A gift economy is one in which goods, food and help move mainly as gifts, creating relationships and obligations between people, instead of being bought and sold in exchanges that end once the price is paid. The idea comes from anthropology, especially Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1925), and has been taken up by writers such as Lewis Hyde and Robin Wall Kimmerer. Nomadic hunter-gatherers went further still, sharing in ways designed to stop gifts creating debt or rank, and Therapeutic Shamanism sees the same spirit in how the living world gives to us, freely, and in how we are asked to give back.
What is a gift economy? #
A way of moving things through relationship instead of through price. The botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a people who traditionally grew corn, beans and squash as well as hunting, fishing and gathering, explains the difference with a pair of socks. Socks bought in a shop are hers once she has paid; there is no bond beyond a polite thank you, and the exchange ends there. The same socks knitted by her grandmother change everything: she writes a thank-you note, looks after them, wears them when her grandmother visits, and gives a gift back in return. As she quotes the writer Lewis Hyde, “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”1
So a gift economy is not an economy where things are free. In Kimmerer’s words, “in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships.” Its currency is reciprocity, and where private property is a ‘bundle of rights’, property in a gift economy carries a ‘bundle of responsibilities’.1 See Who is Robin Wall Kimmerer, and what is Braiding Sweetgrass about?
Where does the idea come from? #
From the anthropology of the early twentieth century. The French anthropologist Marcel Mauss, in The Gift (1925), drew together accounts of peoples who moved wealth by giving: the potlatch feasts of the Pacific North-West coast of America, where settled, complex hunter-gatherers gave away and destroyed goods to win rank, and the kula ring of the Trobriand Islands, where garden farmers carried shell valuables from island to island. His conclusion was that a gift is never simply free: to give, to receive and to give back are all obligations, and a gift brings a return, or at least a felt debt.2
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins later set out a range of exchange running from what he called generalised reciprocity, the giving amongst close kin where nobody keeps count, through balanced exchange, where like is returned for like, to negative reciprocity, trying to get something for nothing, and showed how the kind of exchange tends to change with social distance.3 See Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is “the original affluent society”?
Did hunter-gatherers have gift economies? #
Something more radical, in many cases. Hunter-gatherers knew very well that a gift can be used to build power. Sahlins records an Inuit saying: “Gifts make slaves,” the Eskimo say, “as whips make dogs.”4 A gift that cannot be repaid puts the receiver in the giver’s debt, and in a society where a debt can become a hold over someone, that is the beginning of rank.
So the small, mobile bands of foragers that the anthropologist James Woodburn called immediate-return societies mostly did not exchange gifts in Mauss’s sense at all. They shared. The anthropologist Jerome Lewis, who has lived for many years with the Mbendjele BaYaka of the Congo forest, describes demand-sharing: people ask for what they need, and those who have are expected to give, so the giver gains no standing by it. Lewis lists demand-sharing alongside other levellers, such as gambling amongst the Hadza and gift-giving amongst the San, that “ensure that valued goods circulate without making people dependent on specific other people.”5 Among the !Kung, a hunter who came home boasting found his meat mocked; see What did Richard Lee learn from the !Kung about sharing? and Who is Jerome Lewis, and what can the BaYaka teach us about equality?
This fits how hunter-gatherer life is understood in Therapeutic Shamanism. They were Leaver cultures, taking what they needed at any given time and leaving the rest, often deliberately leaving a share of the berries for the other animals, where Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer is wholly orientated towards building up a surplus.6 The great gift-giving systems that made people famous, such as the potlatch, belonged to settled peoples with wealth to store and rank to win.
How does the gift economy connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the way the living world gives. In nature we are surrounded by thousands of beings with healing gifts, knowledge and wisdom, all given freely; all we have to do is ask.7 Receiving them is not a purchase, and giving back is not payment. Thanking a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, for example, is about expressing gratitude and appreciation with no strings, conditions or expectations attached.8 Yet receiving does bring a responsibility: if we ask for help and teaching from the Animal, Plant and Stone People in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, then we need to help them in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer too, and these days they need our help.9
That is close to what Kimmerer means by a gift that creates a bundle of responsibilities, and to the Leaver habit of taking only what is needed. Where Taker culture turns the living world into commodities, things to be owned, used and sold, a gift relationship keeps it a world of relatives. See What is right relationship and reciprocity?
Is a gift ever really free? #
This is disputed. In the line of thinking that runs from Mauss, a gift always calls for a return. The researchers Adam Graycar and David Jancsics, writing on gift-giving and corruption, sum up the anthropology this way: gifts trigger a return, or at least a feeling of obligation, and an unreturned gift makes the person who accepted it feel inferior, so that they seek to repay it and be free of the debt. They also trace the norm of reciprocity back, through Mauss, to sacrifices offered to the gods in the expectation of a return, and show how easily a gift slides into a bribe.10
On the other side, Kimmerer agrees that gifts are not free, but sees the obligation as the point, not the problem: the gift is what ties people, and people to the land, into a set of relationships, and many of her people’s teachings say that whatever we have been given is meant to be given away again.11 Lewis and Woodburn describe sharing amongst nomadic foragers that is designed so that nobody ends up in anyone’s debt.12 And in Therapeutic Shamanism, giving back to the other Peoples is offered freely, with no strings, as part of a relationship, not to settle an account.
