The gift economy inside and outside patriarchal capitalism

by Genevieve Vaughan

The  gift economy provides an alternative point of view from which to analyze the market economy and patriarchy. It is an alternative that has always existed and still exists today at a time when patriarchal capitalism is demonstrating its devastating effects on  humanity and the environment. I believe that gift giving is the original human economy of which the exchange economy is an elaboration and a distorsion. The reasons for choosing to access and practice this original economy  are psychological  as well as material. That is because the way we procure our sustenance influences what we think both at the level of daily life and at the more theoretical level of Marxian structure-superstructure.  By making the distinction between direct  need-satisfying gifting and quid pro quo exchange  we can see the gift economy as the source of the values of care as opposed to market-based  values of competition and domination. These two kinds of values then feed back into the market economy where the practice of quid pro quo exchange dominates free gift giving. Indeed, profit, the motivator of the market, is formed by the taking of the gifts of the many by the few.

Understanding this perspective requires some re framing  and some new ways of connecting the dots in old discourses. By framing mothering as economic, a mode of distribution in contrast to market exchange, we can understand its commonality with the gift economies of indigenous peoples.

 Since the 1960's I have thought that the market with its logic of exchange is the source of our many problems and that it is not by assimilating more people into it that we can create a peaceful and abundant society. Hidden behind the market though is the other economy, a free economy that has its own unrecognized but functional logic.  In the market, where everything is valued and defined in monetary terms, gift giving seems to be nothing. 'Free' is at most a gimmick used to sell more commodities.

Instead on closer inspection we can see that free giving-and-receiving has a basic logic of its own. Very briefly: that A gives to B implies that B is valuable for A or s/he would not have given to h/er. On the other hand A  is valuable to B as the source of the gift. The gift itself is valuable in that it is used to satisfy a need.  Passing the gift on:  A gives to B and B gives to C implies that A gives to C. Continuing this gifting from A to B, C,  D, E  and F creates a gift circle of shared value and solidarity. Starting from different points weaves the implications in different ways.  Giving and receiving different kinds of gifts and services has different kinds of qualitative implications as does giving and receiving with different partners.  These are relational implications and the logic of the gift is primarily a relational logic.  It can be extended to include non human things in several ways: by attending  to and caring for them, by recognizing  them as gifts and by receiving them. We can project our gift relations onto nature and receive from it as well: perceptions, synchroniciites and all the infinite variety of material gifts nature provides, though many of these are not widely accessible in a regime of private property.

The human free economy is aligned with the 'economy' of nature, which is also free. Only  human property and the  market are artificial and dysfunctional.

 In 1493 Columbus wrote of the people he encountered in the "New World" that they were "... artless and generous with what they have, to such a degree as no one would believe but him who had seen it. Of anything they have, if it be asked for, they never say no, but do rather invite the person to accept it, and show as much lovingness as though they would give their hearts." (Bourne and Olson eds. 1906:265) The free gift economy is always vulnerable to the economy that dominates and takes. it was not just the horses and the military technology of the Europeans that allowed the conquest but the ego oriented (non or anti gift) motivation of acquisition and domination, typical of the market economy.As time went on and Europe's destructive hold on the Americas and other colonies became solidified,   the contact with "pre" capitalist[1] economies sustained the developing capitalist economies materially because the indigenous people were forced to direct their gifts towards the foreign conquerors. (Weatherford 1988: ch. 1)

It is important to take the long view in order to understand the two logics of  gift  and exchange. They have coexisted for centuries  but  the market is not ubiquitous, "natural" or necessary. Gift giving and receiving are more fundamental. They are first encountered in socialization through the basic  free need-satisfying  care that is necessary for the survival of infants. The care of small children can be done by biological mothers, other family members, entire villages or paid child care workers but for the child the care is free. [2] This is demonstrated by the fact that children do not begin to understand exchange and money until they are around 4 years old (Webley 2005:44-50)[3].  While early childhood has often been seen in Freudian terms as pre-Oedipal, it should also be seen in even more socially relevant terms as "pre" market. In this sense everyone is born into a gift economy and practices it during the period in which s/he is learning language and basic life skills. It is only later that the child even begins to understand exchange and starts to adapt to a market economy based on quid pro quo interactions. Children are protected by their lack of development from embracing market logic in their earliest years. If adults are to succeed in bringing them 'up', they also have to adapt to the economy of direct giving.

