Sociology of Giving () 0761956484, 9780761956488

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Sociology of Giving

SOCIOLOGY OF GIVING

Theory, Culture & Society Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also publishes theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture, and new intellectual movements. EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University SERIES EDITORIAL BOARD Roy Boyne, University of Durham Mike Hepworth, University of Aberdeen Scott Lash, Goldsmiths College, University of London Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh Bryan S. Turner, Deakin University THE TCS CENTRE The Theory, Culture & Society book series, the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society, and related conference, seminar and postgraduate programmes operate from the TCS Centre at Nottingham Trent University. For further details of the TCS Centre's activities please contact: Centre Administrator The TCS Centre, Room 175 Faculty of Humanities Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NGI I 8NS, UK e-mail: [email protected] Recent volumes include: Deleuze and Guattari

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Myths and Structures Jean Baudrillard Georges Bataille - Essential Writings

edited by Michael Richardson Culture as Praxis

Zygmunt Bauman

SOCIOLOGY OF GIVING

Helmuth Berking Translated by Patrick Camiller

SAGE Publications Ltd London

•

Thousand Oaks

•

New Delhi

This work was originally published as Schenken: Studien zur Anthropologie des Gebens © Campus Verlag 1 996, Frankfurt This translation © Sage 1999 Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society, Nottingham Trent University First published 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 6 Bonhill Street London EC2A 4PU SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91 320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd 32, M-Block Market Greater Kailash I New Delhi 1 10 048 -

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 761 9 5648 4 ISBN 0 7619 5649 2 (pbk) Library of Congress catalog record available

Typeset by Mayhew Typesetting, Rhayader, Powys Printed in Great Britain by BiddIes Ltd, Guildford, Surrey

For Sabine, Laura and Bela

CONTENTS

Preface

Vlll

Part I The Phenomenology of Gift-Giving

Motives

3

2

Occasions

11

3

Emotional Norms

21

Part II Towards an Anthropology of Giving

31

4

The Gift

32

5

The Sacrifice

50

6

Distribution of the Sacrifice

64

7

Attributions

77

Part III Transitions

1 10

8

Ideal Constructions

1 10

9

Beyond Necessity

1 24

Part IV Morality and Society

1 38

10

Individualization and the Common Welfare

1 39

11

The Solidarity of Individualism

1 46

Bibliography

1 53

Index

161

PREFACE

Even a superficial observer of the contemporary world cannot help feeling that he is witness to a dramatic social turnaround, as painful as it is productive of crisis. Customary routines of everyday life are being threat­ ened and basic entitlements of the Welfare State suspended; perceptions of the world and constructions of identity that not long ago were celebrated as avant-garde appear destined for the rubbish-tip of history. The collapse of the East European dictatorships, the return of religious civil war in the heart of Europe, deep worldwide recession, crisis of the parliamentary democracies, a dearth of ecological innovations - these are just a few of the global faults that offer little cause for optimism as the twentieth century draws to an end. We hear each day of mass redund­ ancies; the end of social peace is just a question of time; and in a scene dominated by phenomena of psychosocial deprivation, regressive right­ nationalist protest movements are forcibly undermining civilized standards with cheerful abandon, while educationalists can come up with nothing more than strained and impotent theorizing. Political apathy, disaffection and a fundamental utilitarianism cause the moral consensus of society, with its orientation to common welfare and collective responsibility, to dissolve in a mass of particular interests, whose normative demands seem to consist in nothing other than protection of one's own advantage. With such matters on the agenda of the day, it seems rather odd to be writing about giving. The suspicion may all too easily arise that here is someone who is shutting his eyes to the harshness of reality and taking refuge in the mawkish idyll of a hoary yet inconsequential form of inter­ action. Why should one concern oneself with a thoroughly ordinary and all too familiar practice, when the common home is bursting into flames on every corner? A provisional answer might be that the acts of free giving and taking are not only assuming greater quantitative and qualitative importance, but also undergoing forms of contextualization and norm attribution which are intimately bound up with the question of the moral foundations of modern society. To give means to acquire a power, to carry out a symbolic exchange, to initiate relationships and alliances, to attribute rights and duties, to objectify subjective meanings and systematically to classify alter egos. It means to dress up strategic orientations in altruistic motives, to make social challenges look like simple acts of charity, to honour and shame, to hierarchize and stratify, to solidarize, to knit forms of mutual recognition,

PREFACE

ix

to become equal and intimate. The main purpose of this book will be to analyse, within a cultural-historical perspective, the moral and integrative potential of this ambivalent structure of giving. It is to be hoped that interpretation and recollection of the all too familiar will bring to light something that directs our attention to something else. After a brief look in Part I at the motives, occasions and emotional norms of gift-giving in the present day, Part II examines the forgotten social-theoretical dimensions where the exchange of gifts is still the dominant structure of social reproduction. The subject here is giving and taking, guilt and debts, the cultural invention of reciprocities and rela­ tionships, bonds of symbolic violence and resulting modes of social integ­ ration - above all, as these occur in the archaic sacrifice and the sacralized distribution that serves to stabilize the sphere of sociability. Changing forms of intercourse with strangers and the institutionalization of the 'guest' finally provide the starting point for an anthropology of gift-giving, in which it is assumed that unconditional giving (and taking) is not only a basic and effective activity in the evolution from ape to man, but also the essential practical foundation for the symbolic order and the moral vocabulary of archaic sociality. Part III follows the traces of this ambivalent model of reconciliation within a perspective defined by the theory of civilization and the sociology of knowledge - up to the point where the threads of the traditional gift­ morality come apart for ever and 'individual interest' begins its historical career. With the division of economics and culture intrinsic to the bourgeois world-picture, gift-giving definitively passes beyond the realm of necessity into a sphere where it is 'not worth it' economically because it is not supposed to be counted. Freed from traditional constraints, made transparent in its ambivalent structure through the reflexive cognitive components of interaction, the gift comes under suspicion either of being subordinate to the strategic orientations of individual interests, or else given its normative character as duty - of conflicting with the personality ideals and subjectivity images of the bourgeois individual. In the early stages of bourgeois society, the split between economics and culture mainly served to limit individual interest and market calculation to the sphere of the economy by means of cultural norms and moral impera­ tives. Today, however, sociological diagnoses emphasize the very different image of a superordinate utilitarian morality no longer held in check by any cultural framework - a morality which has itself entered the subject's reference lifeworld with the power to shatter it into pieces. Against this background, the fourth and final part of the book attempts to sketch out the connection between individualization and an orientation to the common good, whose normative focus is the precondition for an 'individualism of solidarity'. Behind the polysemy of conceptual orientations running through current discourse in the social sciences, behind the various attempts to conceptualize a civil religion, a civil society or to take the particularism of communities as a reference, something common to them all can be

x

PREFACE

recognized. For the existential problem that used to be considered under the title of gift-giving is again unmistakably making itself felt, only now as the question of the moral economy of modern society, the forms of distributive justice, mutual recognition and social solidarity. It may be regretted that insights arising from the anthropology of giving have not been used enough for a critical look at interpretations of our contemporary situation. But that would have made this quite a different work. This study would never have materialized without Urs Jaeggi's interest and dogged persistence. Gaby Althaus and Joachim Moebus gave me the opportunity to discuss a first draft with them, and I am most grateful for their helpful criticisms. Hans-Ulrich Treichel and Sighard Neckel kept surprising me with little literary presents on the subject in question. Hannes Kammerlander converted electronic characters into readable sentences. And I would like to thank them all here for our long years of friendship and collaboration. Finally, I would like to express special thanks to Scott Lash, Robert Rojek and Patrick Camiller who made this English edition possible. My gratitude goes also to Inter Nationes for providing the financial backing for parts of the translation. Helmuth Berking

PART I T HE P HENOMENOLOGY OF GIFT-GIVING

It is just before midnight and the party is moving to a climax. New guests are still arriving - friends and friends of friends. Everyone is greeted by beaming faces, smart get-ups, and a hostess who is celebrating her thirty­ third birthday. A somewhat smaller space has been cleared for presents to be left and eventually handed over around midnight. The table-load has taken on imposing proportions. Most of the gifts have been elaborately and tastefully concealed in coloured paper trailing shiny ribbons and little hearts or stars, witticisms and ironic allusions. People are eating, drinking, dancing and waiting. Finally the time comes. Stevie Wonder's 'Happy Birthday' makes quite unmistakable what is about to happen. The hostess opens the ceremonies with champagne, then starts to hold court. After a slight commotion around the gift table, the initial chaos turns into a well-ordered sequence of waiting guests. It does not escape an attentive observer that this has a hierarchical structure, for the queue denotes positions of proximity or distance from the hostess. At the front are her current lover, her girlfriend and her sister; then the 'exes' and those with prospects loosely follow one another, until at the very end the friends of friends stand ready to pay due reverence. The highpoint of the parade is the act of presenting the gift. A little kiss here, another one there D. is doing brilliantly. She is enjoying the situation and living up to expecta­ tions. As soon as each present is handed over, it becomes the object of speculation - 'whatever can it be', 'I think I know what it is', etc. - and when the wrapping paper is finally discarded, cries of delight and surprise mark a new round of appreciation. The giver has the right to stay beside the hostess, at the centre of things, for just as long as this ceremonial exchange is taking place. Once it is over and the chorus of spectators has delivered its comments, room is made for the next in line. It all takes nearly an hour before D. sinks glowing, but visibly exhausted, into an armchair. The floor is littered with string and ribbons, and the table now displays the presents in all their colourful variety. People are dancing, drinking, talking and making arrangements for the few remaining hours of the night. In short, it has been a lovely party. The rather late sobering-up breakfast, at which the hostess's innermost circle is present, cannot impair the impression that has been left. But her comments about various people and their presents do put the picture a -

2

TH E PH E NOMENOLOGY OF G I FT-GIVING

little straighter. The bottle of champagne from a lover of many years strikes her as too cheap and impersonal, while the charming underwear from another seems impertinent in its devious implication of intimacy. She feels offended that F. did not come at all, and according to the state of a relationship she takes either good-humouredly or disapprovingly the suggestive innuendos attached to a number of presents. What really did give her pleasure? Anyway, a network of her current relationships informally takes shape at this chat over breakfast. It is as if the queue hierarchy were being confirmed, with a few modifications. The mother sent a gift of money which is not quite the right thing to do, except that D. is always hard up and it will make her daily life that little bit easier. Leaving aside the drinks and home-made dishes that are there as a kind of extra, the most striking thing about the presents is their obvious superfluity. Knick-knacks, you could say - many of which will already be forgotten tomorrow and lie around somewhere in the jumble of private life, until years later a domestic clear-out brings the occasion to mind again.

1

MOTIVES

The giver teaches giving

In our introductory story all the main themes of a current everyday prac­ tice of giving can be readily discerned. Giving is all too familiar an occurrence. Everyone knows it and seems more or less fully in charge as they give and are given to. Of course, everyone also remembers the risks and the imponderables that go hand in hand with this form of interaction. The form itself is as old as the hills. At least since Marcel Mauss's pioneering essay on 'the gift' ( 1 990 [ 1 925]), it has been known that the exchange of gifts is a primal phenomenon of sociality. Archaic societies reproduce themselves in the specific form of mutual gift-making. It is no accident, then, that the contemporary form recalls ceremonies that cut across different cultures and historical periods. The material offering, the ceremonial handing over, the proofs of thankfulness - these frame an exchange in which a great deal is always at stake, although it differs enormously from one historical period to another. In the same way that the historical perception of a strict dividing-line between public and private fixes the difference between political expression and private life, so does everyday knowledge - with its equally strict division between market and personal relations - systematically repudiate the capitalist exchange principle. Today the gift lies almost entirely within the sphere of personal relations: it mainly designates a cultural practice which, if transposed into the realm of politics or economics, would immediately be cause for scandal. It is no longer a question of groups and clans whose economic, political, cultural and moral reproduction is almost entirely conducted through the exchange of gifts. Rather, individuals organize their own reproduction on an individual basis and, through the distribution of private resources, bind themselves to one another by bestowing gifts that give pleasure. Giving (Gabe) and the gift (Geschenk), though interwoven with each other through the most diverse attributions of meaning, do not denote the same structures of action. 'The bourgeois gift culture, as an expression of personal, familial and friendly relations, is not to be found before the eighteenth century' (Hannig 1 986: 1 50); its generalization beyond the narrow limits of bourgeois class morality was essentially completed in the early decades of the twentieth century. To measure the distance that has opened between the two in the history of civilization, it is therefore hardly sufficient to employ the interpretative schema favoured in anthropology and the ethnographic literature - a

4

T H E PH ENOMENOLOGY OF G I FT-GIVING

schema which, in its quest for elementary structures, considers that the basic forms of archaic exchange can be straightforwardly applied in explaining 'modern' relationships. I What is needed first is an up-to-date description of the 'gift', one that allows us to see the cultural frameworks and situational contexts (in short, the social structures of meaning) which befit gift-giving in the contradictory dynamic of individualization and de­ traditionalization so characteristic of modern societies. Only then will a real debate be possible about continuities and ruptures in the history of culture, about altered and freshly created meanings, new features and loss of differentiation. The sociology of the gift has remained a poor cousin in the discourse of social science. 2 The theme ranges over literary and legal studies, ethnology and folklore, market and consumer research; and important aspects can be found in social psychology and the study of altruism, in the sociology of the family and social policy. But the social-theory dimension that is such a feature of discourse about gift-giving has withered in the face of the dominance of capitalist forms of socialization. This is surprising because, as Georg Simmel already sharply emphasized, gift-giving is thematically separated by a wide gap from the objective norms of exchange. In his view, the gift - in combination with the forms of interaction directly associated with property transfers - displays 'the greatest wealth of sociological constellations, because the attitude and position of the giver and of the recipient are most diversely combined in it in all their individual nuances' ( 1 958: 370). In the wealth of sociological combinations, however, some­ thing else can also be recognized. If gifts are thought of not merely as gratuitous transfers of property but as reliable indications of how recipro­ city is established and social estimation expressed, then the normative orientations and moral ideas which regulate social intercourse beyond the laws of the market will necessarily enter into the picture. The language of gift-giving is the language of our conventional morality. It allows us to investigate with special clarity the 'moral economy' (Thompson 1 97 1 ) of modern society, the non-contractual presuppositions on which contracts are based, the non-institutional framework of every institution. The sociology of the gift, that is, offers a promising way of tracking - where the conditions of knowledge are reflexive and forms of life pluralized - the initiation and institutionalization of relationships, the interactive modula­ tion of norms of reciprocity, cultural shifts in the expressive behaviour of subjects and collective feelings of responsibility. The structural features of the gift-exchange situation are rather complex. It has at least four components: the gift itself; the action sequences of giving and taking; the actors' own understanding of the object, action structure and motives; and the 'feeling rules' (Hochschild 1 983: 65f.) that control the expressive behaviour of the interacting partners. To these should be added contextual variables, different definitions of the situation, and status and gender differences seen as social frameworks to which the intersubjective production of meaning gives expression and is inevitably subject. You do

MOTIVES

5

not expect the same from close friends and slight acquaintances, from lovers and your godmother. Intimate knowledge and privileged access to the other's biography arouse expectations and expectations of expectations; they call for expression and demand satisfaction. The closer one is, the more chance there is of finding what is 'just right' - but also the more risk of 'putting one's foot in it'. A distant acquaintance can take protection beneath conventional signs; flowers, wine or confectionery here serve as convertible currency. But a friend or lover must show themselves prepared to take a lot of time and trouble, and even in the smallest matters to detect a wish behind a mere piece of information. Gift-giving, like greetings and farewells, like the exchange of gestures, words and courtesies, is a ritual practice through which the current value of a relationship may be communicated and maintained for a certain time. Gifts function as 'relationship signals' (Goffman 1 972a: 248), as conven­ tional means of expressing love, caring and trust (Cheal 1 986: 424). They also present themselves as objectifications of normative ideas and as judgements of taste (see Schwarz 1 967; Caplow 1 982, 1983; Cheal 1 988), bearing meaning about both giver and recipient. They make moralities visible; they are in a sense feelings and also, temporally speaking, memories to be grasped and held because they are structurally associated with particular histories and bound up with particular individuals. In the gift, essential facets of our self-image and our image of others take on material shape. If, however, one tries to express the ideal image of oneself and of others in this way, one has to reckon with the strategic ambiguities and ambivalent effects which inevitably develop as thought turns into action. 'Male' and 'female' gifts to children - for example, a machine-gun or a barbie-doll set - do not only say things about the parents' imagination and desires. They are also important means of allocating and confirming gender identities (Schwarz 1967: If.), entry tickets to a future of brave soldiers and sweet princesses. The gift, then, as presentation of self and objectification of the other­ image, casts a revealing light upon both giver and recipient. But especially if a third party is present, it is also not uncommonly experienced as a burden and a challenge to personal identities. It objectifies and distributes symbolic allocations, and publicly establishes character traits which are not always consistent with, or pleasing to, the self-perception of the alter ego. This is how 'awkward situations' arise (Dreitzel 1 983). As authenticity and self­ realization increasingly become the ideal standard for images of personality and subjectivity, self-reference and self-presentation acquire the status of cultural norms with which people seek to comply on pain of damaging their own selves. Insofar as gift-giving is today generally bound up with self­ reference and reflexive knowledge, its horizon of meaning therefore differs fundamentally from older motivations for which self-reference and self­ presentation in gift-giving still coincided with independent production and occupational roles. 'Therefore', Ralph Waldo Emerson described this ideal case, 'the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn;

6

TH E PH ENOMENO LOGY OF G I FT-G IVING

the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man's biography is conveyed in a gift. But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops and buy me something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith's.' The picture is too simple to be still real today. How would a lawyer, a factory worker or a pensioner objectify their life-history? The epoch in question was one of craft and peasant production largely geared to use­ values, where personal goods could be made into gifts because they were not sold on the market but directly transferred to significant others. Against this background, gifts and gift-giving were not so dramatic. When everyone gives what they are themselves capable of producing, the message is inevitably limited because the symbolic value of the object is univocal. A community secures its moral foundations when all its members bestow upon one another the goods and the social value for which the community itself holds individuals in high esteem. In such a situation, little room is left for the play of ambivalence, the polysemy of signs, the staging of uncertainty, the dramaturgy of surprise. The struggle over identities still runs on safe tracks, and interest in the other finds expression in the act of giving, not in the content of the gift. Only the interplay between objectification of self and others allows goods which function as presents to appear overdetermined and multivocal as bearers of meaning. Given the premisses of self-objectification and self-reference, gift-giving is itself a kind of identity politics, 'impression management', self-reflexive and never entirely free of strategic implications. Purely 'identificatory sympathy' (Goffman 1 972b: 92), relating exclusively to an ideal image of the other, might be the other extreme. The authenti­ cation of a close relationship anyway requires both: a part of me (heartfelt, of course), but unequivocally relating to you. Even aggression, 3 formally toned down as irony, can be expressed through gift-giving. A notorious pedant may be forced to put on a brave face when being presented with the most absurd desk trappings. An auth­ oritarian chief clerk may gulp hard on seeing himself celebrated as commander-in-chief of an army of tin soldiers. And a worker also gets the message when his colleagues ceremonially offer him a hammock and a pair of carpet slippers. The group problem is here unmistakable, but its articu­ lation leaves enough room for gestures of dissociation and the handling of awkwardness and shame. On the other hand, obviously deliberate acts of aggression, or exaggerated labelling that damages the recipient's self­ esteem, lead to a breakdown in interaction. Unfriendly acts can be graded. Contamination of the gift by the giver evokes rejection, as do relationship signals not in keeping with the real state of things. Play with the temporal structure on the recipient's part carries a special significance (see Bourdieu 1 977: 17 1 ). Thus, immediate reciprocation negates the gift-giving form of interaction, by directly discharging the sense of obligation that is its specific

MOTIVES

7

intention; while failure to reciprocate at all makes the other's uncertainty a source of personal pleasure. Excessive violation of the rules of reciprocity, by giving too much or too little, may thus serve to correct the giver's definition of the situation. Any response may, however, work to the actor's disadvantage. Contrary effects are the typical danger of a symbolic practice which - though encompassing all imaginable motives, intentions and interests, however contradictory - is associated in our everyday consciousness with fellow­ feeling and mutual trust, with ideals of solidarity and norms of reciprocity. Someone who rejects a conciliatory gift in the presence of other people can easily acquire the reputation of being hard-hearted; someone who gives too much arouses the suspicion that he wants to buy friendship; and someone who gives nothing at all is in danger of being denounced as a miser. If the perspective is broadened to include consequences unintended by the giver which are inevitably verbalized when the recipient brings his own definition of the situation into play, then the scope for derangement becomes plain to see (Caplow 1 982: 1 3 14). Unsuitable items of clothing, for example, often evoke the partly ironic, partly pained reaction: 'Good Lord, I'm not really that fat, that small, etc. '. Regressive strategies in children and young people are open to the objection that they are too grown-up for that. Sometimes it takes a while for the giver to realize that he or she has got it wrong - when the thing gradually disappears for good, or the piece of jewellery is never worn, or the suit is forgotten the first time it goes to the cleaner's. The risk of disappointment is always high, and so here, as in every unusual conflict situation, a host of moralizing proverbs and wise sayings are deployed. That one should never look a gift horse in the mouth, or never expect thanks for anything, attests to the composed lack of pleasure that seems to be a matter of common sense. Of course, behind the pedagogic aim of expressing one's affects in a socially controlled manner, there is the ambivalence that accompanies non-monetary giving and taking,4 the simultaneity of hostile and friendly impulses, selfish and altruistic motives, which endows gift-giving with the opposite emotional values of burdensome duty and moral good deed. Given the cultural context, however, negative motives are largely denied expression, unless the possibility of conflict is calculated in advance and the whole relationship is put on the line. Giving and receiving are not solitary acts but trigger mechanisms for the initiation and consolidation of social relationships in lasting cycles of reciprocity (see Gouldner 1 975b: 227f.). This presupposes moral orienta­ tions that guarantee mutuality through complementary role allocation and situational difference of the interacting partners. In Mauss's classical account ( 1 990) the positive contribution of the gift consists in the three obligations of giving, taking and reciprocating, which set in train a dialectic of symbolic power in which the actors encounter and recognize one another as creditors and debtors in ever-shifting roles. Distributive justice is directed not at equal final balances but at temporary equilibrium

8

THE PH ENOMEN OLOGY OF G I FT-G IVI NG

between the degrees of debt and discharge from debt. Each individual gift, whose full significance is disclosed only in the totality of the 'circuit', sets up an asymmetry even between people of equal status. The giver offers a good that obliges its recipient to show himself grateful, including in a material sense when the occasion arises. In terms of the theory of power, moral superiority of the one corresponds to self-degradation of the other demanded by the situation. The gift-giver sacrifices part of his resources. The recipient cannot shake off a suspicion that he has placed his autonomy in peril. The uneven situational distribution of symbolic power is one, but not the only, reason why giving has a positive connotation in contem­ porary societies, while receiving appears to be shot through with mixed feelings. The splitting of discourse corresponds to an uneven distribution of roles. When people are asked about their reason for giving gifts, they speak of love and friendship, care and solicitude, trust, respect and appreciation (see Cheal 1987, 1 988). When asked how they feel about receiving gifts, misgivings and suspicions are quite often mixed in to an exaggerated degree with the ostensible pleasure. A social encounter defined through the exchange of gifts operates within the solid framework of a ceremonially controlled performance. Implicit knowledge of the forms of interaction already prescribes the next step: that one should behave towards the other with dignified composure, that the actual presentation of the gift should be followed by its receipt and then by a visible show of thanks, or that each sequence of actions should be performed in the spirit of complete reciprocity. The ritual context requires some attention. It would be impolite simply to push the present to one side. The compulsion to act passes from the giver to the recipient, whose task it now is to consummate the ritual of staged uncertainty. The act of wrapping helps to raise the dramatic inten­ sity of a situation which comes down to the airing of a mystery. 5 The aesthetic concealment here serves a large number of functions. It makes the small appear larger, the trivial more meaningful. It highlights the time and effort that the giver has been prepared to sacrifice. And it focuses all attention on the present and the act of unwrapping it, which creates enough time for the situation to be appropriately structured. The recipient may bring into play every legitimate feeling of uncertainty: he may display nervousness and curiosity, remove the wrapping with clumsy fingers, so as finally to slip into the climax with gestures of surprise and pleasure. What is allowed to children - unbridled curiosity and a drive to possess, which treats the wrapping as mere hindrance - is forbidden to adults on pain of ridicule. They are required to behave with both spontaneity and rule observance (while not appearing to follow any rule), both curiosity and restraint. Because of its dramatic qualities, its staging of uncertainty and its sudden raising and dissolution of tension, gift-giving is not only a highly appreciated cultural practice in the counteracting of everyday routines, but also a typical insulation phenomenon (see Schwarz 1 967: 1 0). With the

MOTIVES

9

unwrapping of the present and the immediate show of thanks, the climax of interaction is reached and then abruptly passed. A sharp descent into mundane normality would appear imminent. To prevent this, and to create the right framework for the staging of uncertainty and surprise, parties and festivities serve as situational forms which further strengthen the bonding power of the present. Before we consider the social settings and typical occasions, however, there remains the unsettling (because somehow absurd) question of what a present actually is. Legal definitions are here of little avail. A donation, it is said, is a gratuitous disbursement. But what is a present? What actions and back­ ground changes are necessary for a certain mass product, a teapot or a book, to turn into a present? The transformation of industrial products into symbolic goods, the indi­ vidualization of things with a subjective significance somewhere between critical animism and blatant fetishism, already begins when they leave the marketplace and come into the hands of consumers. 6 If we follow Mary Douglas's anthropologically based account, in which goods are not only means of subsistence and distinction but also the most prominent (because visible) part of the respective culture, then the essence of consumption is its capacity to establish collectively binding meaning. 'Forget the idea of consumer's irrationality. Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing and shelter: forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking: treat them as a nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty' (Douglas and Isherwood 1 979: 62). Various dishes divide up the days, the table service defines special situations, one's little black dress has its time and place just as champagne and marmalade do. Rituals appear here as conventional sign systems 'that set up visible public definitions', the more effectively the more that sig­ nificant goods are integrated into the ritual performance of actions and trivialized as specific bearers of meaning. 'The more costly the ritual trappings, the stronger we can assume the intention to fix the meanings to be. Goods, in this perspective, are ritual adjuncts; consumption is a ritual process whose primary function is to make sense of the inchoate flux of events' (ibid.: 65). In the gift ritual, then, a given mass product is transformed into a symbolic good of the highest order. The present has certain properties in common with every ritual object: it organizes memories, makes feelings concrete, and sets up relationship signals. Gift rituals are the paradoxical, because collectively recognized, form of the individualization of things; gift­ giving is individualization sans phrase. Exchange mediated by buying and selling is not only unilaterally suspended but systematically negated. The general equivalent drops out of the symbolic framework of gift-giving which is why money is accepted as a proper gift only in exceptional circumstances. Presents, especially the little tokens that are known to sustain friendship, do not have to be useful; their value is not an important factor. Their characteristic feature is their 'superfluousness', their strict

10

TH E PH ENOMEN OLOGY OF G I FT-G IVI N G

negation of any necessary, purposive use of the things and values geared purely to acquisitiveness. A symbolic practice that acquires its specific meaning from the negation of market relations must ensure that all trace of contamination by expec­ tations of profit or advantage is erased. No one wants to see their private relations expressed in pounds and pence, or likes social esteem and per­ sonal commitment to be valued in economic categories. Moral economics and market economics follow different laws of their own, but their two worlds do refer to each other in the way they are constituted. In general it is true to say that around the field of consumption we have a spontaneous, operative boundary between two kinds of services: professional, paid with money and to be classed with commerce, and personal, recompensed in kind and in no other way. Within the field of personal services, freely given and returned, moral judgement of the worth of people and things is exercised. (Douglas and Isherwood 1 979: 58f.)

It is only in this figuration beyond the economic that a present is a present. Only here can it be said that economic value does not enter into the picture, that intentions alone count; only here is it possible for the social mythology of voluntariness and freedom to be deployed against the realm of necessity, or for the idea to gain ground that relations exist for their own sake and have their existential meaning within themselves. Only this suspension, historically rooted in the division between economy and culture inherent in the bourgeois understanding of the world, creates space for the development of a distinctively moral economy. Where the equivalence principle loses its validity, so that neither its yardsticks nor its values hold sway, what matter are social skills, interactive knowledge and expressive behaviour. In this unique terrain people negotiate over love or happiness, friendship or appreciation, and symbolic goods such as sovereignty and solidarity, honour and dignity, truthfulness and trust, are distributed as personal values. And only here does strategic polyvalency operate as a matter of principle. For that which is excluded always remains virulent as a framework for the interpretation of displeasing or unsuccessful intimations of reciprocity. However carefully the price-tags are removed (see Camerer 1 988: 1 97), this does not provide an effective defence against the interpreta­ tion of things according to their economic value - too cheap or too expensive, unpleasantly much or embarrassingly little. The reversion to economic categories is a signal of irritation and disappointment.

2 OCCASIONS

A present is a present, is a present . . .

Who gives what when to whom, seems at first sight a contingent matter. Gift-giving knows the most varied conventional occasions, without being limited to them. It may happen as a surprise, but it may also fail to occur on an occasion for legitimate expectations. One can give a present 'just like that', as well as refuse the gesture even at Christmas. Moreover, since much that goes even slightly beyond the required degree of politeness may be colloquially described as a gift - time and attention as well as love or chocolate - it is only possible to describe the typical occasions associated with the gift economy. Gift exchange, perhaps the oldest form of social intercourse, not only drew its integrative force from its proximity to the cult sacrifice but, in the exchange of women, also crucially regulated relations between the sexes (see, e.g., Levi-Strauss 1 969; and critically, Stentzler 1 979). This background makes itself felt in a now largely secular, yet still effective, practice in which gift-giving appears indispensable. For without that shadowy dialectic of gift and surrender, there would be no 'getting to know each other' and no flirtation, not to mention so-called 'serious intentions'. Opportune invita­ tions to have a drink together are favourite approach rituals. An invitation to dinner, if accepted, is already a tricky business. Tradition has it that he pays for her, and that if she lets this happen she is giving her agreement to something more - a kind of entrance fee whereby the choice of restaurant and the type of conversation are as much unmistakable signs as is the size of the tip. When it comes to paying, the plot thickens. He plays his role, trapped between what he thinks she expects - who wants to appear stingy? and the old model of reward. She, for her part, has the most varied options at her disposal. What might have been an unambiguous signal thirty or forty years ago - she pays her share and says thanks for a lovely evening - may now point in any direction. The offering may be accepted and, according to the archaic model that you give a little to obtain more, be recompensed. It may be called something for nothing, or also, if she pays herself, nothing for everything. However such a game proceeds, it could not be played at all without the initial act of giving. Of course, the situation also makes it clear that, within conventional sign systems, courting has become more difficult, more open to misunderstanding, more uncertain and more costly. It is not only that courting men give different things from courted women, and in different ways. They also give presents more often and, in

12

THE PH ENOME NOLOGY OF G I FT-GIVING

accordance with their strategic intentions, give qualitatively more. Probably the 'love tokens' exchanged in more or less stable relationships are today the only form of gift into which elements of the archaic idea of magical possession can still be read. Someone who loses their ring, charm or other important sign of a relationship may start to move - not uncommonly with the support of psychoanalytic interpretations - in the realms of superstitious fear, such as that the substance of the other person or of the relationship is gone for ever. That 'substances' are at stake is evident, perhaps, from that ruthless show of destruction which often engulfs tokens of a broken relationship. In the ideal type of relationship between the sexes or, more precisely, in the succession of courtship, building, consolidation and institutionalization of the relationship, three patterns of behaviour and sets of motives may be seen to determine the process of gift-giving. First, approach rituals invitations, little presents, conventional signs such as the well-bred young man bringing flowers on the first date and therefore being identified as well bred - illustrate an interest and a readiness to invest. Second, con­ firmation rituals, mostly in the shape of jewellery, little totems or more intimate objects, try to bring certainty into an insecure situation by signalling that things are intended to stay as they are. Third, togetherness rituals - presents given on self-worshipping anniversaries designed to shape a common future together - no longer leave any doubt or any room for imagination and misunderstanding. The play of structural uncertainty has now been acted out. Assuming reciprocity, each phase of this play remains gender-specific. It is the man's presents which predominate right up to the moment when consolidation is on the horizon. However many intermediate stages the dialectic of gift and surrender may require, however much time it may waste with postponements, it does eventually reach its goal. The path to a lasting intimate relationship is lined with presents which, as bearers of meaning, are essentially distinguished by one thing: namely, an ideal 'impression management' that promises the best conceivable balance between devoted partners and passionate lovers for a future that remains to be forged together. Generosity and solicitude, savoir vivre and depend­ ability, virility and tenderness, need to be constantly expressed, even if the person does not in the end live up to what the packaging so eloquently promised. Once the relationship is established, the civilizing pedagogy of the female sex begins, and with it the man's aesthetic education dressed up as solici­ tude. From now until death do you part, or until you find reasons to separate, the women run the show with rather predictable yet purposeful interventions in which the main presents are clothing and other body­ related objects. Flirtation and relationship politics are one thing. Another is the stabil­ ization over time of a quite ordinary social network with intergenerational dimensions, with everyday, personally important relationships, friendships

OCCASIONS

13

and neighbourliness. In this domain, as empirical studies from the English­ speaking world have shown in particular (see Caplow 1 982: 1 307; Cheal 1 988: 6 1 f.; Corrigan 1 989), it is women alone who maintain and stabilize the gift economy. 'The culture of gift giving', according to David Cheal ( 1 987: 1 53), 'can be most usefully understood as part of a feminized ideology of love.' Even if the gift-giving appears as an always realizable possibility in which surprise and unexpectedness play the major role, there are enough occasions and opportunities, many highly ritualized, which place the present firmly at the centre of things and, as it were, proclaim it as a social duty. Birth, puberty, marriage, illness and death, separation and coming together again, the various anniversaries or 'sentimental days', the annual cycle of major feasts and especially Christmas, offer so many opportunities both to give pleasure and to take trouble over potentially awkward situations. Much, though far from everything, refers to the context of the 'rites of passage' (van Gennep 1 960). Arnold van Gennep distinguishes three typical phases in every rite of passage. The cycle begins with separation and detachment from a social position previously assumed; it leads on to an intermediate position of varying duration where the old social identity is no longer, and the new is not yet, available; and finally incorporation in a well-defined new rela­ tionship completes the public authentication of the new social position. Marriage affords a characteristic example of this sequence of three rituals. The bride money given to the woman's family as well as the traditional eve-of-wedding party introduce the phase of separation; then the wedding effects the outsider's incorporation into the local group, with an accom­ panying exchange of gifts whose collective 'meaning' is not only to confirm his acceptance into the group, but also to bind him to the new symbolic order. Rites of passage are important, but far from the collectively most sig­ nificant, occasions on which the gift economy is at the centre of events. Community has always been embodied in symbols and rites, at festivals and processions, where it calls forth visible tokens, declarations of belief and modes of experiencing itself. From the cycle of seasonal feasts, Christmas clearly stands out as the undisputed climax of the bourgeois gift culture. Indeed: 'An ethnographer who discovered so important a ritual in some exotic culture might be tempted to make it the centrepiece of his cultural description' (Caplow 1 982: 383). It is not only the society's unparalleled expenditure of effort, money and time which confirms the exceptional character of this collective happening. The gift-giving itself is here set apart from the usual inner logic. For the Christmas-present economy knows no hiatus between gift and counter-gift: it erases the interval and instates a simultaneity of giving and taking and taking and giving; it removes the symbolic framework of complementary creditor and debtor role-structures and approximates to the ideal of reciprocal typing.

14

THE PH ENOMENOLOGY OF G I FT-G IVI NG

The suspension of 'ordinary life' (Huizinga 1 970: 27), the postponement of the everyday in favour of plenty, luxury and extravagant consumption which is a feature of Christmas as of all festivals - creates the setting for the periodical repetition of a collective happening whose profane significance, as a brief historical reconstruction would clearly show, has only taken shape in the course of the last century. 7 The custom of giving Christmas presents is as old as it is general. It is commonly explained by the habit, when a new child is born, of making little presents to the older children already there, on behalf of the newcomer, as it were. This is intended to bind them to him all the more firmly right from the start, and to make brotherly and sisterly love gradually take root, sooner perhaps than it would otherwise have done. So, it is said, the custom of giving Christmas presents among Christians originated with the pious thought of accustoming children earlier to the love of Jesus. I will say nothing more here about the merits and demerits of this pedagogic and religious dalliance, except that it seems to me demeaning for the human heart to produce virtuous feelings and dispositions through such paltry devices, and to accustom children so early to self-interested ways of thinking, to buy their love through presents, as it were. This, in my view, is so striking for any rational human being that the dalliance method could not easily become so general as to be the gradually forgotten source of a general custom. (Gedike 1 784: 74f.)

For the Enlightenment educationalist, gift-giving turned out to be a relic of a pagan custom, namely, the Roman Saturnalia. After the introduction of the Julian calendar in Rome, the 25th of December became the day of Sol invictus when people greeted the winter solstice. It was the day of the Sun's rebirth, and it was the day of the Christmas festivities - although it was only in the year 336 AD that it appears to have become established as the day of Jesus's birth (see Pannenberg 1 989: 57). The Eastern Church adopted this date even later, towards the end of the 4th century, having previously regarded the 6th of January as the day of gift-giving, as it still is in the Italian community of Befana. The winter solstice was a time of festivity in every traditional culture, and the Christian Christmas probably took its place within this mythical context of the solar cult. Its core dogma of the Incarnation, however, solidly established the giving and receiving of gifts as the structural principle of that recurrent yet unique event. 'Children were given presents as the Jesus child received gifts from the magi or kings who came from afar to adore him. But in reality it was they, together with all their fellow-men, who received the gift of God through man's renewed participation in the divine life' (ibid.: 61 ). Like all sacral seasonal festivals, Christmas has changed its religious meaning in various ways over the course of time. The newborn child­ redeemer is by no means identical with the gift-bringing Christ Child or with Father Christmas. The latter two forms derived from customs during processions and wayside halts, not before the sixteenth century. Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann describes the conversion of the wayside game 'Angel' to 'the symbolic form of the gift-giving Christ Child' as a reaction formation against the seriousness of the Reformation ethos, whereas the cultural

OCCASIONS

15

invention of Father Christmas is attributable to Catholicism. 'In him, all properties of the wintry Nikolaus and Perchten came together in the image of the grandfatherly bearer of gifts. His fur clothing and boots he took from Nikolaus's helper Knecht Ruprecht and wrung free of all demonry; but his flowing glittery beard adjusted him to a child's image of a grand­ father. His now mainly gift-bearing function has [ . . . ] its precedent in the Nikolaus legend, where the saint amiably decks out three daughters of an impoverished but pious nobleman in such a wonderful manner that they can marry and live happily ever after. Rich monastic-medieval traditions of gift-giving developed around these characteristics everywhere in Western Europe. But in the domestic sphere, too, from the sixteenth century on, an 'inlay' of Nikolaus gift-giving spread out from a courtly upper-class Catholic layer and became established alongside the Evangelical Christ Child. Until 1 800 or so, he remained here the only bringer of presents.' His material representation goes back to Moritz von Schwind, who in 1 847 drew a 'Lord Winter' 'and thus publicized nothing less than the first Father Christmas fairy-tale' (Weber-Kellermann 1 968: 2f.). The early decades of the nineteenth century seem to mark a kind of general take-off where the features of a new, bourgeois gift-culture become discernible and start to impose themselves with breathtaking speed. The mythical gift-bearers - Father Christmas and Christ Child as well as the Easter bunny - ensure that children are excluded from the cycle of reciprocity. The relationship becomes one-sided and it becomes pedagogic. For the Christ Child cannot be thanked, except through obedience and good behaviour towards the parents. What Friedrich Gedike stilI bemoaned in 1 784 as 'pedagogic or religious dalliance' referred to the principles upon which the bourgeois family was based, with 'childhood' as a new kind of refuge and Christmas as a family festival. Rooted in Romanticism and the conformist mentality of the Biedermeier period, supplied with living and nursery rooms and ruled over by a stern paterfamilias, the small bourgeois family conquered the ground of domestic life. It was stilI influenced by courtly gift rituals, which gave shape to the present-giving ceremony beneath the Christmas tree and to the associated mythical forms that made visible humanity's old dream of receiving without obligations and without apparent limits. In his Weihnachtsfeier, adapted from Plato's Symposium, Friedrich Schleiermacher verified in a way the place of the family within salvationist history. The Christmas festival owed its popularity largely to the fact 'that it has been introduced into our houses and homes, and that it has been established among the children' ( 1 890: 59). Because its main object is 'the Child', every mother feels like Mary at Christmas, everyone calls their own 'an eternal divine child' and even tries to find in him 'the movement of the higher Spirit', because everyone remembers their own childhood and sees 'their own higher birth in Christ's birth'; the festival thus appears almost of itself as a symbolic framework for the moral refurbishing of bourgeois family life. The small family takes shape as 'Holy Family', with Christmas

16

TH E PH ENOMENOLOGY OF G I FT-G IVING

as its founding myth. It melts down the religious contents and seeks to profane them by referring them to itself. It produces 'modern' mythical forms which, as gift-bearers from another realm, secure and symbolically serve more than just the new institutional centre of 'childhood'. Father Christmas and the Christ Child also operate as unburdening figures, in a twofold sense. As pedagogic figures, they transform the practice of protection and obedience. As figures in moral economy, they transform the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism in the direction of opulence, luxury and wastefulness. Father Christmas and Christ Child guarantee the festive character of the festival; they not only promise surprise but also ensure that the sometimes only slight excess of consumption can take place without too bad a conscience. The mythical gift-bearers are two of those intermediate shapes which, in a temporary condensation, create for bourgeois society the time, space and good conscience to give itself over to a practice that used to be known as demonstrative luxury consumption and to mark the lifestyle of the courtly aristocracy. These forms are modern in the precise sense that they bring relief from economic pressures and systematically elude the realm of necessity. From time immemorial, the giving and receiving of gifts has referred like no other interaction ritual to the various cultural models of unproductive expenditure. However, the festive and ceremonial aspects that accompany all giving and handing-over today do rather more than recall the pale glitter of times gone by. The fact that extravagance, demonstrative consumption and middling luxury are still part of the picture does not vindicate only those roman­ tically tinged 'cultural critics' of commercialization who see a danger to the religious content of Christmas. The social sciences, too, insofar as they deal with the theme at all, highlight the practice of 'unproductive expenditure' which, as at a secret signal, suddenly grips whole cultures for weeks at a time before finally returning them to everyday normality. Whether the contemporary Christmas in North America really should be seen as a gigantic, prestige-bearing potlatch festival (Levi-Strauss 1 969: 55) is seriously open to doubt, for the dominance of family structures means that, unlike in traditional potlatch societies, the gaining of prestige no longer plays any significant role. Still, 3 . 1 per cent of annual family income is spent at Christmas - which represents approximately 66 per cent of total yearly expenditure in the gift economy (Caplow 1 982: 390). But it is only in a macroeconomic comparison that these figures afford a proper view of the role of the private gift economy. Thus, in 1 972 in England, roughly 4.3 per cent of all household consumer expenditure went on gifts, an order of magnitude far exceeding that of other sectors of the economy. The value of manufacturers' sales of gifts is greater than sales by the ship­ building and marine engine industry, and approaches the total sale from coal mining. In this sense gifts are five times more important in the economy than all nuts and bolts and screws; 45 times more than cement; 86 times more than glue. In short, the apparently small percentage conceals really quite important

OCCASIONS

17

magnitudes. Reciprocity, too, occupies a significant place in our allocation of personal income; a fifth of what we spend on food; a third of what we spend on housing; a half of what we spend on clothes. (Davis, quoted in Caplow 1 982: 390)8

Between 1 976 and 1 979, Theodore Caplow undertook the exacting task of replicating Helen and Robert Lynd's famous studies of Middletown in 1 929 and 1 959, but he broadened the framework to cover the cycle of religious and family festivals. 'The celebration of Christmas, the high point of the cycle, mobilizes almost the entire population for several weeks, accounts for about 4 per cent of its total annual expenditures and takes precedence over ordinary forms of work and leisure' (Caplow 1 984: 1 307). The results offer an interesting glimpse into the symbols of the private sphere, showing in particular the close connection between the modern gift culture and the family's respective individual patterns of life. The distribution of Christmas presents follows the rules of a strictly kinship-related morality: four out of five presents go to relatives, and four­ fifths of these to the immediate family, so that economic value directly corresponds to the closeness or distance of the relationship. By far the most presents, and also the most expensive, are given within the narrow family circle. As a Canadian study shows, however (Cheal 1986), their value is well below the dimensions for which Thorstein Veblen ( 1 970 [ 1 899]) coined the term 'conspicuous consumption' . We have already noted the way in which female activity surpasses that of men: women take care of the presents and wrap them up, they give more things more often, and they ensure that the different age groups are treated equally. Imbalances occur only between generations, with adults giving seven times more than they receive from their children. Even spatial distance, usually a critical point in the com­ munications network of private relationships, does not play a major role in the exchange of Christmas presents (Caplow 1 984: 1 307). Christmas in Middletown obeys fixed, unwritten rules that their observers are usually at a loss to explain, even though ninety per cent acceptance testifies to an extraordinary degree of uniformity and conformity. One rule is that married couples with children should put up a Christmas tree and unmarried couples without children should abstain from this symbolism, while individual widowers or divorcees can choose for them­ selves. Few of the written laws that agents of the state attempt to enforce with endless paperwork and threats of violence are so well obeyed as this unwritten rule that is promulgated by no identifiable authority and backed by no evident threat. Indeed, the existence of the rule goes unnoticed. People in Middletown think that putting up a Christmas tree is an entirely voluntary act. They know that it has some connection with children, but they do not understand that married couples with children of any age are effectively required to have trees and that childless unmarried people are somehow prevented from having them. Middletown people do not consciously perceive the Christmas tree as a symbol of the complete nuclear family. (ibid. : 1 3 10)

18

THE PHENOMEN OLOGY OF G I FT-G IVING

Christmas presents must be wrapped. If they do not observe this rule, they are by definition not considered Christmas presents. A further rule stipulates that the rooms where presents are handed over should be decorated, that the gift-exchange should take place at a family gathering or celebration, and that a 'traditional Christmas dinner' should be part of the occasion. Not only the festive symbols but also the choice of presents is determined by the forms of kinship morality. A Christmas gift should (a) demonstrate the giver's familiarity with the receiver's preferences; (b) surprise the receiver, either by expressing more affection measured by the aesthetic or practical value of the gift - than the receiver might reasonably anticipate or more knowledge than the giver might reasonably be expected to have; (c) be scaled in economic value to the emotional value of the relationship. (ibid. : 1 3 1 3)

The participants are not at all free to express their own gift-economy valuations of the current network of relationships. Here too a strict hierarchy operates, with the married couple at the top, followed by the parent-child relationship, and further down by close and distant relations, and finally by friends. Trapped within an extensive yet never explicit apparatus of rules, the actors who devote themselves year after year to this ritual practice thematize what they do in a standard expression that hides a lot and explains nothing. Christmas presents, like other gifts on ritual occasions, are said to be just a matter of tradition, a nice custom that people willingly follow. For Caplow, however, the surprising conformity of unconscious rule observance is to be explained by the fact that the gift-exchange system is organized like a language, which uses objects instead of words as its lexical signs. 'In this perspective, every culture ( . . ) has a language of presentation to express important interpersonal relationships on special occasions, just as it has a verbal language to create and manage meaning for other purposes' (Caplow 1 984: 1 320). At the same time, the strict family-centredness of the Christmas gift economy refers to the type of interpersonal relationships and social constellations which appear especially endangered as a result of the modern logic of socialization geared to competitiveness and individualization. Structural-functionalist theoretical strategies are therefore not the only ones which explain the incorporation of Christmas into the family institution by the fact that, in an age of permanent social change, people need symbolic forms which allow them to measure out and stabilize through communication the domestic emotional spaces of personal and intimate relationships (see Liischen 1 972: 520). It is the family which uses Christmas as a social highpoint for the representation and consolidation of its moral underpinnings. Risky, insecure and temporarily unstable, relations between partners and between the genera­ tions especially demand the highest degree of moral commitment and mutual personal attention. Christmas - not only in Middletown - is a confidence-boosting mise en scene of the ideal of the family and its sur­ rounding social networks, a symbolic practice in which the topoi of the .

