In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Enigma of the Gift
  • Paul Roscoe
The Enigma of the Gift. Maurice Godelier. Translated by Nora Scott. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press and Polity Press in Association with Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1999; 256 pp.

It is difficult to stifle a yawn in picking up yet another book about gift giving, not least another book about Melanesian exchange. So it is refreshing that Godelier's first words are: "Why this book? Why yet another analysis of gift exchange . . . ?" (p. 1). His answer is a spirited and eloquent assertion of the relevance of understanding gift giving in the modern world. We live in a time when market economies exclude massive numbers of people. In the wealthiest of nations, let alone the poorest, thousands have [End Page 151] taken to begging in the streets, many of them homeless. Yet, even as conservatism shifts it ever further away from economic intervention, the state remains charged with reintegrating the dispossessed into society. And so, the call to charity is increasingly heard: to give, to share. Even in the secularized West, the gift is back.

If the socially excluded provide the moral incentive for this book, Godelier's dissatisfaction with aspects of Mauss' Essai sur le Don provides its intellectual stimulus: The Enigma of the Gift is an attempt to "complete Mauss' anthropological analysis" (p. 104). To this end, the first half of the book reworks Mauss, with some effective swipes at Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and others along the way, most particularly at their assertions that the imaginary has primacy over the symbolic. The remainder of the book recapitulates much of Godelier's previous publications on exchange and social reproduction but ventures also onto new ground in grappling with unresolved problems in that earlier work. Drawing from Annette Weiner's Inalienable Possessions, Godelier argues that to understand the production and reproduction of society, we must focus not only on gifts and exchange as Mauss and others have argued but also on what is not given, those things (sacred objects and persons, heirlooms, secret myths, names) that are distinguished by the fact that they must not be given. Using his Baruya data to illuminating effect, he argues that these are the anchors or "realities" from which the imaginary realm constructs and develops individual and collective identities.

This is not the easiest of books to read and would not be suitable for any but the most advanced student audience. Though far from the worst offender among those who resist concessions to the reader, Godelier propagates his fair share of enormously long, baroquely constructed sentences. Some border on the unprocessable and, along with occasional, prolonged flights of rhetorical questioning, leave the reader with the uneasy feeling that smoke and mirrors are being deployed to hasten the analysis past dangerous ground. Still, there is much to recommend in this thought-provoking book.

Godelier's insistence, with Wiener, that we pay more heed to what cannot be given is well taken, especially for the case of Melanesian societies, where at the core of clans and even "tribes" are often found the most valuable of heirlooms. Among the Yangoru Boiken with whom I am acquainted, these are the largest and "blackest" of the shell rings, the suwanga, personified as the clan's wala spirit. Though otherwise indistinguishable from other shell rings, all of which feature prominently in exchange, these should never be given away or, if they are, they must be retrieved at the earliest opportunity on pain of catastrophe. Suwanga, it is said, are the "bone" of the clan, the anchor of its identity, precisely as Godelier claims.

Also intriguing is Godelier's connection of such anchors to his particular notion of the sacred. Along with other sacra, these are concretizations of a certain type of (false) relationship that humans entertain with the origin of things. The sacred is a realm that humans have populated with imaginary duplicates of themselves. Why? By postulating these duplicates as the superhuman creators of society, they thereby obscure from themselves the reality that humans are, along with nature, authors of their own society (and, hence, in part of themselves). Godelier's debt to the Marxist paradigm is manifest, but this...

pdf

Share