 A new understanding of intersubjectivity 

" Freud, Piaget and Skinner contributed to the 'myth of the asocial child', a myth, which is now being overturned by research on preverbal intersubjectivity, neonatal imitation and mirror neurons. Neonatal imitation depends on a close coupling between perception and action that undergirds intersubjective engagement with others...self-other connectedness is functional at birth" (Meltzoff and Brooks 2007: 153-154) Children are born pro social. At the age of 20 minutes they are already able to imitate facial expressions and tongue protrusion. Gaze following, and  understanding goals and intentions soon develop. "Intersubjectivity is a precondition for culture not the outcome of it" say Meltzoff and Brooks (2007: 163)

Caring for infants is thus consciously interactive from the beginning, not the care of a passive ego centric being. In fact children are already carrying on 'proto conversations' (Bateson 1979:65, Trevarthen 1979:321, Trevarthen 1998: 15-46) with their mothers as early as the age of 2 months. They respond positively to the motherer's satisfaction of their needs and also provide h/er with cues that satisfy h/er psychological, communicative and cognitive needs regarding the needs of the child. Although in a sense there is reciprocity, because each satisfies the other's needs at different levels this interaction is not exchange in the sense of do ut des constraint. It is not an exchange although motherer and child are keyed to each other and intricately time their turntaking initiatives. (Trevarthen 1998:15-46) The interactions are both turned towards the other; they are, as Stein Braten (1998:105) says, 'altercentric'. The interactions between motherers and small children necessarily have giving and receiving material care and sustenance as their main theme and context. In fact communication is at first this material care along with all the  accompanying multisensory experiences of touch, taste and smell etc. The child's body and mind are the product of that material care work.

This early economy of giving and receiving is a mode of distribution and a life enhancing one.

The relations it creates are the mutuality and trust, which form the basis of community.These are relations of bonding prior to the relations of debt and obbligation that are typical of exchange. The interactions involved are mutually attuned turntaking at giving and receiving and are not quid pro quo exchange. The motherer provides unilateral material gifts for the child. Her gifts do not depend on the child's equivalent return gifts. The child provides communicative gifts for the motherer. S/he does not make them contingent on an equal exchange.

Two Logics

Exchange follows a contrary logic. Giving in order to receive an  equivalent cancels the other oriented implications of the gift and  transforms them to ego orientated implications. The purpose of the gift is to satisfy the need of the other. The purpose of exchange is to satisfy one's own need, using the satisfaction of the need of the other as means.  Gift and exchange constitute two logics, which contradict but are also intertwined with each other.

The decoupling of giftgiving from needs  by exchange disempowers our idea of gift giving and alters our conception of needs. Economics uses the  concept of "effective  demand", which restricts our understanding of needs by making relevant only the needs for which the buyers can pay. "Supply" and "demand" are translations of gift and need into  economic terms that take for granted "effective demand". Unmonetizeable needs and people who have needs but not money, are irrelevant. Instead in maternal gift giving, the motherer actually "mind reads" the child, focussing on the child and trying to understand by guessing what h/er needs are even when the child cannot tell h/er (much less pay h/er).

 In gift economies, needs are not  monetarily expressed, nor do all needs have to be verbally  expressed.  People use their intuition to focus on others and they are sensitive to their feelings and circumstances. They recognize other minds in their variety and not only according to the limited though mutuallly or equally adversarial perspective of a point of profit and loss, benefit and cost in exchange. Direct interpersonal giving is qualitative and thus more informative for both giver and receiver, than merely quantitative exchange. The gift  carries something of the personality or spirit of the giver. Not just material but psychological needs are important, including the need for reciprocal respect.

The gift economy thus has relational consequences, which are different from those of the exchange economy, which are typically more adversarial: competition for domination and control, striving for accumulation and autonomy,  reciprocal ego orientation, [4] lack of emotion –  values and motivations similar to the patriarchal bag of tricks.