OCCASIONS

19

happy home, mother and child, love, care and solicitude are periodically given dramatic form (see Caplow 1 982: 226; Cheal 1 988: 78). However, the decisive means for the expression of moral commitment and emotional bonds, and their preservation in the face of all empirical adversities, is the Christmas present. Gifts and feelings belong together, for gift-giving is in the ideal case nothing other than practical confirmation of the emotional status of a relationship. This is made clear by the characteristic occasions, which are defined as collective, community-stabilizing events. Birth, initiation, marriage, spatial and social relocation, mark crucial points in people's lives around which gift-giving is organized on a wide scale. Yet the rites of passage in question here, though exceptionally numerous and meaningful, are not the decisive occasions on which presents flow in abundance. Christmas, followed by birthdays and the 'sentimental days', account for more than 80 per cent of all presents and more than 70 per cent of all the money that goes into the gift economy - or at least, that is what David Cheal's studies in Canada have shown (Cheal 1988: 1 49). Such occasions, although seasonally recurring, point in a different direction from rites of passage, religious rituals or the rites of an agrarian society. While rites of passage thematize and authenticate changes in individual status, Christmas, birthdays and 'sentimental days' stress permanence and continuity in relationships. These 'rites of progression' do also share the theme of change over time, but they set themselves against separation and break-up. 'In a rite of progression what is emphasized is not change through opposition to what went before, but change through the potential for growth in what already existed. Rites of progression are therefore rites of extension rather than contrast. They are, in fact, pure rites of extended social reproduction' (Cheal 1 988: 1 49f.). Rites of progression are con­ structions of social time full of dramatic content; the relationship history is confirmed in the light of contemporary reality, and the contemporary reality is modulated as a promise for the future. They celebrate the periodic consolidation of the collective in question, reproduce and evoke the requisite feelings, and thereby, in a kind of analogy with the annual cycle of offerings in archaic society, renew the foundation of the community, the normative expectations of its members, and the moral ties between each individual. To appreciate the extent and range of evocations of community, insofar as these concern the rites of progression, it will be enough to glance at a simple intergenerational network of relationships. A family-centred net­ work encompassing parents, two children and grandparents - and thus excluding all social connections, friends and neighbours, as well as all events due to rites of passage - would in one year develop a gift economy around some 220 transactions, each member, according to position and gender, having to perform between 23 and 36 acts of giving and receiving. If we take into account every possible occasion, as well as the interface between job and private life, we can see that the gift economy penetrates

20

T H E PH ENOMEN OLOGY OF G I FT-G IVING

the everyday life of modern, capitalistically organized societies with the same obviousness that is usually attributed to the validation of traditional social orders. Such a manner of speaking should not make us forget, however, that collectives and communities are now of a very special kind. People active in them are exposed to the opportunities and pressures of a modernization which has long been asserting itself as a break with tradition and an individualization of lifestyles. Where established communal models and everyday routines have ceased to be taken for granted, each individual is in the end alone responsible for the initiation and continuation of personally important, but insecure relationships. Post-traditional forms of commu­ nity-building, as well as all social relationships not defined by occupational roles yet still highly valued, demand a maximum of personal commitment and interactive competence, which makes them at once more delicate and more costly. Individuals therefore revert more and more often to an apparently tried-and-tested form of interaction whose intrinsic logic is to hold together individual expression and social bonding, personal autonomy and mutual recognition, individualization and community-building. Gift-giving is on the increase. The staging of the non-everyday, the intensification of the anti-economic, is constantly expanding. Reciprocity is gaining ground as a protest against equivalence. 9 Revaluation of the 'non­ necessary' is gnawing at the foundations of materialist prejudices, and pointed handling of the 'superfluous' is winning the highest social prizes.

3

EMOTIONAL NORMS

There is no finer excess in the world than gratitude La Bruyere Gratitude is a burden, and one would happily shake off any burden Diderot

Modern gift-giving has been described as a highly specific interaction ritual - specific both in its assertiveness against the contrasting reality of market socialization and in its action logic, subjective imagery and normative references - which translates the pressures of cultural modernization into everyday behaviour and keeps them available for a moral economy. For this ritual, too, it is true that there is an old form of interaction which seemingly remains in force, but now it is knowledge which lends this form its currency in modern cultures, opening up the space of the symbolic order, setting in motion the form-play and the expressive interests which serve the form just as much as they are shaped by it. Thus, I can make my present the symbol of an appreciation that I do not actually feel, but which I would like to give to be understood. I may completely conceal my expressive purposes and yet formally meet the expectations I expect others to have. None of these games should make us forget that a quite definite emo­ tional expression is, so to speak, part of the duty of ritual performance. The emotional norm institutionalized in the gift-giving form of interaction is called gratitude. Deliberately to refuse it is to destroy the ritual, while to make an exaggerated display of it is to damage one's own credibility. Just as a service elicits a service in return, or a challenge a reply, so does a present call for an expression of thanks. In dealings between people, 'the giving statement tends to be followed immediately by a show of gratitude. Both moves taken together form a little ceremony - a "supportive interchange'" (Goffman 1 972b: 90). But what does it mean to be grateful, to thank someone or even to owe them a debt of gratitude? And what does it really mean to feel grateful? Verbal expressions of thanks are as much part of everyday life as the social situations in which politeness makes it obligatory to express gratitude. Greetings often take the standard form of 'How are you? - Fine, thanks'. Congratulatory messages, requests, condolences, as well as any sort of kindness, form ritual sequences that are usually answered and ended with a 'thank you'. In 'remedial exchanges', where potential breaches of the rules

22

TH E PH ENOM E NOLOGY OF G I FT-GIVI N G

concerning explanations, apologies and requests are handled, expressions of gratitude play an especially significant role and indeed reveal the essential kindness of the intended offering. Goffman ( l 972b) has shown that the justified rejection and the granting of a request are 'ritually equivalent'. Someone who refuses a request with good reason not only keeps the impli­ cations under control, but may also meet with approval and understanding (perhaps colloquially expressed as 'thanks all the same'). In 'interpersonal exchange', as Goffman conceives of it, gratitude and expressions of thanks are ritual norms. Such norms, involving obligation on the one side and expectation on the other, regulate the performance of ceremonies, declarations and attitudes. The exchange of appropriate ges­ tures and words is highly conventional and takes place in a largely mech­ anical way. Someone may do someone else a favour by letting him go first, whereupon the other thanks him and they both go on their way. Here the expression of thanks is itself an obligatory part of the ritual sequence. We learn little about the emotional state of the actors. When mutual regard and personal commitment are crucially influenced by what is at stake in both the short and long term, the obligatory expression of thanks is probably not sufficient. Simply covering routines in the process of interaction, it is the least socially demanding and thoroughly undramatic form in which gratitude can nowadays be given voice. But if even this weak ritual norm is breached and the expected gesture withheld, the most innocuous situation immediately faces a major upset. 'You might at least say thanks', is then the minimum moral rebuke that lowers the potential infractor to the level of someone owing a debt. So do outstanding bills come into being, to be settled with a considerable investment of emotion. As the time and effort that someone puts into interpersonal exchange becomes larger, the display of thanks is required to be longer and more intense. Displeasure or annoyance with services rendered will often provoke the question whether that is all the thanks one gets, and therefore signal a normative dilemma. The expectations on both sides, but also the evaluations of each other's behaviour, do not match. The right yardstick is missing, and when that happens guilt comes into play. Here too debts make their appearance. Accounts in terms of exchange theory (e.g. Homans 1 96 1 ; Blau 1 964) all too easily reduce these dilemmas of interaction to basic utilitarian approaches on the part of the actors. A new colleague may ask someone who has worked longer for the firm to give him some advice, and then thanks him when this is given. Peter Blau writes The giving of advice was an exchange in which the ordinary worker paid for advice by acknowledging his inferiority to the expert, while the expert received ego­ enhancing deference in return for the time he lost from his own work in helping his colleague. Both profited. But beyond a certain point, further sacrifices of the expert's time would become more costly to him than the initial sacrifices because his own work would begin to suffer, and further acknowledgements of his superiority

EMOTIONAL N ORMS

23

would become less rewarding than the initial ones. He would then become unwilling to give more advice unless the deference and gratitude became more and more extreme. In short, it would raise the price. (quoted from Hochschild 1 983: 77)

The idea that demands for, and appreciation of, expert knowledge necessarily go together with feelings of superiority is as implausible as the underlying assumption that subjective cost-benefit optimization is the only factor influencing the two parties' action. It would not be too difficult to give other reasons why the exact opposite might be the case. The interaction may take place within a corporate framework where a readiness to help is a basic institutional element; the expert might be a practising Christian who values something higher than self-interest; or he might be willing to help for longer out of an interest in a personal relationship, and so on. Explanations in terms of exchange theory structurally tend to downplay moral ties geared to emotional norms, the capacity of actors for inner action. To act is understood as choosing between various options, in accordance with the most rational (that is, the most successful possible) achievement of one's own interests. Where investments have to be worth it and pay-offs must match them in cooperation, gratitude would over time indeed be a self-debasing currency. Such explanations, as well as others that are wrongly believed to have gone beyond utilitarianism's misconceptions of itself, usually involve a further short-circuit that is fraught with consequences. Concerned as they are to build up exchange as a universal fact, a primal phenomenon of sociality, they systematically neglect the qualitative differences between objects involved in exchange. Whether these are women, camels, buttons or compliments seems pretty inconsequential. Now, there is no doubt that presents and greetings, for example, are symbolic exchange processes. But it should also be beyond doubt that gift­ giving and greeting are by no means the same. On the one side is the material substratum, the overdetermined signifier; on the other are words and gestures. The two may pass into each other. Presents may, for instance, be handed over at a lengthy welcoming ceremony, while the gift of a bunch of flowers may function as greeting behaviour towards a dinner hostess. The remaining difference concerns the intensity of emotional commitment and the follow-up behaviour of those involved. The hostess will be grateful for the flowers in a different way than for the greeting. A comparison between the two forms of interaction - the favour I have asked for and the present I have received - shows different expressions of thanks, which may nevertheless be joined together as ambivalent structural characteristics in the image of gratitude. It is true of both the request and the present that the concluding 'thank you' is part of the ritual itself, an expression of thanks that is obligatory, and yet the obligatory expression is not adequate, or at least not if it is a question of more than the banalities of everyday intercourse. To ask someone for a personal favour is always a tricky business. It presupposes the social relationship and places it in question. In being

24

T H E PH ENOMEN OLOGY OF G I FT-GIVING

compelled, in your own clearly understood interests, to recognize your need to obtain from someone else what you yourself do not have, you experience your state as a resource deficit, a lack which affects your self-esteem and can easily bring feelings of inferiority into play. Any serious request changes the balance of a relationship, especially if there is not much difference in the two people's power and status. It highlights and establishes a resource asym­ metry, as well as interpretations of the situation in terms of inferiority or superiority. If the request is eventually fulfilled, the spell is far from broken. For then begins a second, equally difficult phase when ties of personal dependence, having been converted into a positive expression of feeling, must be brought to an end. Subliminal experiences of inferiority mingle with pleasure at what has been obtained and a feeling of being obliged to be grateful. What distinguishes this constellation, however, is the fact that gratitude obligations still carry the strongest possible connotation of a (seemingly or actually) inferior social position, so that expressions of thanks, though necessary, are not sufficient to restore a symmetrical relationship. On the contrary, that bitter aftertaste which often fosters hate or envy, resent­ ment or conformity, is due to the fact that gratitude obligations perpetuate the asymmetry of the relationship. If self-esteem is so much as touched, even conscious downplaying on the part of the one who did the favour may be misinterpreted as a gesture of superiority. The social construction of gratitude is quite different in the case of a present received. Whether it was a surprise or expected, welcome or inept, the ritual context again carries an obligation to display recognizable gestures of gratitude, but not the emotional sense of being obliged to feel grateful. It has not always been so; we hear quite different stories about gift exchange in premodern times. Only when the context of gift-giving escapes the snares of status and prestige and is relatively independent of allocations of social position - a burden that the asking of a favour obviously cannot shake off so easily - only then is an emotional state possible in which friendly feeling counts for more than inferiority, appreciation for more than power. Only then, in short, does gratitude come into being. The distinction between gratitude and an obligation to be grateful cannot be so clearly perceived in everyday behaviour, yet it concerns the inner action logic of those involved, their feelings prior to expression. Any interaction threatens to topple over in one direction or the other. It involves nuances which quite often alter only in the course of the act itself. For the emotional experience, however, there are strict boundaries, two different situations in the world according to whether I feel gratitude or feel obliged to feel it. Gratitude is a modern feeling, a quite recent mode in the history of civilization which is due to the gradual disencumbrance from obligations to be grateful. In other words, gratitude as a feeling and expression of 'pure' appreciation can arise only insofar as obligations to be grateful have been dispelled or transferred to other, partly more effective, modes of social control.

EMOTIONAL N ORMS

25

This perspective, which rather tends t o recall elements o f traditional gift morality, does not seem to apply where institutionalized mistrust uses the obligations associated with gift-giving as an opportunity to delegitimize the form of interaction itself. In the end there is a social space in which it is a punishable offence to give way to this form of interaction. Public officials and employees are obliged to refrain from it - some on oath, others with a handshake. Further agreements about official rules and disciplinary regulations lay down the smallest detail of what is permitted or at least requires authorization. In this context, rewards and presents are under­ stood to include not only money or objects of value but also other benefits such as privileges in private companies, where what matters is neither the value of the service nor whether there is reason to fear a loss of objectivity on the official's part. The acceptance of customary, trifling tokens ('free samples') not generally considered objectionable may, so long as their quality does not make them more than trifling, be regarded as tacitly allowable. So too may ordinary hospitality in the framework of official duties. But it becomes a problem as soon as office-holders are involved in activity based upon 'the rules of business entertainment'. Here tact and sensitivity are required. Naturally, the only relevant motive on the giver's part - the gaining of advantage - is also placed under threat of penalty. Today more than ever, then, the giving of presents is inimical to bureau­ cratic administration and its principle of impersonality in accordance with a rule (sine ira et studio) plus expert decision-making and implementation; it endangers the very algorithm of administration, the well-known Schema F of interest-free bureaucracy. What is banished from the public sphere with the gaining of advantage, corruption and bribery is, of course, that 'bonding power' which has been attributed to the gift from time immemorial. Many things point to it, as if one was still privy to the 'spirit of things' and had reason to fear it. If, as Jakob Grimm ( 1 865: 1 73) realized, 'all law has risen out of the womb of morals', then presumably it covers all precarious, conflictual circumstances requiring regulation. This is true nolens volens also of the giving of presents, whose codified form marks a middle position between traditionalism and relief from gratitude obligations. A gift, like exchange and purchase, is a contractual relationship from which obligations result on both sides. According to §5 1 6 of the German Legal Code (BGB), 'a donation whereby one person makes another richer out of his own assets is a gift if both sides are agreed that the donation takes place free of charge'. Ownership of the donation in question, voluntariness on the donor's part and approval on the recipient's, are indispensable prerequisites. But the donor must also keep an eye on intentions and any possibility of culpable negligence; he is responsible for both legal flaws and material defects - a gift horse is looked very carefully in the mouth. Other compli­ cations may also arise. A conditional donation means that the donor may require fulfilment of the condition if he has kept his own side of the

26

TH E PH EN OMENOLOGY OF GI FT-G IVI N G

agreement; the recipient has the right to refuse to fulfil the condition if legal or material flaws become apparent, but if there are no such flaws, he may be required by the donor to give the donation back. The everyday notion that 'a present is a present' is true here only with certain reserva­ tions; it is possible for the donor to ask for the present back if he becomes impoverished and is no longer able to live a life in accordance with his status or to pay his maintenance obligations. The favoured party may, on the same grounds, avoid repayment, but not if his straitened circumstances are his own fault. Revocation (BGB §530): 'A gift may be revoked if the recipient, by committing a serious transgression against the donor or a close relative of the donor, is guilty of gross ingratitude'. If the law concerning the return of a gift relatively clearly contradicts our everyday notions, the ingratitude clause arouses rather mixed feelings. An everyday expectation - gratitude - is here codified ex negativo. The donor's right to something which no longer belongs to him is derived neither from the thing itself nor from some kind of reciprocal obligation on the part of the recipient, but solely from the latter's conduct. The donor acquires a right, as it were, over the recipient's future behaviour. What exchange makes us forget because of its reified form reappears in the law as a matter of right: namely, the gift as a bonding between persons. And it is a key element in the old gift morality which in a thinner form precisely as an obligation of the recipient to avoid the worst - defines this relationship. For Marcel Mauss, the revocability of the gift for reason of ingratitude, already to be found in Roman law, is an 'institution of natural law'. Whoever accuses his benefactor before a third party of having stolen the present commits the offence of gross ingratitude, as does the unfaithful lover whose girl-friend promised a trip together around the world before the avoidable Fall. But here again, does not the law plainly express what has been persist­ ently denied down the ages by the practice of gift-exchange - namely, that it is an interest-guided transaction which does not and cannot risk reveal­ ing itself as such, but which displays its full 'meaning', all denials notwith­ standing, during the period of time that passes as the time of the other's obligation? Something is not exchanged for nothing. And so, interpretations of the legal code fall systematically short of the mark when they discover in it the idea of a 'pure' gift free of reciprocal obligations (see Rost 1 989: 99). As to the period of time that elapses as debtor's time, the Civil Code is rather traditional in its orientation. After a decade the spell is broken and the former debtor recovers all his options. As far as the law itself is concerned, the norms are negative and at first sight very weak: act in such a way that you avoid the bpression of gross ingratitude. Actual gratitude is not demanded. The modern legal system relocates the sanctionable offence in a non-occurrence and thus fundamentally weakens the inward moral focus that attaches to the everyday practice of gift-giving. In this respect, it brings about a relative disencumbrance from gratitude obligations, which

EMOTIONAL N ORMS

27

should not make us forget, however, that the donor's rights over the recipient's future behaviour, as well as the various offences for which a return of the gift can be demanded, prescribe and asymmetrically distribute rights and duties within a contractual relationship. The difference between gratitude and gratitude obligations has been thought to lie essentially in people's inner life. Whereas feelings of grati­ tude modulate the processes of mutual appreciation, an obligation enforces follow-up actions of a unilateral raising of status. Even as an ethical postulate, it remains a compulsory relationship. It requires the recipient to play the part of the one whom the donor absolutely needs in order to be as he would like to appear to other people: charitable, generous, high-minded - in short, sovereign. The recipient's transformation - through gratitude obligations - into a representational value for others may appear in numerous cases as justified, desired or strategically demanded by the producer himself, or as for what­ ever reason unproblematic, but this changes little in the character of a power relationship where the recognition of superiority and inferiority is at stake. However, the shaping of behavioural demands as necessary for the donor's representation of himself cuts across the subjective images and personality ideals of individualized individuals. And there is more. It is only for the donor that this form of interaction is relatively proof against disappointment. Assuming that the first act is successful - whatever the reactions may then be - nothing can stop the benefactor from realizing the symbolic surplus on his investment. A refusal of gratitude obligations, or even manifest actions of gross ingratitude, will actually assist the full expression of the intended performance. The most ungrateful person confirms the other's generosity - a social asset that can be turned to splendid advantage. Until the beginning of th e twentieth century, duty was the basis of dis­ course about gratitude. Georg Simmel was the first to shift the emphasis: his 'Exkurs tiber Treue und Dankbarkeit' widened the horizon to take in other feelings, without, of course, radically eliminating the traditional ethical imputations. It is first of all a crowning addition to the legal order. All human interchange rests upon the schema of equal relinquishment. Now equivalence can be enforced for innumerable cases of relinquishment and service. In all economic exchange that takes place in the legally prescribed form, in all fixed pledges in return for a service, in all obligations deriving from a legally regulated relationship, the constitution enforces the two-way traffic of service and return service and assures the reciprocity without which there is no social equilibrium and no cohesion. However, there are numerous relationships to which the legal form does not apply, in which there can be no talk of enforcing equivalence for what is relinquished. Here gratitude appears as a complement weaving the bond of reciprocity and the two-way traffic of service and return service, even where no external force guarantees It. (Simmel 1 958: 443)

For Simmel, exchange is at once starting point and backdrop for the positioning of gratitude. Unlike the dominant form of socialization, in

28

TH E P H ENOMENOLOGY OF G I FT-G IVING

which only objectively similar things are exchanged and - man himself being 'anyway irrelevant' - the relationship between persons has become a relationship between things, gratitude arises within and out of the recipro­ cal relationship between persons. What emerges on one side in the com­ modity now enters people as a personal reciprocity. Gratitude is the 'subjective residue of the act of receiving or also of giving' (ibid.: 443); it is 'the moral memory of humanity' (ibid.: 444), a bridge to other people whose sociological meaning is that it points beyond the immediate act of giving and taking, joins the earlier to the later, and remains serviceable for a long period of time. Though at first a purely personal affect, gratitude becomes one of the strongest social bonds because it creates 'the harmony of universal obligation', 'which cannot be dispelled by any individual services' (ibid.: 447). As a model of balance between giving and taking, gratitude may be unproblematically subsumed under the reciprocity principle. The general norm to be found at the core of every moral order, the norm of recipro­ cating services received (see Gouldner 1 975b: 242), guarantees the exchange of advantages and also of disadvantages, in the sense of reprisal or retaliation. Reciprocity does not mean equivalence, but rather a culturally determined 'approximateness' brimming with different variants. Within such a pattern of behaviour, gratitude might then be interpreted as a quality of debtor's time. It is a time 'within which people are morally compelled to show gratitude towards their benefactors' (ibid.: 1 04) - but what compels them? It is an interval of time characterized by structural inferiority, by an asymmetrical relationship, and by complementarity in the formal sense that, until the moment of restored equilibrium, rights and duties are each distributed on only one side. The compulsory character might indeed be described in this way, but not the element of disen­ cumbrance. Gratitude requires a different kind of contextualization. Although rules of reciprocity are also implicit in Simmel's argument, his central explanatory figure goes far beyond such a framework. Reciprocity, in his view, falls short where gratitude is not only a reaction to certain benefits but is directed at the actual person of the benefactor, so that things appear only as 'occasional causes' (Simmel 1 958: 446) of a personal relationship. Simmel does not only distinguish the usual, object­ directed form of thanks from person-related gratitude. For in the interactive form of gift-giving, he believes he has found a moment that makes moral demands on the recipient. Only the 'voluntary' nature of the first gift, the initial outlay, evinces that freedom 'which is lacking in duty, including the duty of gratitude' (ibid.: 446). Against Kant's coup de force of conceiving duty and freedom as identical, Simmel reasserts the just claims of difference. For the idea that full freedom is to be found only on the side of desisting (Lassen) not on the side of doing something to which I know myself duty-bound, could escape the ethical rigorism of an earlier century. Furthermore, only freedom beyond duty makes it understandable

NOTES

29

why in the first, non-thanking, action there i s a kind of beauty, a spontaneous giving of self, a blossoming from the virgin soil of the spirit that cannot be balanced by any gift, however much greater it might be. There is always a residue expressed in the (. . . ) feeling that we simply cannot reciprocate the gift; ( . . .) Perhaps this is why many people are not happy to accept a gift, and avoid it as much as possible. This would be incomprehensible if the beneficence and the gratitude only concerned the object, because then a return action could make everything equal again and completely dissolve the inner bond. In reality, however, there is perhaps an instinctive sense that the return gift cannot preserve the decisive moment of freedom present in the first gift, so that by accepting it they place themselves under an obligation that cannot be dissolved. The fact that such people usually have a strong drive to independence and individuality indicates that the gratitude situation easily carries nuances of an inextricable knot, that it is morally a character indelibilis. (ibid.: 446)

Simmel explains the precarious aspect of obligation by the unparalleled difference between freedom and duty. Everything centres on the first action, the 'starting mechanism' (Gouldner 1 975b: 25 1 ). Although the entangle­ ments of long-term exchange cycles remain as screened off as the question of the obligation to give, it is the argument in terms of freedom which divides the traditional gift morality from modern present-giving and gratitude obligations from gratitude. The freedom of the initial gift is the utopia­ bearing cipher of bourgeois subjectivity, the idyllic picture of a thoroughly materialist society whose inner communicative structure tends to be such that the struggle over mutual recognition is less and less mediated through material substrata, and must instead centre upon subjectivity images and personality ideals. This turning point may be more precisely defined in the history of culture. Semantic shifts in the main word-fields - sacrifice, debt, duty and thanks indicate the path on which gratitude obligations arise and eventually fade away, and gratitude comes to mark a new emotional state. Gift-giving is then culturally framed in such a way that the gift, freed from the repro­ ductive compulsion of exchange, appears as nothing other than a symbolic expression of personal ties. NOTES TO PART I I . The mingling of archaic exchange and modern gift economy is already present in Marcel Mauss (1990), but only in the limited sense that the one provides the ideal structure for an analysis of its lack in the other. For Claude Levi-Strauss, however, the most advanced representative of structural anthropology, the theoretical programme does not require such differentiation to play a role. Bernhard Laum's monograph 'Schenkende Wirtschaft' (1 960) also lets itself be guided by assumptions of continuity. For a critique of the anthropological paradigm, but also of the discourse of political economy from the perspective of a developed 'gift economy', see Cheal (1988: 2f.). 2. As I see it, Georg Simmel was the first to sketch a sociology of the gift, in scant but powerful strokes ( 1 958: 370f.). The theme itself has acquired something of a fixed position, especially in Anglo-American discussions (see Schwarz 1967; Titmus 197 1 ; Caplow 1982; Cheal 1986, 1987, 1988; Camerer 1988). For the discussion in Germany, see Sahle (1 987) and the research of Gisela Clausen (1991) in accordance with the exchange-theory paradigm.

30

THE PH ENOMENOLOGY OF G I FT-G IVI N G

3. Pandora - literally, the all-giver - might be said t o open the iconography of bad intentions. Today, the ritual defence mechanisms and precautions developed in nearly all cultures to minimize the risks of giving have been replaced by discursive strategies, justification compulsions and rigid enquiry into each other's motives. 4. 'The very nature of the gift exchange provides a condition for unfriendliness. Although gift giving is itself rewarding ( . . . ), it is accompanied by obvious deprivation as well, for the giver presents to another that which could have been employed for self-gratification. While he may receive a gift in return, there is certainly some loss of personal control over income and output of goods and money. The recipient in this light becomes a depriver about whom various degrees of ambivalence may emerge' (Schwarz 1967: 5). 5. The 'nice' wrapping of goods, which the better stores have offered as a matter of course in the Christmas period, has become increasingly professionalized. Not surprisingly, given the national tradition, it is in Japan that this has been taken furthest with the creation of firms purely devoted to the art of wrapping. 6. For a critique of those critiques of consumerism which systematically neglect this side of things, see especially Douglas and Isherwood (1 979), Ewen ( 1 988), Featherstone (1 990). 7. On the politicization and political history of Christmas, see Faber ( 1 993). 8. Comparable figures are not available for Germany. We know from the current accounts of selected household types that in the mid-1980s annual spending on gifts to third parties ranged by type from 300 to 600 deutschmarks, while the annual receipt of gifts ranged from 250 to 900 deutschmarks (see Clausen 1 99 1 : 1 38). But this takes no account either of gift transfers within the family or of dinner invitations, receptions, parties, and so on. My own research, which is admittedly of only limited generalizability, suggests that the economic value spent on gifts has roughly trebled since the I 980s. 9. Aestheticization strategies and aesthetic superelevation of the everyday (Soeffner 1986; Berking \989b) are at the centre of a cultural practice which, known by the keyword 'lifestyle', has also had a wide echo in sociology. On the discussion, see Berking and Neckel (\986, \990), Miiller (1 989), Liidtke (1 989), Horning and Michailow (1990), Hitzler ( 1 993).

PART II TOWAR DS AN ANT HRO POLOGY OF GIVING Our little phenomenology of gift-giving has sketched some initial insights into the moral economy of modern society. An apparently everyday form of interaction has turned out to be the nodal point of the moral vocabulary: we have spoken of reciprocity norms and recognition relationships, normative obligations and emotional ties, social appreciation and personal autonomy, but also of symbolic power effects, social asymmetries and wounded self-esteem, without adequately clarifying their place within the system as a whole. Once this aim is taken seriously and an attempt is made to retheorize gift-giving within the context of moral economy, it becomes necessary to include those wider dimensions that have obviously determined the (discursive) practice of giving and taking. Within this perspective, the 'gift' offers itself naturally, so to speak, as the fixed point. For gift-exchange is not only the significant form in which archaic societies reproduce themselves; giving and taking are also the elementary activities through which sociability became rich in evolutionary chances, and upon which any community-building process still rests. 'Giving is, in general, one of the strongest sociological functions. Without constant giving and taking within society - and also outside of exchange - no society would have come into existence. For giving is not at all a mere effect of one person upon another; it is precisely what is required of a sociological function: it is interaction' (Simmel 1 958: 444). How gift-giving grounds symbolic orders, how symbolic orders develop their moral vocabulary in relation to gift-giving, will be the theme of the following anthropologically focused section.

4

T HE GIFT

He who first offered a gift, I considered the king of men Rig Veda

In the beginning is the gift. It binds everything together: sacrifice, duty, debt, war and peace, status and prestige. The gift presents itself at once as symbolic form and material substratum of social synthesis. It constitutes an exchange which irrevocably unifies economics, power and morality, cult and culture. At roughly the same time that Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific first appeared, Marcel Mauss's essay Sur Ie don made history. The fascination of this work was due not only to its comparative method, which allowed a vast wealth of ethnographic material to be sys­ tematically organized, but above all to the disconcerting results that came to light in it. 1 Universal in neolithic societies, archaic exchange presents itself as an organization of reciprocal gifts in which not so much individuals as collec­ tives - families, clans, tribes, whether acting as groups or through an out­ standing figure - accomplish their social reproduction. The occasions are varied - wedding, birth, initiation, death and alliance - and the motives are by no means only economic. The goods thereby set in motion are immense: it is not only a question of useful possessions, movable and immovable. Indeed, the exchanges are mainly acts of politeness: banquets, rituals, military services, women, children, dances, festivals, and fairs, in which economic transaction is only one element, and in which the passing on of wealth is only one feature of a much more general and enduring contract. Finally, these total services and counter-services are committed to in a somewhat involuntary form by presents and gifts, although in the final analysis they are strictly compulsory, on pain of private or public warfare. (Mauss 1 990: 5)

Mauss calls archaic exchange a 'system of total services', each of which embraces the whole of society and has a similar economic, moral, religious, legal and (not least) aesthetic quality. The system displays two fundamental forms: exchange aimed at an alliance, and exchange whose central motives are struggle and rivalry. The ideal type of the former is the alliance of two phratries, with strict complementarity of rituals, weddings, military and priestly titles between the two halves of the tribe. The 'agonistic' form is represented by the Chinook expression potlatch meaning 'to feed' or 'to -

THE G I FT

33

consume', or among the Kwakiutl, 'place where one is sated'. The potlatch mainly presents itself as a kind of 'contest of demolition' (Benedict 1935: 1 93). The very rich North American peoples living on salmon and coastal­ fishing passed the winter in 'a continual festival', and 'everything - clans, marriages, initiations, Shamanist seances and meetings for the worship of the great gods, the totems or the collective or individual ancestors of the clan - is woven into an inextricable network of rites, of total legal and economic services, of assignment to political ranks in the society of men, in the tribe, and in the confederations of tribes, and even internationally' (Mauss 1 990: 6). Of incalculable importance, however, is the principle of rivalry and antagonism which, at first sight at least, is a confusing form of social integration. They go so far as to fight and kill chiefs and nobles. Moreover, they even go as far as the purely sumptuary destruction of wealth that has been accumulated in order to outdo the rival chief as well as his associate (normally a grandfather, father-in-law, or son-in-law). There is total service in the sense that it is indeed the whole clan that contracts on behalf of all, for all that it possesses and for all that it does, through the person of its chief. But this act of 'service' on the part of the chief takes on an extremely marked agonistic character. It is essentially usurious and sumptuary. It is a struggle between nobles to establish a hierarchy amongst themselves from which their clan will benefit at a later date. (Mauss 1 990: 6)

This system was fully developed among the coastal tribes of Northwest America, but elements of it may be found moderated in nearly all segmented cultures. To repeat: Archaic exchange appears as the reciprocal presentation of gifts, or - to be more precise - of services whose Janus face displays at once voluntariness and duty, selflessness and self-interest. 'Almost always such services have taken the form of the gift, the present generously given even when, in the gesture accompanying the transaction, there is only a polite fiction, formalism, and social deceit, and when really there is obli­ gation and economic self-interest' (ibid.: 3). But how are we to understand the distinctive, and highly effective, compulsion of an exchange which has neither traders and money nor the modern forms of contract at its disposal, which knows no commodities and is not bound by any law of value? 'What rule of legality and self-interest, in societies of a backward or archaic type, compels the gift that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated? What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?' (ibid.: 3) The answer, gleaned from what a Polynesian informant had to say about the hau, has itself long been a subject of ethnographic controversy (see Levi-Strauss 1 987; Firth 1 959; Sahlins 1 972). It is the 'spirit of things', the idea of a magical property which compels reciprocation. Archaic exchange knows no freely available goods. Unlike in Roman and modern law, things are still endowed with a power of their own: they do not detach themselves

34

TOWARDS A N A NTH ROPOLOGY OF GIVI N G

from their owner. The thing received as a gift binds both giver and recipient with a force at once magical, religious, moral and legal. Itself a power, the gift gives power over the one who takes it. Violence lies in wait behind the ritual exchange intended for reconciliation and alliance, and the obligation to give back is, so to speak, covered by fear of magical retaliation. [Olne must give back to another person what is really part and parcel of his nature and substance, because to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul. To retain that thing would be dangerous and mortal, not only because it would be against law and morality, but also because that thing coming from the person not only morally, but physically and spiritually, that essence, that food, those goods, whether movable or immovable, those women or those descendants, those rituals or those acts of communion - all exert a magical or religious hold over you. Finally, the thing given is not inactive. Invested with life, often possessing individuality, it seeks to return to what Hertz called its 'place of origin' or to produce, on behalf of the clan and the native soil from which it sprang, an equivalent to replace it. (Mauss 1 990: 1 2- 1 3)

In a kind of rationalization, Mauss completes the operational framework of the system of total services by adding to it the obligation to reciprocate gifts. No one is free to evade the duty of giving or even to refuse accept­ ance of a gift; either would be tantamount to a declaration of war on the community. As Karl Marx discovered commodity fetishism, so does Marcel Mauss lay bare the jinxed forms of the gift. 'Everything is mixed together.' The gift-exchange is neither an objective relationship concerning things, nor a personal relationship concerning persons (Stentzler 1 979): the things (which in a way are 'souls' or persons that can be named and killed or bring death in their turn) and the individuals and groups (which 'to some extent treat one another as things') guarantee that everything comes and goes, as if there were 'a constant exchange of a spiritual matter, including things and men, distributed between social ranks, the sexes, and the generations' (Mauss 1 990: 14). As the organizational principle of social cohesion par excellence, gift­ exchange cannot simply be equated with the reproduction cycle of the social community. Rather, it encompasses both the living and the dead, the nature that gives everything and to which one owes so much, the super­ natural forces and gods to which one sacrifices a little in order to obtain a lot. It is obviously tempting to ground exchange on sacrifice, to let it follow its path in the history of civilization as the rationalization of sacrifice. But such an approach, which we shall examine later in detail and to which Mauss himself made an essential contribution, never comes to the fore in Sur Ie don. Here Mauss's major theme is the overcoming of a precarious initial state, the ending of the war of all against all, the conversion of the Hobbesian state of nature into peaceful, contractual forms of socialization. The gift performs for segmented societies what the state does for modern ones: it creates and guarantees peace. Mauss's Sur Ie don 'is a kind of social

THE G I FT

35

contract for the primitives' (Sahlins 1 972: 1 69). The original situation is the encounter between strangers, governed by that 'strange attitude' of exaggerated fear and animosity. In all the societies that have immediately preceded our own, and still exist around us, and even in numerous customs extant in our popular morality, there is no middle way: one trusts completely, or one mistrusts completely; one lays down one's arms and gives up magic, or one gives everything, from fleeting acts of hospitality to one's daughter and one's goods. It is in such a state of mind that men have abandoned their reserve and have been able to commit themselves to giving and giving in return. This was because they had no choice. Two groups of men who meet can only either draw apart, and, if they show mistrust towards one another or issue a challenge, fight - or they can negotiate. Until legal systems and economies evolved not far removed from our own, it is always with strangers that one 'deals', even if allied to them. In the Trobriand Islands the people of Kiriwina told Malinowski: 'The men from Dobu are not good like us; they are cruel, they are cannibals. When we come to Dobu, we are afraid of them. They might kill us. But then I spit out ginger root, and their attitude changes. They lay down their spears and receive us well.' Nothing better interprets this unstable state between festival and war. (Mauss 1 990: 8 1 -82)

The gift is alliance, solidarity, community. The exchange of things that are in a way persons, and of persons who in a way are treated as things, creates new forms of social integration that eventually leave behind the natural bonds of kinship systems. These systems are not, as political philosophers claim, based upon an original act of recognizing authority and power - not, that is, upon the state but upon the gift (see Sahlins 1972: 1 70f.). The gift is reason itself, albeit in a jinxed form. 'It is by opposing reason to feeling, by pitting the will to peace against sudden outbursts of insanity of this kind, that peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gifts and trade for war, isolation and stagnation' (Mauss 1 990: 82). In the 'general sociological and moral conclusions' that Mauss draws from his analysis of archaic exchange, 2 the history of civilization appears even more clearly as the perspective within which he is writing. Societies have progressed in so far as they themselves, their subgroups, and lastly, the individuals in them, have succeeded in stabilizing relationships, giving, receiving, and finally, giving in return. To trade, the first condition was to be able to lay aside the spear. From then onwards they succeeded in exchanging goods and persons, no longer only between clans, but between tribes and nations, and, above all, between individuals. Only then did people learn how to create mutual interests, giving mutual satisfaction, and, in the end, to defend them without having to resort to arms. Thus the clan, the tribe, and peoples have learnt how to oppose ( . . . ) one another without sacrificing themselves to one another. ( . . . ) This is one of the enduring secrets of their wisdom and solidarity. There is no other morality, nor any other form of economy, nor any other social practices save these. (ibid.: 82-83)

Nous touchons Ie roc. Gift-exchange is what binds collectives together. Based upon the group's mythical picture of the world, the motives, occasions and ritual practices all refer to experiences that have to be explained sociologically. Segmented

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or dual societies organize membership in such a way that the community, split into two halves, maintains complex relationships between the poles of rivalry and association. Mechanical, kinship-based solidarity (Durkheim 1 964), a narrow divi­ sion of labour and largely similar lifestyles ensure that the social units are strictly complementary in the world, that individuals define themselves in relation to one another by their membership of one of the halves, and that the social totality, according to the dominant principle of organization, is produced through kinship systems of widely varying reach and clarity. Marriage and descent are the focus around which the order of segmented societies is established. Structural anthropology has taken this contextualization in a much more radical direction. Claude Levi-Strauss starts from the idea that kinship systems are themselves nothing other than manifestations of a much more fundamental symbolic system - the exchange system - and that their essential function is to generate marriage rules and prohibitions and to define creditor-debtor relationships. Kinship rules, in this analysis, are the rules of an exchange in which women are the basic good and the highest value; but it is marriage which is the archetype of this exchange. Arguing with Mauss against Mauss, Levi-Strauss criticizes his 'empiricist' error of reconstructing exchange out of the three obligations of the system of total services. 'Exchange is not a complex edifice built on the obligations of giving, receiving and returning, with the help of some emotional-mystical content. It is a synthesis immediately given to, and given by, symbolic thought' (Levi­ Strauss 1 987: 58). In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Levi-Strauss 1 969), the deduction appears to be successful. The great variety of cultural patterns crystallizes into a small number of logical structures; incest and exogamy can be seen almost as institutionalized patterns complementing exchange relations, as the expression and regulation of the reciprocity principle underpinning the symbolic system of exchange. In the end, we are dealing with a mental structure that is grounded upon 'the unconscious activity of the mind'. This is, of course, not the time or place to pass judgement on 'the unconscious activity of the mind', the transformation rules between sym­ bolic systems or the logical marvels of structuralist analysis. 3 But a number of things do need to be established: that the exchange of women, insofar as it is at all adequate to think of it as exchange, occupies the key function in archaic societies; that kinship relations determine the distribution of material and symbolic goods; and that status and rank, as well as rights and duties, are hereby distributed, acquired or lost. If marriage and descent define the outward limits of community, kinship relations modulate internally the moral economy of reciprocal services. Mauss distinguished two forms in the system of total services - alliance and potlatch. Marshall Sahlins, in connection with Karl Polanyi's studies in economic history, compresses these into reciprocity and redistribution. Reciprocal exchange relations between two parties and, as an evolutionary

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acquisition, redistributive exchange relations organized through the person of the chief: these two forms are a continuum within which segmented societies carry out exchange relations. Although it is nothing other than a centralized, highly organized form of reciprocity, the redistributive type refers to a new social constellation. Reciprocity is an 'in-between relation', which regulates exchange between two parties with different interests; it maintains duality and produces symmetry. Redistribution, on the other hand, is a 'within relation', the collective action of a group, the comple­ ment of the social unity manifested in the chief. Now the chief functions as a 'tribal banker' (Malinowski), and the redistributive organization of reciprocity already contains the potential for political organization of the community. Political or personal allegiance may appear in the place of kinship, as it does in the Melanesian 'big man' system. As a ritual of communion and of subordination to central authority, redistri­ bution sustains the corporate structure itself, that is, in a social sense. The practical benefits may be critical, but whatever the practical benefits, chiefly pooling generates the spirit of unity and centricity, codifies the structure, stipulates the centralized organization and social action. (Sahlins 1 972: 1 90)

The typological distinction between reciprocity and redistribution is not without its problems. If one holds to a general norm of reciprocity, redistri­ bution is nothing other than an evolutionary variant of reciprocal services. The difference proves to be sharp only when a reordering of social integ­ ration is at issue, a transition from a dual-structured to a centralized community. It should also be considered that reciprocity is the form of exchange in archaic economies; the gift and the obligation to reciprocate it keep pushing, as it were, towards a conception of reciprocity as exchange. And yet, the seemingly 'economic' transactions of gift and return gift mainly serve to initiate, institutionalize and ratify relationship formulas. The fact that obligation 'assumes an aspect that centres on the interest attached to the things exchanged' (Mauss 1 990: 33) should not make us forget that there is always testing and generation of a standard, which lends predictable forms of mutuality to the interaction. 'In reality this symbol of social life the permanence of influence over the things exchanged - serves merely to reflect somewhat directly the manner in which the subgroups in these segmented societies, archaic in type and constantly enmeshed with one another, feel that they are everything to one another' (ibid.: 33). Reciprocity and exchange are not the same, even if they are not yet separate from each other in archaic economies. It is therefore important to maintain this distinction, because it implies the further difference that gift-giving is primarily geared to reciprocity rather than exchange, to social relationships rather than acquisitiveness and property transfers. For despite the confusion that makes Mauss constantly speak of gift-exchange, we should stick to his discovery that gift and exchange also cannot be equated with each other. The continuum of reciprocal services may best be grasped hypothetically by means of an extreme hypothesis. On the one side, we find Malinowski's

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'pure gift', marriage and kinship obligations, assistance o f various kinds, hospitality, all informal aspects of politeness, and the duties bound up with status and etiquette and culminating in noblesse oblige. Positive reciprocity, 'generalized reciprocity' (Sahlins), produces mutual ties and can easily accept one-sided exchange relations even over a long period of time. People give and then expect a return service sometime in the future: value and measure remain vague, depending upon the community definition. 'The expectation of reciprocity is indefinite' (Sahlins 1972: 1 94). On the other side, we find the stuff of which dreams are made: taking without giving, something for nothing. Negative reciprocity defines social groups from which one can take without having to give. This desire to have something for nothing is as old as the prohibitions that surround it. Of course, only its reverse seems capable of institutionalization: the obligation to give without taking (Gouldner 1 975a: 266). Generosity has connotations of status and power, and only at this level of subordination and super­ ordination do the extremes really seem to touch. Noblesse oblige. Finally, a mean is somewhere constructed as balanced reciprocity, with the Roman legal formula Do ut des adopted into the language. This too sets up mutuality, in the much stronger sense that both sides are obliged to do or give something for the other to do or give something in turn. 'I give in order that you give' - balanced reciprocity - is the normative orien­ tation and the form of interaction underpinning Mauss's interpretation of gift-exchange as a policy of peaceful alliance with neighbours. The distances between the forms, between measure and value of recipro­ cal services, between rights and duties, are socially constructed. Structure and validity are derived from the respective distance between kinship groups: in short, reciprocity, morality and kinship form a sectoral schema, a 'topographic' order. Sahlins ( 1 972: 1 99) has expressed this as shown in Figure 4. 1 . If the total space is represented as a hierarchical structure of different levels of integration, then each social space of its own takes shape as a structured segment of moral order. Family membership and close kinship tend towards forms of positive reciprocity; at the borders of local com­ munities, relationships start to become precarious; and intertribal space is at first the province of the Unnamed. Where kinship relations end, so too does the social world of mutual rights and duties. The level of social integration manifests itself spatially, and finds its most concentrated expression in the face-to-face action of groups. The greater the social distance, the weaker are the group's normative standards. Insofar as the moral economy proves itself, so too are reciprocity and morality them­ selves given a sectoral definition. Gift, help, common meal, for example, are not good or bad in themselves, but acquire their normative content from the situation that defines who and what the other is. In a theoretical construction that attempts to grasp reciprocity from the extremes as a continuum of mutuality relationships, the mode of seemingly non-self-interested, voluntary exchange relations established in family

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intertribal sector tribal sector village sector lineage sector

I

household gen . rec

Figure 4 . 1

I bai .

neg. rec

Sahlins diagram

subsistence economies is taken and used as, so to speak, the normative yardstick from which any deviation must necessarily appear to be a weak­ ening of the norm. Reciprocity and morality become frayed at the edges; the ethnic periphery of the community forms its outermost limit. The path through the continuum leads from forms of family solidarity through marriage, alliance and balanced exchange relations to abduction and war, from seemingly altruistic to apparently self-interested, one might almost say businesslike, enterprises. Yet it is precisely the sectoral boundaries, conflictual and therefore in need of regulation, which must be not only ritually marked but also made permeable. They make demands on the society's powers of imagination, being at once occasion and purpose of never-ending symbolic work. Not the least of its aims is to banish self­ interest from the formulae of social relations, to convert it into a collective process of systematic misrecognition, to replace inevitable selfish links with the 'sincere fiction' (Bourdieu 1 990: 1 1 2) of voluntary mutual relations. Contrary to the constructive logic of the reciprocity schema the sectoral boundaries, and especially the intertribal spaces are grown over with sym­ bolic orders, of which the kula is perhaps the most developed ceremonial form known to us. In societies whose symbolic representation systematically denies that their economic interests are economic, it is exactly as if the symbolic work cannot help converting those precarious social interstices into second- or third­ order kinship relations, as if, even where tough negotiations to safeguard particular interests determine current practice, it is first necessary to find a relationship formula for which the ritual form of gift-exchange cries out just as eagerly as that formula seeks for its part to ratify the ritual form. If brothers make gifts, then gifts make brothers. Service and return service, especially in the sphere of balanced reciprocity 'phrased as gift-giving' (Sahlins 1 972: 20 1 ), underlie the compulsion to develop a ritual form that promises nothing less than to revoke the law of self-interest. For the gift may not be capable of completely closing the gap between egoistic group interests and relations of solidarity in which strategy and calculation are by no means unknown, but it is capable of bridging it by institutionalizing the

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'Do as if' principle, so that at least violations are punished through either magical or violent retribution. Since the exchange involves the offering not of equivalence but of 'reciprocity' (Sohn-RetheI 1972: 1 42), all attention can be directed, seemingly without any calculation, at the symbolic aspects of the action, at the interaction rituals which only exist to stage generosity and voluntariness of the exchange as relationship formulas. Everything is concentrated around the pole of balanced reciprocity, as the problematic space where social relations are first invented and expressed as the most artificial form of symbolic work. But since the ritual compulsion becomes recognizable as compulsion, and the formalism is easily seen to be a fiction, ethnographic discourse has hardly been able to resist the temptation of reducing archaic exchange to the 'objective' core of an economic truth which seems to correspond more to the observer's picture of the world than to the practice of archaic societies. In order to grasp the social meaning of that collectively shared fiction, however, it is not enough to castigate the formalism of the gift as a social lie behind which naked interest takes cover as the need arises. In a society which refuses to recognize economic capital as such, to use Bourdieu's termin­ ology, the strategies of every practice (including economic practice) undergo a major shift; symbolic capital constitutes 'the only possible form of accumulation' (Bourdieu 1 990: 1 1 8) and gift-exchange its only 'rational' medium. The concept of the gift is so important that virtually nothing can be seen clearly without it. Yet as soon as one abstracts from concrete exchange­ acts and interests associated with the objects, one is left with a simple schema that obeys the logic of challenge, response and outstripping. The game of giving, like the game of honour, is not at all a zero sum game operating through reciprocity cycles; it is the modus operandi of social differentiation. In particular, the modulation of time structures, the free shaping of the time between gift and return gift, offers opportunities for the realization of a symbolic surplus; at the same time, it is the decisive gateway for the transformation of relations centred on reciprocity into ones of personal dependency. Because it protracts and so disguises the transaction that a rational contract would telescope into an instant, gift exchange is, if not the only mode of circu­ lation of goods that is practised, at least the only one that can be fully recognized in societies that deny 'the true ground of their life', as Lukacs puts it; and also the only way of setting up durable relations of reciprocity - and domination with the interposed time representing the beginnings of institutionalized domina­ tion. (Bourdieu 1 990: 1 1 2)

The transition is gradual from the symmetry of reciprocal service to the asymmetrical effects of redistributively organized relations, from horizontal structure to vertical hierarchy. Family rankings and seniority principles may be based upon the group's mythical picture of the world, but they alone cannot justify political rule (see Eder 1976). Political authority is built only through a combination of hereditary ranks and the redistributive

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organization of reciprocity. But the economic basis o f archaic 'politics' is calculated generosity. 'Or to take a larger view, the entire political order is sustained by a pivotal flow of goods up and down the social hierarchy, with each gift not merely connoting a status relation but, as a generalized gift not directly requited, compelling a loyalty' (Sahlins 1 972: 206). In an analogy with Gouldner's view of the reciprocity norm as a 'starting mechanism',4 Sahlins describes generosity as a triggering mechanism of political interaction, 'because it creates followership' (Sahlins 1 972: 209). Wealth creates obligations. One possesses in order to give, for only by giving does one possess. Only generosity summons great names, and these draw riches after them as well as themselves signifying wealth. 5 Rank sign, status duty and supreme virtue all in one,6 generosity implies and endorses practical proof of that social status which justifies the accumulation of 'economic capital' merely to distribute it ostentatiously, and thus to keep in motion a seemingly pointless, because circular, circulation which actually ensures that symbolic credit constantly grows in the form of obligations, loyalty and deference, services and dependences. 7 Again it is the gift which performs this miracle of converting social differences into officially recognized relations of reciprocity, and thus a la longue of moving from loyalty and allegiance to protection and obedience. The unreciprocated gift can give rise to debts, can itself become a debt; it justifies ties of dependency going well beyond the time period for reciprocation, and it is through giving that the only recognized power is established, the power of loyalty obligations, allegiance relations, rank and prestige. In such a universe, there are only two ways of getting and keeping a lasting hold over someone: debts and gifts, overtly economic obligations ( . .) or the moral obligations and emotional attachments created and maintained by the generous gift, in short, overt violence or symbolic violence, censored, euphemized, that is, misrecognizable, recognized violence. (Bourdieu 1 990: 1 26) .

