1959: 21).

Reay’s book is actually about why these practices make sense in terms of the religious beliefs of Kuma people and their social priorities: the pig kills created fertility, prosperity, and renown. In a materialist rather than a culturalist tradition, Rappaport (1967) argued that pig-raising strategies were a rational way of converting vegetable crops into high-quality animal protein. He attempted to prove, based on both qualitative and quantitative types of analysis, the adaptiveness of social constraints surrounding the consumption of pigs in terms of population control and the satisfaction of human nutritional needs. Yet others emphasised the political importance of periodic pig kills, which brought together autonomous groups from a large region and were the context for alliance-building; the show of clan solidarity and strength; and the stage for individual and group status competition (Meggitt 1974; Strathern 1971). All these approaches share assumptions of functionalism, i.e. that things generally fit together coherently and ‘work’. They can all also be read as foundational since they stop short of reducing feasting to a single, dominant function.

Perhaps the best illustration of engagement with functionalist arguments alongside the articulation of a more foundational perspective is Michael Young’s ethnography, Fighting with food (1971). Young’s book about Goodenough island life focuses on the way that an abstract system of values and an esoteric domain of magical knowledge are motivated by, and find their most compelling expression in, feasts. Goodenough Island is one of many in the Massim archipelago, which lies off the south-eastern tip of New Guinea. A Goodenough festival’s climax was a large distribution of pigs and vegetable food to visitors assembled in the sponsor’s village. Visitors gathered around platforms and stands on which food was displayed, listened to the sponsor and other chiefs’ speeches and then watched as the display was disassembled and guests received food. With his gifts of food-wealth the chief repaid debts he had accrued and marked new debtors, among them enemies who received the food along with a message about the offences they had committed against him – adultery, abuse of hospitality, theft, insult, and meanness. The distribution was therefore a great drama in which ‘visitors delight in unexpected scandals or delicts suddenly brought to light’ (Young 1971: 244). Aside from its entertainment value, the festival was, Young said, an ‘instrument of social control’, which worked by public shaming and the obligation to repay. He suggests that it worked rather well, providing a mode of redress which did not resort to physical aggression or warfare (Young 1971: 264). He suggested that one of the reasons Goodenough islanders in the 1960s took competitive food exchange to such an extreme was the colonial suppression of warfare (Young 1971: 233, 250). Feasts worked as a kind of system of justice and conflict resolution that was better than anything colonial officials could think to impose. Young therefore suggested that colonization could lead to feasts’ flourishing rather than to their inevitable extinction. This is a trend other scholars have also noticed in other parts of the world (e.g. Kirch and Sahlins 1992; Masco 1995) where there have been colonial booms in feasting and exchange activity. On the basis of his historical analysis of Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, Masco suggests that feasting tends to flourish during phases of great historical upheaval because it allows people to work through the new conditions they find themselves in and thereby to seize control of their lives (Masco 1995: 57). Masco and Young therefore both show that feasts are foundational to both people’s enduring identity and their capacity to direct historical change.

While Young is keen to demonstrate the rationality of feasts and festivals in terms of their equivalence to Western legal and political systems, much of his book is about elucidating the value system in which food serves as political currency. Festivals brought political credit and fame to sponsors who proved that they could incarnate the paramount moral values of industriousness, self-discipline, and magnanimity (Young 1971: 252). As the crucial events in Goodenough people’s lives, much of their everyday behaviour is oriented to cultivating the right kind of knowledge and moral disposition to enable them to succeed at feasting. For example, Young describes how men test their mettle and the power of their anti-hunger magic by keeping their best yams to rot, uneaten, inside their houses. This is one way in which they harden themselves into virtuous food abstainers who never admit hunger or allow themselves to be seen eating in public (Young 1971: 159). It is in the context of these values, for which feasting is the ultimate stage, that the giving of food between adult men is an aggressive act which shames the recipient. This is why at the Goodenough festival’s climax, upon the distribution of great plenty, nobody eats.

Eating and not eating

On Goodenough island and in Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the drama of the feast is in the gathering together, display, and distribution of food and not in the eating itself. Portions of food may be deliberately too large to eat or they may be distributed raw or undercooked (Rubel & Rosman 1978: 305). In the Goodenough extreme, eating is explicitly taboo. Perhaps a more common pattern is that hosts, as sponsors and owners of the feast, serve guests but do not eat themselves. What happens then is that food serves to oppose two groups of people (givers and receivers). This is the case in most Amazonian feasts where hosts are defined by their role as givers of food or drink, and guests as eaters and drinkers. I will give two examples, one in which hosts are forceful and the other in which they are humble.