The archaeology of the present

Young children everywhere have to begin life in a gift economy and there are pockets of the gift economy in the market economy, namely in the "domestic sphere". These are rendered difficult by the social focus on and self- validating credibility of the market. In fact the gift economy requires and creates abundance while the market requires and creates scarcity in order to maintain control of the flow of gifts. If too much abundance accrues, the "excess" is eliminated by wasting it in patriarchal wars.

The context of scarcity created by the market makes gift giving difficult. Not only gender roles but the lack of access to independent sources of gifts of nature and the community penalize anyone who does not do monetized work and especially those who are responsible for the lives of their children. It is isolation in the context of exchange that makes the free labor of motherers difficult and sometimes self sacrificial, not the gift economy itself. In fact it is the system of the market merged with patriarchy, that is the problem. Although it may help  a few for a time, and  thus seem like a gift to them, assimilation into the system is only an individualistic and partial solution.It is the gift exploiting system that needs to be changed.

The encounter between exchange and gift economies within Capitalism is similar to the conquest and encroachment by the European market economy and culture on indigenous peoples wherever they have found them. Indigenous gift economies,  many of which existed in the past and still exist in surviving matrilinear, matrilocal, matriarchal societies, [5]pose an alternative model that threatens the market. Gift practices were considered barbaric and much was done by the colonizers to eliminate them. On the other hand the values of the market insinuated themselves and transformed the indigenous ways from within with the help of drugs, alcohol and missionaries. Either way the encroachment of the market privatized and  enclosed the Native lands  and allowed the gifts of resources and territories to be seized by the colonizers.

By making the comparison between childcare in Patriarchal Capitalism and Indigenous gift economies I do not mean to somehow infantilize the "pre" capitalist societies but to say that they have  developed the logic of direct giving/receiving, elaborating it in ways other than the market to distribute goods and services and create culture (gifting in festivals, spiritual gifts, symbolic gift exchange) But in fact the market itself is also a  way of using gifting –  doubling it back  and forcing it to be contingent, thereby transforming it into its opposite: giving in order not to give.

 In Capitalist Patriarchy we consider the market the province of adult behavior. For Indigenous gift economies the market is not adult but extraneous. Of course the encounter between the market and Indigenous peoples has brought about many hybrids. For example there is the market of Juchitàn which is traditionally controlled by women.Gifting continues however through almost  daily festivals offered to the community by one woman or another. (Bennholdt-Thomsen 1997)

 I propose that we understand the gift economy as primary and the exchange economy as secondary, derivative. Isolated in the domestic sphere, ontogenesis is "pre" patriarchal even inside of patriarchy and "pre" capitalist even inside of capitalism. In the traditional patriarchal heterosexual model, the practice of the gift economy becomes the responsibility of one woman, the mother, while the husband is supposed to work in the market economy and  provide the means of giving.  As women have joined the paid labor force  it is also the woman herself who works in the market economy in order to sustain her own practice of the gift economy with her children.

Capitalist Patriarchy controls the means of giving and takes gifts from the gift economy in the same way that at another level it takes from "pre" capitalist societies and at still another level it takes gifts from nature. It creates scarcity and makes independent gift giving  almost impossible.

Patriarchal capitalism plunders the gift economy

 The altercentric processes and values that we learn  as mothered children provide the structure of human communication and should be made visible in order to generalize them.  They have not been generalized until now because the foreground of our thinking (and doing) has been occupied by the system that is the combination of the market and patriarchy.

This system isolates women in the role of  mothers practicing the gift economy alone, depriving them of the extended families or villages which they would have had in "pre" patriarchal – "pre" capitalist  societies.

In many matriarchal societies the father is nurturing while the mother's brother provides authority.(Watson-Franke 2002:605) In others the mother's brother provides support for the biological mother in satisfying the physical and psychological needs of the child[6]. Males, fathers or uncles -mother's brothers - therefore also do the kind of detailed nurturing that females, especially biological mothers are expected to do in patriarchy.  Moreover because the mother's brother's relation with the mother is not sexualized, there is no stimulus for the Oedipus complex in such societies and there is little or no violence against women.[7]

The values of direct need-satisfying gifting are practiced by both males and females in matrifocal and  matriarchal societies and they extend to the society as a whole. In patriarchal capitalism where men and money are in power and women are assigned the whole resposibility of  gift giving and care work in isolation with their children, the processes and  values of the gift economy are not generalized. Indeed they are particularized, individualized as morality or essentialized as common to  one biologically identified sex.