The coexistence of the two forms should not make us overlook that symbolic violence, as a strategy for the pacification and officialization of social inequality, assumes a kingly role based upon the simple fact that power can be exercised only in its elementary person-to-person form and that personal authority can be gained only through actions which are recognized as corresponding to the group morality. Symbolic capital, that social credit provided by the group, requires the maximum investment of time and material resources (tokens of attention, helpful acts, gifts, proofs of trust), before it is established as political power and appears as a legitimate property rooted in the character of its owner (ibid.: 1 3 I f.). In this respect, the accumulation of material objects that appear to be of no 'economic' benefit chiefly serves as a means of gaining symbolic power, which then exerts itself 'as a power to achieve the recognition of power'. The wonderful objects that the gift-exchange moves around are such a constant source of social struggles because they are essentially 'means of

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demonstrating power' (ibid.: 1 3 1 ). Their possession documents the per­ sonal input that people were prepared to make to obtain them. Visibly, demonstrably, and largely removed from the realm of the profane, the group values are thus not only reified but, above all, represented as tokens of power incarnate in the possessor. This logic of personification, kept going through generosity and redistribution, is what makes possible the symbolic forms of power and legitimizes the costly exercise of that gentle force which is realized only by means of the gift-exchange. In these societies, a social or political figure is invented which pervades the history of cultures up to the present day. This is the generous, liberal­ handed man who selflessly indulges self-interest, scorns wealth and labour, gives without taking, because he knows how to take something that is obtained only by giving. From now on: 'To give is to show one's superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to , become small, to fall lower (minister) (Mauss 1 990: 74). The cooperation between naked and symbolic violence, between ritual warfare and destructive festival, conspicuous waste and political power, but also the totalizing power of archaic exchange, appear nowhere with greater clarity than in the 'property wars' of so-called potlatch societies. This form of archaic exchange, which Mauss considers more radical and more dis­ tinctive, governed social life among the coastal Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl peoples of the American Northwest. The tribes have a dual structure: from the end of spring they disperse to go hunting, to gather roots and the juicy mountain berries, and to fish for salmon in the rivers; at the onset of winter they concentrate once more in what are called 'towns'. It is then, during the period when they are gathered together in this way, that they live in a state of perpetual excitement. ( . . . ) There are constant visits from whole tribes to tribes, from clans to clans, and from families to families. There are repeated festivals, continuous and long drawn-out. At a wedding, or at various kinds of ritual or promotions, everything stored up with great industry during the summer and autumn on one of the richest coasts in the world is lavishly expended. This even occurs in domestic life. The people of one's clan are invited when a seal has been killed or when a case of berries or roots that have been preserved is opened up. (Mauss 1 990: 34-5)

The potlatch, whereby these societies effect a transfer of wealth con­ siderable even by today's standards, is nothing other than the system of gift­ exchange, from which it differs only in scale, extremeness and antagonism. Here too, the circulation of wealth in the form of gift and return gift is only a means to the end of obtaining special goods. The potlatch governs social life as a fait social total, and there is scarcely a single event - from wedding to funeral rite, from initiation, status-acquisition and ritualized transgres­ sion to the intertribal hierarchies of chieftains - which is not partly triggered by the potlatch, and in any case publicly ratified and authenticated by it. Unlike in simple organizations where kinship and marriage assure horizontal integration, this dimension is already used vertically in potlatch societies. Reciprocity involves collective redistribution and recognition of

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power and prestige, movement up and down a social hierarchy that does not seem at all secure. Everything is still to be played for; or, as Mauss remarks, the precondition is still the fragility of a hierarchy whose strengthening is actually the purpose of chieftain rivalry. A chief must give potlatches for himself, his son, his son-in-law, or his daughter, and for his dead. He can only preserve his authority over his tribe and village, and even over his family, he can only maintain his rank among the chiefs - both nationally and internationally - if he can prove he is haunted and favoured both by the spirits and by good fortune, that he is possessed, and also possesses it. And he can only prove this good fortune by spending it and sharing it out, humiliating others by placing them 'in the shadow of his name'. (Mauss 1 990: 39)

On the occasion of a festival, or even in the form of one, 'potlatch-giving' consists in the ceremonial and generous handing over of costly presents, which, after a certain period, must be not only reciprocated but just as ceremoniously and generously outmatched, with annual interest-rates above one hundred per cent not at all uncommon. Without any soothing rhetoric geared to reconciliation, the potlatch dramatizes the game logic of challenge, response and outstripping intrinsic to archaic exchange, where the main issue is to accumulate symbolic capital through generosity and lavishness, to gain honour and prestige, power and superiority, but also the right to humiliate one's inferiors and to cover them with invective. Nowhere is the individual prestige of a chief and that of his clan so closely linked to what is spent and to the meticulous repayment with interest of gifts that have been accepted, so as to transform into persons having an obligation those that have placed you yourself under a similar obligation. Consumption and destruc­ tion of goods really go beyond all bounds. In certain kinds of potlatch one must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is the richest and also the most madly extravagant. Everything is based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry. The political status of individuals in the brotherhoods and clans, and ranks of all kinds, are gained in a 'war of property', just as they are in real war, or through chance, inheritance, alliance and marriage. ( . . . ) Marriages for one's children and places in the brotherhoods are only won during the potlatch, where exchange and reciprocity rule. They are lost in the potlatch as they are lost in war, by gambling, or in running and wrestling. In a certain number of cases, it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated. Whole boxes of olachen (candlefish) oil or whale oil are burnt, as are houses and thousands of blankets. The most valuable copper objects are broken and thrown into the water, in order to put down and to 'flatten' one's rival. (Mauss 1 990: 37)

The struggle is waged for the acquisition and public recognition of titles and family rankings; the most valuable possession is usually a good name, or precedence in a ceremony such as a dance, or a certain position. Everything revolves around the concept of honour, which in these cultures is 'really destructive' (ibid.). Mauss suggests that its original meaning is best expressed through the modern concepts of 'wealth' and 'authority'. The only wealthy person is the one who has mana (Polynesia), auctoritas (Rome) or, in potlatch societies, walas who is therefore a 'generous man'. -

44

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The closeness between wealth (noblesse oblige), authority (the right to order those who receive gifts) and the potlatch is clear enough. In Indo-European languages, too, there are the same conflicting meanings of liberality and honour, but the original Gothic word for wealth (gabei) referred to giban, which means 'to give', while the word Reichtum (which means 'wealth' in modern German) referred to that which is there only to be given. Honour (Ehre), however, is achieved only by giving. Stemming from the old High German era, it denotes an action that is owed (Ehrerbietung, Ehrung) but also the objective form of the gift (Gabe), as well as the motives and emotional states (Ehrfurcht [,reverence'], Scheu ['awe']). On the other hand, it also denotes the qualities (Ansehen ['repute'], Wurde ['worth'], Glanz ['glory']) for the sake of which the emotions arise and the actions are performed (Grimm and Grimm 1 862: 54f.; Korff 1 966; Zunkel 1 975; Berking 1 989a). At the beginning there is a reverence of the gods, which also affects those who have to mediate between the profane and the sacred. The divine representatives, as well as the earthly authorities, were for a long time able to live off this reverence. The sacral core is quite apparent in potlatch societies. Someone who cannot keep up in the rivalry and property wars, or respond to the challenge, or place the creditor at the first opportunity in the position of debtor, loses his honour, his soul and his face - in the literal sense of the word. For 'it is in fact the face, the dancing mask, the right to incarnate a spirit, to wear a coat of arms, a totem - it is really the persona that is called into question in this way, and that is lost at the potlatch, at the game of gifts, just as it can be lost in war, or through a mistake in ritual' (Mauss 1 990: 39). Even the discourse accompanying the potlatch frames it, so to speak, in its profane, power-stabilizing dimension. Driven by rivalry and ostenta­ tious displays of superiority, extravagant generosity is always what one owes to the ancestor whose name one bears. Self-glorification of the one through degradation of the other is hardly likely to calm anything down. The caricatures of invited rivals are just as much part of the potlatch as are the contemptuous speeches and songs on the part of the hosts, which appear to foreign eyes as 'unabashed megalomania' (Benedict 1 935: 1 90). I am YaqatIenis, I am Cloudy, and also Sewid; I am great Only One, and I am Smoke Owner, and I an Great Inviter. These are the names which I obtained as marriage gifts when I married the daughters of the chiefs of the tribes wherever I went. Therefore I feel like laughing at what the lower chiefs say, for they try in vain to down me by talking against my name. Who approaches what was done by the chiefs my ancestors? Therefore I am known by all the tribes over all the world. Only the chief my ancestor gave away property in a great feast, and all the rest can only try to imitate me. They try to imitate the chief, my grandfather, who is the root of my family. Wa, out of the way, Wa, out of the way. Turn your faces that I may give way to my anger by striking my fellow-chiefs. They only pretend; they only sell one copper again and again and give it away to

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the little chiefs of the tribes. Ah, do not ask for mercy, Ah, do not ask in vain for mercy and raise your hands, you with lolling tongues. I only laugh at him, I sneer at him who empties (the boxes of property) in his house, his potlatch house, the inviting house where we are made hungry. I am the great chief who vanquishes, I am the great chief who vanquishes. Oh, go on as you have done! Only at those who continue to turn around in this world, Working hard, losing their tails (like salmon), I sneer, At the chiefs under the true great chief. Ha! have mercy on them! put oil on their dry brittle-haired heads, The heads of those who do not comb their hair. I sneer at the chiefs under the true great chief, I am the great chief who makes people ashamed. (Benedict 1 935: 1 90-2)

'Monstrous product of the system of presents' (Mauss 1 990: 42) yet 'universal mode of culture' (Levi-Strauss 1 969: 53), the potlatch stands for a maximum of etiquette and ceremonial. The game of honour generates a simple system of negation and conscious misjudgement. The most expensive goods must be handed over and received with dignity; but at the same time, they are introduced into the transaction as excreta or garbage worthy of contempt. The challenger feels compelled to execute the material loss with ostentatious composure, but, at the same time, the etiquette gives him space to experience it as a symbolic gain and to incorporate it into his expressive behaviour as a publicly legitimated sign of social superiority. Meanwhile, all the rival can do is meet with perfect aplomb the giving and the humiliation, the provocation and the contempt, so that he can make up for it all the more at the next opportunity. There are no other alternatives. For 'the punish­ ment for failure to reciprocate is slavery for debt' (Mauss 1 990: 42), which would lose him not only his social position but his very status as a free person. The potlatch model is not, at first sight at least, based upon the moral idea of mutual recognition that is commonly ascribed to the gift-exchange. Indeed the agonistic structure, symbolically tamed (though little extenuated) through etiquette and ceremonial, marks out that historically successful mode of symbolic struggle where the stakes are never reciprocity but always the establishment and institutionalization of relationships of superiority. The potlatch vision condenses themes and motives that run all the way through the history of human cultures: conspicuous waste, liberality and contempt for wealth as a means and expression of cultural superiority, linked with the formation and stylization of exclusive, more or less rigid, bodily rhetoric and practices of 'honour'. That the potlatch is an aristocratic form driven by magnanimity and etiquette, should obviously not be taken as the last word on the matter. It was Georges Bataille who decisively radicalized the Maussian prob­ lematic. Whereas Mauss mistakenly traced even our own welfare societies

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back t o archaic 'noble' forms of reconciliation through lavishness, Bataille offered a different model based upon the destructive and the violent, the apparently meaningless and the purely wasteful, thereby simply inverting the rigid images of what was useful and useless, necessary and superfluous. 8 One does not have to share the, as it were, cosmic perspective of Bataille's 'general economics', nor his philosophy of history that assumes a growing homogenization of the world, nor the anthropological foundations of his emotive concept of sovereignty that wagers upon the removal of boundaries and the recovery of a lost intimacy - and yet, one can still find captivating his notion of 'unproductive overspending'. The idea is simple: there may be a surplus of social resources which is not completely appropriated; a broad sphere of unproductive expenditure may thus appear alongside production and the directly necessary process of reproductive consumption. 'Luxury, funeral ceremonies, wars, cults, the erection of magnificent buildings, games, theatre, arts, perverse (i.e. dis­ sociated from genitality) sexuality are all activities which, at least originally, have their goal within themselves' (Bataille 1 967: 26f.), and whose main emphasis is on loss. Only to them does the term 'unproductive expenditure' apply - pure waste of resources, non-purposive and without any relation to the quality of things. As far as the philosophy of history is concerned, the core feature here is the sovereignty or abyss-like freedom of the subject's pointless consumption, a freedom which, appearing at most in moments of ecstasy and frenzy, is actually excluded from the world of utility and things by the original curse of work and by the advance of purposive calculation. The one and only substitute that still offers some access to sovereignty is religion, and Bataille accordingly finds in ritual sacrifice the purest empirical form of this sovereignty. But it too is already a hybrid, profaned form, an echo of unbounded, self-consuming subjectivity. What Bataille finds interesting about potlatch societies is, in a sense, the second original sin against sovereignty. The potlatch serves first as empirical confirmation of the primacy of unproductive expenditure; it is a process of squandering beside which production and acquisition appear secondary. At the same time, however, the archaic form displays a thoroughly ambivalent aspect, for it constantly subordinates the acts of unproductive expenditure to a peculiar logic of appropriation. Waste and appropriation, unproductive expenditure and acquisitiveness, are equally constitutive: they establish and support the terrain of symbolic violence, and underpin distinctions expressed in the differential value of individuals which ultimately, according to Bataille's central anthropological thesis ( 1 988: 7 1), are based upon 'the identity of power and the force of loss'. There is no going back once one is caught in the poker-like ritual of potlatch and counter-potlatch. Gift and return gift are simply counters in the game, their only purpose being to provoke further moves and to produce shame-driven assurances of coordinated action; this situational power cannot be guaranteed or translated into some property or other, but it is always precisely determined (at a considerably greater level) for the

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next move in the game. Showered with return gifts, the original challenger sustains an appearance of profit, while his counterpart can play with the impression of having victoriously gained some real power. The ideal would be a potlatch that cannot be reciprocated. For only he who has the last word achieves a power that derives superiority from the force of loss. We need to give away, lose or destroy. But the gift would be senseless (and so we would never decide to give) if it did not take on the meaning of an acquisition. Hence giving must become acquiring a power. Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses. He enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity. (Bataille 1 988: 69; 1 967: l i S)

Obviously, though, the unproductive expenditure, the sovereign con­ tempt for riches, is not exactly selfless but is bound up with interests and goals related to the gaining of power. For the extravagance confers prestige upon the extravagant giver and ultimately determines his social rank. Through the force of loss, prestige in the etymological sense of trickery or magic becomes prestige in the more familiar sense of status or reputation. Bataille stresses the contradictory nature of a practice which is directed entirely at the negation of purposive use, yet makes that negation itself purposive. The losses are not in vain. They call forth rank, that is, the opposite of a thing which is entirely based upon contempt for things, and yet which can be appropriated and used just like a thing, a tool or a field. It is this paradoxical issuing of desire from its negation, of the symbolic power of the useless from the negation of use, which produces the glittering illusion of the superfluous. Prestige and rank, honour and glory, thus appear as sources of profit, successfully integrated into strategies for the acquisition of power and dominance. But this should not make us forget that they have their ground in processes of unproductive expenditure. Whereas Mauss drew little or no distinction in his argument between generosity and strategic calculation, Bataille shifts the weight towards the force of loss which is symbolic power. We cannot assert the priority of the rivalry principle over the sovereign generosity which is the origin of the gift. Were we to do so, we would actually reverse the terms under discussion. Would this then mean that calculation was on the side of the giver? The game would cease if things were so. Even if the giver only feigns it at bottom it is always his generosity, not his calculation, which makes an impression. To be sure, in these archaic forms it was the rule that the giver should put on a show, but his generosity would not have got a look-in without excess. In the end, it was the one who went beyond measure who won the victory and whose sovereign nature imposed itself. (Bataille quoted and translated from Bergfleth 1 985: 1 9)

Immoderation and sovereignty are originally equivalent values; both refer to a realm strictly removed from the mundane, and the power that they give is also not of this world. Rather, it is based upon that sacredness

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whose auratic powers are released through the paradoxical practice of waste and appropriation, profaned within certain limits and thus made accessible to the presentational symbolism of power. The sovereign force which Bataille sees operating in history is a derivative sovereignty mixed together with profane power, and the 'nimbus' (plessner 1 970: 77) radiating from it, the 'mystery' (Simmel 1 958: 274) surrounding it, everything that commands reverence and compliance, results from the communion that binds even the most worldly power to the sphere of the sacred. In archaic societies, Bataille maintains, rank still adheres to 'the sacred presence of a subject' whose sovereignty does not depend upon things, whereas in bourgeois society it is determined only by the ownership of things neither sovereign nor sacral. Analysis of potlatch societies makes it easier to see those interstices of the civilizing process where symbolic orders are designed and put into operation. Social rank already displays both its origin in a sphere beyond goals and things, and its capacity to be employed repressively in practices of domination. Bataille shares Durkheim's legacy in that he too insists on a strict polarity of the profane and the sacred, although the significance he attaches to them is quite different. The sacred does not appear as an expression of hypostatized society; it cannot be directly decoded as collective image and moral consciousness of the social group, 9 but stands for that which is radically other, that which is systematically removed from any routine or regulated form of life. The locus of elemental violence, of death and sexuality, the sacred is fenced round with taboos and summons up both joy and terror; it is thus related to the profane as the superfluous is to the purposive, or as original sovereignty is to historically triumphant rational calculation. Bataille uses this dualism to evoke the development dynamic of the historical process as one of progressive delimitation and 'extraterritorialization of sacred powers' (Habermas 1 987: 225) - a destiny affecting even unproductive expenditure, the form that still retains partial access to the sacred. We shall look more closely at some traces of this ethical rationalization of life, in the sense of an extraterritorialization of the sacred which leads from priestly power through the military power of the nobility and the absolute power of the ruler to what Bataille ( 1 967: 90) calls the 'universal meanness' of bourgeois society and the accompanying return of the repressed. Before we turn to these matters, however, we need to step much further back in the history of civilization. For gift-giving and the potlatch refer to something elemental. Both bear clear marks of an older institution where the open violence of exchange - in the form of ritual killing - is made the centre of sacral action. The symbolic order of archaic worlds is religious in nature, and the religious sacrifice is an original power. Could gift-giving, then, have its foundation in the sacrifice? Can the gift be more accurately described as a secularization or rationalization of sacrifice? In the concept of the sacrificial offering, and more generally the employ-

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ment of offerings and gifts, there lingers something which used to be theorized in religious studies as a relationship of inverted grounding and which, in the gift paradigm of the offering, was of considerable historical importance. 1 0

5

T HE SACR IF ICE

Like every human institution, religion does not begin anywhere Durkheim The history of civilization is that of the inversion of the offering Horkheimer and Adorno

Up to this point, social relations among living people have been the focus of our attention. But the dead and nature also play a major role in exchange. The festival of the dead among the Unalit begins with a summoning of the ancestors' souls to reincarnate themselves in the living bearers of their names. The souls are showered with gifts, and are heavily laden indeed when they finally make their way back beyond the grave. 'At this moment, then, not only does the group regain its unity, but the ideal group, composed of each successive generation since the earliest times, takes shape in one and the same ritual' (Mauss 1 966a: 447). To give to the living means above all to give to the dead - to recognize the spirits of the dead and the gods as the true owners of the things of this world. Exchange with them is both necessary and dangerous, as profitable as refusal would be risky. From these themes Mauss develops a theory of the 'contract sacrifice' according to which it is necessary to buy from ancestors and gods, for they are there essentially to give something big for something small (Mauss 1 990: 1 6f.). The potlatch demonstrates both: it mixes the principle of giving and the principle of sacrifice. Insofar as it is sacrificial action, the violent, purely destructive aspect in it is the principle of sacrifice. The ultimate purpose of the destruction 'is precisely that it is an act of giving that is necessarily reciprocated' (ibid.). Slaves and valuable teams of dogs are slaughtered, boats and houses are burnt, sacred objects are destroyed, and yet nothing is really lost: everything remains destined for ancestors and spirits, those beings who own the wealth and constantly reproduce it, who give life and take from the living in order to live themselves. Nature too gets its share, so as to ensure the persistence and repro­ duction of the whole. Reparation and resurrection are at the centre of cultural actions that mediate the society's relationship to nature. So it is with the eskimos' 'bladder festival'. 'At the end, they throw at once into the sea all the bladders of all the sea creatures killed by the whole group in the course of the year. The animal souls they are supposed to contain will be

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reincarnated in the females o f the seals and walruses' (Mauss 1 966a: 446). The idea that one owes a debt to nature is as old as the gifts offered to pay it off. For hunting and trapping, even reaping, are all basically forms of violent killing. These assaults on animate nature demand that the stuff of life should be protected, the wounds of theft and murder healed, and the fears of reproductive sterility calmed through appropriate sacrifices. This is why Indian gatherers offer up the first fruits, or fishermen the first catch. Nomads sacrifice their best young animals, the Phoenicians gave Baal the first-born of the noblest families, and as the corn ripened the Aztecs immolated the corn goddess represented by a female slave. The spatial and temporal extension of these primordial sacrifices indicates that fertility and ancestor cults are among the most ancient recorded institutions in the history of culture. Gift and sacrifice belong together. It is not only that, in the most varied cultures, gifts are again and again understood as sacrifices and vice versa. It is also that gift and sacrifice denote two, admittedly distinguishable, intensities in the continuum of an anthropology of giving from which the moral vocabulary of archaic societies developed. We do not know how guilt came into the world. But we can investigate what it may have meant to owe something, and try to show how this something gradually fell away, how guilt (Schuld) came out of debts (Schulden) and how obligations came out of the relationship formulae brought about by exchange. A first, amazingly simple answer to the 'genealogy of morals' was given by Friedrich Nietzsche. Guilt, he argued, comes from owing. Creditor and debtor (Schuldner) form the basic configuration, but its obvious core is the idea that there is an equivalent for damage and pain, that debts can be settled through suffering. The creditor, as it were, acquires a right to cruelty, which he executes by making the other suffer in a 'veritable festival'. Nietzsche bases his critique of morals on the exchange relation, or rather on the law of obligation in which punishment, precisely as pain and suffering, serves as compensation to the injured party. I I Punishment, however - at first, the right of masters - is one of those outer bulwarks which were erected against the instincts of freedom, but which in the end only caused them to turn inward. Someone who is too weak to harm others will harm himself. 'Hostility, cruelty, the delight in persecution, raids, excitement, destruction all turned against their begetter. Lacking external enemies and resistances, and confined within an oppressive narrowness and regularity, man began rending, persecuting, terrifying himself, like a wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage. [ . . . ] this fool, this pining and desperate prisoner, became the inventor of "bad conscience'" (Nietzsche 1 956: 2 1 8) : the malady of a humanity whose history has been one of resentment and guilt. Here too it is a question of creditor-debtor relations - initially with the idea that the living can survive only by repaying their debt to their forebears through service and sacrificial offerings. Nietzsche stresses the juridical character of the relationship and

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dismisses out of hand any emotional engagement. However, the debt grows through being acknowledged: it becomes all the greater, the more that society gains power and glory from the ancestors. But still nothing comes free. So how could the ancestors be repaid? 'By burnt offerings (to provide them with food), by rituals, shrines, customs, but above all, by obedience ( . . . ): but could they ever be fully repaid? An anxious doubt remained. . .' (ibid.: 222), and an awareness of having debts to the gods never ceased to grow for several thousand years. The progress towards universal empire brought universal gods: despotism, by allowing the independent noble to conquer, cleared the way for monotheism; and the 'stroke of genius' of Christianity, the god who sacrifices himself for the guilt of men, finally seals the inescapable domination of the feeling of guilt. Guilt comes from debts, and debts are settled with violence, with murder and homicide, torture and enslavement. Retribution, however - repent­ ance, atonement, reparation - remains a sacred duty. Mauss's essay Sur Ie don tells of war and peace, the ending of original violence through the exchange of gifts, the replacement of naked with symbolic force. The gift is an alliance: it establishes symmetry. But violence still lurks behind the duty to reciprocate - a potential which is acted out in the potlatch as ritual warfare serving the triumphant visualization of social superiority or else, in a banal backsliding, the murder of the rival. The symbolic power of the two forms recalls the sombre background still apparent in the religious sacrifice that is institutionally harnessed as glorious, sacred violence. It is not the gift but the sacrifice, not the reciprocity of archaic exchange but ritualized killing, which is the starting point for the journey of civilization through those regions of guilt and duty which provide the moral inventory of the anthropology of giving. The basic formula of the gift exchange - give, take, reciprocate - cannot have been the first word. For the giver must already have taken. The above-mentioned redistributive strategies which serve to institutionalize chieftain roles point in the wrong direction. Before giving, taking and reciprocating, there is slaughtering, taking and distributing - in short, everything required by the contextualization of ritual killing as sacrifice, as sacred doing (sacer + facere) or (in Bataille's interpretative translation [ 1 967: 28]) 'the production of sacred things'. The sacrifice l 2 is a fundamental religious ceremony; people offer their god a sacrifice, which usually means that something is destroyed or slaughtered. 'Take your son ( . . . ) and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you' (Gen. 22.2). Abraham obeys his god's command, finds the indicated spot, builds an altar, makes a pile of wood, binds his first-born and makes ready to kill him. At the last moment, God stops the pointless sacrifice of Isaac - in whose place a ram eventually dies and is burnt. The story of Abraham and Isaac prefigures the definitive sacrifice of Christian theology, the crucifixion of Jesus, 1 3 which is repeated and recalled in the ritual meal of the Communion ('this is my blood', 'my body', for 'the forgiveness of

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sins'). Not only does the talk of 'the Lamb of God' (John 1 .29) emphasize the archaic image of animal sacrifice; the definition of the Mass as bloodless representation of the sacrifice on the cross imported the central concepts of Roman sacrificial language immo/atio, hostia, victima, sacerdos, sacrificium into the dogmas of the Catholic Church (see Cancik­ Lindemaier 1 990). There was slaughter on all sides. The ancient heaven is full of gods and permeated by the smoke and greasy vapours of altar-burnt offerings. On the various festive occasions when people came together to sacrifice to the gods, their main motives must have been vows, entreaties and thanks­ giving, purification and atonement. The schema of a Roman state sacrifice clarifies the ritual procedure of such sacred actions (see Oldenstein 1 984: 1 78f.). Having been checked by the ponti/ex for any external sign of injury, the cattle and pigs were adorned with cloths and ceremonially driven to the place of sacrifice. Tied with ropes (as any runaway was a bad omen that meant the whole procedure had to be repeated), the animals came to the sacred spot. People were commanded to be silent, and flute players sur­ rounded the holy circle to offer musical protection against harmful influ­ ences. While the priest pronounced the offering formula, the sacrificial victim was purified. Then began a preliminary offering of wine or incense on the altar, and the animal itself was sprinkled on the head with sacrificial meal and wine. To leave nothing to chance that might damage the effect of the ceremony, the priest recited the full prayer to the master of the sacrifice, who repeated it after him. Then an assistant felled the animal with a blow to the head and dissected it to check that all its entrails were intact. If this was not so, the sacrifice had to be repeated. But otherwise the exta were boiled and then burnt on the altar with parts of the meat. The whole festive meal with the rest of the meat finally concluded the religious event. Thus killing and eating, sacrifice and repast, appear as the highpoints of archaic festivals. Animals are slaughtered for the gods, but the congre­ gation keeps the best for itself. In the mythical meal at Mekone, which epitomized the Olympian food offering, Prometheus divided up the roast: bones, hide and gallbladder for Zeus, and everything edible for humans. The myth calls this the sacrificial trick, using it then, of course, as the basic formula for Olympian sacrifice: 'And from this time the tribes of men on earth / Burn, on the smoking altars, white ox-bones' (Hesiod, Theogony 556f.). It was pointed out long ago that the sacrifice is meant for eating and forms part of a food communion; that gods and men come together to renew their original unity through a common meal. 1 4 The prior spilling of blood, however, went remarkably unnoticed, and it is not easy to avoid the suspicion that this might have something to do with the Christian ethnocentrism of research. It is well known that Freud already envisaged the primal scene of civilization as an act of violence, the common slaughter and devouring of the totem as a ceremonial repetition of parricide, and the emergence of monotheism as a return of the repressed. -

-

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What stories and interpretations present themselves, then, whether new or only age-old, if the Freudian framework is extended to make 'violence and the sacred' our starting point (Girard 1 977), so that ritual killing is not mainly an expression of religious ideas but, rather, religious belief systems and religions themselves are grounded upon the sacrifice? And what does it mean for the context of gift-giving if its genesis lies in the violence of ceremonial slaughter? Walter Burkert ( 1 972: 9f.) writes about Ancient Greece: This is the ceremony of piety: blood-letting, slaughter - and eating. ( . . .) It is not only in a holy way of life, nor in prayer, song and dance, that God is most powerfully experienced, but in the deadly blow of the axe, the trickling blood, the burning piece of thigh ( . . ). The basic experience of the 'sacred' is the sacrificial killing. Homo religiosus acts, and becomes aware of himself, as homo necans. This is 'acting' as such, operari - from which the German loan-word Opfer ('sacrifice' or 'offering') is taken. l s .

Homo necans - killer man - i s both title and thesis of an imposing investigation into the imponderables of prehistoric times, in which Walter Burkert attempts to explain the religious sacrifice on the basis of the hunt. Karl Meuli ( 1 975 [ 1 946]) had already paved the way by uncovering older, long-obscure hunting rituals (most common among Siberian peoples) in the curious distribution rules of the Olympian sacrifice (see Burkert 1 983b: 22). Not the burning of bones, but the 'cremation' of thigh-bones and skulls of slaughtered beasts, was what took place at the holy sites - a hunting custom whose traces went back to the palaeolithic period, and which had been able to survive into the age of peasant and city cultures. The central meaning of the Promethean division of the sacrifice then became perfectly understandable: not a trick, but regeneration of the prey, restitution of the basis of life, return of the part from which the whole emerges again - to a being conceived as lord or lady of the game. Intimately bound up with this idea of restitution, the hunting rituals clearly bring out the aspect of killing, the notion - rather amazing in relation to 'primitive' societies - that the hunting and killing is related to feelings of guilt and therefore needs a kind of settlement or absolution of guilt or, in the so-called 'comedies of inno­ cence', is played out in such a way that the sacrifice is lamented at length and responsibility for the deed is shifted on to others: in short, that the original act of violence is subjected to collective denial. Tungus hunters, for example, immediately make off from the scene of their success and later come across it again 'by chance', expressing loud and pained surprise at finding the noble beast slain by wicked men. The Finns used to offer their hand in all honesty to the dead bear, regretfully pointing out that he was to blame for his own misfortune (Meuli 1 975: 953f.). The ritualization of the hunt - preparatory cleansing, comedy of inno­ cence, absolution, reparation - is the ritualization of killing. Karl Meuli explains it in terms of the principle of 'respect for life'. The hunter must kill in order to live, and he fully enacts this paradox in his rituals. Sacrificial

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rituals precisely reproduce this model of killing animals in order to eat. Sacrifice is 'ritual slaughter' (ibid.: 948) followed by the common meal. Walter Burkert develops Meuli's findings in two ways. First, he connects up with the discussion on the role of hunting in prehistorical and anthro­ pological studies, and takes the 'hunting hypothesis' at its word. Second, he provides Konrad Lorenz's theory of aggression 16 as the framework to explain the human functions of hunting and killing as a channelling of species aggression, whose community-building power is proven in the sacralization of violence as the evolutionary mechanism out of which society emerges. In this respect, the theory of the ritualization of hunting is for Burkert also a theory about the origins of religion. Rituals come into play here - or, to be more precise, the idea resulting from the 'Copernican revolution' of ethology (Burkert 1 972: 37; see 1 983a: 29f.) that standardized behaviour functioning as signs is prior to linguistic forms of communi­ cation. The ethological theory of ritual is the bridge built between behavioural science and religion to elucidate the passage from nature to culture. The 'hunting hypothesis' states that man became man when groups of males went out hunting together with suitable tools - which simultaneously presupposed and advanced the development and consolidation of speci­ fically human physical dispositions and behavioural patterns, such as an upright gait, use of weapons, association and forms of cooperation with a corresponding system of signs, mastery of fire to toughen wooden spears, a gender division of labour, and differentiation of gender roles. 'This is not immutable nature, but anyone who fights it has to beat a tradition going back a hundred thousand generations' (Burkert 1 983b: 26). Whatever man's precursors who came down from the trees actually looked like, they had to give up a tried-and-tested form of life and expose themselves to the risks of seeing and being seen within a larger horizon. 'Absolutism of reality' ( 1 985: 4) is how Hans Blumenberg describes this constructed zero hour of anthropogenesis: confrontation with the indeter­ minate, absolute predominance of the Other that has for long not been the other, defines a situation in which fear is the basic presence. Here the most varied ways of mastering fear - not only prevention but, for example, suppositions of closeness for something not close at all, or of explanation for things inexplicable, or of naming for things unnameable - are the central challenge facing men. 'The formula of "hunters and mothers" sums up the overcoming of the loss of the old state of concealment in the primeval forest' (Blumenberg 1 985: 4). With the division of space into caves and the wild, inside and outside, the 'absolutism of images' opposes the absolutism of reality. Hidden shelter permits what open spaces deny: the rule of wishfulness, the magic of illusion, the preparation of an effect in thought, the imaginary removal of power from an unfamiliar outside. 'Homo pielor is not only the producer of cave paintings for magical practices relating to hunting, he is also the creature who covers up the lack of reliability of his world by

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projecting images' (ibid.: 8 ) . Yet the need for food, which must be secured in the wild, always demands practical action before this creature shapes the inside with his imagination. Homo pielor steps forth and returns to his shell as killer man. To kill animals for food was thus the first pragmatic act, the primal scene in a sense, which inaugurated the pluperfect of humanity. Precisely because this species, unlike beasts of prey, has no biological 'blueprints' for successful hunting, it must make adjustments which (according to Burkert's interpretation) all stem from the one violent act of killing at the dramatic climax of the chase. The prey is the other living being that provides food for those who run it down. It is projection surface for the intraspecific aggression on the group, which only thus becomes a group capable of cooperation; and at the same time, it is an outstanding reference object for a whole complex of motiva­ tional and psychological patterns which make killing itself a necessary but highly problematic, and therefore central event. The projection of aggression onto the prey already begins a process of anthropomorphiza­ tion. Perhaps through the perception of physical similarities, a number of contrasting attributions - beast/man, hunter/prey, friend/enemy, life/death, in ever-changing roles - assert a basic unity and eventually converge in the idea of a lord or lady of game. But anthropomorphization is not what creates the problem; the experience of killing, rather, is what sets the whole process in motion. To explain how this happens, how new forms of behaviour and motivation become so rich in prospects, Burkert transposes Lorenz's theory of aggression to the model of primeval hunter-groups and describes the motivational qualities of the moment as a shock-mixture of triumph and fear, excitement and guilt, from which a particular kind of association arises. Since aggression is from the beginning wedded to the primary motive of food acquisition, since the necessities of life can be obtained only together and only through violence, this whole constellation suggests a kind of nascent awareness of the meaning of killing that is experienced in the mode of shock. This is the new motivational level, resulting from the necessary act of collective violence, which makes the act itself the centre of conflicting motivations. The shock of killing, the terror of shedding blood, leads to a ritualization of the hunt. The ritual does not negate the fear or the excitement but makes them productive. The ritualized hunt begins with preparations 'at home'; the chase itself is the dramatization of action sequences whereby the group is kept in order, the approach to the prey is controlled, and fear and terror are heightened until the moment of death, when they are discharged in triumph and joy not unperturbed by guilt or remorse. The aggression is fully acted out in the communal hunting and killing, but in the rituals of concern and restitution it is practically transformed as a new standard of behaviour. The flesh of the slain animal is destined for 'others', for the women and children 'at home', and this inversion of the motivational structure - giving (back) to others what one took for oneself by killing emerges from the ritualization of hunting and killing as the key

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distinctively human disposition. Burkert analyses it, i n his usual behaviouristic terms, as a reaction to the shock of killing that is intended to make 'reparation'. Whatever the psychosocial realities of palaeolithic hunters may have been, the 'hunting hypothesis' offers a simple model to explain basic forms of cooperation and exchange, yet ritual killing itself is the paradigmatic case of an encounter which, when ritualized as an exchange relation, becomes a powerful tradition. Hunters kill prey, give the 'souls' back to the lord of game, and share out the meat among the mothers and children. All the basic socializing activities - later represented by the basic verbs 'to give', 'to take', 'to bring', 'to kill' - are here already in play. For an anthropology of giving, this means that the sequence of hunting, killing and distributing appears to be fundamental to the formula of the gift­ exchange: 'between "taking" and "giving" stands the act of slaughter' (Burkert 1 983b: 27). After the killing, however, and long before the gods enter the stage, comes the communal eating. With one exception, and abstracting from the mother-child relationship, the gender difference in food procurement and distribution is not present among either primates or beasts of prey. Only male chimpanzees now and then hunt smaller animals, whose meat they hand out, as the mood takes them, to begging members of the group. This appears to be the only known occasion on which chimpanzees share out food: 'it is everyone for himself when it comes to bananas' (ibid.: 28). Among humans, however, the near­ universal combination of meat-eating and distribution rules, whose history begins with the hunt, 1 7 still survives in the ritual sacrifice of urban high cultures. Some primeval hunter-groups made killing a highly ritualized and intricate affair, which not only attracted all the attention but structured all of the group's social and affective life. This 'invention', according to Burkert, did not at all prove to be an evolutionary cul-de-sac, but gener­ ated a ritual tradition of killing and distribution from which every com­ munity developed. The main objection to this construction of sacrificial ritual out of hunting behaviour is that the sacrificed animals were always domesticated, and that the rituals in question could have appeared at the earliest only with the neolithic revolution. However, Karl Meuli has taken much of the force from the objection by pointing to the amazing uni­ formity between the ritual slaughter practised by hunters and by herdsmen. 'Just as sacrifices among the Greeks for the common meal had their dead and their heroes, so here does the [herdsmen's] sacrifice follow the vener­ able old slaughtering ritual which, since the age of the hunters, had been laid down for any killing of an animal for food' (Meuli 1 975: 987). The ritual seems to continue unchanged through the structural transformations of the neolithic revolution, but its narrative framework becomes completely different. For 'what it really meant was forgetting; the "sacred" parts, like so much else, became a gift' (ibid.). As ritual sacrifice in pastoral and agrarian cultures no longer presupposed the violent capture of the hunt,

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but counted rather as a kind o f transfer o f wealth or property, the thing given could now really appear as a gift. Perhaps this is the precise historical point of departure for that interpretation of the sacrifice as a gift which persists even today - an interpretation more in keeping with the narrative mode than with the thing itself. 1 8 The achievements o f the neolithic revolution are not limited t o the technological and organizational innovations of an increasing domestica­ tion of plants and animals; they also involve a fundamental reconstruction of world-views and available schemas of interpretation. 'The primitive mind reaches its zenith with an increasing mastery of external nature, in a symbolic construction of the world which culturally interprets nature in a new way: the emergent "mythological world pictures" thematize the causal interrelatedness of the world not as an impersonal dynamic of forces but as interaction among personal beings' (Eder 1 976: 52). From now on it is persons - supernatural but active beings, hungry, aggressive and unpredict­ able as men themselves - who hold the universe together and enter into alliances with humans. It is thus not so far-fetched that, in keeping with the model of social intercourse, such a relationship between gods and humans should be conceived in the mythical world-view as one of gift and return gift. The persistence of ritual does, of course, remain rather confusing. Myth is always about 'arbitrary elimination' (Blumenberg 1 985). But what narrative so artfully varies and sharpens, ritual keeps in its unyielding grasp. Should it be thought, then, that the refinements of mythical narra­ tive trust to the stability of ritual performances, that arbitrary elimination in thought corresponds subterraneously to arbitrary execution of action? Following the ethological formula 'first the ritual then the myth', Burkert explains the transition from hunting to sacrificial ritual by the fact that the pragmatic basis of ritualization gradually evaporated and gave way to a 'surviving' symbolic content. This does not mean that innate forms of experience and response bring particular rituals into being - for example, that prior feelings of guilt and reverence lead to rituals of resti­ tution and honour - but, on the contrary, that the ritual tradition pre­ scribes certain responses which prove their worth. These responses are acquired, indeed compelled, by the fact that not to learn this 'language' is to be a failure, a 'ritual idiot'. In anthropogenesis, rituals are passed on not genetically but culturally. They are not manifestations of pre-existing beliefs, not a pragmatic, action-structuring organization of an initial idea, but communicative activities extrapolated from tradition which first and foremost call to mind ideas and belief systems (Burkert 1 987: 1 56f.). In this way, men are supposed to have learnt to devise religious ceremonies or to act in a prescribed manner, regardless of whether they believed or not. Burkert assumes that linguistic expression intervenes as part of religion, but that the core structure of religious action remains the sacrificial ritual derived from hunting behaviour. One brings the animal, slaughters it, divides up the meat and tucks in. The sacrifice in Antiquity again and again acts out all the ritual elements of that original scene. We find forms

THE SACRI FICE

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of preparatory cleansing of the victim, whose own voluntary nod of assent is supposed to come from the sprinkling of wine on its head; we find the ritual slaughter, the comedy of exoneration and innocence, as well as the rites of restitution and distribution. The Attic buphonia gives an especially vivid picture of such procedures. After the bull was sacrificed, its hide was stuffed and the dummy stretched before a plough. Then followed a trial, whose purpose was to clear up the buphonia, the 'bull murder', and to take the murderer into custody. After each participant was able to shift the blame onto his closest neighbour, the knife was the only thing left to be found guilty of the murder. As we have seen, however, comedies of atonement and innocence are a primeval hunting custom; they do not indicate the animal's holiness, nor is the bull-murder ritual inherently connected to the god on whose feast day it takes place. There is simply a food offering at which the gravity of the killing, the 'respect for life', is rather strikingly expressed in the form of a trial (Meuli 1 975: 1 004f.). The channelling of intraspecific aggression through a joint act of ritual killing, and hence the sacralization of violence, is for Burkert the decisive step which binds both violence and group solidarity to sacrifice; sacrifice thus becomes the focal point of the cult, and religion the basic institution of group stability. The start-up mechanism may be a matter of speculation in distant prehistoric times, but it acquires the status of historical fact in Antiquity. 'The emotional climax is marked by the women's inarticulate shrieking, the ololyge, when the axe comes down. The shock of killing and the subsequent restoration of order at the festive meal are analogous to the concepts of mysterium tremendum, fascinans and augustum with which Rudolf Otto has described "the sacred'" (Burkert 1 983b: 33). But the holy shivers that run down the group's spines are, ethologically speaking, nothing other than relics of the nervous system that can make the back­ hair of primates put on such an imposing exhibition - enlargement of the outline shape as a threatening gesture. Fear and aggression, guilt-sharing and food-sharing, joy and festivity: these are part and parcel of the ritual from which the symbolic order arises and is periodically renewed. But ritual killing and ritual eating are 'sacred' because they stabilize the structural mechanism of the form of socialization itself, by regulating the central functional cycle of distribution and consumption. Only through the sacralization of violence could the 'sacrificial community' become 'a model of society as a whole, divided according to occupation and rank' (Burkert 1 983a: 37). To speak of ritual killing without touching upon human sacrifice is somewhat of a problem. The 'rationalist' account of the hunt-sacrifice complex is not, of course, meant to offer a general theory of sacrifice; it does not work, for instance, in the case of the annihilating chthonic sacrifice or of apotropaic rituals. Moreover, the mythical narratives let us glimpse a murder behind the animal sacrifice: a man, a hero, a god is dying - otherwise, there would be no food, no culture and no feast. The idea of animal sacrifice as substitute for an original human sacrifice was already

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familiar in ancient times. Naturally the actual sociogenesis - whether the sacrificed god was originally a man and animal slaughter is only a stand-in, whether human sacrifice and cannibalism are thus older than the killing and eating of animals - remains widely disputed. 19 But it can be said with some certainty that both forms are present at quite different stages of man's development, and that, with the emergence of mythical world­ pictures following the neolithic revolution, the theme of primeval killing and a cosmogonic act of original violence becomes extremely widespread and potent. There are myths among early planter cultures which locate the origin of the fruits of the field in the dismembered, interred body of a hero. Thus, according to the Frobenius school, the cannibalism of planters repeated a ritual cult-drama in which a human sacrifice took the place of the slain divinity of vegetation (see Jensen 1 966). Here too there is a surprisingly close link between meat, food and distribution: in the cannibalist cult meal shared by the males, in the mythological transformation of flesh into useful plants, and in the prior act of ritual killing with its dismemberment and 'burial' of the body. The myth of Hainuwele, which Adolf Ellgard Jensen reports from West Ceram ( 1 939), is made up of such themes. Hainuwele lived in the earliest times of humanity. Her birth from the first coconut palm was quite as extraordinary as her life and death. For she brought wealth, jewellery and other valuable objects and made presents of them to humans, who then decided to kill her. Her father found the corpse, cut it into many pieces and buried it at various spots around the place allocated for dancing. This was how useful plants first appeared on earth. Structurally homologous narratives also locate the vegetation myths of archaic high cultures; there too, it is mainly cereals and wine which grow from the limbs of slain bearers of culture. The original cult doubtless involved human sacrifice, but in historical times it was celebrated through the ritual killing of domestic animals and the symbolic death of the fruits of the earth. The ritual defence mechanisms (Bourdieu) that apply wherever the reproduction of life demands certain excesses - in short, where there has to be generation, cutting and killing - transform the necessary act of intrusive violence into a stabilizing sacrifice. 'Denied transgressions' is how Pierre Bourdieu calls the transpositions of the rite. In the case of the harvest, the social truth to be collectively denied is unam­ biguous: harvesting (thamegra) is a murder Cthamgert' designates the throat, violent death, revenge; and amgar, the sickle), through which the earth, fertilized by ploughing, is stripped of the fruits it has brought to maturity. The ritual of the last sheaf C . . ) consists fundamentally in symbolically denying the inevitable murder of the field or 'the spirit of the corn' C ), the principle of its fecundity, by transforming it into a sacrifice that will ensure the resurrection of the sacri­ ficed life. The sacrifice is always accompanied by various compensatory tributes which seem to be substitutes for the life of the 'master of the field' himself. C ) the logic adopted is that of blood vengeance (thamgert'), a 'throat' for a 'throat', and the 'master of the field' risks paying with his life for the life he takes from the .