The Tamara festival of the ’Wari of Western Amazonia begins when guests from other subgroups arrive singing at a foreign village only to be humiliated by hosts, who stuff food into the incomers’ mouths pitilessly while insulting the quality of their singing. The guests passively accept this treatment and continue to complain of hunger despite the large quantities they are fed (Vilaça 2010: 64–5). What is going on here is that guests are being treated as the animal prey of hosts, and the mutual stranger status of the two groups is being affirmed.

Among the Enawenê-nawê with whom I work and who live south-eastwards of the ’Wari in Brazilian Amazonia, in each season of the year there is a different opposition between offering and consuming parties within a single village: women serve men, men serve women, or the men of one clan serve the men of the remaining eight clans. As in the ’Wari case, the emphasis is precisely on the reversibility of the oppositions enacted through relations of production and consumption – the point is to take turns and to create a dynamic of reciprocity. Unlike in the ’Wari Tamara festival, Enawenê-nawê hosts are humble because they are providing nourishment to others who incarnate spirits whom the hosts wish to sate and gratify. Both these cases contrast with others in which the identity of eaters and servers is fixed by hierarchy or gender and is usually non-reversible. A very clear example of this is the Georgian feast (supra) in the form it took in late Soviet times, when men sat at tables to eat from ever-full platters and to drink wine from bottomless cups, while women garnered resources, cooked, and stood ready assiduously serving and pouring (Manning 2012: 153–5). There was no supra in which women sat while men served them.

The ethnographic and historical record gives us every permutation of shared and restricted commensality. I will end with two extremes, both taken from European contexts, past and present. In a transfiguration of former medieval feasts at which noble men shared the King’s table, at Versailles the King began to take his meals seated alone, surrounded by standing courtiers – making this feast a public event with no commensality (Freedman 2015: 103). In contrast, the paradigmatic act of sociability at European formal dining occasions is the act of standing to toast the embodiment of a shared ideal (‘The Bride and Groom’; ‘The Queen’) around a table, touching glasses (or merely lifting them) and making eye contact (or gazing into space) before everyone simultaneously drinks. Toasting, which links two uses of the mouth (communication and consumption) is a concrete expression of accord in mind and communion in body. It can be convivial and heartfelt, or formal and even strained, but its affordances are the same. Waiters and waitresses don’t join the toast, so that one-way offering and sharing coexist.

Risky, anti-social feasts

If feasts are fundamental to the creation of the world in which people live then why are they so prone to fail? They can descend into drunken blowouts, jeopardising all the good outcomes that they promised, or alternatively they can fall flat, remaining so formal and constrained that they never generate the ‘effervescence’ which sociologist Emile Durkheim (1995 [1912]) saw as their ineffable brew. Feasts may also meet with disaster and have overtly dysfunctional outcomes: sponsors can produce too little food or drink for their guests, hostilities can break out, and there is the ever-present threat of poisoning – in London’s Mayfair or in Brazilian Amazonia. I suggest that the very fact that feasts are so prone to fail is a sure sign that they are efficacious and consequential.

Fights at festive family meals are a staple of novels and dramas. A great example is the Danish film, Festen (directed by Thomas Vinterberg), which is an exploration of the perversion of family values through the souring of the feast. It follows the unravelling of an upper-class dinner party on the occasion of the senior male of the family’s sixtieth birthday. Sinister family secrets are revealed as tensions build painstakingly over many courses and increasingly malevolent toasts. There is probably always a degree of brinkmanship entailed in orchestrating feasts. One of the reasons for this is that hosts tend to work to the boundaries of what they can pull off. Freedman (2015: 103–4) provides various medieval examples of hungry stampedes trampling the food, of melting confectionery sculptures, and of other dramatic failures born of audacious ambition.

