Turning commodities into presents

A tradesman’s morality?

If anthropologists were quick to acknowledge the validity of Mauss’s approach to exchange with respect to primitive societies, they were slower to apply his ideas to contemporary capitalist societies. Yet this reluctance was not shared by Mauss himself, since he was keen to find out about his own society as well, albeit to a lesser extent: ‘We possess more than a tradesman’s morality. There still remain people and classes that keep to the morality of former times, and we almost all observe it, at least at certain times of the year and on certain occasions’ (Mauss, 1990 [1925]: 60). Thus Mauss highlights a number of examples of giving that are still very much alive, such as presents offered on the occasion of a birth, confirmation or wedding. This perspective led him to stress the importance of feelings of solidarity today, by showing how the exchange of gifts contributes to ‘group morality’ as a necessary means of social integration. While for him the gift does exist in our societies, it is as a sort of survival, in social contexts which are, in the final analysis, marginal. Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé are rare exceptions when, in their comments on the essay’s Conclusions de morale, they stress the importance of studying contemporary gifts in these terms:

… Mauss seems to have had difficulty in realizing that the gift still exists today other than as a kind of survival, illustrated by the example, which is a marginal one, of birthday or New Year’s gifts. … The idea has gradually dawned on us that the gift is as modern and contemporary as it is typical of archaic societies; that it concerns not only isolated and discontinuous moments of social existence, but also its very totality.

In our societies, the circulation of gifts has often been regarded as minor in comparison with trade. As Richard Hyland (2014) points out in this issue, such a viewpoint gives commodities precedence over gifts, harking back to a debate over the relationship between the two concepts that could be said to have been started by Mauss, even though he claimed that the two had more in common as forms of exchange than their differences. Such a contrast emphasizes the role of money payment in commercial exchange. For Georg Simmel (1978 [1900]), the use of money permits the partners to transactions, among other things, to remain anonymous, thereby enhancing the scope for rationality. The paradox of money for Simmel is that commerce frees participants while being a source of alienation. We are now more open to the idea that money liberates by increasing the autonomy of individual actors; and finally, as Viviana Zelizer (1994) has shown, impersonal money may be personalized, depending on its source. This perspective, inspired by Simmel, reinforces a point of Mauss’s that has been forgotten or poorly understood, namely that the opposition between interested impersonal commerce and disinterested personal gift exchange is a false one.

The gift/commodity contrast has also been qualified by Marshall Sahlins (1974), who takes up Karl Polanyi’s (1957) theory of the three modes of exchange and suggests looking at it not in a binary fashion but as the two extreme points of a continuum. Other authors claiming inspiration from the work of Chris Gregory (1982), despite the author’s denials, take this theory in the opposite direction that Mauss himself was trying to refute, opposing commodity economy to gift economy and Western societies to non-Western societies (Strathern, 1988). Western thinkers have emphasized the opposition between the obligatory contract and the free gift, so that gift exchange has often been idealized in representations of ‘exotic’ societies.

During the 1980s, anthropological research questioned this romantic construction and demonstrated how inappropriate such a contrast is. Gifts and commodities usually coexist and may even be interchangeable, like money, which can be both a commodity and a gift in turn (Appadurai, 1986; Carrier, 1990a; Parry, 1986; Parry and Bloch, 1989). At the same time, others introduced the expression of personal feelings into gift exchange (Caplow, 1996; Cheal, 1987, 1988), something ignored hitherto since it did not seem to offer anything useful to the debate. These writers made sure to take into account the economic, religious and social aspects of exchange. Finally, anthropologists have turned increasingly to the study of their own societies, where individuals, rather than being swamped by the alienating experience of mass consumption, try to ‘appropriate’ their domestic material environment by making it their own personal space (Miller, 1987).

My own work in various parts of Europe focuses on this process whereby the private sphere is formed and how it interacts with the public sphere. This has led me to try to understand the situations in which commodities acquire the status of gifts, and the mechanisms used by the actors themselves to appropriate these commodity/gifts as an expression of their identity (Chevalier, 1998; Chevalier and Monjaret, 1998).

The material construction of the private sphere

The artefacts of interest here are, in the first instance, presents sometimes displayed as elements of domestic décor, especially in the living room or lounge. As such, they contribute to their recipients’ attempts to build up a private space, helping them to create an environment with personal meaning; and they are arranged alongside other pieces of furniture and decorative objects, most of them purchased by the owner. The various elements making up this décor are most often mass-produced furniture and objects. In themselves they do not distinguish the interior they equip and adorn from all the others. On the contrary, it is the combination of these pieces of furniture and objects – and the relationships set up between them, each unique in its own way – that serves to express the identity of the household.