.

•

•

•

.

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THE SACRIFICE

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field b y cutting the throat of the last sheaf (. . ) . This i s underlined b y the treatment often inflicted on the 'master of the field' as if to obtain from him the equivalent of diya, a compensation that was sometimes used to break the cycle of revenge killings. In one case, for example, the harvesters leap on him as he is about to cut the last sheaf, bind him, and drag him to the mosque, where he negotiates his ransom - honey, butter, and sheep, which are immediately sacrificed and eaten in a feast attended by all the harvesters. (Bourdieu 1 990: 234-5)

Despite the not unreasonable mistrust of comparing structural elements from quite diverse cultural contexts, one can hardly fail to remark the analogy between sacrifice rituals and the rite of the last sheaf. The dimly perceived background always contains a murder, an act of collective violence calling for atonement and reparation. Rituals operate as if it were not the first time: they refer, in one plausible reading, to real events of which they are both effect and repetition. But what was the first event, the primal scene inaugurating the human drama? Was it a real murder, the scene of a collective murder? This explanatory strategy inspired by Totem and Taboo, and seemingly opposed to the hunt­ sacrifice complex, is the one that Rene Girard adopts in his Violence and the Sacred ( 1 977). Homo Necans and Violence and the Sacred share the premises of Lorenz's theory of aggression: both derive the basic institutions of sociability from an act of violence which constantly recalls sacrificial rituals, permits the ritually tamed unburdening of aggression, and thus reinforces the cultural institutions. However, what lies behind the model of collective murder that Girard builds into a general scapegoat theory is not some detour via the man-animal relationship, but rather, a basic anthro­ pological conviction that violence and rivalry are endemic in early societies, that mechanisms of controlling species aggression can only be culturally invented. The process that inevitably blows up in a 'sacrifice crisis' of archaic societies is driven by what Girard calls 'mimetic desire', an ever more powerful longing that is oriented to other people's desire. It is called 'mimetic' because the other's desire is the model for my own desire. The object plays no role: I desire the other's desire, attempt to become the model's model, and thus by imitation pass the critical point beyond which the relationship inexorably veers into rivalry and violence. The climax and resolution of the crisis is a collective murder. '(S)ociety is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a 'sacrificeable' victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect' (Girard 1 977: 4). A victim is selected by the group, a 'scapegoat' is designated and put to death. The substitute sacrifice brings the cycle of rivalry and violence to a halt, so that the group can return to normality and cooperation. 'The paradox of the mimetic cycle is that men can almost never share peacefully an object they all desire, but they can always share an enemy they all hate because they can join together in destroying him, and then no lingering hostilities remain, at least for a while' (Girard 1 987: 1 28). Cathartic violence in the form of collective

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murder holds society together. Thus the Athenians maintained a kind of 'reserve' of human scapegoats, the outcast pharmakoi, who could be stoned as surrogates as the need arose. Such strategies also have the happy function of ensuring that the group has a systematically false idea about itself .zo Sacrifice, then, is the expression that refers both to the collective murder and to the mythical rationalization and ritualization of the deed, without yet being able to designate them as such. The scapegoat mechanism serves as a kind of basic self-regulating, civilization-generating structure through which defence against threats and anxieties, prohibitions, taboos and institutions, but also technical innovations, become manageable and are culturally asserted. King Oedipus remains the model, although, like the scapegoat of Mosaic law (Lev. 1 6f.), he is not killed but loaded with the community's guilt, driven out and delivered to an alien power. Different from this is the story of Cain and Abel, perhaps the original Western myth of aggression, which ends by deriving a cultural innovation from the central murder of a rival. Stigmatized and made invulnerable by his mark, driven far from agrarian culture, Cain founds the first town of the human race. A multitude of myths appear to support Girard's reading of collective murder as the crime that first gave rise to culture. It is always a person with exceptional capacities (Hainuwele), a stranger with charismatic qualities, who, being for that reason appointed scapegoat, challenges the collective murderer and subsequently, in the prettifying myth, changes from wrongdoer to benefactor, culprit to heroic saviour and bringer of culture. 'In sacrificial rites, the immolation of the victim corresponds to the "dark Event" of the myth, and it is realIy central to primitive religion. The colIective murder functions like a triggering mechanism for the various benefits that accrue to the culture' (Girard 1 987: 1 20). Myth makes every cultural innovation pass through the route of sacrifice - abandonment of the part to save the whole, atonement and exculpation through a stand-in victim. Sa/vatio and redemption, however, both demand and promote religion, which is essentialIy capable of one thing: the mythical rational­ ization and ritual channelIing of colIective violence. Religion is thus, in Girard's view, misconstrued violence; that alone is the foundation of its claim to serve as the load-bearing resolution of intraspecific aggression. 'Violence and the sacred cannot be separated' (Girard 1 987: 34). We have seen that Girard, in seeking the colIective murderer, ilIuminates the obscure background of archaic festival, identifies actual murder as the primal scene of civilization, and traces the generation of the symbolic order back to the scapegoat mechanism; while Burkert, folIowing his preference for origins, links alI specificalIy human dispositions to the one solitary act of collective violence, so that ritual kilIing becomes for him the focal point of the cultural tradition. With this twin inspiration - even if both authors' exclusive emphasis on the community-building power of aggression is not ultimately convincing - let us now return to the simple and elemental question of giving.

TH E SACRIFICE

63

It seems clear enough that for theorists of religion there is a world of difference between animal and human sacrifice, whereas this distinction plays only a secondary role for the anthropology of giving. In both cases, however, the really essential point is that an act of violence precedes the giving (and the forgiveness); giving and distributing thus both refer to killing, long before they are codified as gift and exchange. But to refer to something does not mean to be grounded upon it. Those who, like Burkert and Girard, ground the basic structures of social order solely upon ritual killing, exaggerate the role of aggression in building a community and downplay a second, equally fundamental principle of organization. For sacrificial communities are also food communities, whose internal order is achieved through the giving and distribution of food. Giving and distributing refer to killing as the act which precedes them, but they are actually based upon distribution of the sacrifice. In this way, gift-giving is structurally interwoven with the sacrifice.

6

DISTRI B UTION OF T HE SACRIFICE

First comes eating, and only then morality Brecht

To give means to forego, to deny oneself something, to share with others. The difficulties of establishing such a mode of conduct have been constantly reported in the various myths and sagas. Hardly anything seems more natural, but also more extraordinary, than to give what one could enjoy alone. How else are we to interpret the rare appreciation that archaic societies show for generosity, or their profound contempt for anything that smacks of meanness and greed? The pious claim that giving is more blessed than taking even promises gratification for the force of loss. Epigrams that sing the praises of liberality coexist, from the earliest times, with others that stress the unclarity of motives and the general ambivalence surround­ ing the rhythm of giving and taking. 'Ich bring ein Ei und hatt gern zwei', goes the German saying. 2 1 Or: 'A present is a chicken and the recompense a camel' (Bourdieu 1 990: 298). Precautionary measures, apprehensive statements, ritual defence mechanisms, promises of a 'higher' reward or of purely mundane merit - these frame an option, as necessary to life as it is fickle and unreliable, which can turn into its opposite at any moment, and which displays its ambivalence even when it has long been rooted as an obligation or basic norm in the moral economy of society. Phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic models associate the 'obligation to give' (Riches 1 9 8 1 ) mainly with the distribution of food. Items of food are the first goods to be shared with others (Sahlins 1972), and significantly not just in the care of the brood among animals but also in the specific mother -child relationship which makes the social and emotional-affective sharing of food ontogenetically compulsory. In childhood one receives food from older, better-placed people, but for the rest of one's life it has to be shared. It is no accident that commensality, cult eating or holy meals appear together with giving and sacrificing, as institutionally grooved forms of giving within a social order that is in its own eyes mainly con­ solidated through the regulation of food distribution. Now, the first and oldest food that systematically requires distribution beyond the basic dyad is the hunted and slain game animal - which suggests that the 'universal act of reciprocal "giving'" should be traced back to this prehistoric constellation (Burkert 1 983b: 26). For the division of meat is the founding act in the codification of human table arrange­ ments (Baudy 1 983); and perhaps the symbolic excess that has gone

D I STRIB UTION OF TH E SACRI FICE

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together with the enjoyment of food right up to the present day (see Fiddes 1 99 1 ) finds here its archaic fundamentum in reo As an adaptation to a special form of feeding, the readiness to share directly contains the potential both for dependence and for solidarity. Division of the prey or (in later phases of human history) distribution of the sacrifice follows certain rules that precisely define inside and outside, above and below, the one and the other, but also whether, what and how much someone gets. 'The Eskimo hunter of Hudson Bay "who first strikes a walrus receives the tusks and one of the fore-quarters. The person who first comes to his assistance receives the other fore-quarter; the next man, the neck and head; the following, the belly; and each of the next two, one of the hind-quarters'" (Levi-Strauss 1 969: 33, quoting Boas). Public distribution of the meat may also prove to be a dramatization of the inner structure of group and kin. 'The Thonga assign a hind-leg to the elder brother, a fore-leg to the younger brother, the other two limbs to the eldest sons, the heart and kidneys to the wives, the tail and the rump to the relatives-in-Iaw, and a piece of the loins to the maternal uncle' (ibid.: 35). Regulation of the share-out varies according to the ecological situation and the level of socialization. Among hunter cultures, a scarcity of resources and cooperative hunting practices already mean thorny distribution prob­ lems quite different from those encountered by individuals acting alone. But regardless of whether the division of the meat is entrusted to authority figures, regulated by seniority principles or decided by the successful hunter himself, there is always a symbolic surplus through which group member­ ship and hierarchical position are not only distributively marked (as in higher vertebrates) but actively shaped. Behavioural science has taught us a great deal about the connection between hierarchy and eating among animals, as well as about the division of the prey. 22 In contrast to hordes of predators, however, the human hunter keeps individual possession of the prey. Only thus can food pro­ curement and distribution advance to become elementary hierarchical activities, and the authoritarian, prestigious distribution of scarce, highly valued meat yield that symbolic surplus-value which is capable of affecting status and hierarchical rank. In Tierra del Fuego, for instance, the successful hunter reserves the privilege of distribution exclusively for himself; he decides at his discretion which of his neighbours will get which pieces of meat, so that size and amount express their creditworthiness and the regard in which he holds them. Gifts of food, then, are ways of showing honour, but also of putting others under an obligation to perform appropriate services in return (Baudy 1 983: 141). That this is successful, that the flow of gifts and return gifts is kept up, points to the action­ motivating implication which seems to be inherent in giving and taking. Theoretical strategies in ethology therefore reduce the anthropology of giving to a simple model by treating the precarious structural mechanism of the obligation to reciprocate (which Marcel Mauss thought he had explained with the idea of magical property) as a counterbalance stemming

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from brood-care behaviour. 'We can firmly state', writes Eibl-Eibesfeld ( 1 97 1 : 1 64), 'that rituals derived from feeding of the brood are generally employed for the purpose of bonding. Kissing and giving are thus certainly the most widely ritualized forms of feeding.' If social valuation and the symbolic emotional-affective decor of giving do indeed correspond to this model - a model which also seems onto­ genetically irrevocable - then any act of giving and taking can be more or less unambiguously described as a hierarchical act whose immediate effects evoke asymmetry in the form of superiority and inferiority. 'Only by reference to brood-care behaviour between a socially superior parent who gives food and a dependent child who receives it, is it possible to explain why the gift absolutely must be neutralized with a return gift, unless one is to remain content with a position of social inferiority' (Baudy 1 983: 1 42). Every child begins his or her life as a little bourgeois. A stage of uncon­ ditional taking is followed by a painful one of sharing, until the totally unreasonable demand for giving, greatly softened by gains in authority and prestige, acquires its quite special charms. However plausible this ethological account may be of giving as a mechanism stemming from brood-care behaviour, it remains unclear - and not only in this special case - how lines of argument in the behavioural sciences are connected to the way in which society hangs together. Ethology answers the question 'where from?' It elucidates the phylogenetic back­ ground to this elementary functional circuit, by reconnecting it to the bonding qualities of brood-care behaviour. The explanatory content appears rather strained, of course, if biologically fixed standards of behav­ iour are applied to normative orientations and moral rules in such a way that they scientifically interface, as it were, the latter's claim to validity. At any event, the seductive short-cut that offers itself between genesis and validation actually leads into the void. Brood-care behaviour is one thing; quite another is interpretation of the validity claims of relationship formulas, or explanation of the action-motivating structure of gift and return gift in terms of a fear of social inferiority. 2 3 Thus, there should be no great controversy over the bonding quality of feeding rituals derived from brood-care behaviour, nor over the central role that the transformation of food rivals into partners played in the evolution of human society. What does remain to be explained is how and why the biological altruism of feeding - which marks the whole passage from nature to culture - seems to lead inexorably to symbolic orders that make of giving and taking a prestigious, status-defining strategy. The fact that taking is associated with weakness and giving with strength or physical superiority should not make us forget that the framework itself changes insofar as the taking falls under social regulation; claims and entitlements then arise which, as in exchanges with the supreme being, force the giver into a relationship of inferiority. Of course, talk of 'God's children' actually reproduces the structure of infantile dependence that ethology identifies in the interplay of brood-care feeding and gift rituals.

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The analogy thus strikes a material core and a central recurrent theme in the discourse of human cultures. For if someone in the adult world takes without giving, they must have a special legitimating position or at least strong nerves to enjoy the situational advantage of self-interest over the likely infantilization effects. As regards the radical uncertainty, the constant switching between shortage and abundance, which pervades the reproduction cycle of 'primi­ tive' societies, it is obvious that exceptional significance may attach to the food (meat) and an authority-boosting surplus to the possession or distribution of it. Food is not only 'the source of some of the most intense feelings', it also 'provides the basis for some of the most abstract ideas, and the metaphor of religious life': in short, it serves both as symbol for some of the 'highest spiritual experiences', and as an expression of important social relations (Richards quoted in Levi-Strauss 1 969: 35); it is both existential necessity and focusing metaphor around which world-pictures and symbolic orders develop. If 'cooking is a language through which [a] society unconsciously reveals its structure' (Levi-Strauss 1 978: 495), then society in turn has been more or less consciously built and structured according to table-plan principles. The group's symbolic order is defined and concretized in the common meal, but it shapes its hierarchical interior in the rules of distribution. The group is what it eats, but not everyone eats what others eat. Commensality displays its community-building and rank-generating force mainly by regulating, as it were, the sacramental incorporation of the social structure. Early game-hunting cultures already moved both ritual slaying and ritual meat-distribution to the centre of the social order. And well into modern times, the carving and serving of a roast was a quite gender-specific privilege, while meat-eating itself was the epitome of festive fare. Up to the seventeenth century, at least among the European nobility, the roast animal was dished up whole. 'Not only whole fish and whole birds (sometimes with their feathers) but also whole rabbits, lambs, and quarters of veal appear on the table, not to mention the larger venison or the pigs and oxen roasted on the spit' (Elias 1 994 [ 1 939]: 97). They were all carved and served at table - which accounts for the special honour falling to the host or to someone chosen by him. At the royal and princely courts, the role of meat-distributor was a highly prestigious institution. The symbolic surplus-value of meat, the 'male' food initially bound up with the catching and distribution of game, was extended in the course of social evolution to bread and beef cattle as new products of 'men's labour'. The origin myths and ceremonial cannibalism of early neolithic planters (see Baudy 1 983: 1 47f.) illustrate the transformation mode that ritually negated the increment of socio-economic power which women acquired as bearers of hoe-farming. Since the cultivated plants were said by myth to have grown out of the dismembered body of a hero, and the fertility ceremonies always required a human sacrifice in place of the slain god, 'the men who had the duty of killing and distributing cannibalistic victims, to

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reproduce the external conditions for the fertility o f the fields, integrated their old hunting activity in altered form into the economic structure developed and sustained by women. ( . . . ) The mythical metamorphosis of meat into plant food indicated the way in which women's increased prestige could be ceremonially recaptured' (ibid.). The distribution of meat and the structurally homologous breaking and handing of bread represented not only in the Christian supper but also in medieval tales featuring the master of the house - remain the decisive prestige-regulating mode in the context of eating as a community bond. Vegetables, on the other hand, are still today denied a useful part in the assertion of authority. It is well known that cosmogonies explain the final order of the world by the violent death of a primeval being. Myths, interpreted as reflections of former human sacrifice, appear to transpose its distributional structure to the whole of the world. An Indian myth derives the cosmos, domestic animals and the caste system from the sacrifice of the primeval giant Purusha: his mouth went to form the Brahmans, and his two arms, two legs and two feet made up the other three groups. In Hawaii, 'the ruler [was] described as head, the chief as shoulder, the priest as right arm, the tax collector as left arm, the soldiers as right leg, the craftsmen and artists as innards, the poor and load-bearers as useless froth' (Baudy 1 983: 1 52). In this set-up, social roles appear directly correlated with parts of the sacrificial meat. 'The mythical man comprising the various social categories was thus supposed to reflect the dismembered cannibal victim, who was distributed and consumed in that planter class society in accordance with a hierarchical code' (ibid.: 1 52). With the emergence of class societies in the course of the neolithic revolution, 24 the forms of socialization and the level of integration under­ went fundamental change. Hoe-farming and cattle-raising allowed the pro­ duction of social surpluses which were appropriated by a sacral kingship and redistributed in a way that stabilized dominance. This sacral-political constitution of society, which replaced kinship with membership, imposed a division of labour and initially unproblematic relations of inequality. 'The connection between a redistributively organized neolithic economy and a sacral form of rule worked at its optimum in the so-called temple econ­ omies: first of all, they are in a position to maintain redistributive structures and to keep back a surplus product; on the other hand, the ruler ( . . .) disposes of the religious mechanisms necessary to assure social integration' (Eder 1 976: 96). The temple economy, with its monopolization and con­ centration of goods in the centre of the cult, also appears to be the prerequisite for the transition to state-organized societies. But the sacral­ ization of food is in turn a sine qua non for a mere subsistence economy to start maintaining stocks of food (Gladigow 1984: 28). Archaic class societies consolidate and reproduce their social structure as sacrificial communities. The ritual practice of killing and distribution not only regulates access to rare goods, but also reinforces hierarchical order and the building of community according to the microcosm of the meal.

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Food availability - the unproductive classes actually live by rank from the sacral ruler's table - communal eating and the social distribution of life's necessities remain the basic system of reference. Moving out from this, the society systematically expands the level of abstraction of both the moral and (through the development of money) the political economy. With regard to archaic Greek high culture, Gerhard Baudy ( 1 983: 1 53f.) has been able to show how central concepts of law, status and destiny were borrowed and generalized from the sphere of sacrifice, and especially from the ritual distribution of meat. With the strengthening of the polis, the formerly royal privilege of a public sacrificial meal was transferred to the community or to an official who, formally acting as archon Basileus on behalf of the king, had the duty of supervising such matters. From now on, the existential basis of the polis was also incorporated in the sacrificial meal or dais (not only 'distribution' but, more precisely, 'cut-up and apportioned roast meat'). This meal 'was a state occasion, and the most important ceremony was the cutting up of the roasted sacrifice. For the piece that each participant received was an expression of his value: that is, a roast-meat hierarchy corresponded to the social hierarchy; each person received the piece corresponding to his position' (Laum 1 924: 46). From the cult rules of the Panathenaea, for instance, it can be deduced that the supreme magistrates received five parts of sacrificial meat, the nine archons three parts, and certain cult officials one part. The strategists and taxiarchs were also awarded certain portions, while the rest of the meat was handed out to the people. At the same festival, however, mass slaughter of cattle took place at the altar of Athena, their meat being distributed by district to the assembled communities (Baudy 1 983: 1 55). At the agones, the victor received a certain part of the sacrificial roast, and games of combat were even an integral part of the cult. The Greeks used the concept nomos to characterize the internal structure and legal order of the polis. Nomos refers to nemein ('to distribute'), an activity originally related to the cutting up and apportionment of roast meat which was later extended to other spheres of distribution. Nomos, according to Baudy's etymological analysis, 25 initially meant nothing more than distribution of meat, a ritual codification of a first form of distributive justice. The main authority here is Hesiod. In the Theogony, a just distri­ butive order takes shape in the goddess Eunomia, daughter of Themis and sister of Dike, Eirene and the Moirai. Dysmonia - who stands for unjust distribution - is the daughter of Eris, the goddess of discord and sister of the goddess of retribution, Nemesis. Nemesis appears to be the personi­ fication of wrath who pushes for repayment of those who feel themselves cheated by the distribution of the meat. So does Oedipus curse his sons, who refuse him the part of the sacrifice to which he is entitled, the 'kingly shoulder' (Ranke-Graves 1 984: 340), and kill each other fighting over it. A similar origin in ritual meat-distribution applies to the oldest Greek concepts of destiny, moira and aisia (meaning 'part' or 'share'), as well as daimon (,divider' or 'allocator'). These terms cover aspects of the concept

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o f nomos before the establishment o f the polis, but they also remain current in post-Homeric times. In ritual inscriptions, moira appears as a term for the share of sacrificial meat. Baudy suspects that the personification of the portion of meat in the Fate goddess Moira was already part of popular religion before the time of Homer. In the Odyssey moira appears as a portion of meat, and in the Homeric hymn Hermes cuts up the sacrificial roast into twelve moerae, the honorific portions set aside for the gods. Geras, like time, denotes not only honour but also the material substratum in the form of a particular piece of meat. It is with long strips of back that Agamemnon honours Ajax after he has proved himself especially well in battle, and with long strips of back that Eumaeus honours the still unrecognized Odysseus, and Odysseus the bard. Pieces of back were also the special privilege of Spartan kings (see Meuli 1 975: 947). The duties accompanying the differential status of the various portions become apparent from an episode in the Iliad, where Agamemnon calls Odysseus and Menelaus to account for not having fought at the very front of the battle, although he himself summoned them first to the common meal. The moerae, according to Baudy, 'are the claims of individuals demarcated at table and manifested in portions of meat' (ibid.: 1 64). In the Homeric epics, the gods are designated as daimones or appor­ tioners. The etymology refers to daizein ('to cut up'), dais ('apportioned meat'), dateisthai ('parts'), daitreuein ('cutting meat'), daitron ('portion'), daitros ('cutter'), daitymon ('feaster' or 'guest'). 'It is quite clear from this evidence that the destiny-setting daimon is a projection of the father of the house who cuts up and distributes the meat and therefore a semantic complement to moira, the portion that decides people's destiny' (ibid.: 1 66). Even the term hierarchy stems from the sacral sphere of human table plans (ibid . : 1 67f.). Of course, it is not only the general concepts of law and destiny that developed in the context of cult sacrifice. For the sociogenesis of a complementary functional circuit tells the same story: the emergence of money, as the universal concretization of abstract exchange forms,26 is also based on sacrifice or the distribution of its ritual victim. The German word for money, Geld, comes from the Old High German gelt, which originally meant 'sacrifice to the gods' but was also used in the sense of 'retribution', 'recompense' or 'payment'. Gelt is at first that which is offered to the gods, and as it was generally a question of animals, the same expression was quite often employed for cattle and money. The Romans called money pecunia, the Indians rupee (from the Sanskrit rupa, meaning 'herd of cattle'). Like every outstanding object capable of serving as equivalent, this 'currency' too owed less to utilitarian considerations than to its 'sacred function' as sacrificial material in the cult meal. The rules of distribution and the means of circulation stem from the sacrificial context. Even if the bride price is calculated in head of cattle and sheep, and Homer can state that Diomedes's armour has cost nine oxen but Glaucos's a hundred, this secular form of 'calculation' retains the link to

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that 'sacred action' through which the sacrificial community reproduces and consolidates its moral vocabulary. The minting of coins that began in Greece in the 7th century B.C. - at first as a monopoly of the temple centres - marks that interface between material cult-sacrifice and secularization which inaugurates the transition from 'cult economy to political economy' (Kurnitzky 1974: 30). The pre­ liminary forms of money leave no doubt that coins also directly stemmed from cult sacrifice or the communal cult meal, but it was mainly cult utensils that performed such duties. The obolos, the well-known Greek coin, was originally a thin iron rod, a skewer, on which everyone sharing in the sacrificial meal cooked the portion of meat allocated to him. This skewer-share first became a symbol of value and finally gave its name to the coin. The Attic drachma, worth six, literally means a 'handful' of oboli. 'The coin thus appeared in the place of a skewer (i.e., of a portion of skewered meat) and kept the name obolos through "repeated connection'" (Laum 1 924: 1 14). A similar allusion to sacrificial meat may be inferred from the Roman coin the as, which probably goes back to assus ('roasted'). Other sacrificial implements, such as the dual-headed axe used in ritual slaughter or the trivet, developed in similar ways: first as a discrete form of money, then as an image stamped on coins. In general, the marks on coins tell only of the symbolic order of the cult to which they owe their genesis and their currency. The coins of Eleusis are decorated with the swine sacred to Demeter, the diadrachmae of Eritria show the cow sacred to Hera, the trivet with sacrificial bowl on the coins of Kroton testify to the religion of Apollo, and so on. The examples are legion (see Kurnitzky 1 974: 35f.), and symbolic images of a similar kind - such as the heraldry of ruling dynasties and noble families, or the totemic animals still in evidence at inns and guesthouses - also stretch back to the tradition that once fed on ritual killing and communal eating. Let us lastly just mention the close association between sacrifice, exchange and the development of trade. Feria or Messe (,fair') stands for both religious and secular festival, for holy conduct and profane business. Exchange, we read in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1 979: 49), is 'the secular form of sacrifice', while sacrifice already appears as the magical schema of rational exchange. It thus systematically deceives the god for whom it is meant. The primal history of subjectivity, exemplified by the fate of Homer's Odysseus, already bears the stigma of self-sustaining rationality grounded upon the compulsive mastery of external nature, through which the surrender of self is capable of changing into cunning self-assertion. The 'transformation of sacrifice into subjec­ tivity', however, succeeds only at the price of annihilating the very sub­ jectivity for whose sake it happens. The self sets itself up as a sacrifice to itself, by cutting out everything heteronomous. Consciousness of itself as nature is eliminated, giving way to a ruthless dictatorship over its own affects and passions, in order to escape from the unstable rhythm of devouring and being devoured. In the sacrifice, however, unreconciled

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nature reports back for active service. So much seems true in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to which 'the history of civilization is the history of the introversion of sacrifice', or in other words, 'the history of renunciation' (ibid.: 55). For the obsession that men can escape only if they are willing to pay with their flesh (in the literal sense of painfully cutting into it) connects up both with the sacrificial economy and with the logic of exchange. As soon as domination of nature and assertion of self come together in the medium of self-sustaining rationality, cultural renunciation and sub­ stitute sacrifice can be detected as the common foundation. Someone who sacrifices does not do it because he wants to: he gives something up that is part of himself, in the hope of keeping what is more than that self, or perhaps also much less than it. Every kind of sociation, and apparently also 'discontent with civilization', is based upon renunciation: 'Sacrifice as a gift to obtain more, and sacrifice as a part-payment so as not to go under' (Stentzler 1 979: 1 20). Gift exchange and exchange sacrifice belong together, just as the logic of sacrifice is from the beginning inherent in exchange, and the logic of exchange in the sacrifice. Adaptation to instrumental reason should not make us forget, then, that archaic exchange chiefly functions as a model of reconciliation; the gift is the pacifying bond between collectives and generations, and the sacrifice is handed over to the original mythical powers in order to secure the repro­ duction of the whole. Through the cult sacrifice, the community seeks to perpetuate the delicate balance between surrender of self and mastery of nature. Success here is connected not so much with the content of beliefs as with the complete ritualization of the reproductive schema. In the rituals of killing and eating together, of giving, taking, reciprocating and distri­ buting, the dissociative structures of individual forms of practice seem to be systematically banished. The symbolic order of archaic societies turns out to be ritualism tout court. But what does ritualization mean if it embraces all basic activities that perpetuate human existence? We have already considered the sacralization of violence as the key disposition in the process whereby ape becomes man. But more needs to be said about the sacral character of interaction, 27 and about the functional primacy of ritualistically secured activity as the basic structure of social integration, at least as far as the formal significance of ritual is concerned. For rituals, 28 as collectively staged performances, help to overcome block­ ages in reality and thus put order back into the world. As 'prescribed formal behaviour for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in invisible beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects' (Turner 1 982: 79), ritual has traditionally been seen as performatively expressing, making conscious and validating precisely' this 'first and final', but also that which lies hidden in the structure of social life: its norms and values, the group's internal morality. As we have already seen in the case of palaeolithic hunter-groups, ritual­ ization frees precarious pragmatic activities from their 'natural context', so

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that highly formal, symbolically loaded action sequences appear instead with a 'new' meaning. In short: 'Social rituals create a reality which would be nothing without them' (Douglas 1 970: 78) Ritual constitutes a 'limited province of meaning' (Berger), evoking and symbolizing the non-everyday. It does this formally through the separation of a special space-time structure; mentally through the pressure towards thematic concentration, reference displacement and experience control; and psychosocially through the common physical experience of representational practice and the resulting 'sense of moral well-being' (Durkheim). As 'a regulated, absolutely necessary sequence of imperative actions' (Bourdieu), rituals establish nothing by themselves; they are thought to be mediated by myth, and functional ascription - at least in Durkheim's reading - proves to be secondary. The main purpose is 'to arouse certain ideas and feelings, to join the present to the past and the individual to the collectivity'. Accordingly, it is the psychological state of the group which is the only solid basis for what Durkheim calls the 'ritual mentality'. 'So far as beliefs ascribing this or that physical efficacy to the rites are concerned, those are accessory and contingent matters, since they can be absent without change to the essence of the rite' (Durkheim 1 995: 383). Of course, representational expression of the collective consciousness does not seem to be all that ritualism does for the reproduction of archaic societies. If ritual is per se normative conduct, if a correct performance already guarantees that the prescribed meaning will be evoked, this is because ritual, unlike narratively structured myth, is itself the central practical form of social remembrance. Ritual formalism and the strict sequence of events limit the meaning-content and ensure the validation of social norms in the absence of any alternative (see Eder 1 976: 28). The success in restoring the status quo ante is referred to the schematism of sacralization, upon which every process of forming legitimacy or securing legitimation devolves. 'By ritual and speech', writes Mary Douglas about ritual failure among the Dinka ( 1 970: 83), 'what has passed is restated so that what ought to have been prevails over what was. ( . . . ) When an act of incest has been committed, a sacrifice can alter the common descent of the pair and so expunge their guilt. The victim is cut in half alive, longi­ tudinally through the sexual organs. So the common origin of the incestuous pair is symbolically negated.' The symbolic order of ancient societies relies upon the happiness which confidence in the world derives from memory, repetition and incorporation. Rituals operate as if it were not the first time. They have to be vivid, graphic, representable, stereotypical, easily reproducible - qualities which enable them to achieve emotional bonding of the community, in the sense of that ritual mentality. Ritual control over the society's memory and experience, over transgression and sanction, asserts itself as the only legitimate mode of moral integration. Where guilt arises only from dis­ regard for what the symbolic order has separated or from illegitimate separation of what it has joined together, where reproduction of the social

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whole is still existentially bound up with the necessity of infringement, what is perhaps the most important achievement of ritual comes to the fore: that is, it systematically denies any conflict of norms between alternative yet equally imperative courses of action, and therefore, through denial, enables the unavoidable crossing of boundaries to be permitted. 'The most fundamental ritual actions are in fact denied transgressions' (Bourdieu 1 990: 2 1 2). Unlike in Durkheim's conceptual world, their sociogenesis has structural conflict as its foundation. For Victor Turner, 'the primordial and perennial agonistic mode is the social drama' (Turner 1 982: 1 1 ), of which ritual is a kind of detached and generalized reduplication. A social drama is initiated when the peaceful tenor of regular, norm-governed social life is interrupted by the breach of a rule controlling one of its salient relationships. This leads swiftly or slower to a state of crisis, which, if not sealed off, may split the community into contending factions and coalitions. To prevent this, redressive means are taken by those who consider themselves or are considered the most legitimate or authoritative representatives of the relevant community. (ibid.: 92)

Here the role of ritual as a promising form of crisis and conflict resolu­ tion comes in very useful. However, general and detached reproduction of the agonistic process hardly seems sufficient to bring about the beneficial effects of reintegration. Only the substantive drama of collectively staged difference, withdrawal from the conflictual everyday world, strict oppo­ sition between profane wrangling and sacral alternatives, can create the possibility of discovering collective truths as well as moral bonds within the contradictions. Ritual is 'anti-structure', a kind of ideal space of cultural freedom, an 'inverted world' in which everyday demands on people's behaviour are nullified, the ethical 'ought' is associated with pleasure and emotional commitment, and conflicting interests are symbolically reduced and trans­ formed into moral well-being ?9 Crisis resolution means to return - with an awareness of the necessity of the symbolic order - from the inverted world of anti-structure into the structure of society. If, like Turner, one accounts for the emergence and significance of rituals by the pressure of social crisis and conflict, it would seem reasonable to go one step further and explain rituals not only as crisis resolution mech­ anisms, but also as culturally effective strategies for the avoidance of conflict. One essential property of systems of ritual action is to protect from danger, at their very source, the constantly necessary yet structurally precarious forms of cooperation. Ritualization standardizes situations, transforms anarchic orientations that threaten the group's inner unity into 'a regulated, absolutely necessary sequence of imperative actions', and thus builds a cultural tradition of affective controls and moral integration. The Primitial sacrifice, for example, where the first and the best is offered to the gods, is typical of ritual conflict regulation in the sphere of distribution, but

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it produces a 'defensive void' by negating and eliminating 'the greedy question of mutual envy: who gets it first?' (Burkert). Exclusion of the problem is tantamount to sacralization of the context. Whatever falls to ritualization in the way of pragmatic basic activities leaves the realm of the everyday and becomes sacred. The 'social construction of reality' (see Berger and Luckmann 1 97 1 ) appears here as ritual construction of the non­ everyday. And it is in this process of taking things out of the everyday that precarious social figurations, directly linked to first and last convictions, undergo fundamental changes in meaning. The cultural potential of ritualism is based precisely on the fact that the paradox of denied trans­ gression motivates and impels that labour of collective misconstrual which in turn evokes meaning shifts and new inventions, and hence symbolic constructions of every kind. Thus, the suspicion that sociability is constituted through the sacred, that sacred action is less a phantasmagoric form of community than the very principle of the group's construction, is at least worth some reflection. We have seen how gift and sacrifice, the two most prominent forms of archaic giving, are exorcised in rituals, incorporated in the context of sacred action, and thereby delivered up for excessive symbolic labour. The phylogenetic starting-point for this journey is provided by food pro­ curement and distribution, satisfaction of a basic need and forms of its perpetuation. Killing, giving, taking and reciprocating were all directed at eating; food is the material around which it all first revolves. The sacral­ ization of acquisition, distribution and incorporation finally consolidates the foundation upon which projective conceptualization and all manner of symbolization can proceed to build. Perhaps the common meal is really the first cultural invention through which what we call the symbolic order becomes operational. A situation whose action logic meets all the prerequisites for social drama is ritually controlled and neutralized. The taking of food - not by accident is the change in eating customs a major issue in the 'civilizing process' (Elias) - is a highly individual, destructive act of tearing, breaking, chewing and devouring, which mobilizes the whole gamut of conflicting affects and emotions. The eater always feels the pressure of antagonistic desires: the greed and pleasure of subjective fulfilment overshadowed, or at least moderated, by fear and the compulsion of cultural denial. The bridge over the abyss of scarcity is all too narrow, the confidence in one's own physical strength all too limited, for cooperation and regulation not to enter the picture. In the common meal, then, the humble prose of eating is bridged over by ritualization and the symbolic codification of structural conflict, as food rivals turn into a paradoxical society of the currently split-up which first appears as a community of egoists. For 'what the individual eats can under no circumstances be eaten by anyone else' (Simmel). But at the same time, of course, it is the identity of what is consumed, the symbolic quality of what is incorporated, which produces the identity of the group. The meaning shifts and symbolic inventions impelled by ritualization open the

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horizon for transference and associative linking, which are able to exter­ nalize what must then be incorporated in the common meal as the 'sub­ stance' of community. From now on, it is the very material for ingestion which not only incorporates the claims of the symbolic order, but also symbolically organizes the process of consumption.

7

ATTRI B UTIONS

Name: one of the most venerable words living among us Kluge Proper names are, of all names and commonplaces, the ones that resist the dissolution of meaning. Levinas

The language of distribution takes shape out of the experiences and con­ flicting emotions of satisfaction, repletion and fulfilment, shortage and privation, so that a vocabulary of 'higher' feelings appears whose promises are still with us today: love passes through the stomach, and it is also still permitted to love someone so much that you could 'eat them alive'. The corresponding world-views and systems of interpretation are present in the abstract realms of law and destiny, moral and political economy. The unknown is related to the known, the unnamed to the named. For name­ giving puts an end to unfamiliarity, and the play of signifiers opens the way for a magical convergence between word and thing, between what corre­ sponds to the name and what is 'really' the case - a convergence that makes it possible to use the nominal to grasp the actual. We do not know how the play of signifiers got going, but it is quite obvious that it is crucially related to the anthropology of giving. Here too, pragmatic basic activities - giving, taking, killing, etc. - would appear to provide the start-up mechanism for social differentiation, ultimately sym­ bolized as personal properties, capacities and competences, which culmi­ nates in the real as well as magical power of names. Such activities seem especially inclined to hierarchy, because their claim to validity is originally rooted in the sphere of distribution. 'All trust in the world begins with names, in connection with which stories can be told' (Blumenberg 1 985: 35). Already the first promise in the biblical story of paradise claimed that the completely unknown world of Creation was being entrusted to man because he was capable of naming the various creatures. To know the 'true' names of the gods, things and the original mythical powers meant to use the imaginative resources which, by invocation, permit not only acquaintance but also formal manipulation, practical intervention, contractual obligation. As, in the fairy-tale of Rumpelstiltskin, the discovery of a name dramatically affects the fate of its bearer, so too does mythical thinking build upon the correspondence of signifier and signified, in the sense of a causal interrelation.

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The effective short-circuit between language and world i s i n turn based upon presuppositions which, according to structural anthropologists, are typical of the analogical construction of mythical world-pictures, a mode that constantly discovers equivalences or relational connections between things, behaviour and objective fields, and thus erects, through relations of affinity and contrast, a complete universe of meaning. 'By analogy the whole world makes sense, everything is significant, everything can be explained within a symbolic order, where all the positive known facts transposed into subject matter for myths, may take their place with all their rich abundance of detail' (Godelier 1 977: 2 1 3). Whereas the 'sociological armature' for myths refers to the structural correspondence between forms of mythical thinking and forms of archaic society, so that the network of kinship relations supplies the organizational schema both for the social structure of the real world and for the imaginary structure of the ideal world, analogical linkage transmutes the 'objective' material of the natural and social order into a representation of the world that appears to us purely illusory. This is why the analogical classification of nature as culture and culture as nature plays such an important role. By representing Nature as analogous to man, the primitive mind treats the world of things as a world of persons, it regards the objective and unintentional relations between things as the intentional relations between persons. At the same time, in opposition yet complementary to it, the primitive mind regards the subjective world of its idealities as objective realities outside man and his thoughts, with which it is possible and necessary to communicate when wanting to influence the order of things. (ibid.: 208)

The result is a twofold illusion: about oneself, because the mind gives its idealities an extra-human existence; and about the world, which it populates with imaginary beings who, though analogous to man, are also superior to him and capable of looking either favourably or unfavourably upon his pleas, needs and desires. Here magic acquires its systemically inalienable possibility of influencing the consciousness and will of those who determine the course of the world and the order of things. Analogical thinking establishes therefore both a theory and a practice, religion and magic. Or, at least, religion exists spontaneously in a theoretical form (representation, explanation of the world) and in a corresponding practical form (magic and ritual influence over the real); thus, a means of explaining the world (in an illusory way) and changing the world (in an imaginary way). (ibid.: 209)30

Names are dams which the savage mind builds against the contingencies of a superior, still largely untamed nature. Insofar as the 'magic of names' (Ruth Benedict) in archaic societies offers to close the dangerous gap between men and things, it has many different faces at its disposal, yet every (god's) name is also the origin of an imaginary world that would remain invisible without it. 3 l The fact that the name implies at once a form of practice, an embodied action logic and a stable expectation of expec­ tation, but also rights, duties and status attributions, is based upon the genealogical structure of the group - a kind of collective onomatomania

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that gives rise to constant and bitter struggle over the right to inherit the most illustrious names. For to bear names and to incorporate ancestors also means to feel entitled (and to assume the right) to claim certain things that are traditionally associated with them, and thus to insist upon corre­ sponding modes of conduct, as well as material and symbolic benefits, in a manner that knows itself to be above any doubts regarding its legitimacy. In this way, semantic distance perpetuates those originally social distinc­ tions which mainly result from the practice of giving and taking, but does so by transforming them into a model of hierarchical order in which the name functions as an institution, so to speak, as an institutionalized action context. Much as the genealogical use of kinship terminology is reserved for official situations (Bourdieu 1 990: 1 3 1 ), name and title belong in the context of official concepts, and thus in the realm of cult worship, politics and law. Kinship relations regulate moral economy on the inside of archaic societies: every designation here contains a full set of duties and rights, whereby a moral position is marked out and claims for recognition are sectorally defined according to the relevant proximity or distance. Above this, however, the group disposes of a second nomenclature of forenames and titles which, though well integrated into the organizational schema of kinship, is nevertheless distinct from it. This is usually a kind of logical classification of attributes, capacities and powers stemming from the group's myth of origin which are then attributed to the various members, in most cases through a person set apart by the myth itself. A simple and impressive example of this practice is the forename policy of the Winnebago. Now in our clan whenever a child was to be named it was my father who did it. That right he now transmitted to my brother. Earthmaker, in the beginning, sent four men from above and when they came to this earth everything that happened to them was utilized in making proper names. This is what our father told us. As they had come from above so from that fact has originated a name Comes-from-above; and since they came like spirits we have a name Spirit-man. When they came, there was a drizzling rain and hence the names Walking-in-mist, Comes-in-mist, Drizzling-rain. It is said that when they came to Within-lake they alighted upon a small shrub and hence the name Bends­ the-shrub; and since they alighted on an oak tree, the name Oak-tree. Since our ancestors came with the thunderbirds we have a name Thunderbird, and since these are the animals who cause thunder, we have the name He-who-thunders. Similarly we have Walks-with-a-mighty-tread, Shakes-the-earth-down-with­ his-force, Comes-with-wind-and-hail, Flashes-in-every-direction, Only-a-fiash-of­ lightning, Streak-of-lightning, Walks-in-the-clouds, He-who-has-Iong-wings, Strikes-the-tree. Now the thunderbirds came with terrible thunder-crashes. Everything on the earth, animals, plants, everything, is deluged with rain. Terrible thunder-crashes resound everywhere. From all this a name is derived and that is my name Crashing-Thunder. (Radin, The Winnebago Tribe, quoted in Mauss 1 966b: 344-5)

The nomenclature duplicates and corroborates the whole of the world, whose existence as an eternal presence encompassing every generation is

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assured only through the survival of the names of individuals, of personae. These may be characterized as a 'first' form of individualization. (In the end, what is at stake is also individual appropriation and individual rights and duties, status and prestige, and already in early societies the leeway between what corresponds to the name and what is 'really' the case was massively used in strategies of domination.) But the personae are mainly important as socially inheritable properties and capacities whose complete representation determines the well-being of the group. At this level of mythical world-pictures, it is no longer (and not yet) the extraordinary capacities of one individual which go into the symbolic surplus of a polyvalent name; on the contrary, it is the attribution of original mythical attributes which first of all, by means of the name, imposes those qualities and capacities on the individual. Names are formulae of interaction stabilized by myth, which supply the existentially necessary framework of a society with competent, because legitimated, actors. Names are not just hollow sounds: they are capable of securing and handing down a minimum of civilization attained in the role repertoire of archaic societies; and they also function as a sensuous medium in which people understand, handle and somehow also preserve other people (as well as superior beings). The interplay between name distribution and food distribution appears even more clearly in classical potlatch societies than among the Winnebago. Their nomenclature presents itself as endless variation on a single theme. The word poLa - 'to sate' - originally refers not so much to the potlatch and its effects as to the festive meal. 32 Thus it is the distribution of foodstuffs which, at least theoretically (as Mauss all too briefly mentions ( 1 990: 1 31 4» , constitutes the elementary reference of the potlatch. PoLas denotes the organizer of the festive meal, as well as the place at which one is sated. The Kwakiutl - a collective name that simply means 'wealthy' - employ poLas as a chiefly title, so that the hierarchical names of the chiefs correspond to the logic and the range of meaning of the respective potlatch. Maxwa, that great intertribal potlatch where the overall leadership is decided, forms a kind of peak of the nomenclature around which other significant titles - Inviter, Food-giver, Wealth-producer, He-whose-property-raises-tears - group them­ selves. Although in the case of the K wakiutl, still based upon original myth, the schema of attribution seems to be more general in nature. 'To possess is to give', and all the more so, the higher the rank - writes Malinowski concerning the political economy of the Trobiand Islanders. This defines a moral position that we find repeatedly in otherwise quite different cultures, precisely in its function as strategic differentiator. Honour and reputation, rank and prestige - all cultural inventions in which semantic distances are assigned as personal properties - refer to the practice of giving. 33 And since foodstuffs are the first goods that have to be shared with others, the road from food distribution to name attribution, from material substratum to symbolic expression, is usually short and continuous. On the one hand, we find object-related attributions - Meat-distributor or, in Northern Germanic regions, Bread-server. The word 'lord' (the highest noble