The spectre of poison is the ultimate spoiler. In medieval times, specialist tasters ritually tested food before it reached the mouths of nobles and royals. The Amazonian Kuikuro also ritually test drinks for poison but their motives are more communitarian. Like many Amerindians, the Kuikuro make their special drinks from the juice of bitter manioc, which is high in cyanide and can be lethal to humans when raw or undercooked. The cyanide is gradually transformed into sugar through prolonged boiling. The Kuikuro dramatise the danger of poisoning and its overcoming by designating a man as a formal taster. He very publicly assumes responsibility for protecting the community and its guests. He sips the drink after it has been boiled for some time and always pronounces it to be, as yet, unsafe to drink. Only once it has been re-boiled and tested a third time does the official taster pronounce it safe to drink (Dole 1978: 232). The drink is then passed among all the guests, a sharing which, after such an ominous start, emphasises their peaceful coexistence.

Undoubtedly the most spectacular and laborious of the feasts held by the Amazonian Enawenê-nawê is a reunion between two halves of the population, on the one side the hosts and all the women of the village, and on the other, the fishermen who return from an approximately sixty-day fishing expedition. The hosts do everything they can to find out when the fishermen are likely to return so that women can correctly time the production of about 4,000 litres of a manioc and corn porridge called ketera. The fishermen have been far from their gardens living off dry bread and flour, and they are said to eagerly desire this drink. Indeed, the homely drink is a necessity for successful reunion, since it reminds the men of the human mores they have side-lined at the fishing dams. Inconveniently, the drink has to be made fresh and the process takes a minimum of eight hours from start to finish. This means that if women hear a distant hum of engine noise which indicates the possibility of the fishermen’s imminent arrival, they will wake in the night to start frantically grating manioc. This is a work of anticipation. The whole event is defined by uncertainty about the timing of the fishermen’s arrival which is coupled with their potentially dangerous disposition. The huge quantity of ketera and its laborious preparation makes a show of indomitable preparedness in the face of all this risk and anxiety. If this feast was not prone to go disastrously wrong then the reunification of the community would not be such a climactic achievement.

Morality and politics under negotiation

I have now established that feasting neither necessarily upholds or upends social and political orders; rather, it is part of their making, their maintenance, and sometimes also their undoing. In fact, feasting seems to be a key infrastructure for specifically political action. A feast can serve any end – reformist, conservative, or revolutionary – but what is always true is that feasts are a flash point for political and moral contestation. On the side of revolution, Mao Zedong forbade large banquets and ancestor commemorations when he became chairman of the new people’s republic in 1949 (Goody 1982: 173) and during the Cultural Revolution he closed both restaurants and brothels in a renewed attack on indulgence (Goody 1982: 149). At the other pole is conservative luxury. Sumptuary laws like those issued by Edward II in 1283 limited the number of courses that were permitted at any feast and controlled the populace’s access to food and drink. These laws were intended to preserve the existing hierarchy by restraining feasting by persons of inferior rank, who were perceived as threatening upstarts, imitating the great men of the kingdom (Goody 1982: 141). In ancient Greece we find something intermediate; a constitutive tension between luxury and puritanism within the elite. In Homer’s epic poems, elite heroes feast on the simple fare of bread and platters of meat. This made them equals, joined by the fellowship of the table where eating and drinking, talking, fighting, and politics were inseparable so that access to the table equalled access to power (O'Connor 2015: 92–6). Homer’s depiction of frugal, egalitarian commensality in the male public sphere was probably an idealised one but it inspired later generations for whom feasts, banquets, and all-male drinking parties remained key political fora and had to be continually reformed against the subversive threats of excess and luxury (O'Connor 2015: 109–11).

Politics and feasting are perhaps nowhere more self-consciously entwined than in Georgia, where debates about the proper form of the traditional feast, the supra, are always about authoritarian governance, and where attempts to reform the supra aim at nothing less than transforming statehood (Manning 2012: 148–76). In the 1980s, supra were feats of endurance, lasting up to eight hours during which toasts were interspersed with singing, dancing, and recitations (Mars and Altman 1987: 272–3). There could be twenty or more rounds of toasts in an evening (each requiring a man to drain his glass). Because everyone present was mentioned in at least one toast and the toasts passed through the clinking of glasses from one speaker to the next, the assembled company became linked across distant tables (Mars and Altman 1987). Stalin is famed to have ruled from his lavish dinner table (Freedman 2015: 106) and was a Georgian by birth, and Manning suggests that every Georgian toast-master is under Stalin’s shadow as the ‘dictator’ of the feast table. In the post-socialist era, people disagree vociferously about whether the supra is a noble, indigenous form of civil society or a vehicle for authoritarianism masquerading under the guise of a harmless tradition (Manning 2012: 172). Critics comment that the toast-master is elected but that his election is a farce since there is only one candidate and he always wins unanimously (Manning 2012: 167–8). Manning mentions a young professional woman telling him in 2001 that rather than having a supra for her birthday party she had celebrated with a ‘democracy’. This she described as a feast at which there was no toast-master to tell people what to do (Manning 2012: 169).