In themselves the objects have no meaning, since it is persons who give them that; so the global context of their production and circulation endows them with features that are then reinterpreted by their owner. According to my argument here, it is the context and mode of circulation of the objects whose interpretation is important. This process of reinterpretation as part of the construction of a personal world at home takes place within a specific social and cultural framework. My comparative study of France and Great Britain showed how similar objects or pieces of furniture were arranged differently, not just to suit individual taste, but also to satisfy shared cultural imperatives of spatial organization (Chevalier, 1995, 1996, 2002). The construction of a private world occurs at the intersection between the individual and society: that is to say, between the wish to express oneself and the need to signify that one belongs to a group. This private world, developed through consumption practices, may be regarded as individuals’ subjective interpretation of their objective experience of socio-economic reality. From this perspective, the presents are a reification of social links arranged in a domestic interior. This may be analysed as a process of appropriation, leading to the transformation of objects of mass consumption into inalienable objects (Chevalier, 1999, 2002; Miller, 1987; Putnam and Newton, 1990). My aim here is to show how consumers, through their way of life, personalize mass-produced commodities.

What is a ‘present’? Transforming commodities into gifts

The presents found on display in a domestic interior are nearly all commodities transformed into gifts. The recipients know little of how they were bought, although they may sometimes guess or be told.

The objects given as presents are already involved in a process of appropriation: from the moment a donor chooses an object, s/he appropriates the item, investing it with his or her personality and, what is more, stamping it with his or her own identity. S/he takes possession of the object when buying it in order to make it a ‘personalized’ gift (Carrier, 1990b: 581; Miller, 1987: 120). In order for an anonymous object to be invested with the identity of the donor, it must already be in his or her possession (Carrier, 1990b: 581). Carrier distinguishes this expression of an identity between the object and its owner, created by a process of appropriation, from one of ownership, which is an abstract relation in law (see also Miller, 1987, 1998). In order to be given, an object must be alienable: the donor must have the right to dispose of it freely and to renounce ownership of it, so that the recipient may possess it as an owner in turn (Cheal, 1988). Purchasing an object is thus as much a cultural as an economic act; it is truly work, reflecting the affection we feel for those close to us and thereby allowing the maintenance and revival of social relations (Carrier, 1990b: 587ff.; Miller, 1998). In this sense, possession itself effects a transformation that leads to a redefinition of the object’s status, from a commodity to a potential gift, making it a possible means of creating identities (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979: 59). This is how we redefine who we are and how we are connected with one another.

We might hypothesize that when a present is given, there is indeed a transfer of possession but not a complete transfer of ownership, which, in a way, becomes joint. This is so as long as the relationship between donor and recipient is meaningful to them and the reification of that relationship also means something. In other words, the donor retains a certain right of inspection over a present (Sahlins, 1974: 211ff.).

Thus, if these presents retain something of the donor, it is not exactly in the sense of hau, conceived of as the spirit of the gift that demands a return (Godelier, 1999 [1996]; Mauss, 1990 [1925]), but rather in that articulated by Nancy Munn for the Walbiri, where the relationship between individuals and their community is mediated by the world of objects (Munn, 1971: 141). We may therefore assert that the present contains a relationship and as such mediates the link between donor and recipient (Chevalier, 1998). This, then, is the difference between a ‘gift’ and a ‘present’, two words that are often used interchangeably in the literature: the gift is a social relationship and presents are the things given and received.

If the present therefore bears the stamp of the donor’s identity, how can the recipient integrate it into her world and make it her own in turn? Appropriation occurs through acknowledging the social bond that gave rise to the exchange. This has two dimensions: one of identity and one linked to the social relationship proper. A gift received is personalized when it is used to express one’s identity, by incorporating it into one’s décor. There is then an admission that the social relationship it materializes is, or has been, part of our identity. From this angle, the dimension of identity would not therefore differentiate the present from its purchase. Rather, the latter expresses the ‘freedom of trade’ made possible by the use of money (Simmel, 1978 [1900]): that is to say, buying an item allows you to free yourself from social connections. If the buyer can walk away free of any constraining ties with the seller, this allows him or her to make relationships of a more binding nature by converting a purchase into a present. This latter, however, is from the outset located within a social bond; it is part of the dynamics of exchange between individuals. As an expression of both constraint and freedom, the exchange of presents allows a revaluation of each person’s position within a network of friends and relatives (Weiner, 1976: 232). May we then claim that displaying and using these presents as elements of home décor is a second stage in the acknowledgement and evaluation of relations with the donor?