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category in England) refers back t o similar roots (Bread-keeper, Bread-server or Bread-protector), while 'lady' originally denotes Bread-kneader. 34 On the other hand, there are symbolic expressions and personal attributions which, already moving beyond the material substratum, name only characteristics from the sovereign handling of distribution that are, so to speak, condensed into honorary titles. The generous 'free giver' (Freigebige), a widespread Indo-European name component, belongs here, but so do those hierarchy­ related collective terms which are not based upon duties to give but on rights to take: for example, the Vornehme as the one who takes from the food before the others, or the princeps, who in the 'truest' sense of the word is capable of acting as primus capiens. Names, we read in The Dialectic of Enlightenment in reference to mythical powers, 'are perhaps no more than frozen laughter, as is evident nowadays in nicknames - the only ones that retain something of the original action of namegiving' (Horkheimer and Adorno 1 979: 77)? 5 Of course, they are also and above all petrified actions, frozen table-rules. Names are the hiero­ glyphs of distribution. Along with object-related attributions and characteristics extrapolated from distribution and condensed into honorary titles, we thus find a third category of abstract relational concepts which come directly from the ritual­ eating community. Gilde or 'guild' - of sacrifice, payment, retribution denotes 'fraternity', in accordance with 'the common sacrificial feasts of the age of heroes' (Kluge and G6tze 1 95 1 : 267). Genosse or 'comrade' - from the Middle High German genoze, Old High German ginozo - means the person who has his possessions in common with others. The Gothic form gahlaiba, derived from hlaifs ('bread'), preserves the memory of what one 'enjoyed' together. Compania is the community of those who share their bread with one another. Whether Mal - an old Germanic term for sacrifice or sacrificial feast, public gathering - enters directly into the names for spouses, Gemahl and Gemahlin - is still a matter of dispute. Recent etymo­ logies refer to the root me (messen, 'to measure' or 'to time') and interpret Mahl as 'eating at fixed hours'). In context, however, the suggestion that messen relates not to temporal but to distributional commitments - in the sense of 'measuring out' food - seems thoroughly plausible (see Laum 1 960: 289). These remarks, more illustrative than systematic, have outlined a singu­ larly homogeneous semantic field in which phylogenesis revolves around eating. Ritualization of the procurement, distribution and ingestion of food gives rise to sacralization of the context, and this in tum helps the con­ flicting dialectic of self-abandon and self-assertion to become a certainly precarious, but also balanced movement. The inner bond that evokes cohesion of the symbolic world makes homologies of human table plans discernible in the most remote cultural objectification. Nevertheless, the focus on distribution should not be so exclusive as to make us forget that the interplay between semantics and somatics plays a decisive role. For it is above all the bodily practices of eating - breaking, swallowing, digesting

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and evacuating - which, in their culturally specific forms, produce the 'material' that 'fuels' the categories of the symbolic order. 36 The construc­ tions of that imaginary body which is the social organism, its procedures of inclusion and exclusion, the social-moral classifications of desire and denial, revulsion and taboo, heterophobia and removal, correspond so significantly to bodily processes that the suspicion is hard to avoid that, in their most elementary symbolic form, they may be no more than reflections of the somatic constitution of the human being. To measure their possible reach would, of course, be quite another story. If we return instead to the problem of attributions, we find within the semantic field grouped around food the genesis of a relational formula of a quite special kind. As it wanders through the two polar regions of eating and being-eaten, it gradually rises to that 'universal' phenomenon of the Gast-mahl or banquet, the first peace-making institution in human history. Hospitality (Gast-freundschaft) suspends the sectoral schema of norm recognition, punches holes in the mystique of kinship morality, opens the horizon for the completely other which now, as 'stranger' and 'guest', finds a legitimate because thoroughly sacralized position not outside but at the heart of the symbolic order. Before the guest situation is constructed, however, before the mode of mutual typification changes from conflict to kindness and the guest (Gast­ freund) steps onto the cultural stage, the early form of guest (Gast) has undergone the most varied stations of a dramatic Passion story. Practical discourses are focused and encapsulated in the semantics of hospitality: discourses about sacrifice and gift, taking and giving, killing and eating, the sacred and the profane, in such a way that reason and consequence begin to operate as cause and effect and to summon up an almost developmental schematism. The history of the guest may be said to broach nothing more, but also nothing less, than a complete miniature of the anthropology of giving. Gast from the Gothic gasts, Old High German gast, kast, Anglo-Saxon gast, giest, Old English gest, guest, Norse gestr, Norwegian gjest is certainly related to the Latin hostis and goes right back to the Sanskrit ghas meaning 'to eat'. According to Jakob Grimm's somewhat adventurous etymology, the understanding of Gast as 'the one catered for' (Bekostigter) is at best derivative, and the root mainly denotes consuming, swallowing, devouring. 'If it is true about ghas, I can see only one possibility in terms of meaning: that hostis, gast is originally the stranger who, according to a custom still resonating in the sagas, was sacrificed as an enemy of the gods, but who also, like any blood sacrifice, was consumed by the sacrificers as a sacred meal, as hostia humana, and the accord between hostis and hostia may well support this assumption; also hostire, to slaughter and atone, hostimentum, means of atonement, are better understood in relation to the sacrifice. . .' (Grimm and Grimm 1 862: 1 454). Assuming that there is something in all this, how did the guest situation come about? 0 xenos, stranger, enemy and guest - was it a 'reconciling' -

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murder that set it going, but also forced a symbolic reversal and associated the imagined zero hour of killing with that other extreme of imaginary fulfilment in which host and guest finally lose their reserve toward each other? The relationship remains thoroughly paradoxical. The guest is the stranger, but the enemy is the elementary form of his appearance, exclusion is his fate - and that means death. At the same time, of course, the guest's appearance is the occasion for the feast; it is held in his honour, but also extended to him in honour of the sacrifice. In the sacrificium, the practice that serves to produce sacred things, the metamorphosis takes place, the community-threatening stranger disappears, his body transmutes into a special form that now incorporates the substance of the community. Before he is fed, he is consumed; before the table is shared with him, he himself is shared out. 'To kill a stranger for food' is thus, as it were, the first (imaginary?) expression of a relational formula to which the etymology bears witness - understood, of course, only in the limited sense of Jacob Burckhard's remark that this is one of those 'stories' that are true at once nowhere and everywhere. 37 Exclusion through incorporation sets up a paradoxical connection between two poles, for what is meant is complete inclusion of the excluded, its highly intimate and trace-free somatic assimilation through communal consumption. This paradox, however, is the modus operandi for inversion and reversal that stand the test in the construction of the guest situation. The incorporated material pushes for a new externalization, motivates second-order exclusions. The guest becomes 'inviolable', hospitality a 'sacred duty'. According to ethnographic discourse, the stranger's appearance is experi­ enced nearly everywhere in the world as a kind of existential provocation that calls forth ritual defence mechanisms among the local group, while forcing the stranger into a conformist 'probation'. There may be tests of courage and the like, or else strongly ritualized forms of interaction relying upon mythologically sanctioned knowledge. At any event, space is created for non-everyday forms of encounter which, once introduced, end up systematically negating all the initial conditions designed to ward off danger. In certain Eskimo tribes, the guest's appearance meant at once an occasion for festivity and an obligation to fight, associated with the victor's right to kill his inferior opponent. Since the hierarchical structure of social recognition was thus enacted through physical superiority, the stranger - if he won the test - created the framework for his unproblematic promotion to favour within the community. But if he was defeated, a different mode of integration appeared on the scene. For the right to kill the opponent appears made to be suspended, cancelled, in favour of a now almost clientelistic relationship to the victor (Pitt-Rivers 1977: 98). The guest marks an empty space in the system of meanings, a kind of symbolic zero-value at which identificatory thinking threatens to go mad, since it is well known that any attempt to establish identity breaks down there. The stranger may be rich or poor, noble or base, master or

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bondsman, god or charlatan. All that can be said about him is that he is different, that he is simply the Stranger, the Other. So 'detachment' remains the only (highly formal) formula for an identification which betrays nothing, promises nothing and yet ultimately gives everything. Julius Caesar noted in his book on the Gallic War that the Germans 'regard strangers as sacred' (VI, 23), and Tacitus also laid special emphasis on their laws of hospitality. No nation indulges more freely in feasting and entertaining than the German. It is accounted a sin to turn any man away from your door. The host welcomes his guest with the best meal that his means allow. When he has finished entertaining him, the host undertakes a fresh role: he accompanies the guest to the nearest house where further hospitality can be had. It makes no difference that they come uninvited; they are welcomed just as warmly. No distinction is ever made between acquaintance and stranger as far as the right to hospitality is concerned. As the guest takes his leave, it is customary to let him have anything he asks for; and the host, with as little hesitation, will ask for a gift in return. They take delight in presents, but they expect no repayment for giving them and feel no obligation in receiving them. (Germania 23 Penguin edn) -

Abstracting from the wide range of cultural practices - and the Germans are only one, if exemplary, case in point - the social construction of the guest rests upon an ideal-typical schema that can be characterized in a perfectly general way. For it is always gift, feast and sacrifice, extravagant generosity, sacralization and sacrilege, which come together in a single form of interaction in which there has to be giving and taking, but never in the same coin. The stubbornness of the attributions that make the guest a guest initially only highlight the systematic void in which all current rela­ tions of opposition that guarantee identity are temporarily suspended. The guest's appearance marks a radical break with the idea that primary significance necessarily attaches to primary relations of kinship, entourage, and so on. The concentric construction of the archaic world does not thereby fall apart. All that is surprising, and in this sense, structurally formative, is that the Other who appears from the Unknown and Unrecog­ nized - a realm of sectoral norm-validation for which kinship morality always reserves negative reciprocity - is capable of taking up position not on the precarious margins of balanced reciprocity but right at the moral centre of the group. In that place where the gift develops its pacifying and alliance-building powers, the stranger is not at home; but where generalized reciprocity determines the group's inner perspective, he is 'more' than at home. Here he finds himself in a situation that he does nothing to define; he enjoys a status of highly artificial kinship, combined with extraordinary rights that he cannot sue to recover, and completely detached from duties that he cannot know. Although the guest situation is modelled on 'close' kinship, its main characteristic is that it constantly goes beyond the norms of kinship morality and pushes the content of general reciprocity to its outermost limit. 'Everything - or almost everything - for nothing' might be the formula for an exchange as well as a relationship in which,

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paradoxically enough, 'indeterminacy' has been structured in the midst of a semantic void. Even if the extravagance and unproductive expenditure leap to the eyes, hospitality can hardly be adequately understood as a 'weakened form' of the potlatch (Benveniste 1 973: 77). At least before the contractual establishment of rules of hospitality, the second crucial step for the dialectic of challenge, response and outbidding is absent from the action logic of the guest situation. The traveller who is here today, gone tomorrow does not come up with any response. 38 It is part of his 'being' that he is guilty of every­ thing, without actually being guilty of anything. Even equality and balance, without which there can be no status rivalry, play no special role here. Indeed, strict resource asymmetry and unequal role attribution are among the defining features of the guest situation. But how, in a void where indeterminacy must be structured, can attributions ever hit the mark, or ever condense into stable expectations and anticipated expectations? The semantic void, it has been argued, arises from the fact that the guest's appearance temporarily sets aside, almost invalidates, all current relations of opposition that guarantee identity. As a personification of the complete Other, the guest suspends the rules of archaic exchange; even strategy and calculation are not worthwhile. As he is neither relative nor friend, his appearance modifies the group's symbolic framework; member­ ship and temporary integration have to be redefined and resymbolized. As he has no significance within the group's division of functions and labour, identificatory attributions from this context never make contact. At first, the guest represents absolutely nothing in the group's symbolic order, but his appearance also immediately annuls the pattern of conflict and oppo­ sition that is usual in dealings with strangers. In short, 'guest' is the concept for systematic 'role indeterminacy', which finds its perpetuating institutional kernel in the 'guest situation'. It is this role indeterminacy, corresponding to the indeterminate char­ acter of the guest, which almost manically challenges the imagination to come up with ever new, yet ever vain, attempts at attribution. And since identificatory thinking cannot endure any idle expectations, everything now threatens to negate the distance between the poles and to fill the semantic void with meaning. Hence theory and practice, religious protective constructs and 'unconditional' gifts, each play a special role. Many cultures know of gods dressed as beggars and strangers who roam the here-below to test men's sense of justice. Odin was imagined as an eternal wanderer; Zeus/Jupiter and Hermes/Mercury appear in a morally desolate region: They looked to a thousand dwellings for shelter. A thousand dwellings were closed up. Only one received them, small, covered with straw and reeds. ( . . .) When the heavenly dwellers came to the tiny little house and with bowed locks stepped through the low door, the old man bade them rest comfortably on a prepared place. Baucis, as ever industrious, lay a rough fabric on top and stirred the tepid ashes in the hearth. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8, 630f.)

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Everything the poor home holds is prepared for a common meal with the strangers. In the end, Philemon and Baucis recognize who the guests really are. 'Yes, we are gods: the neighbours, wicked as they are, shall suffer the punishment they deserve' (ibid., 8, 688). And while the whole area sinks into the marsh, the gods fulfil the desires of the old couple. Later, in Christian times, Jesus and Peter take over the same position. That hospitality and love of one's neighbour are also unsurpassed in the hier­ archy of Christian moral values, will be seen on the Day of Judgement. For when the Son of Man comes and judges the nations, the decision between heaven and hell, eternal life and eternal damnation, will depend on whether the laws of hospitality have been observed (Mat. 25, 3 1 f.). Even if, as in this case, the divine guests are correctly identified and one symbolic zero-value is replaced by another symbolic zero-value, the experience of insuperable difference is the heart of an encounter in which absolute closeness and infinite distance, spiritual togetherness and strictest otherness, are affirmed at the moment of recognition. Indeterminacy con­ nects the god and the stranger, reverence the guest and the host: the homology is based upon the mystery surrounding the Other. Here, mean­ ing and significance evoke the sacred, but the guest situation operates at the level of the profane. This is why such a razing of boundaries, such an irruption of heterogeneity into the world of the profane, can always only be an exception. And the relation established in this way appears to exist only to be cancelled. Unintentionally, but no less momentously, the sacralization of the stranger (and eventually of the guest) enlarges the void instead of filling it. What it makes possible is not insignificant, because now a moral idea begins to gain currency in the world of the profane which motivates tem­ porally limited recognition of otherness as well as of a completely different Being. The idleness of identificatory thinking is corrected by moral pre­ cepts, and the curse of being unable to know is transformed into the heroic gesture of not wanting to know, which is comparable in rank to a virtue. To ask the guest who he is, where he comes from and where he is going, is frowned upon not only in the ancient Arab world. The Phaeacians waited until just before the final separation to question Odysseus; the king of the Lycians first entertained a noble stranger for nine days before making enquiries, and among some North German tribes it was considered wrong to be especially interested in guests' names. The law of hospitality, we remember from Tacitus, knew no opposition between people familiar and unfamiliar. Whereas sacralization gives an illusory explanation of the 'essence' of the guest without actually defining it, the aim of unconditional giving at its most intense is to change this 'essence' in an imaginary manner. In the guest situation too, food is the first and most significant item to be shared with strangers. Words are not enough to make an other out of him: substances must also come into play, so that, as in the sacrifice, a climax and provisional conclusion are reached in the commonly enjoyed meal.

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Con-vivum is what the Romans called such a meal - a 'living together' for a time, defined both by one-sided giving and by communal consumption. It is no accident that the ritual actions, as well as the incorporated sub­ stances, recall age-old forms of the cult of the dead; there too one finds the offering of food and drink whereby togetherness across time succeeds in summoning up the ideal group that encompasses all generations. The funeral meal is not an apotropaic ritual (see Oexle 1 984: 406f.); its central meaning is to bring the deceased person back into the community, to confer on him a 'real' existence, a social and legal status - in short, to make him present in the present. The banquet structures a comparable order. In both cases there is a feast; eating and drinking, accompanied by dance and song, change the legitimate aspect of sociality and put a broader form of community on stage, in the sense that the dead person (or the stranger) has access to the group with a clearly defined status. The guest too is assured of his presence in the present. In both cases, time and how it is experienced play a special role. For only through transformation of the temporal structures does a crack appear in the concentric construction of the world and allow another order, another interpretation of being, to assert itself. Both the dead person and the guest must come and go, but they cannot stay. Seriality not continuity, situational non-everydayness geared to repetition rather than persistence: this seems to be the starting­ point for those relational formulas that always appear somehow boundless in their normative core. One of the defining features of the guest situation is that it is limited in space and time; 39 it constitutes both a period of grace and a place of reversal. Between greeting and farewell stretches that time filled with hospitality and unilateral giving which turns the outsider into a respected guest, and the one who could be taken from without giving into the one who is given to without taking. Once the period of grace is over, host and guest quite often return to their old unsociable ways with each other. The void disappears, and the indeterminacy of the guest's role is again buried beneath seemingly secure identities. The responsibility of the one ends when the other crosses back over the operational threshold. Beyond the limits of the home, group or city, the roles are once more lost in nothing­ ness. In some Arabian desert tribes, it used to be a sacred duty to provide food and shelter even for one's personal enemies. As soon as they left the host's dwelling, however, the status quo was restored and it seemed more than advisable to take off as inconspicuously as one could. The custom of the Kalingas shows by a curious variation the true nature of the sociological space defined by hospitality. When the guest of a Kalinga is a local man his host is responsible for his protection only within the confines of his property. His hurt or murder on the premises must be avenged by his host. But if the guest is a foreigner his host remains responsible for his protection throughout the entire region. The range within which their complementary relationship holds good coincides with the territory where their mutual status is unequal. Where neither has a greater claim to authority than the other their complementarity lapses. (Pitt-Rivers 1 977: 1 08)

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Against this background, how can the internal structure or action logic of the guest situation best be described? Role complementarity, inequality of status, unequal endowment with material and other resources important in the strategy of domination: these do not appear, at least at first sight, to be the conditions most favourable to an empathetic model of mutual recognition. And yet, everything indicates that difference itself produces the condition of possibility for such recognition and, thereby too, for a second recognition of a completely different being. What is involved here is not a gift - the guest's present obeys a logic of its own that will be discussed later - but an elementary, quite unconditional giving-of-food and giving-of-drink, which appears in the context of the ritual-meal community and may come to include everything in the host's possession, even women. It is this which regulates a social relationship whose inherent meaning consists in its forbidding any equality and any balance. Where strict complementarity is ritually guaranteed, the fatal 'mimetic desire' that functions as a triggering mechanism for rivalry and violence finds no support. The situation allows no desire that aims at the other's desire: host and guest are prohibited, on pain of their own destruction, from trying to be equal on one and the same occasion; and although 'protection and obedience' are certainly among the modes of the guest situation - it is always the host who gives orders and always the guest who follows them - relations of superiority and inferiority are not significant either for the structuring of the situation or for the requisite expressive behaviour. On the contrary, the difference in power, which cannot be covered up by a sense of belonging or status, is subject to a process of inversion that encourages not so much denial as recognition of an empirical difference, at least so long as nothing happens to make an issue of it. Authority develops into symbolic form, articulates itself only in the mode of representation, and exaggerates the willingness to follow (the critical point of the 'probation') through ritually equal distribution of honour and dignity. The guest is given what he does not have, required to be what he is not - in short, he is made the object of a practice that usually befits the gods and their earthly representatives. It is this practice of unconditional giving, on the one hand, and of equally unconditional taking, on the other, which evokes the inverted complementarity of the guest situation. The fact that strategic implications are not absent from the action precepts of giving points once more to the problem of repeatedly unsuccessful identification. What sacralization promised and systematically failed to deliver is now supposed to come from the practice of giving food and drink, shelter, attention and time: namely, the establishment of the other's identity and the closure of the alarming gaps between body and meaning. We do not know whether something really lies hidden in the grammar of language. But an old, long-forgotten verb does seem to preserve remnants of the original meaning of this one-sided action. Entgdsten (literally, 'de­ guesting') used to be the name for the ceremonial ritual that opened the

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guest situation, the idea being 'to remove the other's stranger quality'. 'Oe­ guesting', then, did not mean only to find words of greeting, to give a welcoming drink, etc. It also meant 'that one took from the stranger ( . . . ) his guest or travelling clothes and provided him with nice fresh clothes belonging to the host, so that externally too he would cease to be a guest' (Grimm and Grimm 1 862: 1 463). Being-a-stranger and being-a-guest are here still identical, and as it is well known that clothes make the person, the word 'de-guesting' precisely denotes the basic intention of a practice that did everything possible to play down the strangeness of the stranger. To fit him out means, not to register, but to clothe the indeterminacy of his 'being', to make it at least invisible, unrecognizable as such. The stage-setting for the guest situation mainly serves to convey ambivalence. Ritual cleansing and alteration of the body's exterior is followed by filling up of its interior. The ensuing round of drinks marks the transition to the speaking body, which is constituted in the exchange of stories. The guest-present - which, unlike in modern practice, was not given to the host on arrival, but to the guest on departure - refers to the symbolic body. It is the material substratum of the relationship, memento, sacrifice and gift, promise and obligation of friendship after the farewells are over (see Bahr 1 994: 1 57f.). By giving, one tries to remove the other's strangeness. Yet the event remains a paradox all the same. For all attempts to grasp the guest's identity are based upon attributions which only make it possible to rediscover in the other's appearance what is all too familiarly one's own, to re-experience it in a mode of double alienation, so to speak. Just as identificatory thinking, in seeking to fill the semantic void, came up against irresolvable difference, so here is identificatory giving unable to provide a definitive answer to the question of who the other is. The unintentional civilizing effect of identificatory giving is thus not identity but respect for non-identity. This form of recognition, extraordinary because it preserves heterogeneity, ultimately rests upon the fact that the problem of identi­ fication is almost replaced by the ritual game of honour, and that the pressure on the other to adapt to one's own standards is temporarily lifted. Beneath the cloak of honour and dignity, the guest situation keeps heterogeneity alive. 'Conceptually, honour (Ehre) has in general a close relationship to guest that goes back to ancient times' (Grimm and Grimm 1 862: 1 468) - and one that still echoes in the synonyms beehren and besuchen (in the sense of 'honouring someone with a visit'). If one considers that gift and sacrifice, wealth and reputation, have a close etymological connection to the concept of honour, it becomes easy to see the overdetermination of the symbolic field in which, and with which, the guest situation operates. Traditional gift morality is replaced by one-sided giving and taking, while reciprocity at the level of exchange (and only at this level) is replaced by complementarity. Unlike the sacrifice, which irrevocably abandons the sphere of the profane, the guest situation remains on the threshold: it is not part of a religious

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cult, yet is highly ceremonial and shares in its regulative effect. Though driven by acts of unproductive expenditure, the demonstration of the force of loss mingles not only with provocative rivalry but also with the theme of respect. Of course, someone who stages a show of unselfishness does not necessarily do so without self-interest. In this field of symbolic honour, however, where self-respect gains a public effect through respect for others, there is ultimately advantage for both. The host honours his guests, who show him honour in return. The honour of the house, local group or community manifests itself in dealings with guests; it becomes tangible at the feast for those who give it as well as for those who receive. Codes of honour are exclusive. Like a comprehensive moral mechanism through which people are educated into the community, they typically regulate individual behaviour within the symbolic context of the group. As a representation of the magical-sacral core of collective identity, they designate morally imperative, ritually controlled action that is due less to strangers than to oneself and one's group. Transposed to the guest, the practice of doing honour therefore reserves for him a special part. More than just a laughing third party, he becomes an acting representative, a symbolic bearer of ideal values, an intermediary figure in and through whom the collective identity is revealed and established. His appearance is sacred only because the group's sacred values appear in him. It is this figuration that gives their distinctive meaning to the guest's role and the accompanying release from exchange relations and gratitude duties. What really binds host and guest is only their status in the dialectic of rep­ resentation. Not by chance does the linguistic expression of honour in German and other languages always have to be constructed with verbs of giving and taking.4o For to give and to take without reciprocating have the same effect in the context of the guest situation: they make host and guest indistinguishable in the requisite honouring behaviour. Reciprocity of expression - or, more precisely, of expressive recognition - dominates this game which relies upon unequal exchange and which again casts a char­ acteristic light upon the unreal, still popular idea that reciprocity and exchange are identical in archaic society. The construction of the guest situation shows, rather, how much unilateral commitment is necessary to make so much reciprocity possible. The imaginary unity of opposites evoked by ritual meals in common and unilateral giving and taking, as well as by expressive behaviour, bodily rhetoric and the ceremonial shaping of a profane world removed from everyday life, also throws up a special kind of discursive precipitate. Whenever heteronomy comes into play, language seems to become confused. Referents disappear and boundaries grow blurred. That one 'gives a reception', 'does the honour' or 'adds to one's reputation' are only some of the more harmless self-referential other-directed cliches - not that a more precise name is required for them. The imaginary unity of opposites only finds its formally complete lin­ guistic expression where a single word suffices to weld together the intricate

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tangle of the guest situation, its actors and their ambivalent relationship to each other. 0 xenos, the stranger and guest and Gastfreund (host, or literally 'guest-friend'). The host gives and receives, offers and accepts, invites and is invited; he is the master and the passer-through. The traveller, the homebird, fixed and mobile, customer and innkeeper, from here, from elsewhere - from the town and the fields, for example. The host is also the object; one cannot see in the word­ exchange where is the thing-exchange - a term that does not change through the handing over of the gift. It may be dangerous not to decide who is the host, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who belongs at the table, who has the gift and who has the damage, and where hostility begins within the hospitality. [. . .J The same word, active and passive, insult and kindness, hatred and benignancy. A word that breathes, from the same mouth, he who has his feet in the fire and he who is passing through dejected from the rain, a word that breathes both hot and cold, for example. (Serres 1 980: 25f.)

Like the event itself, its linguistic expression is bottomless excess. Motivated by identification failure and unsatisfied curiosity, resting upon latent conflicts and ambivalent feelings, the elementary figure of con­ viviality paradoxically emerges just here and retains its ambivalent char­ acter even in language. The guest situation belongs to the core of the conditio humana not because it is a model of reconciliation (although it does have that effect), but because it offers a modus vivendi for periods of grace. Indeterminacy remains its structuring principle. What develops out of it are ways of dealing with ambivalence and latency - and that is no small matter. Even if the guest's symbolic capital is only borrowed, only a loan that the group extends to him, it is still enough ritually to stabilize a maximum of reciprocity, respect and restraint. In the end, reciprocal honour mediates between the unequal positions, establishes a set of com­ plementary roles, and ensures symbolic balance in the shape of the illusory equality achieved in expressive behaviour. In the restrictive conditions of a period of grace, that too is no small matter. If one were to extend Norbert Elias's theory of civilization ( 1 994) into the later history of archaic societies, the construction of the guest situation would certainly offer - along with cult institutions - an ideal starting point for the study of changing standards of conduct and affective controls. Elias was himself interested in the original interplay between the construction of society and of human affects; he interpreted changes in everyday forms of intercourse, from the late Middle Ages until modern times, as a process of progressive detachment from one's own and others' corporeality which, driven by the greater interdependence of interactions, led to the state monopoly of violence as well as to strongly internalized controls on behaviour. But one will look in vain among the regulating effects of archaic societies for an advance in the thresholds of shame and awk­ wardness, a change from external to internal compulsion, and the estab­ lishment of a stable superego structure based on instinctual control and repression, which Elias identifies as typical features of the modern civilizing process.

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What a look back does permit is a different perspective on the problem of power and affect. The image of premodern societies as a haven for untamed aggression obviously forgets that no community has ever existed without a minimum of affect controls. But it also leaves the topography of violence out of consideration, and hence the fact that friends and enemies are precisely defined by the area of validity of kinship morality. Unbridled aggressiveness may still be displayed on the margins, because at first inter­ group conflict is not placed in question by any norms or sanctions, whereas the existentially threatening problem of intra-group aggression is very tightly controlled by ritual behaviour and external taboos. The (relative) social peace within archaic groups stands in contrast to naked aggressive­ ness in dealings with strangers.4 1 With the invention o f the guest situation, this elementary system of the coordinates of violence at least partially breaks up. For what the cult secures for intercourse within society, hospitality now achieves outside it. Gifts and sacrifices constitute guests and gods; strangers who might be happily mistreated with impunity are turned into representatives of the ideal values of one's own group, to be handled with respect, restraint and ritual distance. Closely dependent upon cult symbolism and practices, yet remaining totally in the sphere of the profane, the guest situation lays down new standards of conduct both in dealings with others and in the group's representation of itself. The guest situation is a completely transitional place; the guest is the negation of territorial unity, the strict opposite of forms of belonging determined by lineage, land occupation and inheritance. Settledness is the characteristic feature of a spatial existence to which coming, going and staying are the first major challenge. It is always the resident who defines the wayfarer, always he who sets the conditions for that period of grace in which the fencing of aggressive affects motivated by group egoism, as well as the conversion of new expectations into habits, become rich in pro­ spects. It is always the guest who obeys, and always the feast in his honour which defines the ceremonial framework of the encounter. Gods and guests retain the status of Others, but the usual conduct towards them is now social intercourse rather than unbridled aggression. Festivals and guests belong together. In general, and not least because of the real or imagined presence of third parties, the festival is a breeding ground for the paradoxes of the civilizing process. Under the eyes of third parties, the group sketches an 'inverted' picture of itself. It stages and experiences itself as an ideal community which, now released from the pressures and laws of everyday life, becomes through the objectifying role of the third party a strongly recollective, tradition-forming reality. That things do not have to be especially 'civilized' has to do with the 'essence' of the situation, which lives off the play of oppositions between boundary­ marking and boundary-crossing, order and excess, immoderation and death. The festival is the staged state of emergency par excellence, at which pleasure is the revenge of subjugated nature. 'In pleasure men disavow

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thought and escape civilization. In the ancient societies festivals offered a communal celebration of this reversion. ( . . . ) "This interval of universal confusion represented by the festival,'" says Roger Callois, "masquerades as the moment at which the world order is abrogated. Therefore all excesses are allowed during it'" (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 1 05). As a temporary escape from the compulsions of norm-guided behaviour that has the special status of impunity, the festival constantly threatens to get out of hand, to lose itself in frenzy, intoxication and ecstasy. At the same time, however, the 'festive breach of the prohibition' (Freud), the excess and unproductive expenditure that are kept under control by highly ritualized ceremony, always point back towards the underlying order. The 'aesthetic of transgression',42 even in its extreme version, comes down in the end to repetition of the prohibition and affirmative strengthening of the existing world-picture. Theories of festival tend to overemphasize either its Apollonian or its Dionysian side, either its stabilization of order or its anti-civilizing immoderation.43 For the modest aim of locating the contextual relations between guest situation and festival, however, it is quite sufficient to con­ sider the symbolic principle of mediation between order and chaos. First, let us again recall that something festive clings to the guest situation itself; it represents a quite special, more 'profane' type of par­ ticipation in the surplus symbolism of the 'cult festival'. The structural correspondences between guest situation and festival are anyway too much of a coincidence to be completely without significance. Guests and festivals afford a suspension of everyday pressures in which 'ordinary life' comes to a halt. In both cases, we have to do with threshold phenomena that require departure from a proven symbolic order and entry into another that cuts across hierarchy and authority. Whether as resident or as wayfarer, everyone at the threshold becomes another. Only as guest (or as sacrifice) do they enter the site of inversion that is the festival. Their status lasts as long as the group remains in the non-everyday mode that their appearance has produced. Only here, in the exceptional regime of the festival, does the one who is a symbolic zero in the system of meanings of the others become capable of existence, because only here does the dialectic of identification and differentiation cease to apply. Identities are no longer the issue. It is part of the festival's peculiar rhythm that it suspends social differentiation, calling forth a systematic lack of difference and distance which never, of course, slips into indifference but directly flows into the intensities of the festive mood. The festival mobilizes ecstasy and intoxi­ cation, but also abundance and extravagance. The former may but do not have to appear essential to the ritual; the latter are in all cases essential. For only this form of unproductive expenditure defines the host as well as the situation. To the ordinary time of scarcity it opposes the paradisiacal time of plenty; it expands the period of grace for excessive pleasure and enjoyment, the temporal dimensions of the guest which are also those of festival. There can be no festival without a minimum of conspicuous waste

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and lavishness. But without the real or imaginary presence of gods and guests, there would be no legitimacy for the hours of plenty. What we can see in the guest situation is a mode of social integration fundamentally different from that struggle for recognition, defined by games of rivalry and superiority, which so fascinated Mauss and Bataille in the potlatch societies. Since conspicuous waste and boundless generosity are of central significance in both cases, it is not very easy at first to resist interpreting the guest situation as simply a special, weakened form of the potlatch. Yet it actually represents a strict counter-model, as soon as one realizes that its action logic lacks any reference at all to the principle of symbolic violence which does so much to shape the potlatch. There, gift­ giving meant to acquire a power, to gain symbolic extra value, if possible permanently, by demonstrating the force of loss within a relationship of superiority. The struggle so bitterly conducted in property wars, and locked into the dialectic of challenge, obligation to reciprocate and outbidding, everywhere ends up with winners and losers. As there is here no feeling for reciprocal forms of recognition not motivated by power strategy, it is all a matter of stabilizing social asymmetry in the form of hierarchies. The potlatch makes for hierarchy, whereas the guest situation equalizes expressive behaviour in an imaginary yet telling way. To the dialectic of waste and gain, of unproductive outlay and acquisition, it counterposes that other form of unconditional generosity which heroically refrains from making purposive the negation of the thing's useful purpose. One gives without taking, takes without giving; and in the rhythm of the festival one draws near to the critical point of affective fusion, only to return to the self-sufficiency of one's own being and to go one's way. The one who has the last word, whether as host or guest, no longer achieves any power to build superiority out of the force of loss. In fact, the identity of power with the force of loss is here shattered, and does not that abyssal sovereignty whose polluted expression Bataille saw in the potlatch now reappear in the midst of the guest situation, in its original meaning as a civilizing yeast? Marcel Mauss characterized archaic exchange as a system of total services whose two elementary forms were the alliance-creating gift and the agonistic, differentiation-addicted potlatch. In our attempt to get closer to the 'simple' references of an anthropology of giving, and more specifically in our way through the terrain of the sacrifice, we came across forms of social intercourse and distribution that did not directly conform to the rationalist account of archaic exchange. This is true mainly of the con­ struction of the guest situation, whose inner logic appears to be funda­ mentally different from that of exchange. From giving, taking and reciprocating, the basic formula of the exchange of gifts, the way first led into the misty phylogenetic regions of taking, killing and distributing, which yielded the first basic pattern of a socially differentiated order that included the possibility of both dependency and solidarity. With the invention of the guest situation, a new action model appeared on the scene which tem-

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porarily halted the recursive dynamic of distribution by detaching the duty to reciprocate from the basic formula of exchange and shortening it to the complementary structure of giving and taking. The reproductive logic of the 'circle' broke down. But the guest situation differs from all forms of exchange in that it does not place the partners under a compulsion to make another move; it actually seems to release them of any obligation, in order, of course, to oblige them in a different way. Having shaken off symbolic violence, the standpoint for valorization in archaic exchange, a new and highly demanding form of respect and mutual recognition gradually introduces itself into the traditional system of kinship morality. The exchange or alliance partner, the rival or the legitimate member of a social association based on division of labour, is due the respect (and only that respect) which corresponds to his role in the group's network of relationships, so that the person's value is completely identical with his social function. By contrast, it is part of the basic definition of the guest situation that the guest is respected not for certain qualities but for his own sake. Something entirely without 'sense' (in both meanings of the word), if not actually 'impossible', clings to the social esteem that is accorded him. For in terms both of exchange and of the role or status valuations that define the normative horizon of the social association, he has no right to anything legitimated by the surplus of hospitality. Rather, the standards of conduct between host and guest genetically refer to the 'natural' logic of the ritual-meal community, where from the very beginning, mediated by the unconditional sharing of food, a quite elemental form of care and solidarity with others shows through. This might be called 'natural' altru­ ism, were time limits and ambivalence - the Janus-faced insertions of original violence - not also present. The guest situation is a milestone on the path of civilization, for it expands the room for contingencies and introduces gains in abstraction that undermine both the claims of kinship morality and the narrow limits of mechanical solidarity. Host and guest, however, are the names for a social relationship in which, for the first time in human history, a form of mutual recognition is not based upon belonging and power resources but is regulated by a risky moral principle. The fact that the resulting ethical rationalization of life does not necessarily have a homogenizing effect, but on the contrary equips people for dealings with another being and hence for a recognition of heterogeneity that assures survival, is certainly part of the surprising social-moral potential already inherent in the archaic model of civilization. Two important remarks concerning conviviality and codification still need to be made. Festive or guest-situation dealings with third parties, whether they be gods or strangers, are the origin of all forms of conviviality - for, before these are codified and handed down in rules of politeness and good manners, they are mainly body-related 'moods' resulting from enjoyment and the collectively staged satisfaction of elementary needs. The ritual-meal

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community is the model in which both self-preservation and pleasurable consumption retain their symbolic expression, the one via the regulation of distribution, the other via the cultivation and aesthetic moulding of inter­ action. In this, the anthropology of giving is not only the main trigger for the initiation of relationship formulae. It is also the key source for the modulation of expressive behaviour. The physical action of holding some­ thing out to be received in the hand, the festive toasts and offering of food (still today common gestures between lovers), the 'feeding' of the other with the best pieces, the pinning and tying of gifts to the recipient's body all the ritual sequences of giving and taking call for touching, imply a moment of sensuous-bodily surrender and acceptance (Grimm 1 865: 1 76), offer just as many opportunities to pull down barriers to contact as to enter the other's territory. A third form of interaction shunts between life-and-death struggle and the original power of sexual fusion - a form of closeness which, though appearing to overcome all distance, is in fact highly artificial and full of presuppositions. What is negotiated in it, first ritually and then through stocks of cultural knowledge, finally evolving into the highest form of mutual recognition, is an interest in the other not as enemy or relative but simply as another person. In giving and taking, one leaps over the ground zero of interaction, finds a yardstick for the coordination of action and reaction, and covers up the polar structure through symbolic expression. Only when expressive behaviour is freed from the clutches of functional attribution can the other be perceived as what he perhaps really is, or what he presents himself as being; only then can the interest in him be guided onto new tracks that inspire recognition. The guest situation typically has a pathos of recognition, high spirits due to the awareness of jointly belonging to a single imaginary. Expressions of recognition, especially in encounters between people of unequal status, can also be merely a calculated means to an end, but this does not weaken in any way their civilizing effect with regard to the forms of interaction. Since the difference between expression and expressed is quite immaterial to the 'primitive mind', language and world are not opposed to each other but constitute one and the same reference-system. Persons appear as things and things as persons; no identifiable value can be assigned to the tertium as such. The measure is not actually a measure, for in the game of surrender and acceptance it is not (yet) a question of the tangible and real, of valuables, pieces of sirloin, coconuts or bananas. Again, though, nothing goes without a material substratum, without things, food and drink. For the presents are always both expression and part of the force which they express and which, by expressing it, they themselves ultimately are. In a conception of reality 'that posits the ongoing penetration of the world of everyday experience by sacred forces' (Berger and Luckmann 1 97 1 : 1 28), that which represents is largely identical with that which is represented. All the surplus gifts and gestures are required to mark the quality of a relationship with an effective expression, to break it away from everyday

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ordinariness that supposes the power of identificatory thinking. In the end, it is those gifts and gestures which not only guarantee participation in the same imaginary, but deliver the sacred itself from its extraterritoriality, insert it into the world of the social and make it effective in the structuring of interaction. Forms of politeness and conviviality are part of all this. 'Pure' recognition arises from conduct which, precisely as sacrifice and gift, once only served mutual bonding and hence individual security. Reciprocity too, at first mainly tied to motives of self-preservation through bonding, changes its deep structure to the extent that it helps to express attributions of mutual recognition alongside the schematism of bonding. Critics of merely instrumental reason miss this evolutionary nuance: they do not perceive what an expressive interest emancipated from survival calculations can bring into play. Empathy instead of calculation, solidarity instead of group-motivated egoism, pleasure in consumption instead of fear of loss, are only some of the oppositions that might describe the historically new level of encounter that is at once affectively, morally and cognitively integrated. The guest situation and its forms of civil intercourse all bear the signature of this meaning, no longer gummed up with the pressures of self-preservation. Yet unproductive expenditure still retains a (obviously inverted) moment of violence upon which excess and extra­ vagance in turn rest. The capacity for self-abandonment, that force for loss reaching as far as physical annihilation, does not only enjoy a high premium in every known culture in the world. It is also the extreme, world­ transcending model for the moral evaluation of behaviour which, in terms of the regime of ends and interests, appears unexpectedly meaningless and superfluous, and which even today brings tears of emotion to the eyes of those who come across it.44 When Georges Bataille defines as 'religion' 'the satisfaction that a society finds in the use of excess resources, or rather in , their destruction (at least insofar as they are useful) (Bataille 1988: 1 20), it doubtless follows that unproductive expenditure as well as the capacity for loss belong to the 'sacred' core of all collective moralities. If it is objected that the guest situation is at best only a pale reflection of what Bataille has in mind, this cannot be entirely denied. But it is still true that the aura of non-everydayness surrounding the guest situation arises from the force of loss, and its distinctive pathos of recognition from participation in a single imaginary, an empty place that is certainly not something or other but 'only' the sacred. One does not have to fall back on the idea of a cult way of thinking to see that forms of politeness and conviviality - and thus all practices that modulate an encounter between strangers - emerge from the context of the sacral. It is not only the ritual, disciplining character of their rules and prohibitions which points in this direction. The normative structure implicit in any form of politeness, which requires mutual attention and recognition to be given before and beyond any fixing of identity, also bears clear signs of a cult origin. In the guest situation, people test among themselves what they have learnt from dealings with the gods.

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The German verb schenken ('to give as a gift or present') recalls the close relationship that once existed between hospitality and cult activity, but it originally meant 'to pour out' (einschenken, ausgiefien) something to drink - in other words, an offering conceived as a libation to the gods or a welcoming drink for a guest. We are indebted to Jakob Grimm for his painstaking, and still materially useful, attempt to trace schenken back to its 'physical word-form' of pouring and thus to explain the greater abstraction and range of meaning. The custom of pouring something out for guests and poor people must have been so old and widespread that the concept of giving in general could be, if not ousted, then certainly determined by it. For us today, schenken is as distant from geben (,to give in general') as, for example, the Latin donare is from dare, and in the words schenken and Geschenk (the noun 'present') we are used to thinking only of donatio and donum, no longer remembering at all the old idea of pouring. (Grimm 1 865: 1 79)

Grimm is taking a risky further step, of course, when he thinks he can identify the original meaning of schenken = giefien as the historical basis of giving, and assumes 'that our hospitable ancestors derived the abstract concept of giving in general from the offering of a drink' (ibid.: 205). However tempting it may be to trace giving back to the simple gesture of pouring, the basic idea behind the concept should rather open out into taking, via the 'fetching' of food and a subsequent narrowing up to the point where the two are interchangeable. For if we think of the gestures involved, then taking and receiving, as well as removing in order to give, belong precisely to the conceptual content of an original giving. Evidence of this is the fact that, in all Indo-European languages, the root do means 'to give' (although, according to sentence position, it can also indicate the exact opposite), and that giving and taking largely coincide not only in meaning but also in the gestures expressing interaction (see Benveniste 1 973: 66f.). In these cases, the linguistic expression appears to retain the elements of the body gesture upon which it is based. Just like einschenken, darreichen and zutrinken, nehmen (Greek vemein) also implies a bending, a keeping slanted, a slight inclination of the body: in short, expressive behaviour whose ritual significance greatly exceeds its pragmatic foundation. It is the physical rhetoric of honour (Ehre) bowing, honouring someone with something (verehren), or honouring him (ehren) which calls for a bodily expression that is always conspicuously the same. Here we encounter, now refined, those behavioural dispositions to the gestural expression and symbolic form of respect which once corresponded to the pragmatics of giving and taking.45 The rhetoric of honour, so it seems, also has its roots in the anthropology of giving. The social and semantic milieu in which the original meaning of giving (schenken) first manifested itself was the guest situation. It therefore seems reasonable to conceive the pouring out (einschenken) and offering of a drink, as well as the welcoming drink or the joint emptying of a goblet still common today, as a first form of conviviality through which the -

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reciprocity of expressive behaviour is introduced and the rhetoric of honour is tested a little further. The historical extension of meaning from einschenken to schenken, eventually including all acts of voluntary giving, is connected not only with evolutionary changes in the level of socialization but also with the risky yet fascinating logic of incorporation. For along with slaughter or final annihilation of the object - which is the inner logic of sacrifice - there is 'evidently no form of gift (Schenkung) where revoca­ tion is so impossible as in the offering of food and drink for immediate consumption. The poured and drunk beer remains lost to the giver; and that is precisely why this expression became generalized, as soon as the need arose to have a word for irrevocable free giving' (Meyer 1 898: 22). With the widespread practice of presenting the guest with a goblet after drinking from it together, so as to honour him with both the drink and the vessel, we approach the decisive problem of cultural sedimentation and codification of the guest situation. Cleopatra honoured all the leaders present at Antony's great banquet with the drinking vessels given to them - but she was not alone in such an action. Bellerophon presented Oeneus with a golden double goblet when they parted. This was customary at weddings and festivals, and in the Germanic areas too there are countless such examples. 'The drinking sessions of ancient times', writes Jakob Grimm ( 1 865: 1 83), 'explain the prevailing custom of the goblet gift, and confirm pouring as the oldest form of honorary or honorific gift.' To appreciate the persistence of this symbolic form, one should bear in mind the still popular phenomenon of victory trophies and decorations, preferably in the form of a cup. The goblet belongs in the special context of gifts that the host gave to his guests at their departure. (As late as the sixteenth century, it was customary for the host secretly to slip some gold and silver into his guest's pocket, thus literally making an offering that was not only unrecognized at the time but also non-purposive because never to be reciprocated.) This final present, actually the only one in the guest situation, has its own place and its own time. Unable to be incorporated or in any other way enjoyed, it is imposed as a kind of burden on the person about to leave, a pledge for the measuring of kindness and attention. Both materially and symbolically, it is located beyond feeding and being-fed in a space of promise and obligation: in short, it redeploys all the effects traditionally ascribed to the gift. At the host's front entrance, where the period of grace comes to an end, the guest gift seems designed to trigger an expectation that conflicts with the temporal structure of the guest situation. On the one hand, host and guest are preparing to return to their symbolic worlds; on the other, it is the host who now attempts through the gift to bring the old schema of reciprocity back into force. The circle of giving and taking again begins to close, as the duty to reciprocate is, so to speak, tentatively reactivated. Whoever gives in this way is seeking not only to honour but to obligate. It is no accident, then, that this final one-sided giving is the stake used to

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achieve repeatability. Because it perpetuates the magic of the guest situ­ ation, the gift endangers exactly this particular event. If it is reciprocated, the playing with ambivalence reaches a lasting end. Rules, predictability, tradition-building are its effects, and a contractual relationship now appears in the place of meetings that can be spontaneously arranged. Rules of hospitality differ from the guest situation as the duty to do something does from the freedom to 'leave it at that' . There is a famous episode in the world of Homer where the sociological meaning of the 'laws' of hospitality suddenly becomes clear. In the battle for Troy, Glaucus and Diomedes face each other as opponents and try to get to know something about each other. When they discover that hospit­ ality joined together their fathers' generation, the definition of the situation changes fundamentally for them both. They decide to make their weapons longer and to keep out of each other's way on the battlefield. 'But then let us exchange our armament, so that others will see how we pride ourselves on being guests from our fathers' time. Thus did they speak, and leaping from the cars they grasped each other by the hand and acclaimed their friendship' (Iliad 6, 230f.). The bard notes with consternation the unequal exchange of golden for bronze armour, or a hundred bulls for the equi­ valent of nine, but this is part of the accord once agreed by their fathers which requires renewal and confirmation. The rights are in principle hereditary, but for them to acquire personal force again with the actors, the founding act of the relationship - the confidence-building measures of gift and sacrifice - must be constantly repeated. The archaic law of hospitality also breaches the duty of political loyalty, standing above the firm interests and common welfare of the group. So unquestioned is it as a moral principle that there is no talk in Homer of treason in connection with this unheard-of event. Of course, the implicit character of the obligation alone makes it doubtful whether, without sub­ stituting something else, one can simply eliminate any affective or emo­ tional element from the relationship and reduce it to a bare 'contract resting on exchange' (Benveniste 1 973: 8 1 ). Moreover, such a rationalist approach systematically disregards the non-contractual prerequisites of the contract, and hence the cultural conditions for its validity. No one has ever been able to detect a legal contract in the precepts of hospitality, in the welcoming drink or the banquet. In preparing to enter a tradition where repetition and continuity of the personal encounter become dominant expectations, 'guest hospitality' requires and demands a 'basic mood' for which ambivalence of feeling and latency of conflict are ever less part of the motivational structure, but emotional commitment and behaviour expressive of feeling are an ever stronger part of it. Actors who have geared and accustomed themselves for a time to the standards of behaviour of the guest situation are increas­ ingly able to associate their mutual respect with personal feelings of sympathy and affection. This new intentional interest in the other, evoked by prolongation of the encounter, has a number of consequences. For the

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arrangement of actors characteristic of the guest situation begins to break down into a host who is no longer a stranger, and a stranger who is hardly a guest any more. Developments remain in line with socio-economic change and the accompanying centralization of power, until finally, in the 'waning of the Middle Ages', they flow into commercial hospitality at one pole, and private conviviality at the other. 46 Already in Homer's time, hospitality was a settled institution between rulers' courts that essentially meant one thing: aristocratic right. Of the conduct of other layers we know little. The relationship was hereditary - a practice that continued into the Roman Empire - and anyone who could produce such signs as part of a broken coin, ring or goblet had done enough to be recognized. Even in the age of the polis, the archaic laws of hospitality remained in force, and 'guest friendship', as it was known, counted as proof of the noble ethos and a publicly effective exhibition of politics and morality - a kind of civil virtue that Xenophon considered more important than the duties of the citizen, second only to sacrificing to the gods (see Hiltbrunner 1 983: 7f.). For a long time, however, functional differentiation has decisively altered the forms of hospitality. From the fourth century, for example, state protection for strangers was continually expanding: communal accommodation took shape under the auspices of the municipality (mainly for diplomats) or the local religious and mercan­ tile bodies, in addition to the first commercial guesthouses. The latter enjoyed the worst possible reputation throughout the Greek and Roman world, being seen mainly as thieves' dens and brothels where a refined citizen would not set foot lest he blacken his name (peyer 1 987: 1 3). This avoidance behaviour was naturally a question not so much of morality as of social and symbolic capital; an infringement would be tantamount to agreeing not to have any personal relationship, not to have a host who matched oneself in status. Only metics and foreigners should be com­ mercial hosts, argued Plato, while citizens who sink so low as to seek reward for services rendered should be punished with imprisonment (see Hiltbrunner 1983: 8). The ideal of generous, non-purposive hospitality completely geared to the interests of others began to fade away, not least because of the rising number of people entitled to claim it, and the stranger - who had once been the other and therefore a guest - threatened to vanish. In his place appeared the person of equal rank to oneself, the distant relative, the neighbour, the friend and acquaintance. Already, the celebrated banquets that we hear about from Xenophon, Plato, Petronius or the evangelists are no longer put on for the passing wayfarer; they are an arrangement between people known to one another. Such banquets did not build a community but confirmed its principle. They presupposed the relationship which the guest situation first initiated. Already in the Greek and Roman world, hospitality was promoted into a distinctive feature of 'better circles', while the 'ordinary' traveller, who now appears on the historical stage mainly as a pilgrim or merchant, is relegated to independent, mostly restricted forms of the guest relationship.