It is easy to see all this as mere metaphor, but both Manning and Altman and Mars, whose work I have drawn on here, make the stronger argument that politics happens in and through the supra. Thus the ‘cultured supra’ (not a drunken orgy) was actively propagated throughout the Soviet Union as good socialist culture and it was under late socialism, with its relative bounty, that supra flourished (Manning 2012: 175–6). Later, the proliferated supra had unintended consequences for Soviet rule. The supra in 1980s Georgia allowed people to be good socialists in a way that worked for them. Through the linkages established through toasting, people obtained scarce jobs, permits and licenses, and places at university for their children (Mars and Altman 1987: 278) which were hard to get through the strictures of state bureaucracy.

Feasts can always uphold or threaten the naturalised pecking order among classes and kinds of people, and to end this section I want to reflect briefly upon the banning of native peoples’ feasts by colonial governments. We have seen that feasting and status competition are a major part of European cultural heritage, so why was feasting among the newly discovered peoples of the colonies often met with surprise, disdain, and even criminalization? Marcel Mauss answered this question in one way in his 1925 essay The gift. He said that Native peoples were being judged according to the standards of Enlightenment rationalism and its theories about the kind of economy that was ‘natural’. For rational utilitarian thinkers this was an economy which provided for men’s needs (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 92). Colonists had difficulty accepting that economies that were supposed to be ‘primitive’ were elaborate prestige contests rather than being organised around a struggle for survival (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 96).

A more cynical or real-political explanation emerges from the outlawing of potlatch in the American northwest between 1884 and 1951, which is a famous example of the resolute colonial repression of feasting. Potlatch was an exchange practice led by ranked nobility who distributed property and food to validate their status which was based on their connection to the supernatural powers that controlled the fecundity of the natural world (Masco 1995: 44–7). Before the mid-nineteenth century animal furs, canoes, mats, meat, and slaves were the currency of potlatch and gradually, over the next hundred years, trade goods and then money replaced them (Masco 1995: 51–53, 69–72). In 1889 the founding father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, famously criticised the ban on potlatch by arguing that the potlatch was very similar to the economies of ‘civilized communities’, involving finance and debt calculations (High 2012: 368). As Masco (1995: 65) shows, Boas’ argument was unlikely to be persuasive since it was precisely because the administration recognised that potlatch incorporated capitalist practices to support a ritual economy which was outside of European control that they wanted to stamp it out. They correctly singled out the potlatch as the Kwakwaka'wakw people’s dominant world-making practice. Attacking it was their way of destroying the native cosmology and turning hunters into ‘productive’ farmers and Christian citizens (Masco 1995).

The potlatch has been approached and re-approached from every angle in every era of anthropological scholarship, which shows that feasts work at multiple levels, are dense with meaning, and are constantly shape-shifting as they transform historically. However, it is surprising that while the potlatch is always called a ‘feast’, very little of this scholarship (with the exception of Walens’ Feasting with cannibals, 1981) is about the food or the eating. Perhaps this is because it seemed obvious to anthropologists that ‘traditional’ peoples should hunt and feast to generate further plenty and exceptional that they should have developed modern systems based on debts and interest.

Production before the feast

We now need to turn back the clock and go behind the scenes of feasts. Instead of analysing feasting from the moment the table is laid or the food displayed, we need to explore the organization of time, labour, and resources that go into feasts. The causal nature of feasts’ world-making capacity comes to light in these processes. Rupert Stasch’s (2003) ethnography of the West Papuan Korowai’s sago-grub feasts is a great illustration of the way that bringing about a feast generates people’s core values and reshapes their social and physical environment. It is also a good example of an analysis which concentrates on feast preparation, as opposed to consumption. Stasch’s emphasis is proportional to the Korowai’s own: these feasts marshal resources amassed over a decade and involve two months of intensive work but are all over in 24 hours.