The values, which are the superstructure of the gift economy seem to be 'women's values'. Instead they are the birthright of everyone as "pre" patriarchal, "pre" market values, the superstructure of an economy that has been interrupted,  splintered into little pieces and located inside each isolated home.

The role of motherer in patriarchy is usually gender specific and despite many individual variations biological sex is identified with mothering (female) or not mothering (male). As they grow up in our society, boys are  usually educated not to have the values of the gift economy and they are given a gender ideal that is more functional to the social constructions of the market and patriarchy.

 Violence is a kind of variation on the gift, where one person touches another as in giving but with force, and establishes a relation with the other, not of mutuality but of dominance.The socialization of males into a role opposite to that of the gift giving motherer makes violence seem to be a specific characteristic of masculinity. This violence is integrated with exchange, in fighting as the exchange of blows, war as military "exchanges" and justice as punishment for crime. The war against Afghanistan is "justified" by the attempt to "pay back" Al Quaida for its attack on the World Trade Center.

 It is not the biological necessity of mothering that is the basis of the gift economy but the biological necessity for children to be mothered. The fact that because of our upright stance women's pelvic opening is narrow requires children's brain size to be small and their craniums undeveloped, which results in a long post natal period of dependency on someone's care. This care is called forth by the social responsiveness of the child, and societies assign the role of care giver to the biological mother because they socially interpret the biological fact of giving birth to mean that women must take on this intense and time consuming job, a job which is actually the practice of a "pre" market economy. This economy is kept in a rudimentary stage and never allowed to develop as a system. The market economy takes its gifts and creates the scarcity which keeps the gift economy disempowered. At the same time it monopolizes the attention of all, hiding the importance of gift giving and making it difficult for the existence of the gift economy to be recognized. Downplayed, disempowered and devalued, gift giving becomes subservient to the exchange economy.

In Patriarchal Capitalist society the gift economy is gendered female because women do most of the mothering. In indigenous matriarchal societies this is not necessarily the case because gift economy and mothering are not restricted to one sex or gender. This has the result that indigenous women sometimes do not identify with feminism.  Euro-American  patriarchy and the opposition to it are extraneous to those "pre" patriarchal societies. At the same time though, Patriarchal Capitalism plunders their gifts, marginalizes  and dominates them as it marginalizes, dominates and plunders its own "pockets" of the gift economy as well as the gifts of nature.

Language and communication

I have been trying to map the gift economy onto language for many years because I believe it is a key to the paradigm shift we  so badly need in order to access the gift economy and to re elaborate a mode of distribution beyond the market, one that will satisfy the needs of all.  I can only briefly mention it here to give you the idea.

The altercentric interaction between motherers and children is pre linguistic communication and giving/receiving, nurturing/being nurtured is material pre linguistic communication.  At around 18 months when this material communication is already well established, children typically begin to say their first words. They learn to speak in the "pre" market period of life. It is my hypothesis that language is not just triggered by but actually modelled on gift giving-and-receiving material communication, the nurturing satisfaction of needs.

The generalization of gift giving that is not allowed by  the market is  already present in language but unrecognized. In fact language is verbal gift giving, verbal nurturing: satisfying others' communicative and cognitive needs with word-gifts.

The many and  various schools of linguistic investigation leave  the need of the other out of their concept of language. For example, Chomskian linguistics asserts the infinite creativity of the speaker but does not mention satisfying the listener's communicative needs. The philosophy of language  revolves around the speaker's 'intention' which the listener is supposed to pick up or grasp. Neuro linguistic investigators think children do 'statistical sampling' to learn the meanings of words (Gopnik 2010:81).The closest I have found to mentioning need satisfaction are relevance theorists Sperber and Wilson (1995:3.1-2) who  talk about the 'positive cognitive effect' of communication. They do not actually address a need of the receiver  for this positive effect. Rather they see the whole communicative  interaction in terms of calculated cost/benefit.