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There were already pilgrims in the ancient world, but only Christianity made it a special form of life. The peregrinus was no longer the foreign traveller of Antiquity but became the pilgrim, the epitome of a traveller in the Middle Ages (see Szabo 1 983: 62, Schmugge 1 983). The Christian literature that began with Paul's epistles does not simply retain the idea of unremunerated hospitality;47 it seeks to establish it as the general norm. Every Christian, but especially bishops, deacons and widows belonging to the community, have a duty to follow Jesus's example by assisting travellers and those in need. With the ending of persecution, xenodochia and hospices providing accommodation for travelling fellow-believers spread from the East through Italy and Gaul to every part of Europe where Christianity had left its mark. Apart from free board and lodging, their tasks included care for the sick, elderly and orphaned. The monasteries, at least in their own perception of themselves, were meant to be centres of an unbroken form of archaic hospitality. 'All guests who come', stated the Rule of Benedict, 'should be received as Christ; for he will one day say: "I was a guest and you received me. " And let all be shown the honour due them, especially fellow-believers and pilgrims.' Such texts regulate down to the smallest detail who should receive and entertain which guests and in what manner, but even they are quite unable to establish the ideal of all-embracing hospitality (see Schuler 1 983). Soon social differentiation becomes moulded into relations of class inequality, and the opposition between pauper and potestas, powerless and powerful, turns into the distinction between rich and poor that so decisively struc­ tures monasterial hospitality. Restrictions become more extensive as a strict division of guests separates the poor and alien from the rich and powerful, the former getting only the absolutely necessary, while the latter are more and more received in the traditional manner befitting a ruler. The time of the period of grace is also terminated - a development graphically expressed in such proverbs as: 'A three-day guest is a burden' or 'After three days at table, guest and fish stink alike'. Inside the monastery, strangers found the Latin version of such sayings fastened to the door of their room. A custom of abbots that is reported with special glee is their fencing with irksome guests: one explained to his noble guests that even the Lord was careful not to stay more than three days in Paradise; another pointed out to his visitors (in something like German rhyme) that dung and yeast are best kept out of doors (see Grimm and Grimm 1 862: 1467), which surely echoed criticism of the forced quartering of nobles. With the exception of the upper classes and, to a lesser extent, the monasteries (which despite everything clung to the traditional norm of cost-free hospitality), the breaking-up and fencing-off process followed a simple schema. Whereas Bishop Theodulf in the late eighth century cautioned his faithful not to accept any reward for full hospitality, his successor Walter (877) thought that an exception should be made where the guest gave something on his own initiative; if a priest was too poor to offer travellers full hospitality, he should at least

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receive them in his home and give them shelter, fire, water and straw for their bed, as well as helping them to purchase food. (Peyer 1 987: 4 1 )

It is only in such episodes that ecclesiastical hospitality shows us what had long been the basic legal principle for dealings with travellers: namely, that pilgrims and others must be provided with essentials and refused neither shelter nor fire, but not given free food and drink. It is exclusion from the common meal that defines the life of the 'ordinary' guest. This limited form of hospitality without board, which appears to destroy the moral foundation of the guest situation, nevertheless contains a (double­ edged) civilizing element that creates legal security for random encounters. The traveller acquires a public-legal status, but it is one which largely neutralizes the traditional relationship between host and guest. The rights of the one are the duties of the other, and the legislative and executive powers of the local ruler ensure that both are respected. The constant coming and going - of rulers and their entourage, merchants and pilgrims, supplicants, couriers, artisans, refugees and vagabonds - makes a tiresome duty of what was once a special ritual event. Monetary interests come into play, and the system of social controls becomes tighter. Pilgrims and refugees have to be identified: anyone who knowingly gives shelter to a thief is himself treated as one; and travellers who make a nuisance of themselves or refuse to pay the necessary are liable to be punished. With the extension of the urban money economy and trade with distant parts, commercial guesthouses were established on the continental pilgrim routes and then in all major towns and districts - taverns, bars and hostels of the most varied (but usually thoroughly dubious) quality. 48 To believe Erasmus's reports, conditions had not seriously improved some two centuries later, at least not in German guesthouses (Erasmus 1947: 27f.). Anyway, commercialization advanced the codification of laws of hospitality, but also the encroachments of political authority. In Bologna ( 1 288) landlords had to supply the city authorities with details of guests who were not known to be merchants; and in Florence ( 1 30 1 ) and Siena ( 1 355) a general obligation to register was introduced (Szabo 1 983: 88). Despite this municipal supervision, both landlords and guests continued for a long time to be seen in better circles as thoroughly shady characters; lying and cheating, greed and lust, murder and assassination, are common themes of tales featuring the trade. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron and Hauff's Das Wirthaus in Spessart, to name but three, set up a whole genre that makes the guesthouse known as a sinister place of encounters, adventures, sexual intrigue and exceptional police interest - a halfway configuration in which there seems to be scope for everything possible and much that is forbidden. Beyond the commercialization and codification, the basic normative content of the guest situation remained as a kind of counterweight within semi-private 'publics', in reality strictly corresponding to the class order. This 'privatization' of hospitality thus brought about a homogenization of

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the clientele. Class or guild affiliation regulated the level of what could be demanded, and anything else was increasingly pushed into the commercial sector. The upper layers of society knew one another and showed their appreciation. Merchants or artisans frequented merchants' or artisans' homes without paying anything; to each his own kind. For some, hospital­ ity was one (but not the only) means of displaying power and thus a constitutive element of the mode of class representation, while for the less privileged it was a normative mechanism triggering the construction of group solidarity. Early mercantile capital minimized the risks through highly cultivated forms of hospitality, and in the guilds or corporations the practice of unilateral giving and taking was one of the indispensable non­ contractual prerequisites of the contract. Without convivium et munera, without banquets and gifts, not only meaningful aristocratic politics but the whole world of court interaction would have fallen apart. In each case the ritual-meal community (see Hauck 1 950) remained the centrepiece of social integration, but its operation brought it closer to archaic kinship morality than to the basic idea behind the guest situation. Stratified societies that rely on assigning individuals to one, and only one, subsystem, and on attaching each person's identity to their 'rank', limit the horizon of available encounters, reduce the social-moral potential of the guest situation to intercourse within constructed groups of homogeneous status, and turn the game of hospitality, once marked by ambivalence and latency and a 'period of grace', into a principle of exclusion and identifi­ cation. Guest is no longer a term for systematic role indeterminacy, but denotes a clearly defined relationship. While identificatory thinking finds orientation and support in the class structure of society, and thus still partially achieves its aim, vengeance for unsuccessful identification now strikes the other who does not have the appropriate sign, the real stranger who is again turned into an alien. His part is acted out in the inns, dosshouses and asylums, his identity established through police question­ ing, his destiny fixed somewhere in between naked violence, government legislation and charitable care.

NOTES TO PART

II

1 . Georg Elwert has rightly noted the orienting function which, in the early decades of the twentieth century, could still be ascribed to the expressions of gift-giving and reciprocity as the promise of a society beyond individualist capitalism (Elwert 1 99 1 : 1 60). 2. Derrida (1 993) has recently given a further impressive demonstration, with the help of Mauss's wordplay with 'one must', that the essay 'sur Ie don' sides in a unique way with the gift, generosity and noble forms of extravagance, and that accordingly the moral conclusions, instead of having the status of a summary, actually constitute the normative presuppositions of the discourse itself. 3. For a critique of the paradigm of structural anthropology, see the contributions in Lepenies and Ritter ( 1 970), Jaeggi (1 976), Stentzler (1979), Bourdieu (1990).

NOTES

1 05

4. 'The norm (of reciprocity) helps to initiate social interaction and is functional in the early phases of certain groups before they have developed a differentiated and customary set of status duties' (Gouldner 1975b: 25 1). 5. Public munificence and patronage �in Greek and Roman Antiquity, the relentless competition over liberality and unproductive expenditure to which members of the political class are subject both 'of their own free will' and 'with a sense of duty', and which they agree to use politically - these are the themes of Paul Veyne's brilliant study of the phenomenon of euergetism (Veyne 1992). 6. 'Generosity', wrote Malinowski concerning the moral ideas of the Trobriand islanders, 'is the essence of goodness'. 7. Bourdieu's main criticism of Polanyi and Sahlins is that they neglect the central process of circular circulation whereby economic capital is reconverted into symbolic capital, and hence the power effects of setting up ties of dependence (Bourdieu 1990: 1 23f.). For a critique of Polanyi's conception of the economy, and especially his distinction between redistribution and market, see also Veyne (1992: 97-100). 8. For an interpretation of Bataille's work that also considers the intention behind it, see Bergfleth ( 1 985). On the meaning of the concept of sovereignty, see Bischof (1984); on the paradoxes afflicting a critique of reason that insists on an altogether different path, see Habermas ( 1 987). 9. Bataille sees in Protestantism the third and final sin against sovereignty. Only then do religious experiences, those explosive mixtures of terror and rapture, evaporate into a purely secular moral consciousness, and 'the believer develops a merely moral consciousness to the extent that he is cut off from religious and sexual experiences of ecstatic self-transcendence' (Habermas 1987: 233). 1 0. The gift theory of the offering seems to have been the scientific consensus in the nineteenth century. As far as I can see, the writings of Edward B. Tylor (1871) did the most to popularize this interpretation. I I . Writers as varied as Freud, Bataille, Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as Sartre, Foucault and Lacan, have drawn on ideas in The Genealogy of Morals. And the connection between sacrifice and guilt drawn by the critique of civilization approach has been immensely influenced by the encounter with Nietzsche. 12. An informative overview of the contemporary 'sacrifice' debate may be found in congress reports edited by Iankuhn (1970), Reverdin and Grange ( 1 98 1) and Hauck (1984). See also Detienne and Vernant (1979). The debate is essentially shaped by the contrasting perspectives of Walter Burkert (1972) and Rene Girard ( 1 977 [1972]). Each in his way traces violence, or rather its community-building function, back to the position which, so to speak, is the start-up mechanism for the history of anthropogenesis; namely, that religions, together with all basic social institutions, are based upon sacrifice. See also the contributions to the debate in Hamerton-Kelly ( 1 987). 13. Along with Abraham and Isaac, Abel and Melchizedek figure as the main precursors of Christ's sacrifice (see Suntrup 1984). On the significance of Old Testament sacrifices and their influence in the New testament, see Hoheisel (1984). 14. William Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites launched the theory of the sacrifice as a sacramental communion. Emile Durkheim, who regarded it as a 'positive' cult mediating between the sacred and the profane took over this interpretation and immediately associated it with the theme of the gift: 'Sacrifice is certainly a process of communion in part. But it is also, and no less fundamentally, a gift, an act of renunciation. It always presupposes that the worshipper relinquishes to the gods some part of his substance or his goods. Any attempt to reduce one of these elements to the other is pointless. Indeed, the offering may have more lasting effects than the communion' (Durkheim 1 995: 347). 15. During the conversion of the Germanic tribes from the sixth century onward, the German word was currently used in the sense of 'almsgiving', so that the clash with the Christian rite of sacrifice brought about a remarkable linguistic division. Whereas southern and central regions took operari as the loan-word for 'to sacrifice', Frankish, Lower Rhenish and Netherlandish fastened onto the Latin offere: to offer (Kluge and Gotze 1 95 1 : 538). Of

1 06

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course, Christianization did not put an end t o the sacrificial offering in a new building (dog and horse). A (perhaps not altogether serious) report from Oldenburg suggests that in the seventeenth century children were still being killed for the protection of dykes (Davies 1 98 1 : 45). 1 6. See Lorenz ( 1 967). In the discussion of 'so-called evil', the theory of an inborn aggressive drive is largely revised and eventually given up altogether. See Ashley Montagu ( 1972), Plack ( 1 973), Eibl Eibesfeldt (1984), Gladigow (1 986). Burkert, in his later accounts ( 1 983b, 1 987), considers these objections but does not substantially revise them. Nearly twenty years after the first publication of his magnum opus, he sounded a self-critical note: 'There is too much talk of aggression in Homo Necans, and it is too triumphant. But it remains true that death and killing are not simply signs among other signs; the experiential quality of absolute seriousness and the awareness of irreversibility mean that they have a special status and lead to special effects' (Burkert 1990: 1 9 1). 17. To avoid any misunderstanding, it should be stressed that the paleolithic hunt was by no means the primary food resource. Hunter-gatherer societies remain dependent on the gathering of plants, which is mainly performed by women, and only this stabilizing foundation makes it possible for men to specialize in hunting. One assumes that they never contributed more than twenty to thirty per cent of food requirements, but that the procurement and distribution of the rare and highly prized meat accounted for a hundred per cent of their prestige. 1 8 . Burkhard Gladigow (1984) has attempted yet again to subsume the various types of sacrifice under the category of gift. On the one hand, this connects up with how the sacrificer himself perceives things, and on the other, analyses the sacrifice as no more than the model of an asymmetrical social relationship. It is therefore rather unclear what cognitive gain this interpretation might offer. 1 9. Davies (1981) offers a thorough cultural-historical account of human sacrifice. Whereas some authors flatly deny the existence of cannibalism and at most assign it to the stock of ethnological myth (see Arens 1 979), the rationalist prejudice of the 'protein theorists' (see Harner 1977; Harris 1 977) even ascribes the widespread slaying among the Aztecs to a chronic shortage of available animals, yet comes within a hair's breadth of interpreting sacrifice as something culturally specific. In debate with ethological theorists, Gladigow ( 1 986) has attempted to reconstruct the cultural conditions of collective killing. 20. On the cultural institutions that these mechanisms support, Girard writes (1 987: 128): 'Too much mimetic desire will cause an intraspecific free-for-all intense enough to generate the common enemy that is needed for the reconciliation. This collective victimage will trigger not only the cult of the victimized reconciler, but all useful communal enterprises and institutions, from kinship laws to food gathering and rites de passage, because each one of these demands the social harmony that can only be achieved through this process. That is the reason, I believe, why primitive religion associates all useful activities with some form of victim age that brought communal harmony because it was unanimously believed, unanimously misunder­ stood '. 2 1 . 'I bring one egg and would gladly have two.' 22. Gerhard Baudy (1983, esp. 135f.) has systematically treated the ethological dimensions of the subject. 23. On the culturally specific contexts of social inferiority, as well as the fine but telling distinctions between inferiority and powerlessness, see Neckel ( 1 99 1 : 146f.). 24. For a discussion of the 'emergence of class societies', see the contributions in the eponymous collection edited by Klaus Eder ( 1 973). 25. Unless otherwise indicated, the detailed evidence is to be found in Baudy 1983: 1 57f. Walter Burkert concludes from the etymology of tragoidia ('goat song') that even the classical invention of tragedy, in which the Greeks can rightly claim a special place, can be traced back to the sacrificial cult (Burkert 1 990: 13f.). 26. On the sacral origin of money and its development out of the cult sacrifice, see Laum (1 924) and Kurnitzky ( 1974) (who is mainly concerned to unravel the instinctual structure of money). In this context see also the impressive 'Enquiry concerning exchange' (Stentzler 1 979).

NOTES

1 07

A study by Rudolf Wolfgang Muller (1977) attempts a theoretically demanding historico­ genetic account of the connection between money and abstraction. Also essential are Thomson (1 954, 1961); and see the volume on the 'psychoanalysis of money' edited by Ernest Borneman ( 1 977). 27. It is neither an accident nor a metaphorical figure of speech if Erving Goffman, in a direct reference to Durkheim's sociology of religion, continually alludes to the 'holiness' of the individual. But ritual behaviour, even in its most secularized form, does seem to mediate symbolic contents whose motivation is religious (Goffman I 972a: 95). 28. Despite the inevitable conceptual differences between anthropological, sociological and ethological approaches, there is considerable agreement on the meaning and function of ritual. For an instructive survey of cultural-anthropological and sociological theories, see the study by Rainer Wiedemann ( 1 991). Traces of ethological approaches may be found almost everywhere, if often unexpressed, although Goffman's concept of ritual explicitly draws on this tradition. 29. Taking up van Gennep's three-stage model, Turner has attempted to draw out the characteristic features of anti-structure in the liminal (i.e. transitional threshold) phase of ritual. On the concept of 'communitas' and its varying significance, see Turner (1 969). 30. In his Theory of Communicative Action (1991, vol. I), Jurgen Habermas uses Godelier's (and ultimately Levi-Strauss's) structural theory of the interplay between myth and history to explain the differences between mythical interpretations of the world and 'rational' world­ pictures, above all from the vantage-point of the latter. 3 1 . In an inimitable way, Karl Kerenyi (1 944) has made visible the world of the Hermes image with all its rich meaning. 32. The following, purely illustrative examples of nomenclature are taken from the notes in which Marcel Mauss (1 990) presents the ethnographic studies of Franz Boas. A picture of what it means to bequeath a name, a rank and an action programme is drawn by Ruth Benedict (1935: 201 f.) in relation to the transmission of a chiefly title among the Indians of the Northwest Coast. 33. The material collected by Marshall Sahlins (1972: 246f.) provides an instructive overview of the regulation of reciprocity relations, kinship, hierarchy and wealth distribution in various cultures. 34. The object reference is not necessarily only food, although it may be assumed that this was the main meaning. 'Ring-breaker', a typical honorary title in the North German domain, derives from the breaking of the gold ring whose separate parts were then presented as gifts (see Laum 1 960: 30). 35. The context in which The Dialectic of Enlightenment thinks it can combine the two senses of laughter (sign of power, sign of the removal of that power) with that of naming has been made explicit in the anthropological work of Helmuth Plessner. In laughter, 'man answers that which is unanswerable in its multiple meanings (Mehrsinnigkeit). He thus meets the vital, spiritual, existential irrationality ( Wider-sinnige) ( . . . ) with a reaction that displays both self-assertion and self-abandon. By laughing, he surrenders to his own body, thereby renounces unity with it or mastery over it. With this capitulation as a bodily-spiritual unity, he asserts himself as a person' (Plessner 1 970: 1 53). 36. Elias Canetti has investigated this nexus of self-consciousness, cultural objectification and corporeality with a view to spotlighting the most crucial, but also the most hidden, processes of power: incorporation and digestion. 'One tends to see only the thousand tricks of power which are enacted above ground; but these are the least part of it. Underneath, day in, day out, is digestion and again digestion. Something alien is seized, cut up into small bits, incorporated into oneself, and assimilated. By this process alone man lives; if it ceases, he dies. So much he has always known. But it is clear that all the phases of this process, and not only the external and half-conscious ones, must have their correspondence in the psyche' (Canetti 1984: 246). 37. Emile Benveniste, in his now classic study of Indo-European institutions, comes to the conclusion that the Latin hostis originally involved the idea of equality through equalization, that hostire was correlated with aequare (to compensate or equalize), and that the whole

1 08

TOWARDS AN ANTH ROPOLOGY OF GIVING

conceptual field a s well a s hostis itself referred t o the contractual rules o f hospitality. 'Hostis corresponds to gasts of Gothic' and originally had the meaning of stranger or guest. The classical sense of 'enemy' seems to have appeared only at a time when relations between tribal groups were dissolved as a result of politically motivated demarcation strategies; then the Latin hospes was invented as a new word for guest (Benveniste 1973: 75ff.). The prehistoric preconditions of the institution of hospitality still remain obscure, however. Why, then, should one not for the time being focus on the idea of sacrifice? 38. Georg Simmel employs the terms 'reserve', 'nimble-minded ness', 'objectivity' and 'abstract relationship' to characterize forms of interaction between the stranger 'who comes today and stays tomorrow' and the local host group (Simmel 1 964: 402f.). The temporary structure of the guest situation appears, by contrast, to be far more demanding, risky and fundamental, precisely because it sets, institutionalizes and revokes a time limit that makes possible an experience beyond the status quo to which the group returns, without really being able to return. 39. On the interplay between time and hospitality, see Hans-Dieter Bahr (1990), who describes 'the gift of time' as the act structuring the laws of hospitality. Time and giving are also the major theme of an investigation starting from Heidegger's metaphysical 'es gibt' (,there is') sentence, which Jacques Derrida ( 1 993) has produced to get on the track of a non­ economic ethic of giving involved in reciprocity. 40. See Benveniste (1973: 334ff.). In my typological construction of the guest situation, I deliberately omit the sociological background which - especially as far as the examples from the Homeric world are concerned - mostly lies in archaic kingship. 4 1 . Contrary to the simplistic notion of a linear decline in violence throughout the civilizing process, it should be pointed out that the release of aggression against outsiders is still today one of the key mechanisms of social integration (Honneth and Joas 1980: 1 22). 42. This is the entry-point for Jean Baudrillard's radical critique, for which the aesthetic of transgression draws the sting of excessive experiences in a way that accords with our culture of prohibition. 'The primitive festival, like the sacrifice, is not about transgression but about reversibility and cyclical revolution - the only form that really puts an end to the prohibition barrier' (Baudrillard 1976: 242); and, one must add, that would immediately condemn the transgression to final disappearance through ideal decontextualization. 43. The multiple forms of festival in the history of culture obviously stand in the way of any ambition to outline a general theory. Walter Haug and Rainer Warning (1 989) offer an instructive overview of the current discussion in the volume they edited, Colloquiumsband XIV der Arbeitsgruppe 'Poetik und Hermeneutik'. On the present state of the Dionysian faction that links up with Nietzsche and Bataille, see also Maffesoli (1 986). 44. Studies of altruism provide unusual examples of overstepping the boundaries of self­ abandonment. See, for instance, Hunt (1992). 45. The dispute over whether gestures are biologically fixed behavioural dispositions or products of socio-cultural differentiation, whether their meaning should be construed as universal or entirely specific to the cultural context, cannot be settled here. At any event, the success that travellers have always had in communicating through body language suggests a middle position between the two extremes. As is weB known, Marcel Mauss ( J 966c) already examined the cultural multiplicity of body techniques. And Desmond Morris and others (1979) took on the major task of describing the emergence and distribution of certain significant gestures within the European area. See also the studies in cultural history in Bremmer and Roodenberg (1991). 46. An exceBent survey of the development of hospitality and the establishment of guesthouses may be found in the study by Hans Conrad Peyer (1987), on whose material I have largely based myself. 47. Paul himself (2 Cor. I l .23f.) provides a vivid picture of the drama and dangers of travel at that time: 'I (have had) far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times 1 have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once 1 received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits,

NOTES

1 09

danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters.' 48. On the significance of commercial guesthouses for economic and municipal history, see Peyer ( 1 987: 76f.) and Kerntke ( 1 987).

PART III TRANSITIONS

8

I DEAL CONSTR UCTIONS

For bounty, that makes gods, does still mar men Shakespeare

Lap of luxury (Sombart 1 982) and civilizing force (Elias 1 994) rolled into one, court society is still left with the task of developing the 'potential' of the guest situation, and of the gift, as binding interactional knowledge, in order to hand it down - partly as reviled tradition, partly as exemplary legacy - to bourgeois society. ! If one adopts Norbert Elias's theory-of-civilization perspective on the history of European society, one may say that, from the waning of the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century, the court was the identifiable site where psychosocial change (the construction of new habits and dispositions) found its most concentrated expression. Elias ( 1 983: 1 10) describes it as a social figuration that stands out by its density of interaction and by a special type of action rationality derived from the pitiless struggle for opportunities of gaining prestige (Elias 1 994). Forced functional differentiation, together with ensuing processes of rivalry and monopoly formation, present themselves as triggering mechanisms and quasi-external laws for the pressure towards personal distance and self-control. This civilizing process is carried out on the body; it is synonymous with the social production, indexing and disciplining of the body. When absolutely everything is subjected to the critical gaze of others, so that taste, clothing, posture, speech and gesture chiefly serve to define the individual's current social rating, then the observation of self and others, as well as greater affect controls and cognitive interactional com­ petences, become basic survival strategies and firmly rooted 'habits'. Courtly interaction makes of human intercourse a practical art necessary to survival that is based upon knowledge and encourages the primacy of form;2 its standards of conduct are now formed according to the maxims of prudence and foresight, coded as etiquette and ceremony, set down and transmitted in books of good manners. The art of observing and handling people, which came into full flower in the age of the ancien regime, mainly

I DEAL CONSTRUCTIONS

111

served to protect those status and power opportunities by which personal identity and social esteem were exclusively measured. There is nothing here that might incline a person to deceive himself concerning his own motives. On the contrary. Just as he is forced to seek the true motives of others behind their controlled outward behaviour, just as he is lost if he is unable to unmask the affects and interests of his rivals behind their dispassionate facades, he must know his own passions if he is to conceal them effectively. It was not only in the sphere of bourgeois-capitalist competition that the idea of egoism as a motive of human action was formed, but first of all in the com­ petition at court, and from the latter came the first unveiled descriptions of the human affects in modern times. (Elias 1 983: 1 05)

From it too, of course, derived stocks of cultural knowledge and forms of interaction which signalled the (still class-bound) condition of possibility for the construction of reflexive relations with the self, whose 'meaning', however, already pointed beyond the class framework of the field of inter­ action. Whereas Elias ( 1 994) runs the psychosocial dimensions of the civilizing process into the construction of stable superego structures, and visualizes the underlying dynamic of subjective development as an over-simple process of conditioning, 3 we shall limit ourselves here to a description of certain features of the courtly ego-ideal, especially as this affects the contextual­ ization of the gift. This forming of a courtly ego-ideal - imagined as an aristocratic lifestyle but holding the 'burghers' too in its trance - lasted for several centuries and was fundamentally structured around a single theme already familiar to us from the anthropology of giving: namely, the model­ ling of relations of power by the 'reinvention' of reciprocities. Gifts and guests played a special role in this, and the handling of both was a favourite theme, first in courtly literature, then in learned commentaries and philo­ sophical treatises - not only because it involved a certain type of courtly representation and self-image of the nobility as a group, but crucially also because the monetization of social intercourse helped a different pattern of distribution to break through, in relation to which the peculiar logic of giving appeared in all the sharper relief. As a normative background to the general aestheticization and 'status stylization' of existence (Weber 1 978) or, in other words, to the rejection of any purposive orientation to consumption, the contempt for acquisitive­ ness, the withdrawal through play from the worthlessness of everyday reality - it is necessary to mention a point d 'honneur which encouraged unproductive expenditure and conspicuous luxury consumption, as well as determining the finest details of expressive behaviour. The chivalrous ideal, which was 'only' aesthetic although it wanted to be ethical (Huizinga 1 955: 67f.), gave rise to a code of honour that from now on was the symbolic order of 'good' society: it made a career for itself as aristocratic lifestyle and served as a model in strategies of social distinction, even though its own cultural genesis had long been obscured by the folds of the historical process. -

1 12

TRANSITIONS

The epoch of genuine feudalism and full-scale chivalry was already nearing an end in the thirteenth century, but the knight remained well beyond his court as the idealized model of aristocratic interaction.4 The nobleman shaped his life in the borrowed masks of Arthurian epic and survived the endless adventures of a heroic age again and again - as theatre and as an obligation of his estate. In an impressive work, Harald Haferland has reconstructed the model of court interaction from the expressive behaviour and relationship formulae contained in the literature of the time (Haferland 1988). Here agon and reciprocity leap to the eye as two apparently competing core-concepts, though in reality they converge in honour as the common measure. Knighthood is aventiure; combat and chivalry are the favourite practical fields in which recognition is won, assigned and lost. But it is not only the agonistic schema of archaic violence which takes shape in the courtly epic; a form ritualized through duel and tournament also gradually reduces anim­ osity to the symbolic expression of animosity and thus modulates violence as a moment of reciprocal attention. The outcome of the contest may give the victor everything, without his being able to take away the loser's status and honour. Like the extravagant outlay in combat - 'the tournament is the courtly ritual of sacrifice put on for the noble godhead, the public, to attract its attention, attention that means honour' (Haferland 1 988: 96) - the unproductive expenditure of wealth serves only to accumulate honour and to increase the face value of a name. One transformation comparable to the civilizing of the agonistic schema that has already become apparent in analysis of the guest situation can also be observed in the mutual schematizations of interaction, once the motives of bonding and individual security are systematically replaced by those of mutual recognition. 'In courtly society, all movement of the nobility towards the ideal pattern of reciprocity takes place according to the dictates of courtly expression, whether the encounters in question are accidental or deliberate, between strangers or between persons already linked to each other' (ibid. : 1 38). It is hardly surprising, then, that not only courtly poets but also the actors themselves focus on shaping forms of interaction directly connected with recognition and honour - contests, greetings, receptions, farewells, etc. - through which reciprocity is established. Even in the court context, however, the gift is still the most significant form in which relations of recognition are established and expressed. Although it can be replaced with standards of conduct that have similar effects, it functions as the crucial medium of expression in the internal group structure of the nobility, as the relationship sign par excellence by which shifts in the meaning of reciprocity can be demonstrated with special clarity. The inner logic of the courtly gift, that is, differs conspicuously from the dominant form under common law, as this was conceived in the early medieval relationship of giving. It brings into play new, or perhaps only age-old, motives that negate purpose and duty - motives all too familiar to modern students of interaction.

I D EAL CONSTRUCTIONS

113

For early medieval semantics, almost every exchange was still seen in terms of gift-exchange. Whoever gave something pursued certain ends or fulfilled his obligations in the long circuits of distribution and redistri­ bution; whoever accepted something thereby agreed that the duty to reciprocate had a binding character, and the legal relationship appeared in a way to guarantee this in the case of both the giver and the recipient. In feudal law any giving away of something, including deliveries of anything under the manorial system for which material counterparts and lordly protection were demanded, as well as forms of feudal exploitation in general, were conceived as gifts (dona). In diplomatic dealings between courts or states, 'presents' (munera) were exchanged that often barely differed from tribute. Peace treaties and communions involving an oath called for a ritual exchange of gifts, as did the establishment of bonds of trust between equals and their kinship groups. Even the exchange-based commodity economy continued for a long time to associate buying and selling in the semantics of reciprocal giving (see Hannig 1 986: 1 52f.). The ars donandi (ibid.: 149), at first a promising diplomatic strategy to use gifts as a way out of military impasse, continually gathered momentum and intensity, not least through the courtly social game of ars amandi that Werner Sombart ( 1 982 [ 1 9 1 3]) so vividly described as the victory of femininity and the hour of capitalism's birth from the spirit of extrava­ gance. Finally, the art of giving became the distinct practice of a noble rank in society, and indispensable proof of an aristocratic mentality. The novelty of this courtly art of giving was that it consciously stepped outside the context of any legal obligation and depicted itself as purely 'honorific'. 'The true courtly gift must be an honorific gift, for it must be given of one's own free will. It should not be guided by the expectation of a return gift or an obligation of gratitude, nor given out of sheer obligation for a preceding action. That anyway is how it should look in the ideal case' (Haferland 1 988: 1 5 1 ) . It breaks the continuum of giving and taking, debt and payment of debt, and posits itself as a unique act determined only by the dialectic of honour. Thomasin von Zirklaere's Walscher Gasl, the bestseller among books of chivalry training in the High and Late Middle Ages, formulates a com­ prehensive theory of courtly reciprocity. 5 At its centre stands the concept of generosity, mille. Thomasin means by this a frame of mind that is free of strategic orientations and calculated interests, expressing instead purity of intent (,millen muot'). Someone who gives freely and yet has an eye only for his own honour, concerned through greed or other reasons only with the effects of his action, violates the basic intention by abusing both the form of interaction and the expressive behaviour. For generosity, properly understood, gives gladly, freely and spontaneously. It is neither inner duty nor inner compulsion, not legal maxims but a preference for virtue. This alone marks its distance from the law, whose function of establishing social order may certainly complement it but in a completely different way.

1 14

TRAN SITIONS

Whereas the law has sanctions at its disposal to impose or restore certain forms of conduct, such means are entirely alien to generosity. It can neither be demanded nor even be legitimately expected. Whereas the law, in keeping with principles of stratification, gives everyone their due and takes away what is not their due, whereas it metes out social rigour by imposing retribution, the distinctive principle of generosity is that it only gives. Its sole means are gifts; but it thus takes human coexistence beyond the rough-and­ ready maintenance of order towards the recognition and friendship that make it actually pleasant for the first time. These self-binding norms, however, run up against rigid class boundaries: only the nobleman can live by such a morality, because only the nobleman seems capable of being generous. Thomasin develops a simple value-schema that further accentuates the class differentiation of gifts; it is one that Georg Simmel ( 1 958: 3 7 1 ), many centuries later, would have no trouble in adopting to help him categorize the modern forms of giving. Honour is of little use to the poor and needy. They should be given something to help them - gifts which, for a noble­ man, fall under the category 'small change'. Since no honour is associated with them, they are given without any publicity. Courtly gifts are quite different: they should be strange and handsome artefacts that carry the sign of distinction, for one must be able to see and admire them when they are publicly presented. They bring great honour upon the recipient and are one of the joys of life at court. Whereas the logic of redistribution is bound to 'utility' and highlights the material side of things, generosity splits off this substratum from the courtly gift and stresses the aspect of significance. 'In the courtly public no material resources but only indexical ones are distributed. This explains the universalizing thrust and the differentiation within generosity' (Haferland 1 988: 1 55). Ideally, honour and recognition are here the only important resources distributed through gifts and motivated by generous activity mindful of the pure intent of giving. Insisting on the need to break the circle of giving and taking, Thomasin reminds his audience that any association between gift and return gift violates the principles of generosity. Only unconditional giving testifies to the autonomy of the subject, which may be counted up in the sym­ bolic capital of honour. Neither a return gift nor 'natural' gratitude should be expected by the giver. Accordingly, dealings with guests are a recurrent theme in the courtly epic, and the guest situation demonstrates the 'genuineness' of the basic uncalculating intent that lends generosity the character of a virtue. The gift conveys nothing other than the pure intent of giving. Motives corrupted by expectations of gain must be scorned and kept utterly alien from it. For a calculated concern with interests and consequences belongs to the world of the merchant, not to the context of courtly interaction. If a return gift is eventually received, it should not be compared with one's own gift; it is best to act as if there had never been one.

I D EAL CON STRUCTIONS

115

In Thomasin's view, this explanation of interaction knowledge is capable of protecting the sublime intent from impure temptations. The surprising growth in meaning that the gift undergoes through its courtly construction results, on the one hand, from the separation of the non-purposive intent that autonomously posits itself in connection with generosity. But it also results from the fact that courtly interaction always both favours and isolates the act of giving, removes it from the cycle of gift-exchange, and thus ensures that reciprocation, instead of reciprocating, actually involves further gifts which are themselves due to the symbolic surplus of generosity. The twofold splitting succeeds because generosity is categorized as reciprocal in courtly interaction; it marks out, in relation to the group's internal structure, the decisive attitude for the symmetrical distribution of recognition. Nevertheless, interactional knowledge does not simply develop non­ purposive intent out of the jumble of competing motives, but also strives to analyse the expressive behaviour commensurate with generosity. Pure intent should be reflected in facial expression; it may be displayed in the spontaneity of action, in the fact that someone does not first think, discuss and complain for a long time but simply gives; or it may show itself in the model of unproductive expenditure that evokes the dynamic of con­ spicuous consumption so typical of courtly society. As soon as generosity is expressed by unproductive expenditure, the latter too inexorably gets caught up in the cycle of reciprocity. Once set in motion, the spiral accelerates: expenditure is not now reciprocated only by expenditure, generosity loses all measure; and (in keeping with the inner logic of potlatch) what began with formulae of reciprocal relationship ends in struggle over acquisition and displays of rank. This onward movement is obviously connected with two things. For just as reciprocity can suddenly change into the agonistic schema, agon, even in the elementary form of physical combat, must be transformed into complete reciprocity. Expen­ diture of the body and expenditure of wealth, though at first belonging to different spheres, make up the common foundation on which the courtly struggle for recognition rises to its ideal expression. Generosity that knows itself to be autonomous in Thomasin's sense, because it systematically breaks the link between action and consequence in favour of pure intent, is itself by no means inconsequential (assuming that the expression of intent is successful). Indeed, its unintended effects recall those little psychosocial miracles and turnarounds which fundamentally alter the signs of interaction. For the less one aims to bind the recipient through gifts, the more strongly will he be bound. Where no hint of obligation shows through in the giver's expressive behaviour, the receiver feels his obligation all the more. If he perceives the expression of giving as 'genuine', he will hardly be able to extricate himself from the effects of the gift. Thomasin accordingly describes the recipient's attitude in terms of obligation and gratitude, but then immediately introduces a singular turn of phrase that characterizes it not as a depressing burden but as a special

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TRANSITIONS

value commensurate with the noble cast of mind. The obligation, that is, should be posited with the same autonomy as generosity itself. This being so, what matters is not so much to reciprocate a gift as to be capable of 'bearing' (in both senses) the burden of obligation. Precisely because, in courtly interaction, bonding is assigned special value yet obligation appears at its core, it too must be brought in line with the ideal measure of reciprocity. To be obliged to someone else - just that already qualifies a relationship as courtly. Of course, the obligation must also be set freely and autonomously, as generosity showed how to be done. Only thus does purity of intent show within it too. If generosity does not compel obligation or set any law-like mechanism in motion, then nor does obligation have to feel itself under any compulsion. (Haferland 1 988: 1 58)

It becomes possible for obligation to be voluntary, because the strict hiatus between gift and return gift now implies Being-obliged not as a response to favours received, but as an independent act whose symbolic value is correlated with that of generosity. To be generous, to be made obliged and to show oneself obliged, are no longer more than two sides of the formally complete expression of courtly bonding whose inner structure and ideal form is reciprocity. In the imaginary of the court space, a form of knowledge developed whereby the gift became what it was capable of being in the ideal case: a voluntary sign of recognition motivated by the pure intent of giving, situated beyond debt and any duty to reciprocate, and directed only towards the other's person. This shift became possible because courtly interaction legally enshrined, in place of the ritually controlled, purpose­ negating form of archaic exchange, a symbolic practice which went beyond the isolation and cognitive reinterpretation of individual acts of giving, taking and reciprocating, and allowed not only the pure intent but also the appropriate expression of that intent to be reflected in discourse. The nobleman at least knew, or could know, what he had to give to whom, how and why. The discursivization of gift-giving was the cultural invention that definitively inserted the problematic of reciprocity into much broader horizons than those of exchange. But there were other, quite ambivalent effects too. Since the construction of the ideal required contrasting knowl­ edge, as well as exclusions and prohibitions that mainly related to the despised rationality of mercantile action, the scope both for strategic abuse and for misgivings inevitably increased. Thus, it is possible for me to use the cognitive framework of the form of interaction, in the full knowledge that the expression of voluntariness entails the voluntary character of the obligation, which in turn makes more intense the feeling of being obliged. But even if I am only pretending, I still go along with the ideal of that culturally new knowledge and indirectly help in shaping a style of inter­ action which paradoxically presupposes ranks and hierarchies, only to level them again at once in social intercourse through the figures of recognition

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and reciprocity. Naturally the rules of the game apply only when, as in court society, they exclusively commit reciprocity to a morality of ease and plenty. In the end, only someone with the appropriate rank is capable of demonstratively carrying this through, and thus of according respect to the other person. The structure of such courtly forms of politeness - exempli­ fied by the honorific gift, and all but essential for relations of recognition to come about even in modern societies - displays exactly this pattern of levelling of rank and reciprocal expressive behaviour. Here it is still a culturally stylized status group that is legitimized through a metaphysical world-picture, and for which forms of reciprocal recognition and social esteem are distributed through codes of honour involving group membership. Where nobles are alone among themselves, recognition takes the form of symmetrical relationships. Everyone must be accorded the respect and social esteem due to them as a member of the group. Against the demands on conduct of such a traditional morality, the bourgeoisie will insist on universalization and destroy for its own benefit the privilege associated with allocation to an estate. Yet the normative stocks that condensed in the court imaginary into the ideal structure of gift-giving insistently return and, seemingly cleared of all courtly dross, eventually find their way into the moral economy of modern society. As an anti-economic principle transcending exchange-value, as recollection and revival, tradition and utopia of successful reconciliation, the gift remains alive in the modern form of the present. Initially, however, the immense changes that introduced the 'dawn of capitalism' (Heller 1 982: 3) under the aegis of the Renaissance caused the problematic of giving to lose a little of its shine. The books of manners and pedagogy of Renaissance humanism did not have the gift as their core, but focused on the conscious shaping and control of all expressive behaviour that could take over the reciprocity-boosting effect of the gift and thereby give the cognitive structure of relations of recognition a first push towards universalism. It is in this material that Norbert Elias locates the advancing threshold of shame and awkwardness as the main indicator of the 'civil­ izing' process. To the extent that public pressure grows for considerate and appropriate forms of behaviour, the dampening of instinct through self­ control and affect modulation comes to play a prominent role, while taboos and prohibitions ensure recognition of the inevitable, and fear of overstepping the mark is transformed into those unpleasant feelings of shame and awkwardness which emphasize that you cannot act as your own self-image might lead you to behave. Motivated at first by vivid references to 'what others might think' (Elias 1 994: 66), these new dispositions go beyond traditional notions of morality and come symbolically to express the value of the person himself. As Elias mainly relies upon a simple model of conditioning structured by fear and threats of punishment (see the critique in Neckel 199 1 : 1 35f.), his theory of the 'civilizing process' leaves remarkably little room for any form of internalization modifiable by the ego that rests upon reason and

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TRAN SITIONS

cultural stocks of knowledge. Yet the struggle to reinvent and consolidate relations of recognition not based upon ritually stabilized demands on conduct and mythical world-pictures is hard to organize without the ego­ performance of active subjects, for voluntariness is always among the implicit presuppositions. The establishment of formulas of mutual recognition may have originally been bound up with fear and self-preservation; in the writings of Castiglione, Della Casa or Erasmus, however, the dominant theme is neither fear nor compulsion but the formative process of a new personality ideal. The construction of the cortegiano, who will go down in history as the uomo universale, brings before our eyes part of what the bourgeois subject promises to become in the ideal case: an all-round personality trusting in the power of free speech, dedicated to aesthetic and moral perfection, who knows his obligation to the public interest and operates, so to speak, as a personification of forms of mutual recognition. Already for Castiglione, the generosity and unproductive expenditure that Thomasin treated as a virtue are no longer major themes. While generosity features at most negatively, in the sense that the courtier has to avoid meanness, envy and greed, unproductive expenditure is removed from any framework of reciprocity and rivalry and tightly confined to the ruler's luxury consumption. 'He should be a prince of great splendour and generosity, giving freely to everyone because, as we say, God is the treasurer of generous rulers. He should hold magnificent banquets, festivals, games and public shows; [ . . . ] I would also seek to persuade him to erect great buildings, both to do him honour in his lifetime and to be memorials after his death' (Castiglione 1 976: 3 1 0). For this kind of expenditure, the crucial yardstick is no longer extravagance but functional enhancement in the context of political representation - which means not so much that extravagance is switched off as that the sting is taken from expenditure itself. In displays of luxury consumption, the expenditure is now no more than a practical means of rule, a power to achieve the recognition of power (see Bourdieu 1 990). Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo, first published in Milan in 1 559, strikes rather a different note in obtaining a public hearing for moderation and good manners. Here it is mainly utilitarian considerations that make it advisable for the individual to be tactful and considerate in making promises; this alone serves to keep the advantage. Inserted as he is into the discourse of traditional morality, Della Casa downplays the claims of practical maxims dressed up as virtues, in favour of the unprepossessing manners of everyday interaction that are so extraordinarily significant. [E]veryone must deal with other men and speak to them every day; thus, good manners must also be practised many times daily, whereas justice, fortitude and the other greater and nobler virtues are called into service much more seldom. Generous and magnanimous persons are not called upon to put such virtues into practice on a daily basis; rather, no one could behave in this way very often. Similarly, even men who are strong and courageous are rarely required to

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demonstrate their valour and virtue by their works. Thus, while the latter virtues easily surpass the former in greatness and weightiness, yet the qualities I speak of surpass the others in number and frequency. (Della Casa 1 986: 3-4)

Still, it is not only for its social advantages that politeness is of use to those with the right capacity. The shaping of expressive behaviour, the checking of egoism and amour-propre, clothing suitable to one's station, thoughtful conduct always trimmed to its effect on others (and strictly conceived by Della Casa as producing adjustment to conventional rules of life) - these also serve a single noble end, while converging in a personality ideal for which harmony and perfection are the highest values in both aesthetic expression and moral action. Even if Della Casa's argument tends to stress the internalization pressures found in the thesis of a 'civilizing process', there remains an unexplained residue. For moderation is at once convention and subjective accomplishment, a partly forced but also partly achieved behavioural orientation, which is capable of generating relations of mutual recognition and forms of social esteem only because it is itself defined to some extent by personal autonomy. The exuberance of inter­ action is now used to outline an idea of the subject dressed up in the clothes of traditional morality, which structurally associates self-realization with reciprocity. No more than attention to other people's interests can respect and esteem ever be simply enforced. Interest in others also requires a measure, whose inner norm is reciprocity. If the discourse on the anthropology of giving no longer revolves around the exchange of material resources but mainly around reciprocity of expressive behaviour, the semantics of giving also begins here to shake off its material substratum and to prosper in the symbolic framework of shifts in meaning. The little tokens of interaction, the tactfulness, consideration, advice and corrections to behaviour - so vividly described by Della Casa ( 1 986: 9f.) in relation to the noisy eater Count Ricciardo - are now designated as presents. Now it is possible to make a present of one's life as it is of consideration, time or love, to recover one's health or to perish as a gift from heaven. Gifts are repaid with friendly words, and friendly words qualify as gifts. On the one hand, the spread of the gift semantic goes hand in hand with de-dramatization of the traditional gift morality - which creates space for the elucidation of intentions and the intensification of expression. On the other hand; and not by chance, it monopolizes all symbolic forms of interaction that are capable of even slightly exceeding the conventional framework. But its normative content shows itself precisely in the fact that it emphasizes the aspect of expressive behaviour and promotes it, above any measure of legitimate expectations, as that which is done of a person's free will, as a subjective performance not enforced by any law. Gift and present are the emotive terms of a structure of action in which subjective autonomy and voluntariness shine through terms evoking not the blight of compulsion but the rime of freedom, through an interactional event in which the struggle is for formulae of mutual relationship, for recognition and respect.