Making room for others at home

Generally speaking, presents are important props in the stage we build at home for acting out our lives, a stage made out of the totality of our social relationships. Just observing these things, however, does not tell enough about a relationship, or does so rarely; only the partners to the exchange know its meaning in a kind of deliberate complicity. Who has never looked around a friend’s place to check that the pretty ornament they once gave is still displayed prominently in the living room? In order for outsiders to grasp the meaning of an object, they must be told about the relationship that it centrally expresses. In reality, the stories told by its owner about a present on display usually highlight just one of its dimensions, whether the character of the donor, the context of the gift, its timing, uniqueness or place in a series of exchanges, even the context in which it was bought.

To take one example from fieldwork, a young English couple chose to emphasize in their living room the rites of passage that led to the social constitution of their household as a shared home, in the form of photos and presents from their engagement and wedding ceremonies. When explaining these objects, they downplayed their source in favour of highlighting the events themselves; with the exception of a few close relatives, such as the wife’s mother and aunt, these presents were lumped together as gifts from the family. Other presents, especially furniture given to the young couple by relatives at the time of their marriage, objectified the separation of the generations. They gave material shape to a rite of passage that allowed a new household to be formed. This emphasis on the social context of the transfer is of course connected with its unrepeated and exceptional character (Chevalier, 1998).

By contrast, the perspective changes for recurrent events (Chevalier, 2004: 155), such as Christmas or birthdays, when the narrative is likely to evoke relations with donors. Choosing where to place a present depends on the significance attached to a relationship; and the value of that relationship is often linked to the frequency of exchanges between the parties. Another situation, where what matters is the assemblage of relations involved rather than the detail of each one, is the typical Anglo-Saxon institution of displaying birthday and Christmas cards (Jaffé, 1999). This is generally impermanent and seasonal. The recipients evoke the event above all by displaying the number of cards received, which may be more than a hundred. Most often they are exhibited in no particular order, since specific relationships are not at stake, but rather the constellation of social links is made manifest in this way.

My analysis of the stories told about presents suggests that they highlight certain ‘objective’ aspects of the gift, the donor or the context, but above all their appropriation by the recipient. S/he is able to choose the dimension of the present that seems relevant for the project of building his or her world at home, while reassessing the relationship materialized by that object. This revaluation can be seen at any moment through the place chosen for exhibiting a present, which may be emphasized to a greater or lesser degree, displaced and even sometimes eliminated. The places chosen make obvious the significance attached to it and, therefore, to the relationships involved, as well as to the events associated with its donation. This depends also on how recipients arrange the elements of their home décor. If it is just a matter of accumulating objects, then the latest one received will easily find a place. However, when the décor is already more or less complete, a present may become part of it only if it satisfies certain aesthetic criteria. These contrasting styles of decoration may thus be represented as follows. Some households leave room for outsiders in their home and others give precedence to the owner’s self-expression. Materializing social ties has an advantage over suffering the concrete presence of donors, for an object is stable and yet can be moved, it keeps its distance and it survives through time (even if it ages). Thus, displaying a vase received from one’s mother-in-law in the living room is quite different from having her at home. The object maintains the binding connection nevertheless.

Presents thus possess two contrasting qualities, mobility and stability, which allow their owner to use them flexibly in building a home’s décor, while permitting their metaphorical transposition into social relations through narrative. These relations must be stable enough to afford the individual a certain emotional security; and they are at the same time mobile or rather change in the course of life, allowing a person to grow and to enrich his or her experience. On a foundation of these materialized social ties, people strive to build a domestic environment that expresses their identity, an identity that is at once individual and collective.

Presents, legacies and purchases as means of expressing identity

We know that interior decoration is made up of a combination of objects whose introduction into that space has taken place in various ways linked to their circulation. This combination has an impact on how people appropriate objects, as we have seen with presents, since what is at stake here is the acknowledgement of a social tie linking donor and recipient, then its relative significance as measured by the position it occupies in the composition of the décor. If individuals strive to express their identity, they must also confront their membership of groups whose existence is marked by other modes of circulation of objects, such as purchase and inheritance. To borrow from Nancy Munn (1971), the world of objects mediates relations with others, who may be family, a specific individual or a member of a particular group (the circle of friends, neighbours, and so on).

Objects received as presents and those that we inherit share the condition of being materialized personal links; they are both traces of someone or something precise and known. Presents bring us into a relationship with a wider group, infinitely variable, whose members fill various categories in our social life. Inheritance connects us only with our line of descent; it imposes more constraints through the particular link it maintains with the dead. Inherited objects, such as furniture (Chevalier, 1996: 21), often form the axis around which households build their interior decoration, especially in France, where descent matters more than in the English system of cognatic kinship. An inherited item may be consigned to a corner of the living room, but it cannot be left out of the home décor completely, nor destroyed. Local museums are often the recipients of inherited objects that people are reluctant to dispose of in any absolute sense.