Patriarchal capitalism is an economy of not-giving and the taking and control of gifts. It seems neutral and neuter because both men and women can participate in it. It is not neutral and it is only neuter because it puts both (or all) genders in an anti-gift mode. The interaction of not-giving becomes the deep source of neutral and neuter scientific ideology, which leaves aside the maternal model of the free satisfaction of needs.  Mothering seems to have nothing to do with life processes. Actually though,  giving and receiving form the communicative  lens through which we (and scientists too) understand the world.

Now 'neutral' psychology and neuro science are making headway in conceiving language without gift giving. They are succeeding in constructing explanations for the human that leave aside the fundamental importance of the  altercentric mother/child model.  (This is like explaining walking by describing the actions of the muscles, positions of the limbs, blood rate etc.) A recent study of child altruism showed that 14 month old children would spontaneously  help an experimentor with a task. (Warneken and Tomasello 2009:455-471)[8] The explanation offered for this capacity for altruistic action is that it is a genetic predisposition. The alternative seemed to be that adults 'train' children to be altruistic. Appealing to training or to heredity here puts instructional or genetic 'transmission' in the place of the maternal gifting model as an explanation. It would seem more reasonable to say that children have participated in and been the focus of other centered initiatives – gift work – from the beginning. Through their "innate intersubjective sympathy" (Trevarthen 2011:119)[9]  children learn to be helpful because their motherers have been helpful to them. What we are born with is a pro social capacity, which develops into helpfulness through the social interaction of material communication: mothering/being mothered.

 Researchers realize that social interaction is necessary for language learning but ""the mechanism that controls the interface between language and social cognition remains a mystery." (Kuhl 2004, p. 838)  However It is only by including the human maternal model that the positive economic and political aspects of a non neutral, non neuter economy beyond the market can come forward.

The altercentric mother- child model is not itself biological, neurological, but interpersonal, whatever its neurological underpinnings may be.It is relevant at the level at which models are propagated, the level of consciousness, imitation and metaphor.  Indeed heredity itself is a metaphorical projection of  giving and receiving, handing down economic gifts between generations.

Gift giving is the basis of material communication; in giving and receiving material gifts we establish human relations with each other. The same thing happens in language. We establish human relations with each other when we give and receive verbal gifts satisfying each others' cognitive and communicative needs.

Presently patriarchy in its phallic domination version of  the symbolic order of the father [10]and its neuter version in physical science has eliminated the model of the maternal human. The concept of language is one important place to restore it.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson ( 1980 ) started the field of cognitive linguistics some 30 years ago recognizing metaphor as one of the main structural forms of language. They suggested that 'image schemas' coming from bodily experience are projected into language from a source to a target area. For example the schema path to goal comes from the bodily experience of moving along a path. It underlies such linguistic expressions as 'Life is a journey' and such ideas as the passage of time from point to point.  Up is good is projected into such expressions as 'feeling high' or 'feeling low'. Going into and out of containers is mapped onto categorization. There are numerous other schemas, which have been studied extensively.

I believe the image schema that underlies both material and verbal communication is the  interactive, interpersonal sensory-motor schema of  giving and receiving, first located not in the body of the child alone but intercorporeally, beginning in a moment in which the child has recently been part of the body of the mother, in the womb and proceeding through the long period during which s/he is completely dependent on the need satisfying gifts and services of the motherer for h/er body’s very existence. This is a complementary intercorporality which is embodied in the individual and implies the body/mind of the other. The motherer takes the initiative to give to the child in many ways and the child receives the gifts not passively but creatively. In fact the passive receiver is an invention of patriarchy deriving from a false idea of women as passive. Gifts must be accepted and actively used if they are to achieve their completion. Food must be actively consumed and digested.  Maternal gifts and services must actually  satisfy the need of the child otherwise the motherer just has to repeat them.

The child is first embedded in the mother’s body and then in the material care which is accomplished by the motherers body (and mind). Later as s/he grows older s/he continues to be embedded in the perceptual and material  gifts of the environment  and of society at large. That is, if they have not been made scarse by a plundering economy.