Korowai usually live in single or paired small households, separated from their nearest neighbours by stretches of forest. This small circle continuously processes sago palm starch from the stands within their clan’s territory to meet their basic food needs, at a rate of about one palm every ten days (Stasch 2003: 360). About once a decade, however, different families associated with a clan build houses in a huddle and work together to prepare a feast. They fell up to 1,000 mature sago palms and break open the trunks so that, over a month or so, fat, juicy grubs develop in the exposed pith (Stasch 2003). As the grubs develop, the feast sponsors build a longhouse in which to host invitees. So that the guests are well-fed, the grubs need to be harvested when they are fat but because of the nature of grub development, this is just before they turn into beetles and fly away (Stasch 2003: 372). Grub maturation is inherently uncertain and difficult to time, depending on a range of unpredictable conditions. It is readily scuppered, for example, by the flooding of sago groves (which are low-lying and prone to flood). All of this means that the Korowai have apparently got themselves into a tricky situation because good relations with allies depend on a plentiful and timely crop of grubs, which can never be assured (Stasch 2003: 369). Stasch’s argument in this article shows that perverse as this all seems, grubs are well-suited to the ambivalent quality of Korowai social relationships. The riskiness of a feast based on such a tricky food-stuff ensures the continuing unstable nature of Korowai inter-local alliances and the brinkmanship characteristic of all Korowai socialising.

Stasch’s concentration on the symbolic weightiness of the work that leads up to the feast, which thrusts the Korowai into a mode of production and sociality that is profoundly contrary to their everyday lives, leads me to a second way in which feast preparations are constitutive of social life. The intensified work that is involved in preparing for a feast creates time apart from workaday life long before the guests arrive. Based on Enawenê-nawê ethnography I have argued that intensified production does not so much lead up to a feast, but in a sense is the feast (Nahum-Claudel forthcoming). This is very tangible in the Enawenê-nawê context, where inebriating drinks are shunned, feast foods are just ordinary foods, and people always eat them in moderation. Unlike elsewhere in Amazonia, there is no Bacchic catharsis through coerced gorging on beer, copious vomiting, or paralysing intoxication (e.g. Stolze-Lima 2005: 311; Sztutman 2008: 230; Vilaça 1992: 189; Viveiros de Castro 1986: 354). Rather than consumption, energised collective work itself provides life’s thrills and pleasures. Thus the annual ceremonial calendar involves many ritualised work events which seem to be about celebrating productive activity itself, by synchronising, staging, choreographing, and musicalising ‘mundane’ forms of subsistence agricultural and cooking work. One of these involves all the women of the village waking to pound dried corn seed and manioc fibre in hardwood standing mortars in the dead of night. They pound in an accelerated, syncopated rhythm and, because so many of them do so all around the circular village, the ground shakes.

If feasting is the pleasurable tonic that makes workaday life bearable and marks barren expanses of time with memorable events, it is also the case that production before the feast generates the energetic ebbs and flows that are so important to social life, cognition and the vitality of peoples’ bodies. In the words of Olivia Harris, who came to similar conclusions about agricultural work parties in the Bolivian Andes, work to produce food can itself be a ‘celebration of human energy, creativity and capacity to make and expand relationships’ (Harris 2007: 143).

Invisible guests with power over life and death

From the food-laden alters at Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations to the ambrosia poured for the gods in ancient Greece, at feasts all over the world food and drink is shared with gods, spirits, and ancestors; prayers are spoken, food is consecrated, and libations are spilled. Eating and drinking become the medium for a connection between two dimensions of the world: phenomenal and invisible, living and dead. Hubert and Mauss’s book (1964 [1898]) has been the starting point for thinking about sacrifice in anthropology along with Detienne and Vernant’s (1979) landmark analyses of Classical sacrificial practices. In broad terms they demonstrate that feasts are means to influence the forces that people understand to have ultimate control over the world of the living. There can be no clearer statement that feasts are foundational than many peoples’ certainty that on them rests the health of the population, the fertility of the earth, and the migrations of fish and game.