Inheritance and presents have in common, in particular, the constraints they place on the recipient. They both differ a priori from bought items, since the act of purchase lacks direct social constraints and does not mediate concrete ties. Most of the time, when a purchase is made in a department store as an impersonal exchange, the new owners are free to do what they like with it, either to please themselves or as part of an imagined relationship with a person of their choice, sometimes both. My informants told numerous anecdotes describing at length the bonds uniting them with things in their home, including some they had bought for themselves in a department store. Of course things bought while on holiday were privileged vehicles for this, for bought items are just as good as presents as props for the memory.

So, when it comes to the process of appropriation in practice, the difference between presents, inherited and bought objects turns out to be less than supposed. Presents are not ‘free gifts’, but they do allow for some play between constraint and freedom in relations between individuals and society. To that extent, they mediate the other two forms of transfer, in that inherited objects place stronger constraints on recipients and are less malleable than something that one has bought for oneself. But, as Mauss insisted, rather than attaching any of these categories to one pole or the other, each in its own way articulates individuals and society through a combination of freedom and obligation.

Individual self-expression is articulated with belonging to a group in several ways. All the homes I visited in Britain and France included at least one present displayed in their living room. Were it not so, a person would be described as living outside society with an identity built in isolation that expresses only itself. At the other extreme, a private world made up solely of presents would leave no room for individuality. For the truth is that the givers of presents represent a crushing force without room for self-expression. There is a generational aspect to this: it is not long ago that people were used to living in an inherited home made by predecessors without feeling that they had to change it in the name of their own individuality.

The allocation of presents within a private space allows us to trace the links created between an individual and his or her world. As a feature of domestic material culture, they reveal how households combine self-expression with belonging to others, an articulation which is always shaped by a specific cultural and social framework, whether national or otherwise. Occupying a space between inheritance and the market, presents appear to play an essential role in the construction of our identities.

Conclusion: Commodities in the service of the gift?

To conclude, I return to the distinction between gifts and commodities and suggest some possibly fruitful avenues for investigation into contemporary social practice.

First of all, I have shown how the commodities of consumer society fuel the exchange of gifts. The presents on display in people’s homes were artefacts, so the question of how relationships are materialized was not really at issue since the material presence of the present allowed for immediate identification with the donor. But what about presents of cash, wedding presents on a ‘list’, or even the gift of vouchers, which has risen in popularity lately? Nowadays, the scope of what can be given extends far beyond what is material, and we could say that it comprises everything that can be shared, makes sense and leaves the other person with an obligations or debt (Godelier, 1999). The three kinds of transfer that I have identified have in common that an object’s market value can readily be ascertained and displayed: the price put on the relationship between donor and recipient may therefore be seen clearly, even if the tag has been removed. Yet Anne Monjaret (1998, following Zelizer, 1994) has shown that money received as a gift is often kept apart from household money, for example, and placed in a specific category. The recipient transforms this sum of money into whatever present he or she likes, which is the true purpose of the gift, thereby allowing the relationship with the donor to be materialized. In the case of wedding lists, Martine Segalen (1998) tells us, the donor identifies him- or herself less, if at all, with a particular object; even if the choice of commodities on offer takes into account everyone’s status and ability to pay. As for the ‘gift voucher’, it must also be materialized by the recipient, within certain constraints and with a time limit. It would appear therefore that presents, at least for those associated with ritual moments, must usually be materialized in order to express the relationship, however immaterial their initial form.

So, if any commodity may be transformed into a present, is the reverse true? A look at the eBay website after the Christmas holidays shows that a considerable number of presents are immediately transformed into cash and that their recipients look for the best possible price. Does this observation mean that the vendors no longer place the gift within a social bond? Or rather that individual taste and the expression of personal identity take precedence over the acknowledgement of social relationships through their materialization? Is it now only the ‘gesture that counts’?

As for the status of commodities, we may state, with Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé, that usually

…the gift retains the trace of earlier relationships beyond the immediate transaction. It keeps the memory of them, unlike the sale, which keeps only the price from the past, the memory of the relation between things and not between persons.

Recent work, however, including my own research on the new designations of commodities, reveals that marketing goes out of its way to create a personalized relationship (one that retains the memory of a link) not between buyer and seller but directly between buyer and producer. The staging of the brand and the ambiance created around these commercial objects create a strong relationship between the buyer and whoever made the object, even if this is largely imaginary, often individualizing the latter through photographs and even biographical data. This is particularly true with the current development of the so-called traditional trade, which offers authentic goods for sale, as part of ethical commerce (Chevalier et al., 2011).

When these observations are taken into account, the distinction between gifts and commodities seems to blur and the boundary between them is easily crossed. This, rather than the stark opposition that he set out to refute, is the basic message of Marcel Mauss’s essay.