1 20

TRANSITIONS

A mere century after II libro del cortegiano, another work appeared which dramatically placed before us the collapse of a life and identity project still tied to the traditional gift morality. Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's 'last tragic hero' (Mantey 1 963), embodies as no other figure did the ideals of hospitality and noble lavishness, only to founder on the ingratitude of a world that has long had no use for ideals and no understanding for romantic spirits. Once functionalism has split the unity of the cosmos, interchange between its parts is bound to be unsuccessful. Timon the philanthropist fails to see this change: his measure becomes the hatred and self-destruction into which he is driven, as he imagines the end of a world that does not deserve to remain in existence. Timon, first among Athenians, comes onto the stage as a highly cultivated and influential person commanding our respect, who has devoted himself and all his boundless riches to the good and delight of his fellow-humans, to well-being and well-doing, unmatched in services even by Pluto, the god of gold. His wealth and the attention he receives from others do not reflect the power of having, but serve only the unproductive expenditure that accepts no boundaries of class. 'Born to do benefits' is the maxim by which Timon acts, taking no account of his own self­ interest. The little god of the world gives with no second thoughts, for 'there's none / Can truly say he gives, if he receives' (1.2). Thus, recipro­ cation duties are suspended and little presents are repaid with huge return gifts. Timon does not exchange, he sacrifices - in order to have the intimacy of a meeting that escapes him. Obsessed with the idea of a community of friends, 'so many like brothers commanding one another's fortune' (1.2), the philanthropist continually wishes he were poorer in order to be closer to others. Yet the sentimental appeal to friends not only brings forth tears of his own emotion; it remains without an answer. Timon has no friends. For the lords, the poet, the painter, the merchants who populate his hospitable house, who feast on his splendid meals and go their way with lavish presents, have long served another demon: the god of money and property, that fateful power which moves heaven and hell to assist the joyful maximization of self-interest by 'divine' right. Parasites, fawners and others feathering their own nest move around in Timon's favours - a clientele which knows that 'no meed but he repays / Sevenfold above itself; no gift to him / But breeds the giver a return exceeding / All use of quittance' (1. 1 ). It is calculation, commercialism and self-consideration which turn heroic into comical motives and make Timon's generosity the folly of a Don Quixote out of tune with his times. The weak glimmer of transcendence in which giving used to partake is lost in business practices. Exchange, that 'impossibility' which treats things as commodities when they function as symbols, leads to a dual illusion that ends up as just one huge disappointment. Timon is surrounded not by human beings but by traders; the festival is no longer a festival, the banquet no longer a sacral metamorphosis, and gifts fall into the void. The pure intent of giving is

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dashed to pieces on the laughter of profiteers. Nothing that once allowed for reciprocity is left remaining; and there is an unbridgeable gulf between anyone born 'to do benefits' and those whose reason for existence is to accumulate wealth. Yet Timon too becomes both guilty (schuldig) and a debtor (Schuldner). His guilt is based upon what looks likes innocent giving - on the fact that he aims at good without considering the power effect, that his spending only reinforces his superiority over those whose friendship he seeks. That needy removal of boundaries which gives itself up to lavish spending is the reverse side of 'impossible' exchange, for it systematically negates the return gift and hence the time of obligation. Like the gift, time also - the time spent as debtor - loses its power to create a relationship. Since unproductive expenditure further lacks any framework of reciprocity and mutual standardization, it changes Timon into a debtor of a more pro­ found kind. His once immeasurable resources are finally exhausted: he is no longer able to give, and can no longer settle his debts. On the summit of power to which boundless spending let him climb, he must endure the gift's destructive power as the ingratitude of the very ones he himself entangled in debt without affording them relief, and who by definition could not be his friends. Timon's pleading falls on deaf ears. The harsh warning 'that this is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security' (111 . 1 ) comes from the very ones who have his former wealth in their pockets. Marked by the betrayal and ingratitude of supposed friends, Timon prepares for the cheated cheaters a last banquet to settle accounts. His prayer of thanksgiving spells out his motives and marks a radical break with the ideas by which he has lived: 'You great benefactors, sprinkle our society with thankfulness. For your own gifts make yourselves praised; but reserve still to give, lest your deities be despised. Lend to each man enough, that one need not lend to another; for were your godheads to borrow of men, men would forsake the gods.' Warm water and stones are then served, the guests scatter besmirched and insulted. Timon also runs out, buries himself in an imaginary world of hatred, and surrenders to misanthropy as intemperately as he once did to overspending. Naked, brutalized and destitute, he once more conjures up the image of the archaic beginnings. His last present to the world is a curse on the world, in the form of a chance discovery of gold, that 'common whore of mankind' again energetically playing to the gallery. His last, unmatchable provo­ cation, however, is the act of self-obliteration that he performs on his own body. Shakespeare's last tragic hero, at the extremes of both unconditional love and hatred of mankind, is a representation of longing and vanity. 'The middle of humanity', however, he is never able to find. Where might this 'middle' lie, how might it be recognized in a time when the old no longer has the unquestionable status of moral exigency, and the new does not have it yet? When the straitjacket of traditional morality loses its protective

1 22

TRANSITIONS

function, benefactors turn into fools and profiteers into heroes. The one give without taking, the other take and refuse to give in return by referring to an iron law of equivalence. Just as little as Timon and his friends are reciprocity and equivalence capable of coming together in a single action sequence. Yet out of these inversions marked by incompatibility, a major theme comes into the light of day. Ingratitude is a cipher for the experience of disappointed expectation, which even so evokes the 'middle of humanity' whose internal structure is perhaps not exhaustively, but for the moment sufficiently, described as gratitude or 'thankfulness'. To show oneself grateful and to return favours received - once an unquestioning expectation that the gift morality sank deep into the normal assumptions of social intercourse - becomes a problem as soon as it is no longer in force. In the figure of Shakespeare's Timon, the social drama of nascent capitalism condenses into an existential drama of human failure. From this moment on, the efforts will never cease to justify gratitude as a moral duty beyond the exchange mechanism. Etymologically, Dank and danken ('thanks' and 'to thank') go back to denken ('to think'), and denote a mental activity, a spiritual movement or uplifting, of which there are still echoes in the German words Andacht (,devotional prayer') or Gedanke ('thought'). Dank, however, means not only will or intention but also the feeling of obligation for a good or favour received and the resulting sense of good-will (see Grimm and Grimm 1 862: 727f.). At least in the Indo-European linguistic area, there can be no doubt that the original meaning comes from the sphere of the sacral, and that, before amalgamating with the 'economic sense' and exchange relations, it was associated with the complex idea of Gnade (variously translated as 'mercy', 'grace', 'pardon', 'favour'). Praise, hymn dedicated to God and song of thanks are equivalent expressions for an event that mainly con­ sisted in the performance of a service without anything in return. 'The notion of service that does not demand a counter-service is at the root of the notion, which for us moderns is twofold, "favour" and "gratefulness", a sentiment which is felt by the one who gives and by the one who receives' (Benveniste 1 973: 1 60). The Latin gratia, from the Greek charis, which means joy, pleasantness, favour, already bears clear marks of an economic transposition in the sense of 'giving pleasure free of charge'. What once meant favour and kindness, voluntariness and pleasure, eventually came to express the quality of being 'gratuitous', without a break from the under­ lying religious associations. In a society already bound to the money mechanism, Gnade (the 'mercy' or 'favour') consisted precisely in sus­ pending the obligation to pay for services received. The ritually controlled to-and-fro of gift and return gift was thus voluntarily interrupted through services without anything in return, signs of favour, of pure Gnade. 'Above the normal circuit of exchange - where one gives in order to obtain - there is a second circuit, that of benefice and gratefulness, what is , given without thought of return, what is offered in "thankfulness" (Benveniste 1 973: 1 62).

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But the exchange of equivalents, once it has become dominant, splits up what archaic exchange bound together in a 'system of total services'. The circulation of money and the circulation of giving 'free of charge' now separate from each other, and whoever still confuses the two spheres is always the 'sucker'. Good deeds become burdensome, joy flies away, and gratitude chiefly means to feel obligation, to be indebted for something.

9

BEYON D NECESSITY

Those whose hearts never open to the feelings of humanity should ( . . . ) be shut out in the same manner, from the affections of all their fellow­ creatures, and be allowed to live in the midst of society, as in a great desert, where there is nobody to care for them, or to enquire after them Adam Smith

Discourse concerning the duty to give thanks has a long history behind it. Already Plato counted 'doing a good deed in return' among the unwritten laws; Cicero and especially Seneca wrote long treatises on it. By the mid­ seventeenth century, however, the pathos with which Thomas Aquinas still justified gratitudo as a virtue had long since had to make way for more sober considerations of expediency. In Leviathan ( 1 6 5 1 ) , a distillation in social theory of the experiences of the English Civil War, Hobbes counted gratitude fourth among the laws of nature, whose practical maxim - 'That a man which receiveth Benefit from another of meer Grace, Endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will' - can be derived from the assumption that people freely do something only if they can see some prospect of advantage to themselves. If they knew in advance that their aim would be unsuccessful, they would never be the first to do a good deed, and all mutual trust, all help and reconciliation would drop out of the picture (Hobbes 1 968 [ 1 65 1]: 209). In the Hobbesian state of nature, both benefactor and recipient are legitimated through self-interest, in that rational understanding of their own limits leads them not to behave differently. The guiding activity of reason stages the reconciliation of voluntariness and compulsion as sensible self-control. Gratitude is rational, then, because it sustains the giver's illusion that he can realize his aim. Nevertheless, in a discursive shift symptomatic of his time, Hobbes's main focus is no longer the good deed but the avoidance of possible degradation effects on the part of the recipient. Whoever has sufficient resources to keep free from debt may surrender without hesitation to the cycle of cost-free exchange. But 'to have received from one, to whom we think our selves equall, greater benefits than there is hope to Requite, disposeth to counterfeit love; but really secret hatred; and puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor ( . . . ). For benefits oblige; and obligation is thraldome; and unrequitable obligation, perpetuall thraldome; which is to ones equall, hatefull' (ibid.: 1 62). Generosity and obligation - which Thomasin could still posit as autonomous because of the strict hiatus between gift and return gift, and as an aristocratic virtue because of the voluntary context - now inevitably

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come under suspicion of being counterproductively opposed to the assump­ tions of equality contained in theories of contract and personality. Favours no longer produce, and gratitude obligations no longer perpetuate, any relations of recognition. They merely limit freedom of the will and the scope for personal interest: in short, they call forth illegitimate dependence that is damaging to the subject's self-esteem, although their usefulness to the community is not in any doubt. The ambivalent structure of cost-free giving is brutally clear in comparison with the equalizing circulation of money: on the one hand, it sets up dangerous relations of inferiority and superiority; on the other, it is indispensable to the normative integration of society. Interactional knowledge changes place. It is not courtly but bourgeois society which dissociates the Janus-faced discourse of gratitude obligations from the general economic context, in order to tie it exclusively to moral theory. Assumptions of economic rationality and consciousness of moral responsibility, bourgeois and homme now follow two different stars. Both the ethical and the economic rationalization of life, however, revolve around the fixed point of individual interest. In ancient systems of morality of the most epicurean kind it is the good and pleasurable that is sought after, and not material utility. The victory of rational­ ism and mercantilism was needed before the notions of profit and the individual, raised to the level of principles, were introduced. One can almost date - since Mandeville's Fable of the Bees - the triumph of the notion of individual interest. (Mauss 1 990: 76)

There also had to be the Reformation, of course - that successful 'elective affinity' so fraught with consequences which established itself between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. For not only did Protestant asceticism 'act powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions' and 'restrict consumption, especially of luxuries'; it also freed the acquisition of goods 'from the inhibitions of traditionalist ethics' by looking upon it as 'directly willed by God' (Weber 1 976: 1 7 1). Even more closely associated with this asceticism is the rise of modern individualism, at first dressed up in religious clothing. 'The inworldly individual is before us' (Dumont 1986: 77), that ego face to face with his God which is constituted through restless activity (Calvin) and constant examination of conscience (Luther). 6 Whereas the Calvinist discipline of efficiency regimented the finest details of external conduct, thinking that it could thereby tame the affects and inner world of the subject, Lutheranism aimed at the control of behaviour through rigid control of the imaginative world, of thoughts, intentions, desires and fantasies; its gaze was directed inward. But whether the emphasis fell on action (which anyway favoured self-denial and a ruthless attitude to one's baser interests) or only on an active cast of mind (which imagined a harmony between one's own aims and the divine will), the disciplining of the body as the seat of the affects, and the uplifting of the soul, were posed as an existential task and a sacred duty. Self-reference and self-obligation,

1 26

TRANSITIONS

self-control and self-examination were thus the bases of an egocentric and to some extent asocial view of man, whose ideal figure sprang from the individual encounter with God. Although the religious roots of the conduct of life eventually withered, the disciplinary mechanisms formerly centred on God and the signs of mercy hoped of Him continued for a long time to enter into the identity patterns of the empirical subject. Answers and redemption were no longer proposed in a transcendent domain but expected to come from the individual himself (Soeffner 1 992: 63). Then began the unintended but momentous transfer of divine attributes to a concept of the subject con­ stituted in the world (see ibid.: 66), so that each individual came to represent his own universe and to act as his own god. For the sacred does not die; it only changes its address. The Reformation is the first great historical text of individualization or, to be more precise, of the religiously motivated emancipation of indi­ vidual interest, whose secularization goes hand in hand economically with the history of capitalism and ethically with the history of the bourgeois subject. We have seen in this regard how the central themes of traditional gift morality gradually fell apart, how major change affected the forms of narrative and available interactional knowledge about good deeds and the duty of gratitude, and how established models of reciprocity were disturbed or completely displaced into the extra-economic domain. At the same time, however, the quite wonderful features of a new image of man were clearly visible in the pathos of recognition and reciprocity. 7 The gift semantic spread into all areas of social intercourse, the expression of gratitude drew near in content to social esteem, and the dialectic of rule-bound com­ pulsion and freedom of the will appeared to be largely neutralized by the intervention of interactional knowledge. But what happened to the gift? What symbolic space remained for gratuitous giving when individual interest discarded all traditional motives? Was there instead a self which had an interest of its own in gratuitous giving, or did this space remain unoccupied for the present? An unassuming article on Geschenke ('presents') - published in 1 735 in the 'Complete Universal Lexicon of All the Sciences and Arts Hitherto Invented and Improved by Human Understanding and Wit' - offered a kind of summa of experiences of giving marked by individual interest which appeared to dismiss out of hand not only Thomasin's ideal con­ struction, but also any kind of giving motivated by recognition. 'Present,' it states, 'is the name for a thing whose ownership is transferred to another without recompense. The rational ground for making a present of it is a surplus. Thus, whoever is still short or has only just enough is exempt in this regard. For our duties to others begin only with a surplus. We should thus have no scruples about giving a negative answer to people who shamelessly ask for a present. However, it is by no means irresponsible to have an eye to one's rational interest in the matter of presents, because God willed that we should use our powers for our own benefit.'

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Whether or not the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism gave the author his words, the reduction of giving to a mere core of self-advantage proved to be 'Protestant' through and through. Systematic desymbolization of the form of interaction went together with its functionalization. Charity, sympathy and compassion were banished for a long time from the context of gift-giving. Between shortage and surplus, duty towards others was now identified not as a model of reconciliation but as the only sensible way of distributing one's surfeit to others while bringing advantage to oneself. For surplus is not as such a motive for generosity. Rather, its 'uselessness' means that it is brought into the play of giving for the acquisition of things that one previously did without. This profit-maximizing instrumentalization is both legitimated and somewhat restricted by references to God's will: we should and must place our gifts strategically, so long as the aim is 'just'. Any aim is just, however, which promises some reasonable advantage without losing sight of the duty to reciprocate. Gratitude, too, essentially comes down to the giving of thanks in the form of return presents. Since human knowledge and wisdom appear indispensable 'if one is to use one's presents for the intended effect', it is advisable to study closely the character of the potential recipients. The 'ambitious', 'lascivious' and 'avaricious' - three character masks of egoistic subjectivity - look for expenses to be covered by different kinds of calculation in the giver's individual interest. While the first, in his notorious craving for admiration, repays gifts twice over and thereby sets up a favourable relationship for strategic giving, the second proves to be a contradictory partner who, though happy to give expansively, proceeds in such an arbitrary manner that no one can ever be sure of having actually returned a corresponding gift. To be avoided most strictly, however, is the avaricious type, who either gives nothing in return, or only just so much that his own outlay is compensated. The rigidity of individual interest as a practical maxim also applies here to time, which is defined according to whether the other's weakness or need can be used at any given moment. The fact that the art of giving, and thus expressive behaviour as the great concern of forms of recognition and reciprocity, may best be illustrated by a clumsy attempt at bribery, only strengthens the impression of a syndrome of rigid desym­ bolization and rationalization. Insofar as giving cannot utilize other people's motives for self-interested aims, it assumes a quality almost bordering on stupidity, and in any case worthy of utter contempt. Taking, like giving, is completely under the spell of individual interest and its concern for profit maximization. 'It is very easy to discover from whom one ought properly to take presents - namely, from those who have a surplus of this or the other. Even those who have none left over would like to be counted here as if they did, but they are such bad keepers of their possessions that they give things away without reason. We do not see why we should refuse such a present.' Precisely. For a good conscience fortifies itself by combating any irrational use of (either one's own or another's) possessions.

1 28

TRANSITIONS

Reduction of the gift-exchange to a pure type of strategic giving follows a logic that can hardly be distinguished from the market mechanisms of purchase and distribution. Its driving force is individual interest in acquisition and possession. Just as buying and selling require the individual actors to show little in the way of respect and esteem, so too is giving - in the reductionist ideal case - hard to understand as an action model that involves signifiers, relational signs or reciprocity. It is not only that all emotional values, all sympathetic effects - bonding, trust, gratitude, recognition and esteem, solidarity and assistance - no longer find any expression in the present or any voice in the text. Once the duty to others is limited to cases where a surplus is available, and the duty to oneself to rational, profit-oriented calculation, the normative core of reciprocity itself is substantively weakened. 'The idea of a man's duty to his possessions, to which he subordinates himself as an obedient steward, or even as an acquisitive machine, bears with chilling weight on his life' (Weber 1 976: 1 70). With individual interest defined in this way, to give no longer means to acquire power by demon­ strating the power of loss, to initiate forms of recognition and reciprocity, or to give way to the pure intent of giving; it means, rather, to wager on calculated cheating, or to fear the same. The symbolic surplus-value is worth something only as material substratum. The morality of plenty, once so awesomely associated with sociability, is now treated with contempt delegitimized as irrational and replaced with a morality of duty, where the duty is to safeguard and, as much as possible, to increase one's assets. Generosity, and with it the anthropology of giving, disappears for a time behind the scenes, while the play of individual interest and worldly disen­ chantment is acted out on stage. It is the language of possessive indivi­ dualism that now holds sway, the language of the burgher who grows faint at the thought of dipping into his wallet - homo oeconomicus, as Marcel Mauss called him ( 1 978: 76), who finds his ecological optimum in the 'universal meanness of bourgeois society' (Bataille, 1988). The reductionist ideal of strategic giving taps the last theme to be still denied and systematically concealed in the gift. Self-preservation and alliance, rank acquisition and prestige utilization, generosity and obliga­ tion, mutual recognition and voluntariness, charity and the duty of grati­ tude, altruism and an exclusive concern with individual material benefit these are all the motives which can come up in one and the same form of interaction, and which, through the analytically isolating work of inter­ actional knowledge, become part of a wider stock of cultural knowledge that we take for granted. Since each of these cognitively isolated motives casts a special light upon the definition of the situation, whereas the basic utilitarian schema may assert itself as the culturally dominant framework, there is growing suspicion of being instrumentalized or cheated, and a growing need for insurance against the other's intentions. The multiplicity of perspectives means that giving, once the sign and expression of honour, has something quite imponderable sticking to it.

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1 29

The bourgeois gift-culture, which begins with the freeing of individual interest, establishes a discourse of suspicion: indeed, it is itself a culture of suspicion, in that all traditional motives for giving and taking are subordinated to the prior calculation of individual advantages and benefits. Unlike Thomasin, who stressed only the pure intent of giving, the bour­ geois giver is under a compulsion to justify himself both internally and externally with good reasons, so that he can at least rhetorically satisfy the other's autonomy and dispel suspicions of dishonest purpose. Not giving and taking, but talk about the motives for giving and taking, defines the meaning of the present, as soon as it bears the mark of individual interest which is also the other's interest. In this way discursivization mixes melancholy into the model of reconciliation. Over the distance covered between the gift and the present in the history of civilization, the full meaning of the original form was developed and differentiated. This path led from the total social fact of gift-exchange through the class morality of aristocratic generosity, and then - with the breakthrough of capitalist markets and their logic of individual interest into the discrediting of giving as a meaningless form of interaction separ­ ated from the pressures of social reproduction. Gift and sacrifice were directly associated with the production and stabilization of sociability, hierarchy and political rank. These socially integrative motives can be tracked right to the threshold of bourgeois society, where they (as well as the agonistic moments of unproductive expenditure) are finally replaced by more effective mechanisms of social­ ization. The Protestant ethic then tears the last threads of the traditional gift morality. With the break-up of social reproduction and political power from the late Middle Ages on, gift-giving also loses its representative character in the space of politics. Presents are regarded not as attestations of honour but as a typical feature of a despotic state, whereas in a republic the performance of duty, in the spirit of the law, counts as the only legitimate basis for state action. As Montesquieu tersely puts it ( 1 949: 66): 'They who receive nothing expect nothing; they who receive a little soon covet more.' The universalization of labour eventually leads to the bypassing of subsidiary obligation. Alms and begging are banished as exceptional forms from the legitimate sphere of exchange, and even for political economy, the key science of the time, the gift is no longer a category with any relevance. Yet gift-giving does not simply evaporate amid the egoistic interests of economically motivated individuals. The form of interaction 'only' (and definitively) drops out of the picture of exchange; it changes places and, as bourgeois gift culture, itself becomes part of a sphere that owes its existence to splitting and autonomization or - in systems theory terms - to the process of functional differentiation of social spheres. 'For the first time in history the realm of necessity, home to all the pressures of survival, becomes radically different from the realm of freedom, from a settled idea of culture in which human ideals excused from reproductive pressures can

1 30

TRANSITIONS

develop regardless of their limited practicability' (Schindler 1 985: 1 95). This separation between economy and culture - which, from the point of view of the traditional gift morality, goes hand in hand with 'de­ moralization' of the economic and moralistic provision of the cultural sphere - is not only a result of the breakthrough of capitalist relations of production, but also enters into the construction of bourgeois world­ pictures that are themselves the object of reflection and discussion. As a product of systematic splitting, the bourgeois world-picture requires the citizen to prove himself both as property-owner and as human being. The new social spaces of privacy and intimacy, the development of a bourgeois public sphere of reasoning private persons (see Habermas 1 992) as an ideal (not altogether effective) moral institution, the forms of sociability and expressive behaviour in which status ascriptions, as well as market and state laws, were suspended and replaced by the autonomy of the private and the pathos of human rights: these were all based upon a negation of economic constraints which, though partly illusory, was extra­ ordinarily successful in terms of human civilization. Post-conventional moral ideas, initially introduced in philosophical and constitutional theory, spread out to society as a whole and, in so doing, unleashed a dynamic that would eventually not only crack the frame of traditional morality but also revolutionize the integrative value-principles of society. Liberty and equality were asserted as objective claims, and, if not already actual, were institutionally effective as normative orientations (see Habermas 1 992: 54f.). 'Culture' therefore proved to be the privileged site where people met as private persons not as character masks, because it was both result and goal of the most diverse socially controlled learning processes, which served only to enclose individual interest in the sphere of the economy and to keep material pressures at a distance. Rules of conduct that were rational in dealings between property-owners continued to be scorned in social intercourse between human beings. However, this splitting of spheres merely intensified, though as in an inverted reflection, the old worklnon-work opposition intrinsic to court civilization. In the struggle against the court model - that is, against the rejection and discrediting of gainful activity, against the parasitic luxury consumption and ostentatious destruction of social wealth - the bourgeoisie questioned not the autonomy of culture but first and foremost the strict subordination of the economy as its own power base. Against the pre-eminence of symbolic capital, it asserted the primacy of economic capital. To recognize the economy as the only and 'natural' basis of social reproduction, to accept the external, 'naturally based' pressures of produc­ tion and commerce, was to promote (and to consolidate as habits) the behavioural dispositions which the nobility persisted in dismissing as base commercialism. But the economic virtues also had to be made compatible with bourgeois social ideals - an objective served by the virtual auto­ nomization or severing of culture from economic influences. In the spaces beyond necessity, the bourgeois individual set himself up as a private

B EYOND N ECESSITY

1 31

person and human being, and so many attitudes borrowed from the aristocratic lifestyle became part of the furniture. For 'original sin is at work everywhere', as Marx acutely remarks. 'With the development of the capitalist mode of production, with the growth of accumulation and wealth, the capitalist ceases to be merely the incarnation of capital. He begins to feel a human warmth towards his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him to smile at his former enthusiasm for asceticism, as an old-fashioned miser's prejudice' (Marx 1 976: 740). At a certain stage in development, a conventional level of consumption - as display of wealth as well as means to creditworthiness - becomes an economic necessity for the 'unfortunate' capitalist. He feels compelled to practise the difference between economics and culture - first as 'a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for enjoy­ ment' (ibid.: 741 ), then in the form of conspicuous consumption as status symbol and credit instrument, and finally as a lasting concern for import­ ant but insecure social connections, whose cooperation and understanding are much needed but cannot be bought or compelled. The cultural negation of economics is itself economically grounded. Even the world beyond compulsion, whose task it is to translate the adaptation pressure necessary to survival into social-contractual forms, remains indebted to market laws from which it is possible to detach oneself all the more freely, the more economic capital one actually has at one's disposal. 'Economic power is first and foremost a power to keep economic necessity at arm's length. This is why it universally asserts itself by the destruction of riches, conspicuous consumption, squandering, and every form of gratuitous luxury. Thus, whereas the court aristocracy made the whole of life a continuous spectacle, the bourgeoisie has established the opposi­ tion between what is paid for and what is free, the interested and the disinterested, in the form of the opposition, which Weber saw as charac­ terizing it, between place of work and place of residence, working days and holidays, the outside (male) and the inside (female), business and senti­ ment, industry and art, the world of economic necessity and the world of artistic freedom that is snatched, by economic power, from that necessity' (Bourdieu 1 986: 55). With the separation of economics and culture, the practice of giving moves to that side of the bourgeois cosmos which brings in no economic profit because it is not permitted to bring any - a cultural practice which displays the disinterested interest and inutility staged at home or on public holidays and attached more to feelings inside than to business outside. The texture of the 'present' offered in the Universal Lexicon was still shot through with individual calculation and self-interest: it presented the in-between state symptomatic of incomplete separation, the confusion of motives which (from an economic point of view) made illegitimate claims when they had no right to exist. The breaking of the economic compulsion that seeks expression in giving here presupposes negation of the individual interest for which it is required, as in all areas of extra-

1 32

TRANSITIONS

economic sociability with an important degree of self-discipline and self­ distance. Moral taboos and ethical principles ensure that the transfer of selfish interests to spheres of life not conceived along economic lines does not actually take place, or at least that it has to reckon with social disapproval and interaction crises. Beyond necessity, altruism rules in principle. That this disposition is promoted to the cardinal virtue, or to the ideal case of 'cultured' intercourse (see Schindler 1 985: 203), obviously does not rule out the assumption that dishonest intentions are still oper­ ating. The suspicion of being forced to do something through a present lives on. The projective attribution of utilitarian motives that feeds this suspicion indicates the questionable and fragile nature of the boundaries protecting the realm of freedom. Against a background of rising capitalism, institutional moulding of a post-conventional body of thought and universalist moral ideas, and virtual autonomization of cultural practices, it is hardly surprising that discourse about gift-giving loses its significance for social theory, although the everyday life of individuals, including its economic dimension, is still saturated with presents (for example, in the form of voluntary extras or paternalist benevolence) . People continue to rely upon an established form of interaction, but the sciences take scarcely any further interest in it, unless it is to illuminate the dark corners of custom and tradition. Simplifying somewhat, we might distinguish three narrative forms that pervade the 'modern' history of giving: the programmatic exclusions and notorious silences of economics; the eulogization of charity and gratitude obligations and the disdain for consequences to be found in moral theory; and a discourse on symbolic power that keeps archaic motives alive. From the point of view of private property under capitalist market conditions, giving counts as an economically irrational practice. Adam Smith's basic argument in The Wealth of Nations that the community is best served if each individual follows their own interests - presents economic action only as a strategic instrumentalization of personal interests which no longer has any use for social motives and traditional ideas of morality. As a social being nevertheless reliant upon cooperation with others, the individual 'will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them' (Smith 1 96 1 [ 1 776]: 1 8). It is strictly instrumental reason, then, which determines the behaviour of economic subjects, shrugs off the individuals who are party to an exchange, and systematically hushes up their personal identities and cultural needs. 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages' (ibid.). The bourgeois must learn to feel at home in the world of economics, as a sphere in which behaviour is determined not by moral standards but by rational con­ sideration of interests. The present, with its focus on disinterested interest -

B EYON D N ECESSITY

1 33

and inutility, cannot therefore be an economic category. The bourgeois, of course, must also learn not to transpose the principle of economic action to other areas of life, and to allow morality its rightful scope where the egoistic calculation of interest is taboo. But how is the dynamic of capitalist socialization to be checked in the lifeworld? How are the habitually demanded behavioural dispositions inherent in the model of economic action to be effectively tamed? How are the internalized norms that find expression in, for example, utilitarian morality to be stopped from overflowing into the sphere of culture? At first moral philosophy and political theory take responsibility for this problem which arises with the separation between economics and culture, private interests and ethical principles; today it is still posed with undiminished force, as we can see in Habermas's key concept of the 'colonization of the lifeworld'. This fear - that destructive tendencies inherent in market society would long hinder the emergence of stable, socially integrated communities - was all too familiar to both critics and supporters of bourgeois society. And efforts to control the expansive and destructive dynamic of economic rationalization through non-economic ethical principles and cultural norms already have a long history: from Rousseau's early attempts to secure an active political community through the transcendental claims of a civic religion to the theoretical grounding of social cohesion in ethics by the Durkheim school, from the basic aim of constitutional theory to check the disintegrative force of the market through political intervention to more recent endeavours to outline a normatively substantive concept of civil society. In this problematic, for which solidarity and obligation, orientations to public welfare and collective responsibility must be stabilized against the dominant structure of private interests, themes that once defined the social­ moral context of giving and taking come to a kind of fruition. Charitable­ ness and gratitude are especially favoured topics, because the moral vocabulary of obligation can be located and read in them independently of the traditions of religiously integrated communities. Adam Smith himself, who so ruthlessly banished from the economic sphere any sycophantic grovelling for favours, was fundamentally distrustful of the 'invisible hand' and egocentric calculation in his theory of culture and set clear moral limits to his model of economic activity. Thus The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1 976 [1 759]) bases moral judgement upon a natural faculty of 'sympathy' which allows people to share others' feelings and to know that they share them. The casuistics of moral judgement follows a simple schema. As an observer, I judge another's action to be right (or mutatis mutandis wrong) if I sympathize with his motives and convince myself that I would have acted likewise in a comparable situation. I further judge an action to be praiseworthy (or reprehensible) if I am able to feel that the positive response of those affected by it - above all, their sense of gratitude - is justified. If sympathetic reactions do not occur, however, disapproval is the inevitable consequence.

1 34

TRANSITIONS

With his account of sympathy, Adam Smith seems to antIcipate the concept of role-taking, the centrepiece of social-psychological theories of interaction. What he calls 'sympathy' is the capacity always to take account of the other's point of view and legitimate interests in the pursuit of one's own goals. The 'generalized other' (Mead) appears here, in the form of the 'impartial observer', as the internalized moral authority on which the evaluation of my own action depends, and by which the limiting of my selfish motives is effected. Sympathy is the normative cement of a society broken up into individual interests. Not only does it create social ties by promoting feelings of responsibility and identificatory actions; it also fosters tact and sensitivity in social intercourse. The cardinal virtues in which sympathy is most intensely displayed, however, are 'charitableness' and 'gratitude'. By the first, Smith understands any kind of voluntary personal contribution aimed at what is morally good; by the second, a feeling that directly impels us to reciprocate good with good. 'Of all the duties of beneficence, those which gratitude recommends to us approach nearest to what is called a perfect and complete obligation' (Smith 1 976: 1 56). The strong emphasis on obligation is clearly related to the weakness of the context in which charity appears as a morally required course of action. It is not the fact that I am thankful, but why I should be charitable, which remains the decisive question. And it cannot simply be answered by referring to the moral facuIty of sympathy and fellow-feeling. What appears in the theory of moral sentiments as complete obligation becomes 'holy duty' under the general principles enunciated by Kant. Benevolence, good deeds, gratitude and sympathy are the core of those duties to others which follow from the principle of aiming at one's own perfection and others' perfect happiness. For Kant, feelings are the consequence and never the basis of ethical action; rather, the concept of virtuous duty is determined by the compulsion on individuals from the reason inherent in the categorical imperative. Gratitude, 'the honouring of a person because of a kindness he has done us', is due not to a returning of affection but to respect for the benefactor; it is a special, even a 'holy' duty, because its violation can 'destroy in principle the moral motive to beneficence'. 'For a moral object is holy if the obligation with regard to it cannot be discharged completely by any act in conformity with the obligation' (Kant 1 964 [ 1 797]: 1 23). In contrast to Smith, Kant clearly brings out the relation of inferiority in which the recipient inevitably finds himself because he was not 'the first in benevolence', but he also stresses the moral value of the obligation, in the sense that a favour received should be seen not as a burden but as an occasion to cultivate the general virtue of philanthropy. The impossibility of fully answering a favour with a return gift does not mean, of course, that the recipient is free of any duty to reciprocate. On the contrary: the degree of obligation depends upon the benefit accruing to the recipient and the unselfishness with which it is bestowed upon him. 'The minimal degree is to do an equal service for the benefactor' (ibid.: 1 24).

BEYON D N ECESSITY

1 35

The high moral value accorded to charity and the obligations of grati­ tude reflects not only the thorough discrediting of meanness and ingratitude as the most loathsome of vices (Kant 1964: 3 1 7), but also the empirical problem of legitimizing rules of conduct which in two respects no longer seem in accordance with actual motives. Charitableness clashes with the individual interest in possession and acquisition and therefore requires special motivation to discipline the self in a convincing manner; the obligations of gratitude clash with the fact that they generate social asymmetries, damaging self-esteem and the reciprocity model of social recognition. When the obvious requires justification it has already ceased to exist. Charitableness and gratitude do stand out all too clearly from the jumble of conflicting norms, but their eulogization somehow rings false. Although the obligation that the discourse of moral theory tries to bring into play against a 'mean' and 'ungrateful' reality does not by any means fall on deaf ears, it has the unintended effect that empirical subjects prefer to avoid the context of taking. 'As little as possible let us ask and receive favours from others. One rarely encounters people who have not sooner or later demanded great consideration in return for small services, and that then upsets the balance in relationships, takes away freedom, hinders unrestricted choice.' There­ fore it is better 'always to give, to serve everyone, than to accept services or anything else from others' (Knigge 1 977 [ 1 788]: 42). 8 Avoidance behaviour preserves the subject's autonomy. By negating the cycle of giving and taking, the individual escapes the demands of those holy duties whose existence he is quite prepared to acknowledge. For only someone who is aware of obligation has reason to avoid it. Thus, the discourse of moral theory itself serves to endanger what it would like to see preserved. One can praise charity and gratitude as virtues so long as one is able to escape them. The feeling of moral obligation shows its effectiveness. Awareness of compulsion makes duty resented and confirms the idea that something is owed to one's self-esteem. This is not much help in the social stabilization of gratitude. Its social and emotional qualities will fully assert themselves only when gratitude is practised in a spirit of freedom and is thus reconciled with the personality ideals of the bourgeois subject. The third narrative form pervading the modern history of giving is that of power, violence and destruction. It finds support in archaic motives and its starting point in the potlatch model. Georges Bataille's theory of unproductive expenditure belongs here. 9 For Bataille, to give means to acquire power through the force of loss. Not reconciliation, alliance and reciprocity, but agonistic schematization forms the core of a discourse that seeks a radical break with notions of exchange, utility and cyclicity. lo Unlike the discourse of moral theory, which praises good deeds and reckons up debts as duties on the recipient's part, this narrative form shows mainly in the intentions of the giver and the power effects of the act of giving. Here too, giving remains a modus operandi of social differentiation,

1 36

TRANSITIONS

a social practice which, thanks to symbolic violence, essentially benefits the accumulation of symbolic capital as the decisive power resource allowing the establishment and public authentication of positions of inferiority and superiority. In the background of this account, aggression reveals itself as a seemingly unavoidable ontological 'fact'. Giving is aggression in its most effective form: it is symbolic violence. In this context, Jean-Paul Sartre takes up a special position related to existential experience. For him too, presents and generosity are an original form of destruction, acts of violence that recall - not by chance - the connotations surrounding Bataille's theory of sacrifice. In Being and Nothingness Sartre writes The mania for giving which sometimes seizes certain people is first and foremost a craze to destroy; it is equivalent to an attitude of madness, a 'love' which accompanies the shattering objects. But the craze to destroy which is at the bottom of generosity is at bottom nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away; giving is a keen, brief enjoyment, almost sexual. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives; it is a destructive-appropriative conduct. But at the same time the gift casts a spell over the recipient; it obliges him to recreate, to maintain in being by a continuous creation this bit of myself which I no longer want, which I have just possessed up to its annihilation, and which finally remains only as an image. To give is to enslave. (Sartre 1 957 [ 1 943]: 594)

It is the right of literature and philosophy, within selective tradition­ formations, to keep stocks of traditional knowledge available in a form rich in dramatic content. This, anyway, is how motives remain in play which preserve the tension in interactional knowledge. But unlike the theory of unproductive expenditure, the Sartrean account gambles away the typical ambivalences of giving and taking: it stresses only the moment of destruction, and it systematically denies the variability of expressive behaviour demanded by the culture. One need only recall that generosity may be motivated and staged in the most diverse ways, to see that, at least sociologically speaking, the main stress can scarcely be laid upon giving as enslavement. The Sartrean account supports the culture of suspicion in which the gift figures as an embarrassing temptation, to be avoided as much as possible because it may push the recipient into the status of victim. At first sight the results - silence, duty to be grateful, aggression appear rather bewildering. But what connects all three narrative forms is the partly deliberate, partly unintentional discrediting of voluntary giving: as an economically irrational action on the part of property-owners; as a risky situation affecting the self-esteem of potential recipients; and as an existential expression of aggression and violence. The unavoidable silence of the economists is matched by vociferous praise of duty that addresses beneficence rather than gift-giving, while the ontology of violence rep­ resents a kind of distillation in which the basic idea is to mistrust generosity and to avoid gifts.

NOTES

1 37

Defensiveness seeps from every pore of these texts. Despite all the empirical evidence, a practice that generates sociability has been losing its theoretical voice. Only from the unbridgeable distance between cultures will ethnology perhaps longingly recall other times and other histories. Meanwhile, an old interactional form of life survives in bourgeois gift­ culture, freed from economic compulsion by the splitting of social spheres and from traditional constraints by reflexive stocks of interactional knowledge. Banished from the public sphere as corruption and private advantage, it continues to work its magic in the private domain. And perhaps this magic of giving is actually based on the antiquated and dissident character of a form that still joins together what our conscious mind would doubtless like to see separated. Where feelings and material interests, personal intentions and moral orientations are so inextricably jumbled, one-sided accounts - whether bare utilitarianism or empathetic altruism - can at best only make fools of themselves. NOTES TO PART III 1 . Norbert Elias's work has spelt out in detail the court's significance as a new and momentous form of socialization. For present purposes, we can do no more than briefly outline the courtly context of the gift and the guest situation. 2. Harald Haferland (1988) has produced a fascinating study of the civilizing content of courtly interaction, with reference to the example of the courtly epic. 3. See the critique in Wehowsky ( 1 977: 9). 4. 'All higher forms of bourgeois life in modern times rest upon imitation of aristocratic forms of life. Just as bread in a serviette and the word 'serviette' itself come from the medieval royal household, so are the most bourgeois wedding-eve pranks descended from the grand entrements of Lille. To grasp the significance of the chivalrous ideal for the history of culture, one would have to follow it down to the age of Shakespeare and Moliere, and even down to the modern gentleman' (Huizinga 1965: 127; see idem 1955: 1 25). 5. In what follows, I rely mainly on the interpretation offered by Harald Haferland ( 1 988: 1 5 1 f.). 6. On the genesis of this Lutheran-Protestant type of individuality, which so durably influenced modern notions of subjectivity and personality ideals, see Hans Georg Soeffner (1 992); on Calvin, see Dumont ( 1 986: 52-62). 7. The moral weeklies here offer especially rich material. On the significance of the Spectator in cultural history, see the brilliant study by Joachim Moebus (1989). 8. Knigge too calls gratitude 'one of the holiest virtues' and leaves no doubt that anyone caught up in the circuit of giving and taking has also to offer things. His distinctive concern is with avoidance behaviour, with advice about giving and never taking for which he puts the case in a series of sociologically perceptive rules of conduct. Here gratitude does not have to be taken into account, because every good deed is its own reward (Knigge 1 977: 104f.). 9. It would surely be interesting to look at Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class ( 1 970) as an alternative to Bataille's negation of the economic, but its implacable critique of luxury is not exclusively based upon justification of the utility principle of work and production. Theodor Adorno ( 1 983: 79f.) depicted him as a kind of penny-pinching commissar of culture; see Veyne ( 1 992). 10. Works by Jean Baudrillard ( 1 993) and Jacques Derrida (1993) also reflect this basic approach.

PART IV MORALITY AN D SOCIETY We are forgetting how to give presents. Violation of the exchange principle has something nonsensical and implausible about it; here and there even children eye the giver suspiciously, as if the gift were merely a trick to sell them brushes or soap. Instead we have charity, administered beneficence, the planned plastering­ over of society's visible sores. In its organized operations there is no longer room for human impulses, indeed, the gift is necessarily accompanied by humilation through its distribution, its just allocation, in short through treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private giving of presents has degenerated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort. Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one's way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction. Just this hardly anyone is now able to do. (Adorno 1 974: 42)

Here Adorno mainly has in mind the functionalist, instrumental reduction which necessarily endures the gift as a subordinate element of capitalist socialization. Nevertheless - or for this very reason - any observation that this form of interaction is making a comeback is likely to produce irritation. How are we to explain the prominent position of the gift economy in today's symbolic world of personal relationships? Is it really just a too-loud echo of archaic motifs and traditional patterns, a badly timed intermezzo performance put on by a form of interaction that has long been only a pale relic? Or are the contours of a different civilization perhaps starting to become apparent, a new set of relations between people as well as between persons and things? In a final stage in the argument, then, I would like to take some highly selective and compressed sociological diagnoses of contemporary reality as a basis for examining together the contradictory moments of the modern socialization process, and thus to give a little further support to the idea that a radical change in the way civilization is organized may be in the offing. The keywords in this enterprise are de-traditionalization and indi­ vidualization; the guiding perspective and underlying normative assump­ tion is that the individualization process itself is capable of releasing, or at least preserving, a social-moral potential which sheds rather a different light on the dil�mmas that this development poses for social integration: that is to say, the systematic undermining of solidarity, the decline of collective responsibilities, the loss of bonding, and the self-destructive inflation of subjectivism.