How is it that people and invisible guests can eat the same food? A common pattern is exemplified by the Kuma of Highland Papua New Guinea, where the immaterial part of the pig (the ‘shadow pork’) is devoured by ancestral ghosts while the surviving relatives feast on its flesh and fat (Reay 1959: 142). This assures that everyone’s appetite for pork is satisfied so that ghosts refrain from harming their surviving relatives. The Cree of Manitoba, Canada describe much more complex and various channels of communion with different kinds of invisible agents (spirits, the souls of game animals, and living game animals) at play during their ‘eat-all’ feasts (Brightman 1993: 224–35). Here tensions exist between blockage and communion, exploitation and reciprocity. Brightman describes a 1977 feast at Watt lake in which four boiled beavers (and all the stock), macaroni cheese, bannocks and doughnuts were eaten to the point of nausea and beyond. At the same time that Brightman writes about the feast in terms of the sacrificial gift which anticipates a future return of plentiful game, he shows that the feast is a coercive act rather than a reverent one. By gorging on meat – eating or burning every last scrap within a space that is blocked off from animal spirits – humans hide their exploitation of animals while they engage in a ‘collective and aggressive act of magical control’ over them (Brightman 1993: 235). The channel of influence is not only both open and closed, it is also two-way since as well as feeding spirits, people incorporate the essence of the game they eat to endow themselves with hunting prowess.

There is an unusual degree of elaboration of human-spirit commensality among the Enawenê-nawê, where food is considered to be owned by, and therefore always owed to, predatory spirits (see Nahum-Claudel 2012, forthcoming). The Enawenê-nawê live with this causal connection between food production, consumption, and mortality by sharing with the spirits every day. Mundane commensality is therefore feast-like because it involves the public display, distribution, and consumption of food and drink in the village’s public central arena. This implies that almost all fishing, agriculture, and cuisine is devoted to large-scale catering, minimising the amount of food that is consumed privately and selfishly inside the house – the kind of eating that incites the spirits’ aggression and leads to soul loss. What all these examples show is how metaphysical conceptions of socio-political relations, not only between living people but between beings in general, are worked out through accumulation, expenditure, commensality, and feeding.

Conclusion

Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values. It is because feasts have this force that they can fail in so many ways: from the mundane to the disastrous. And it is because feasts work at so many levels that they have been so open to competing understandings about their function. Feasts do do a lot of things and it is a matter of perspective whether we choose to approach them in terms of their effects on other domains of life, conceived as separate and outside of them, or as internally linked, in causal and conceptual ways, to the whole of life. Within this broad argument, I have shown that the ‘total’ feast takes many forms and have surveyed a range of feasts to open up questions and suggest the following important lines of contrast.

The sharing of food is not a simple matter of a feast’s definition (as it is for Simmel’s meal) but rather a matter of cultural value: people may share communally or feed one another to generate oppositions which may be fixed or reversible. Feasts can uphold the order of things – maintain solidarity or affirm status hierarchies – but they are rarely free of political and moral contention. The questions, Who feasts? On what? And to what end? are pressing ones for political authorities and their opponents alike. Feasts can usefully focus broader debate or be flash-points for conflict. These high stakes make feasts risky undertakings.

A feast’s consummation is often rather transitory in contrast to the elaborate labours that lead up to it. Moving from the feast as event to process highlights the importance, which has long been recognised in anthropology, of exploring the constraints and possibilities offered by a feast’s productive base, be it sago grubs or luxury food and wine. How are resources amassed? With what technology and organization of time and division of labour? These factors should not be understood as external determinants but rather as the social and physical matter that is consciously moulded by people as historical agents. Again, it is because feasts mobilise passions, values, resources, and people all at once and with intensity, that they are great contexts for experimentation and reform. Through them people work out ways to accommodate the forces that constrain them while realising their wider ideals. Finally, feasting invariably transcends the social, and eating and drinking appear to be particularly powerful mediums through which to attempt to exert control over invisible agencies that encompass human life – be it the state, the feudal order, the ecology, or the spirits and ancestors who determine life and death.

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Note on contributor

Chloe Nahum-Claudel is a postdoctoral research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. She has fieldwork experience in Brazilian Amazonia and Highland Papua New Guinea. Her work explores agriculture and the cosmology of livelihood; human relations with non-humans; cookery, food and eating; ritual, and the nature of work; and politics in non-state societies. She is the author of Vital Diplomacy: The Ritual Everyday on a Dammed River in Amazonia.

Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. cn253@cam.ac.uk

[1] The feast was sponsored by the author (pictured). Women prepare bananas and sweet potatoes for the earth oven while men butcher the pig and prepare a blood cake.