The roles of the dependent child necessarily imply the roles of the motherer. The role of giver of cries implies a receiver, and the role of being the  gift given from hand to hand also, while the role of infant receiver implies an actively engaged, attentive and repeated giver who is always doing ‘mind reading’, guessing the needs of  the child and is successful in satisfying them. The child can play these three  complementary roles h/erself, and quite early can understand the other’s part in the interaction because s/he also takes turns and plays that part in another moment.  S/he knows it by doing it.

These are the roles of the image schema of the gift that underlie the transitivity of language as a verbal gift economy. In fact the transitive sentence is formed in that schema with the subject as giver, the predicate as gift or service and the object as receiver. Taking a simple example "The girl hit the ball' 'girl' is the giver, 'hit' the gift or service and 'ball' the receiver. At the same time the speaker (or writer) gives the gift of the sentence to the listener (or reader). Words themselves can be considered as verbal gifts, given to satisfy the cognitive and communicative needs of others regarding the world.  This aspect of language is 'altercentric' in that it is the need of the other that we satisfy with words. We have to use the language of the other, the word-gifts she knows, in order to create a relation for her regardng some part of the world.  Once h/er need for the word gift has been satisfied our own relation to that part of the world has an equivalent in h/ers and becomes aligned with h/ers. If language is framed as self expression, it is not clear how the listener or reader understands. Considering language as altercentric  makes the connection with the other the basis and the possibility of linguistic communication about many things, including the expression of the self. As I mentioned above, language is also not simply infiitely creative as Chomsky suggests but infinitely creative in satisfying the commmunicative and cognitive needs of others.

Even intransitive sentences are  given by one person to another and thus remain in the gift frame. Linguists talk about words modifying each other because they have slots and fillers, ways they fit into each other. However the gift can be projected into this metaphor also and words can be seen as having needs which other words satisfy. The word 'ball' cannot on its own express the  red quality of the ball and so we give it the gift of the word 'red' to satisfy that need.

These few indications can give an idea of the how we can see language as an ongoing  construction of human relation-creating verbal gifts. It is an ideal gift economy, where we give and receive  in abundance because giving verbal gifts does not mean we don't have them anymore. [11]

If as philosophers tell us, language is our species specific trait and  if gift giving is its internal  structure, humans are basically gift giving, maternal animals. We have been alienated from this human capability by the economy based on exchange.

Patriarchal capitalist  interactions are not very satisfactory for those engaged in them. Our uncompassionate system takes a heavy toll even on those who are materially benefitted by it, creating loneliness, meaninglessness and depravity. In fact, much research is being done at present on the neurological and health benefits of generosity. Many new initiatives like www.charity focus.org  encourage gift giving at the level of kind acts in daily life, and this group has started a free restaurant, the Karma Cafe in San Francisco, where clients pay only  for the clients who come after them. There are widespread initiatives in the US and in other countries: initiatives for reclaiming and sharing the commons, community experiments, 'free stores', gifting circles and giveaways  like the Really Really Free Market, and other initiatives like www.couch surfing. org, bikes not bombs, food not bombs, and freecycling, which provide free resources, while still in the context of exchange. None of these initiatives recognize the connection with motherers, altercentric childhood or women though some do refer to indigenous gift economies, usually in Maussian anthropologists' terms of 'gift exchange'.[12]

 The free software movement has been an attempt to  practice a kind of gift economy interpreted as competetive 'gift exchange'. In fact the internet has much potential for practicing the gift economy because of the abundance of knowledge gifts it provides. However, like other gift sources it is vulnerable to capitalist appropriation. Globalization has shown how the privatization and commodification of previously free gifts like water, seeds, indigenous knowlwdges, even genes, can feed Capitalist Patriarchy. In fact commodification of the internet and now even of the needs, interests and desires of its users through data collection is only one new way to plunder gifts. To me perhaps one of the most troubling of these developments is the commodification of language through advertising. We have commodified language before ever realizing it was a gift.

It is time for a matriarchal[13]  gift economy to replace the market economy. Perhaps this can be achieved by uniting across categories as gift giving and receiving  people – indigenous people and motherers of all nations and genders, providers of solutions and satisfiers of needs of all kinds, speakers and listeners, writers and readers. Actually this human multitude potentially  includes everyone who was mothered in childhood, everyone who can speak, even those who are still deeply entangled in the paradigm of exchange.