10

IN DIVI D UALIZATION AN D T HE COMMON WELFARE

Money and power are necessary as means, but they are not the proper measures of a good society Robert Bellah

Nowadays, whoever enquires into the moral economy of modern society soon runs the risk either of being annexed to the long-serving choir of culture criticism, or of being labelled a cynic who makes a virtue out of necessity and a conquest of civilization out of the de-moralization of social semantics. Murderous xenophobic arsonists, a corruption-prone political personnel that daily presents an astonished public with the reprivatization of power opportunities in the form of a blithe maximization of self-interest, a watering down of normative obligations and institutional bonding, major tendencies toward social closure (Parkin 1 983), social protectionism as a promising strategy in the competitive struggle for material and symbolic advantage - all these phenomena create the impression of a society whose stocks of solidarity and legitimation are exhausted, and whose resources for social integration have finally been used up at the end of the twentieth century. Diagnoses informed by critical social theory share the view that the normative, moral and cultural foundations upon which the liberal-capitalist market economy could for so long unquestioningly support itself are crumbling as a result of the encroachment of systemic imperatives on lifeworld practices, and indeed that these societies are increasingly para­ sitical on premodern 'systems of meaning and obligation' that can neither regenerate their economic and political institutions nor replace them with alternatives (Dubiel 1 99 1 : 1 26). Instead the socialization logic has assisted the breakthrough of a cultural model which in the early days of bourgeois society seemed to be limited to the sphere of economics, but which now not least because of the inrush of market rationality in the shape of an outre utilitarian morality - has found expression in all areas of society. The break-up of the old view of economics and culture as two complementary spheres does not, of course, mean the end of the bourgeois system of values - indeed, it signifies its triumph. Contrary to the oft-repeated view of neoconservative culture criticism, we are not facing the end of bourgeois societies as such, but rather a distinctive cluster of crises affecting relationship to self, social integration and political management. Such crises occur when behavioural rationality in the sphere of the market

1 40

MORALITY AND SOCI ETY

expands its frontiers and is no longer held in check by non-market cultural resources. (ibid.: 1 29)

According to Jiirgen Habermas, In the urban centres we can see the outlines of a social intercourse marked both by forms of expression that are no longer differentiated and by individualized lifestyles. You can't really tell whether, in this 'culture society', all that is reflected is commercial and electoral 'abuse of the power of beauty', a privatistic mass culture now semantically exhausted - or whether it might be the sounding­ board on which the seeds of the ideas of 1 789 are first bearing fruit. (Habermas 1 989: 465)

The basis of this new kind of phenomenality of the social - which is variously labelled as 'new obscurity', new 'randomness', 'culture society' or 'risk society', or as postmodern or postindustrial society - is the increasing pluralization of forms of living typical of Western capitalist societies, and not only them. This mode of socialization presupposes major incisions and breaches in the institutionally cultivated patterns of life which result, On the one hand, from the growing detraditionalization (especially the dissolution of class-culturally stabilized socialism and collective contexts of life) but, on the other hand, from the fact that identities centred on work, occu­ pation and family which not so long ago were still beyond question have now lost part of their moulding power. Ulrich Beck has concentrated the social-structural and social-cultural effects of modernization in the concept of a second epochal thrust of individualization. 'On pain of permanent disadvantage', the individual 'must learn to think of himself as the action centre or planning department for his own life's course, his own capacities, orientations, partnerships, and so on' (Beck 1 996 [1 993]: 2 1 7; see 1 992 [ 1986]: 92). For in this context, individualization does not and cannot mean reinstatement of the old liberal idea of a bourgeois subject centred on freedom and property. The release of individuals from social traditions established by capitalist society, the erosion of life contexts, family forms and occupational ties stabilized by class cultures, is not counterbalanced - as it always has been before in the history of this form of socialization - by the formation of new class and group contexts bound up with changes in the social structure. 1 Traditional criteria in which inequality is positionally important (education, job, income, for example) are starting to become blurred, and no collective identities distinguishable in everyday life seem to correspond any more to socio-structural classes and layers. Completely dependent upon market and state, the social destiny of the many becomes the personal destiny of each individual. 'There emerges, paradoxically, a new immediacy of individual and society, a direct relation between crisis and sickness. Social crises appear as individual crises, which are nO longer (or are only very indirectly) perceived in terms of their rootedness in the social realm' (1 992: 1 00). The social ascription of life-chances is advancing unchecked, together with a sharpening reproduction of social inequality (see Berger 1 989, 1 990). And yet, it is as if the old saying that 'life is what you make it' has become

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the only subjective reality formula for survival in the 'steel-hard casing' of bondage. The fact that these structural changes are today perceived as mainly cultural in nature is closely related to the expressive behaviour and response patterns of empirical subjects. The 'individualized society' drives the value of specificity to new and dizzying heights. Whether in art, literature and politics or in the everyday activity of thoroughly everyday people, it is clear that cultural monopolies on 'legitimate' expression and presence are becoming ever weaker and that sign polysemy is developing its dubious powers. To be someone means first and foremost to be visible, to stage one's own existence in a clever and distinctive way, and to assert it pointedly against other people. Important elements here are skill and perceptiveness in sizing up opportunities, and a dramatic discipline and self-control that chiefly shows itself in relation to the body. The endless focused attempts to give clearly visible expression to one's own existence, the spending of time, effort and money on personal outfits, cannot be understood at all as simply the work of fashion, media and distinction. Of course, the fetishism of the commodity world reaches a climax in these stagings of subjectivity, and the ideological theme music accompanying this production of signs is the source of high profit projec­ tions. The advertising industry tells us daily which are the most promising means of evoking sensuality, personality, masculinity or whatever else is required. Yet these commercial demands on behaviour also certainly indicate how aware people are of the fact that identity can no longer be had for the asking, that it results from a remarkable mixture of subjective destiny, good fortune and self-staging abilities, that successful identity politics has thus become a sine qua non in the competitive struggle for social advantages. Identity politics, impression management and market individualization belong together. But it would be too simple to study the process only from the point of view of the 'market individual'. For the reconstruction of the modern individual is also impelled and supported by deep changes in 'legitimate' personality ideals and subjectivity images. The 'change in sym­ bolic figures from Oedipus to Narcissus' (Habermas) indicates the direc­ tion, however much it may be exploited by culture criticism. Whereas Lionel Trilling ( 1 972), in his dazzling study of bourgeois identity models, retraced the path from sincerity (which establishes identity through strength of principle and fulfilment of duty) to authenticity (which imparts identity through sensuous immediacy and quality of experience), empirical subjects already seem to have abandoned the fruitless quest for the real self and moved on to training of the 'functional ego' (Neckel 1 99 1 : 1 74). In place of the small, sickly, constantly endangered ego, a sovereign ego with great pretensions now steps forward, a personality who can make the most of its opportunities and is not so afraid of being inferior. 'The potential of reflexive individuality that is aware of its conditions of possibility,' writes Sighard Neckel, 'and that tries to combine self-development and solidarity

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in its own action orientation, splits up, under the pressure of economic and social competition, into the two poles which Robert Bellah and his colleagues have described as "expressive" and "utilitarian" individualism' (see Bellah et al. 1 985: 27, I 42ff.) . What is common to both is that they hardly recognize any criteria for action outside one's own person (ibid.). Egocentric calculation and a ceaseless narcissistic desire for gratification come together in seeing the moral claims of interaction as mere obstacles to the pursuit of private interests (Neckel 1 99 1 : 1 75). A multiplicity of social phenomena - from the boom in self-help and counselling literature to the change in forms of therapy, from personality images used for publicity to the ingeniously stupid advertising that encour­ ages impudent self-promotion - fit easily enough into this interpretative model. But the monstrously narcissistic, glitteringly sovereign, depressive individual geared only to personal gain is probably not the dominant character in contemporary society. For one-sided accounts of the indi­ vidualization process systematically downplay the possibility that individual freedom and subjective choice may also grow as a result of structurally imperative demands on behaviour, if individuals begin to integrate struc­ tural compulsions into their lifeworld references in a way that can be handled in everyday practice. If the inherently contradictory dynamic of detraditionalization and individualization characteristic of Western capitalist societies is over-hastily identified with erosion of solidarity and collective responsibility, one loses sight not only of the paradoxical effects but also of the perhaps 'unspectacular gains in civilization' (Ziehe 1 992: 1 02) that may also be bound up today with the part-achieved, part-enforced individualization of the conduct of life and pluralization of the forms of life. With regard to this set of problems, it is not hard to understand the broad resonance that the so-called communitarianism debate has had in Germany,2 a debate which concerns nothing less than the moral founda­ tions of modern society. The various theoretical strategies and directions grouped under the heading 'communitarianism' do not only share a critical attitude to liberalism that refers to particular values and norms integrated within the lifeworld. They also converge in their recourse to a normative concept of community. Axel Honneth has drawn attention to the crucial inversions that go hand in hand with this changed perspective. In his view, communitarianism has again placed on the agenda the question of which moral orientations and relationships are necessary to keep alive the institutions that guarantee freedom within a democratic society. Its focus of interest is no longer institution-building but, rather, the non-institutional, cultural conditions upon which a democratic community must be grounded if it is to be recognized as a collective good worth defending. The second inversion, concerning the living conditions of socialized subjects, culminates in the question of how much individuals still rely upon communal value-bonding for the development and stabilization of their personal identity. Here the normative vanishing point may be seen as the idea of the particular

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community: the notion that the individual is still related to a social life­ world, that he or she can achieve self-fulfilment only through identification with particular roles and concrete norms for the development of a narrative identity. The third and, as it were, integrative problematic concerns the question of what communities must be like to fulfil the functions of democratic legitimation and identity formation, without falling behind the moral standards of modern societies (Honneth 1 992: 1 19f.). Faced with the theoretical attempts to provide a philosophical grounding for moral norms, the following considerations will first attempt a socio­ logical account of some significant changes in cultural reproduction, per­ sonality ideals and forms of community-building, in order to gain a little distance from the notions of decline that communitarianism tends to associate with the social effects of modernization (see Bellah et al. 1 985). In this connection, the moral economy of modern society mainly appears as a question of the social-moral potential of the individualization process itself. If this little shift is made in the perspective, a social reality appears that would seem to contradict the supposed dominance of a utilitarian indi­ vidualism concerned only with self-interest. A field of quite ordinary prac­ tices and forms of interaction whose significance has been rather neglected in social theory then comes into view - their common feature being a systematic evasion of the dictates of exchange-value and the logic of the market. 3 If we then leave the level of assumptions of systemic rationality where methodological individualism stubbornly asserts its right to exist, and focus instead on the action logic of empirical subjects, it turns out that our everyday knowledge is still strictly divided between market and social relations, between the principle of equivalence and the principle of reciprocity, between the contract and the non-contractual prerequisites of any contract. The latter include the 'classical' values of the community: its cultural stocks of knowledge, its norm and value orientations governing the initiation and stabilization of forms of relationship and recognition, love, friendship, trust, solidarity, empathy and sympathy, benevolence and willingness to make sacrifices - in short, cognitive, normative and emo­ tional capacities which do not reduce our interest in others to the mode of purely strategic interaction. This two-world theory only becomes really exciting, of course, when it is combined with the provocative thesis that structurally induced processes of individualization have gradually dried up the social-moral hinterland of our social orders, and that we are therefore increasingly faced with a cold form of socialization regulated only by money and power. A brief glance at the homeland of utilitarian individualism, however, soon shows the contours of this picture to be blurred. What does it mean when eighty million Americans - that is, forty-five per cent of the popu­ lation aged eighteen and over - spend five or more hours of each and every week on voluntary services and charitable activity, get involved in crisis centres, civil rights movements and non-profit organizations, organize neighbourhood help groups and community care for the old, run women's

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refuges and anti-drugs campaigns; and when these free services of various kinds, if monetized, would add up to well over $ 1 50 billion a year (Wuthnow 1 992: 6f.)? These figures, it should be noted, only concern the socially organized 'independent sector'. Account should also be taken of the considerable revenue from donations and charity sponsoring, as well as all the free giving and helping within the informal context of private relationships. Furthermore, approximately 4.3 per cent of household income - no small amount when totalled up - goes into the gift economy centred on family and friends (see Ch. 2). Comparable figures are unfortunately not available for Germany which may be connected with the fact that, unlike in the USA, a large range of activities are covered by corporate organizations of welfare-state capitalism. Still, here too there are many different phenomena which point to an intensification rather than a waning of involvement and collective interest. Let us just mention the rapid spread of a well-founded sense of ecological crisis, or the plethora of civil protests and social movements which, since the mid 1 970s, have been able to involve more members than all the political parties in the Federal Republic put together.4 Then there are the local alternative structures to be found in all the big towns, the remarkably broad mobilizations against right-wing violence, and the private initiatives to afford hospitality to war refugees and asylum-seekers. The economic dimensions of voluntary assistance and charity are not easy to quantify. But according to estimates made by the German Central Institute for Social Affairs, revenue from donations stood at around 4 billion deutschmarks in 1 992. We also know that the significance of the private gift economy has increased both quantitatively and qualitatively. This form of interaction runs like a red thread through the everyday life of modern society: it initiates and authenticates relationships, fosters trust, develops mutual recognition, and ensures that generosity still finds a legitimate place in the moral vocabulary of a society which is structurally dedicated to profit-maximizing behaviour. If someone objects that such phenomena at most illustrate the resilience of aspects of traditional culture which do not affect the dominant logic of capitalist socialization, then in this connection - though not others - it may be said in reply that ( 1 ) these are expanding orientations in everyday life, and (2) that they are staged by people who act, not beyond, but already on the basis of general experiences of individualization, and who nevertheless, or perhaps for this very reason, insist upon relations of solidarity, reciprocity norms and forms of mutual recognition. In an impressive study of Acts of Compassion, Richard Wuthnow describes as an 'American paradox' the mix of apparently exclusive value orientations that one can now find, and see being practised, in one and the same individuals. If the research findings are to be believed, more than 75 per cent of the American population give to solidarity, helpfulness and concern for the public good the same value prominence that they bestow upon self-fulfilment, job success or greater personal freedom. The more

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that people foreground self-referential values, the more clearly they emphasize the relevance of altruistic norms for their own life. 'In other words, people who were the most individualistic were also the most likely to value doing things to help others' (Wuthnow 1992: 22). Surprisingly, however, it is motives from the repertoire of utilitarian individualism which are capable of combining these contrary patterns of action (ibid.: 79). In a society so strongly geared to competition and success, good deeds and the time, energy or money spent on them must be justified not only to others but also to oneself. Why do I act in such a way that I unproductively spend resources which could serve to increase my own well-being? The popular answer is: because involvement and an interest in others provide psychological gratifications that are in turn important for self-fulfilment; because I feel good, get a good conscience, make new friends, or even stabilize feelings of superiority or compensate for experiences that gave me a sense of inferiority. Two things are worth noting in how altruism and self-interest fit together in this form of civilization: namely, the seemingly unavoidable compulsion to justify what one does, preferably with the help of utilitarian figures, and the resulting normative delimitation of collective obligations. In terms of narrative structure and self-perception, the individual assumes responsibility not for the public good but for himself or herself. Of course, if one considers the unintentional consequences that self-referential world-pictures set in train through the dynamic of individualization, this contradiction between indi­ vidual and collective responsibility loses some of its sharpness of definition.

1 1

T HE SOLI DARITY OF IN DIVI D UALISM

Modernity is the impossibility of standing on the spot Zygmunt Bauman

Let us try a little thought-experiment which, to borrow a concept from Robert Musil, enquires into the 'sense of possibility' within a form of socialization for which I would propose the paradoxical term 'solidarity individualism'. This experiment may help to make a little more concrete the peculiar relationship that is beginning to develop between individualization and a concern with the public good. Is it possible, we might ask, to find empirical evidence that utilitarian individualism requires knowledge and motives which make an individualism of solidarity rich in prospects? If, as a cumulative effect of modernization and its welfare-state cushion­ ing, a form of social existence beyond 'class and status group' (Beck 1 983) is acquiring the force of reality, and the release of individuals from tradi­ tional references and orientations is reaching a certain depth of field, this means that each individual is also responsible for his or her own body, relationships and images of others. Changed notions of subjectivity and personality ideals, together with the generalization of once-exclusive cul­ tural knowledge, are shaping the contours of this process in two ways: as favoured self-images to which one tries to adapt with all available means, and as basic institutions of social control which, in the competitive struggle for social opportunities, threaten to disadvantage those who are unable to live up to them. Interest in self and interest in others thus become at once more demanding and more unstable. 5 We have long been confronted with the results of these trends. For today individualization means increased subjective freedom and complete depen­ dence on the market, a freeing and a standardization of expressive behav­ iour, greater reference to self and external control carried to almost intolerable limits. In short, at every level of social intercourse, it means to learn how to cope with paradoxical demands on behaviour, to control one's affects and yet to be 'natural', to use the opportunities of informal­ ization and yet to observe the conventions, to demand authenticity and, if possible, to get out of the way of heteronomy. Whether individualization is accented as 'institutionalized expectations of conduct' or 'biographical self-interpretation', as 'symbolic self-attribution' or 'intersubjective demands on the self' (Ziehe 1 992: 1 02f.), individuals are in each case expected to have cognitive, social and affective abilities which according to the thesis we shall now consider - force them to build and

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consolidate reflexive relations to their selves. Ways of life that just keep running unquestioned in the same groove are less and less available. Whoever gets married today can and must know why they are opting for a particular form of relationship; they can and must also know that such a tie may prove temporary, blissful or catastrophic. Not 'the individual' but every individual is led to write their own life-script, to survey the maps of their own social orientations, to direct their own life-story and their own personality (Ritzier 1 99 1 , 1 993), even though at first they do not by any means have the necessary resources. Stocks of cultural knowledge are not only generalized but also converted into a practice of self-reflexive testing. Belief in the inner constructibility of the person has long been common property, and it is now taking the justification compulsion to undreamt-of heights: my efficiency, my appearance, my eroticism, my psychological make-up - there is hardly anything that might not be sucked into this logic at any moment (Ziehe 1 989: 20). In fact, these justification pressures now seem to present themselves as the core of our discursive order. Self­ justification is the dam that individuals erect against the contingency and the polysemy of signs. Whatever the reasons that may be brought to bear the general psychologization of everyday knowledge is only one significant example of a falling back on cultural resources with increased reflexivity motive disclosure and the justification compulsion appear so unavoidable mainly because, for both ego and alter ego, they first of all evoke the meaning upon which common definitions of the situation can build. The belief in inner constructibility goes hand in hand with external requirements - health, beauty, naturalness, elegance - which the individual must achieve by the sweat of his brow and display upon his body. Tireless is the work done on the body as a presentation of self; tirelessly too is this self interrogated, criticized and compared with the cultural norms of its ideal. Self-reference and external perception, expressive behaviour and interactional competence, follow the cultural normativization and are endowed with the requisite level of psychosocial knowledge. Meanwhile, reinforcing these cultural norms and promising SUbjective relief, a mass of self-help and counselling literature offers inexpensive expert advice for every situation imaginable. The sovereign ego, however, the dream of finally gaining relief from the perils of the modernization process, follows this advice to the letter. Yet it is also the case that reflexive relations with the self provide the very motivational resources on which the civilizing achievements of cognitive and moral minorities, but also the forms of post-traditional community­ building (see Berking and Neckel 1 990; Michailow 1 993), base themselves today. 6 Reflexive relations with the self bring forth a further, equally paradoxical effect. They protect the spread of instrumental mentalities, expand instru­ mental access to the self and to others, and support a programme of inner action that can be explained by the cultural constraints of the management of feeling.

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Feelings enter the picture by being expressed in interaction, perceived, controlled and evaluated by ego and alter ego. In this, the connection between feeling and expression may be direct and spontaneous, or it may undergo significant shifts in the course of inner action programmes, or it may be completely negated through strategic orientations that start to be expressed without any mediation. What I give to be understood does not necessarily have to tally with my inner experience. But anyone who finds himself overcome with pain, or who falls under the spell of blind rage, is faced according to circumstances with sanctions and pressure to recom­ pense. The self-control mechanisms and affect constraints imposed in the history of civilization - which increasingly separate people from one another, make the thresholds of shame and awkwardness more vulnerable, and inevitably heighten 'inner anxieties under the pressure of a strong superego' (Elias 1 994: 521) - correspond in an insidious way to the 'face­ work techniques' through which self-esteem and composure, honour and worth are demonstrated and socially rewarded (see Goffman 1 972a: 5ff.). The presentation of self thus involves both a feeling valuation schema and a cultural norm for the definition of appropriate expressive behaviour. The evaluation of a feeling often appears simultaneously with the correspond­ ing emotion (see Hochschild 1983: 1 56f.). I feel rage growing inside me and know almost at once that I am wrong to react as I do. I feel the rage and feel uncomfortable about it. Feeling valuation is the application of general 'feeling rules' to specific situations (ibid. : 65f.), a reaction which sets in train the inner action programme and furnishes the intended expressive interest with strategic meaning. I will control my fear, conceal my delight, and thus be able to continue the interaction sequence with greater com­ posure and the reassuring feeling that I have lived up to my image. All feeling management is concerned with expression: it is always also expression control, which uses the body either to show feelings or (if unpleasant) to conceal them. It is this instrumental contact with emotions which further raises the level of demands and the interactional abilities, because it allows the construction of legitimate expression to be recognized as a subjective achievement, and any failure to be directly attributed to subjective incompetence. Whoever expresses himself wrongly knows not only that he was unable to act as he wanted, but also that others know this to have been the case. It is hard to resist the temptation to make the manipulation of feeling, the truth of a gesture or the subjective effort involved at least appear credible, rather than denounce them as falling short. Nevertheless, this form of instrumental mentality also implies relations of recognition; the subjective effort to 'Do as if' can just as well be interpreted as a going out of one's way to accord the other person respect and recognition. 'Looking at a bright light to make a tear glisten', writes Arlie Hochschild ( 1 983: 76), 'is a mark of homage, a way of paying respects to those who proclaim that sadness is owed. More generally, it is a way of paying respects to a rule about respect paying' (ibid.: 76). An old form of interaction that associated

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sorrowfulness with tears still seems to be in force. But it is no longer a matter of ritual stabilization of a behavioural programme: rather, inter­ actional knowledge itself may either bestow or refuse that force. The interplay of reflexive self-reference, instrumental mentality and interactional knowledge culminates in a general 'expressive dilemma' (see Haferland 1 988: 43), which appears to undermine the very communicative preconditions of intersubjective trust. If, for example, I know that you know that I know how one compliments and thanks another person, I cannot rule it out that you might assume I am doing this only because I know that one behaves like that in certain situations. I try to convince you that I seriously mean it, knowing full well that you know that I know what you might assume; I thus know that you might regard my attempt to prove seriousness as nothing more than my acting as if I were serious, precisely because I know etc. . . . Even if my efforts are successful, part of the dilemma drags on. For I know not only how to express marks of favour sincerely, but also that I have to show thanks if this should happen to me. But if I show thanks only because I know this, I will never do more than follow convention rather than the demand for truthfulness: I will show thanks only when I actually feel thankful. The problem, according to Haferland, arises because my knowledge makes obsolete the immediacy of my expressive behaviour. 'It is hard for me to tell whether I am not faking my immediacy, because I already know that I must be immediate' (ibid.: 45f.). Spontaneity, one of the most powerful and culturally valued proofs of personal veracity, is thus reintroduced as an option available for instrumental use. At the very heart of the structures of communication, individuals find themselves surrounded by contingencies which require them to perform highly artificial constructions of relations of recognition, no longer able to rely unconditionally on self-authenticating expressive behaviour. In the early stages of bourgeois moral consciousness, when a secret fascination for court civilization was never altogether absent, it was known that the more civilized people are the more they act; that they can feign without cheating one another. In general, everything that we call decency (decorum) ( . . .) is just a beautiful illusion. Politeness (politesse) is an appearance of affability which instils affec­ tion. Bowing and scraping (compliments) and all courtly gallantry, together with the warmest verbal assurances of friendship, are not always completely truthful. 'My dear friends,' says Aristotle, 'there is no friend.' But these demonstrations of politeness do not deceive because everyone knows how they should be taken, especially because signs of well-wishing and respect, though originally empty, gradually lead to dispositions of this sort. Every human virtue in circulation is small change; only a child takes it for real gold. Nevertheless, it is better to circulate pocket pieces than nothing at all. In the end, they can be converted into genuine gold coin, though at a considerable discount. To pass them off as nothing but counters which have no value, to say with the sarcastic Swift that ' Honesty [is] a pair of Shoes worn out in the Dirt', and so forth ( . . .) for the sake of preventing anyone from believing in virtue, all this is high treason perpetrated upon humanity. Even the appearance of the good

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in others must have value for us, because in the long run something serious can come from such a play with pretenses which gain respect even if they do not deserve to. (Kant 1 978 [ 1 798]: 39)

Immanuel Kant, who elsewhere complains of the court's sometimes 'excessive demand for civilized behaviour', rescues the game of pretence from rash accusations of fraud and insists that, as a crucial triggering mechanism, it can eventually smooth the way for 'genuine' social relations. However, the criticism of etiquette and convention that accompanied bourgeois society from the outset deepened the consequences of this knowledge into a suspicion that forms of human contact are nothing but empty forms, behind which indifference and at worst strategic interest take cover. Such a view cannot see, of course, that recognition is already involved in every subjective effort to 'Do as if'. But any insights into the 'limits of community', or into the unsatisfied utopian content of all forms of politeness, inevitably pale in comparison with that 'morality of unrelenting sincerity' (plessner 1 924: 98) which begins its triumphal procession at the moment when individual expressive behaviour fuses with norms of truthfulness. When individuals begin to lose faith in their own norms of sincerity, and there is no longer any security beyond the game of pretence, the development of an instrumental mentality is the only possible foundation on which to build stable expectations of expectations. Reflexive relations to self, the spread of instrumental attitudes, the idle proofs of veracity and sincerity evoked by interactional knowledge: these are three of the main references that conservative culture critics use in arguing that a tried-and-tested model of civilization has been brought to a catastrophic end by the individualization of people's behaviour. Freedom plus too little collective responsibility is the fatal combination for those who see a threat to the social order in individualized lifestyles in which strategic interaction dominates and self-interest seems the only reliable guide to how people will behave. An opposite reading is at least as plaus­ ible, however. The permanent quest for closeness and certainty (Ziehe 1 989), the cultural and aesthetic strategies of intensification, the self-referential tech­ niques and hyper-sensitivity to one's own situation, the drive to generalize self-reflexive potentials: all this helps to ensure that these potentials are also reflected in the perception of and emotional commitment towards signifi­ cant others. More sovereignty over one's own life, increased attention to one's own interests, greater care in close personal relations, dealings with other people and the (supposedly nice) little things of life - there is certainly much to suggest that utilitarian individualism is also kept under control by the very constellation that it brings into play. Nothing is decided in this way, however, about social integration and collective responsibility. For if the binding framework of institutional order grows weaker and its expectations of behaviour are themselves drawn into the wake of 'reflexive modernization' (Beck 1996: 40f.), we find ourselves back with a sectoral schema of norm validation. Normatively speaking,

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we would then have a number of highly integrated, morally overheated spheres, whose declining proximity would bring growing indifference. Apart from the fact that this would itself be a formally civilizing achievement, at least if empirical subjects invented ways of dealing with one another that made recognition of difference a general norm, the personality ideals constituted through reflexive self-reference also contain essential moral orientations towards generalization and collective responsibility. Anthony Giddens has characterized as 'life politics' the self-referential practices concerning bodily health, sexuality, and so on, and distinguished it from the form of emancipatory politics that was dominant up until the 1 970s. The former combats pressures and demands bound up with tradi­ tion and unjustified domination; the latter focuses its world-picture and political practice upon a reflexive self that seeks social change from the point of view of its own constructed identity and its goal of self-realization, so that its symbolic peculiarity is that it can keep short-circuiting individual problems at any time with the help of global perspectives (Giddens 1 99 1 : 24 l f.). If I know what the rainforest or car transport means for my health, if I know what effect love and friendship, empathy and sympathy are likely to have, if I ascribe rights to nature and recognize my duty to defend those rights, then - despite all utilitarian motivations - broader solidarities that have not been overhastily limited to my own value-community will come into play. The moral economy of our society, or so it appears, is today migrating more and more into the subjective ecology of highly indi­ vidualized individuals. 7 Subject-centred world-pictures have this normativ­ izing power precisely because they seem so unconditionally self-referential. They cut right across the logic of market rationality, from which it is impossible to acquire the stable relational formulae relevant to the 'self­ realization' system. In the end, reciprocity norms are what make up the core of those new forms of community-building in which not only social relations but also the relationship between self and nature are being redefined in the light of a theory of recognition. The ego's self-realization claims or, to be more banal, its general well-being are not worth anything at all without care and concern for 'others' and nature. 'Subjective ecology' might then be understood as shorthand for a set of cognitive motives induced by the social modernization process itself, through which the magic triangle of individual, society and nature are at once de tradition a­ lized and remoralized. What, then, of solidarity individualism? Its social-cognitive premisses have long been present in the cultural framework of subjective ecology, but one may well have doubts about the security of its affective and emotional anchoring. 8 In the last days of January 1 993, TV viewers could make the acquaint­ ance of a North German workman's family which had decided to play host for a year to an unknown Bosnian married couple. A calm sequence of images, with almost no commentary, showed the necessary preparations. The parents briefly explained to the children why they wanted to help two

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foreigners threatened with death, and why this was little enough beside the horrors to which hundreds of thousands were exposed every day. When they finally stood facing each other at the little town station, not only the participants but also many spectators had tears of emotion in their eyes. It is at such moments that - to cut it short - the vision of a human life and a good society shines forth. The problem is not that we are moved, but that at the same time we dismiss our emotional reaction as kitschy. To interpret this behaviour, however, would call for quite a different history. NOTES TO PART IV I . Adopting Lockwood's distinction between system integration and social integration, Horning and Michailow (1990) have identified a growing split between practices involving these two forms and thus show that there is a certain logic in the sometimes violent reactions to Beck's theses. For his part, Sighard Neckel ( 1 989) has made some important clarifications in the debate between individualization theory and positions stilI deriving from class theory. 2. See the contributions to the volumes edited by Zahlmann (1992), Honneth ( 1 993) and Brumlik and Brunkhost ( 1 993). 3. Birgit Mahnkopf ( 1 992) has recently drawn attention to the significance of mutual relationship networks precisely in economic practice. 4. I am here basing myself on points that I have developed elsewhere in connection with the civilizing role of the new social movements (Berking 1 990). 5. The aestheticization and cultural superelevation of the everyday, but also the increase in giving, might be explained by ever-growing pressure on the private sphere to adjust to the intensification of experience and the greater openness of context. In the flight from routine and boredom, non-everyday performances - see Finkelstein's analysis of 'dining out', for example ( 1989) - acquire greater importance than before, and hardly any practice could compete in this respect with the dramatic qualities of giving. 6. Axel Honneth, starting from Hegel's figure of the struggle for recognition, has attempted the difficult task of clarifying the moral grammar of conflict in the terms of social theory. He distinguishes three forms of recognition that appear indispensable if a person is to be conceived as autonomous and individualized: love, which grows through self-confidence; justice, on which self-respect is founded; and social esteem, which makes self-esteem possible in the integrative context of a community of values. Post-traditional communities, according to this analysis, are constructions in which solidarity is bound up with social relations of symmetrical esteem between individualized and autonomous subjects (Honneth 1 995: 1 7 I f.). 7. Someone who, in the manner of Cora Stephan (1993), simply denounces a social and political practice oriented to subjective ecology as nothing more than 'a how-it-affects-me cult' (Betroffenheitskult) overlooks the fact that this form of speaking and acting in the world has reinstated moral discourse not only in lifeworld contexts but also in politics. 8. Hans Peter Dreitzel's attempt ( 1 993) to plumb the conditions of possibility of 'reflexive sensuousness' provides important pointers for a more precise definition of this context.

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Sombart, Werner (1982), Liebe, Luxus und Kapitalismus. Ober die Entstehung der modernen Welt aus dem Geist der Verschwendung [first published 1 9 1 3], Berlin. Stentzler, Friedrich ( 1 979), Versuch uber den Tausch, Berlin. Stephan, Cora ( 1 993), Der Betroffenheitskult, Reinbek. Suntrup, Rudolf ( l984), 'Priifigurationen des MeJ30pfers in Text und Bild', Fruhmittelalterliche Studien, vol. 18. Szabo, Thomas (1 983), 'Xenodochia, Hospitiiler und Herbergen - Kirchliche und kommerzielle Gastung im mittelalterlichen Italien', in Peyer, Hans Conrad (ed.), Gastfreundschaft, Taverne und Gasthaus im Mittlealter, Munich. Thompson, Edward P. (1971), 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the XVIIIth Century', Past and Present No. 50. Thomson, George ( 1954), The Prehistoric Aegean, London. Thomson, George ( 1 96 1 ), The First Philosophers, London. Titmus, Richard M. (1971), The Gift Relationship. From Human Blood to Social Policy, New York. Trilling, Lionel ( 1 972), Sincerity and Authenticity, London. Turner, Victor (1969), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Chicago. Turner, Victor (1 982), From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York. Tylor, Edward B. ( 1871), Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom, 2 vols, London. van Gennep, Arnold (1960), The Rites of Passage [French orig. 1909], London. Veblen, Thorstein (1970), The Theory of the Leisure Class [first published 1 899], London. Veyne, Paul ( 1992), Bread and Circuses [French orig. 1 976], London. Weber, Max (1 976), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [German orig. 1 904-5], New York. Weber, Max (1 978), Economy and Society, vol. 2 [German orig. 1 922], Berkeley. Weber-Kellermann, Ingeborg ( 1 968), 'Uber den Brauch des Schenkens', in Volksuberlieferung. Festschrift fur K. Ranke. Wehowsky, Andreas ( 1 977), 'Uns beweglicher machen als wir sind - Uberlegungen zu Norbert l Elias', ; sthetik und Kommunikation 8(30). Wiedemann, Rainer ( 199 1), Ritual und Sinntransformation. Ein Beitrag zur Semiotik soziokultureller Interpretationsprozesse, Berlin. Wuthnow, Robert ( \ 992), Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves, Princeton. Zahlmann, Christel (ed.) (1 992), Kommunitarismus in der Diskussion, Berlin. Ziehe, Thomas (1989), 'Die unabliissige Suche nach Niihe und GewiJ3heit. Kulturelle Modernisierung und subjektive Entzugerscheinungen', A'sthetik und Kommunikation 1 8(7071). pp. 1 9-24. Ziehe, Thomas (1992), 'Unspektakuliire Zivilisierungsgewinne. Auch Individualisierung kann "kommunitiir" sein', in Zahlmann, Christel (ed.), Kommunitarismus in der Diskussion, Berlin. Zunkel, Friedrich (1975), 'Ehre, Reputation', in Brunner, Conze and Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 2, Stuttgart.

IN DEX

Note: The letter n following a page number indicates a reference in the notes. Abraham and Isaac, 52 Adorno, Theodor W., 50, 7 1 , 8 1 , 93, 1 37n, 138 aggression, 6, 55, 56, 6 1 , 62, 63, 92, 1 36 alliance, 34, 35, 36 altruism, 108n, 1 28, 145 Ancient Greece, 53, 54, 69-70, 7 1 Aquinas, Thomas, 124 Arens, William, 106n ascetism, Protestant, 1 25 Ashley Montagu, M.F., 1 06n attributions, 77- 104 authority, 43-4 Bahr, Hans-Dieter, 89, 108n Bataille, Georges, 45-6, 47, 48, 52, 94, 97, 105n, 128, 1 35 Baudrillard, Jean, 1 08n, 1 37n Baudy, Gerhard, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 106n Bauman, Zygmunt, 146 Beck, Ulrich, 140, 146, 1 50 Bellah, Robert N., 1 39, 142, 143 Benedict, Ruth, 33, 44-5, 78, 107n Benveniste, Emile, 85, 98, 100, 107-8n, 1 22 Berger, Peter A., 73, 75, 96, 140 Bergfleth, Gerd, 47, 105n Berking, Helmuth, 29n, 44, 147 birthdays, 19 Bischof, Rita, 1 05n 'bladder festival', 50-I Blau, Peter, 22-3 Blumenberg, Hans, 55, 58, 77 Boas, Franz, 65, 107n Boccaccio, 103 bodily expression, 98, 1 08n Borneman, Ernest, 1 07n Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 39, 40, 4 1 , 60-1 , 64, 73, 74, 79, 104n, 105n, 1 1 8, 1 3 1 bourgeois society, 3 , 128-33, 1 39-40 Brecht, Bertolt, 64 Bremmer, Jan, 108n

brood-care behaviour, 66 Brumlik, Micha, 1 52n Brunkhorst, Hauke, 1 52n bull-murder ritual, 59 buphonia, 59 Burckhard, Jacob, 83 bureaucracy, 25 Burkert, Walter, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 64, 75, 105n, 1 06n Cain and Abel, 62 Callois, Roger, 93 Calvinism, 125 Camerer, Colin, 1 0, 29n Cancik-Lindemaier, Hildegard, 53 Canetti, Elias, 107n cannibalism, 60, 67-8, 1 06n capital economic, 4 1 , 1 30, 1 3 1 symbolic, 4 1 , 43 capitalism, 1 30-3, 1 39 Caplow, Theodore, 5, 7, 1 3, 16, 1 7, 1 8, 19, 29n Casa, Giovanni Della, 1 18-19 Castiglione, Baldesar, 1 1 8 Catholicism, 1 5, 53 charity, 127, 1 33, 1 34, 1 35, 143-4 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 103 Cheal, David, 5, 8, 1 3, 1 7, 1 9, 29n chivalry, 1 1 1- 1 2 Christ Child, 14, 1 5, 1 6 Christmas, 13-19 Cicero, 1 24 civilizing process, Elias's theory of, 1 10, I l l , 1 1 7- 1 8 Clausen, Gisela, 29n, 30n collective responsibility, 1 38, 145, 1 50, 1 5 1 colonization o f the lifeworld, 1 33 commercialization of hospitality, 103 Communion, 52-3 communitarianism, 142-3 community, 19-20, 35, 62, 63, 143 'contract sacrifice', 50

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I N DEX

conviviality, 95-7 Corrigan, Peter, 1 3 courtly society, 1 10-17, 149-50 courtship, 1 1 - 1 2 crisis and conflict resolution, ritual a s form of, 74 culture and economics, 1 30-3, 1 39 Davies, Nigel, 106n dead, festival of the, 50 debt, 22, 4 1 , 5 1 -2 de-guesting, 88-9 Della Casa, Giovanni, 1 1 8-19 Derrida, Jacques, 104n, 1 08n, 1 37n descent, 36 desire, mimetic, 6 1 , 88 Detienne, Marcel, 105n de-traditionalization, 4, 1 38, 140, 142 Diderot, Denis, 21 distributive justice, 7-8 donations, 9, 25-6 Douglas, Mary, 9, 30n, 73 Dreitzel, Hans-Peter, 5, 1 52n Dubiel, Helmut, 1 39 Dumont, Louis, 125, 1 37n Durkheim, Emile, 36, 48, 50, 73, 1 05n, 133 duty, 27, 28-9, 1 24, 127, 128, 1 34 eating, 8 1 -2 economic capital, 41, 1 30, 1 3 1 economy and culture, 1 30-3, 1 39 gift economy compared to other sectors, 16-17 market, 10 temple, 68 Eder, Klaus, 40, 58, 68, 73, 1 06n Eibl-Eibesfeld, Ireniius, 66, 106n Elias, Norbert, 67, 75, 9 1 , 1 10, I I I , 1 1 7- 1 8, 1 37n, 148 Elwert, Georg, 104n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5-6 emotional norms, 2 1 -9 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 103, 1 1 8 eskimos, 50- I , 83 Ewen, Stuart, 30n exchange, 37, 7 1 -2, 90 archaic, 3, 4, 29n, 32-49, 72, 94-5 see also reciprocity exchange theory, 22-3 expenditure on gifts, 1 6- 1 7 unproductive, 1 6 , 46, 47, 93-4, 97, 1 1 8, 1 35

expressive behaviour, 4, 94, 96-7, 1 18 - 1 9, 141, 147-50 expressive individualism, 142 Faber, Richard, 30n Father Christmas, 14, 1 5, 1 6 favours, 23-4 Featherstone, Mike, 30n feeling management, 147-50 festivals, 92-4 see also Christmas; dead, festival of the Fiddes, Nick, 65 Finkelstein, Joanne, 1 52n Firth, Raymond, 33 food, distribution of, 64-70, 75, 80-2, 86-7 freedom and duty, 28-9 Freud, Sigmund, 53, 93 funeral meals, 87 Gedike, Friedrich, 14, 1 5 gender identities, 5 generosity, 38, 4 1 , 43, 47, 1 18, 124, 128, 1 36 courtly, 1 1 3-16 Giddens, Anthony, 1 5 1 Girard, Rene, 54, 6 1-2, 105n, 1 06n Gladigow, Burkhard, 68, 1 06n goblet gift, 98-9 Godelier, Maurice, 78 Goffman, Erving, 5, 6, 2 1 , 22, 107n, 148 G6tze, Alfred, 8 1 , 105n Gouldner, Alvin, W., 7, 28, 29, 38, 105n Grange, Bernard, 105n gratitude, 2 1 -9, 122-3, 1 24, 1 33, 1 34 gratitude obligations, 2 1-2, 24, 26-9, 1 1 5- 16, 124-5, 1 34, 1 35 Greece, Ancient, 53, 54, 69-70, 7 1 Grimm, Jakob, 25, 44 , 82, 89, 96, 98, 99, 102, 1 22 Grimm, Wilhelm, 44, 82, 89, 1 02, 122 guest situation, 82- 104 guesthouses, 103-4 guilt, 5 1-2 Habermas, Jiirgen, 48, 105n, 107n, 1 30, 1 33, 140, 141 Haferland, Harald, 1 12, 1 13, 1 14, 1 16, 1 37n, 149 Hainuwele, 60 Hamerton-Kelly, Robert, 1 05n Hannig, Jiirgen, 3, 1 1 3 Harner, Michael, 106n Harris, Marvin, 106n Hauck, Karl, 1 04, 105n

I N DEX Haug, Walter, 108n Heller, Agnes, 1 1 7 Hesiod, 53, 69 hierarchy and distribution of food, 65, 68 Hiltbrunner, Otto, 1 0 1 Hitzler, Ronald, 30n, 147 Hobbes, Thomas, 1 24 Hochschild, Arlie, 4, 23, 148 Homer, 70, 100 Honneth, Axel, 1 08n, 142-3, 1 52n honour, 43, 44, 45, 47, 89-90, I I I , 1 12, 1 14 Horkheimer, Max, 50, 7 1 , 8 1 , 93 Horning, Karl H., 30n, 1 52n hospitality, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 92, 1 00-4 Huizinga, Johann, 14, I I I , 1 37n Hunt, Morton, 108n hunting rituals, 54-9 identity politics, 141 Iliad (Homer), 70, 100 individual interest, 124, 1 25, 1 26-9, 1 3 1 -3 individualism/individualization, 4, 9, 20, 80, 125-6, 126, 1 38, 1 39-52 ingratitude, 26, 122 irony, 6 Isherwood, Baron, 9, 30n Jaeggi, Vrs, 104n Jankuhn, Herbert, 105n Jensen, Adolf E., 60 Joas, Hans, 108n justification compulsion, 147 Kalingas, 87 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 1 34, 1 35, 149-50 Kerenyi, Karl, 107n Kerntke, Wilfried, 109n kinship systems, 36, 38, 79-80 Kluge, Friedrich, 77, 8 1 , 105n Knigge, Adolph Freiherr von, 1 35, 1 37n knighthood, 1 1 2 Korff, Wilhelm, 44 kula, 39 Kurnitzky, Horst, 7 1 , 106n La Bruyere, Jean de, 2 1 Laum, Bernhard, 29n, 69, 7 1 , 8 1 , 106n, 107n law, 25-7 Lepenies, Wolf, l 04n Levi-Strauss, Claude, I I , 1 6, 29n, 33, 36, 45, 65, 67

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Levinas, 77 Lorenz, Konrad, 55, 56, 6 1 , 106n loyalty obligations, 41 Luckmann, Thomas, 75, 96 Ludtke, Hartmut, 30n Luschen, Gunther, 1 8 Lutheranism, 125 Lynd, Helen and Robert, 17 Maffesoli, Michel, 108n Mahnkopf, Birgit, 1 52n Malinowski, Bronislaw, 37-8, 80, 1 05n Mantey, Karl Georg, 120 market economy, 1 0 marriage, 13, 36 Marx, Karl, 34, 1 3 1 Mauss, Marcel, 3 , 7 , 29n, 32, 33, 34-5, 37, 50- I , 52, 65, 79, 107n, 108n, 128 on individual interest, 125 on potlatch, 42, 43, 44, 45, 80 on revocation, 26 men, 1 1 - 1 2 Meuli, Karl, 54-5, 57, 59, 70 Meyer, Richard, 99 Michailow, Matthias, 30n, 147, 1 52n moderation, 1 1 8- 1 9 Moebus, Joachim, 1 37n moira, 69, 70 monasterial hospitality, 102-3 money, 70-1 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de, 129 moral theory, 1 33-5 morality, 38, 39, 1 38-52 Morris, Desmond, 108n motives, 3-10 Muller, Hans Peter, 30n Muller, Rudolf Wolfgang, 107n Musil, Robert, 146 name-giving, 77-81 nature, 50-1 as analogous to man, 78 Neckel, Sighard, 29n, 106n, 1 1 7, 141-2, 147, 1 52n Nemesis, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5 1 -2 Nikolaus gift-giving, 1 5 noblesse oblige, 38, 44 nomos, 69-70 objectification, 5-6 obligations, gratitude, 2 1 -2, 24, 26-9, 1 1 5- 1 6, 1 24-5, 1 34, 1 35

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I N D EX

occasions, 1 1-20 Odyssey (Homer), 70 Oedipus, 62, 69 Oexle, Otto Gerhard, 87 Oldenstein, Jurgen, 53 Otto, Rudolf, 59 Ovid, 85 Panathenaea, 69 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 14 Parkin, Frank, 1 39 Peyer, Hans Conrad, 1 0 1 , 102-3, 1 08n, 109n pilgrims, 1 0 1 -2 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 83, 87 Plato, 124 Plessner, Helmuth, 48, 107n, 1 50 Polanyi, Karl, 36, 105n politeness, 97, 1 18- 19, 149 potlatch societies, 16, 32-3, 36, 42-9, 50, 52, 80, 94, 1 35 power, 1 35-6 economic, 1 3 1 symbolic, 7-8, 4 1 -2, 47, 52, 94 prestige, 43, 47, 128 Protestantism, 1 05n, 125, 127, 1 29 public officials, 25 Purusha, 68 Ranke-Graves, Robert von, 69 receiving, 7, 8 reciprocity, 6-7, 20, 28-9, 33-4, 36-43, 84, 90, 97, 99- 100, 1 19, 126 balanced, 38, 40 courtly, 1 1 3- 16, 1 17 negative, 38, 84 positive, 38 see also exchange recognition, relations of, 45, 89, 1 12, 1 14, 1 25, 1 26, 1 28, 148 redistributive exchange relations, 36, 37 reflexive self-reference, 147-51 Reformation, 1 25-6 relationship signals, gifts as, 5 religion, 1 25-6 and sacrifice, 52-3, 54, 58, 59, 62 Renaissance, 1 17 Reverdin, Olivier, 105n revocation, 26 Riches, David, 64 rites of passage, 1 3, 19 rites of progression, 1 9-20 Ritter, Hans Henning, 1 04n ritual killing see sacrifice

rituals, 8-9, 72-5 of courtship, 1 2 gratitude and expressions o f thanks as, 2 1 -2 hunting, 54-9 rivalry, 33, 44, 88 Roman Saturnalia, 14 Romans, 53 Roodenberg, Herman, 1 08n Rost, Friedrich, 26 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 133 Rumohr, Carl F. sacrifice, 34, 46, 48-9, 50-63 distribution of, 63, 64-76 human, 59-60, 106n Sahle, Rita, 29n Sahlins, Marshall, 33, 35, 36-7, 38, 39, 4 1 , 64, 105n, 107n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1 36 scapegoat mechanism, 6 1 -2 Schindler, Norbert, 1 30 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 1 5 Schmugge, Ludwig, 1 02 Schwarz, Barry, 5, 8, 29n, 30n Schwind, Moritz von, 1 5 self-esteem, 24 self-presentation, 5-6, 147, 148 self-reference, 5-6, 147-5 1 self/individual interest, 39, 124, 1 25, 1 26-9, 1 3 1-3, 145, 1 50 Seneca, 124 'sentimental days', 1 9 Serres, Michel, 9 1 Shakespeare, William, 1 10, 120-2 Simmel, Georg, 4, 27-8, 29n, 3 1 , 48, 75, 1 08n, 1 14 Smith, Adam, 1 24, 1 32, 1 33, 1 34 Smith, William Robertson, 105n social asymmetry, 24 Soeffner, Hans Georg, 30n, 1 26, 1 37n Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 40 Sombart, Werner, 1 10, 1 1 3 sovereignty, 46, 47-8, 105n Stentzler, Friedrich, 1 1, 34, 72, 104n, 1 06n Stephan, Cora, 1 52n Suntrup, Rudolf, 105n sympathy, 127, 1 33-4 Szabo, Thomas, 102, 103 Tacitus, 84 taste, 5 temple economy, 68

I N DEX thanks expressions of, 2 1 -3, 122 see also gratitude Thomasin von Zirklaere, 1 1 3-16, 126 Thompson, Edward P., 4 Thomson, George, 107n time and the guest situation, 87 Timon of Athens (Shakespeare), 120-2 Titmus, Richard M., 29n touching, 96 Trilling, Lionel, 141 Tungus hunters, 54 Turner, Victor, 72, 74, 1 07n Tylor, Edward B., 105n Unalit, 50 utilitarian individualism, 142, 143, 145, 146 value economic, 10 personal, 1 0 Van Gennep, Arnold, 1 3, 107n

Veblen, Thorstein, 17, 137n Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 105n Veyne, Paul, 105n, 1 37n violence, 52, 56, 1 35-6 collective, 61-2 sacralization of, 59, 72 symbolic, 4 1 , 94, 95, 1 36 voluntary services, 143-4 Warning, Rainer, 1 08n wealth, 43-4 Weber, Max, I l l , 1 25, 128, 1 3 1 Weber-Kellermann, Ingeborg, 14, 1 5 Wiedemann, Rainer, 1 07n Winnebago, 79 women, 1 2- 1 3 exchange of, 3 6 wrapping and unwrapping, 8 Wuthnow, Robert, 144-5 Zahlmann, Christel, 1 52n Ziehe, Thomas, 142, 146, 147, 1 50 Zunkel, Friedrich, 44

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