Some thoughts about Lewis Hyde

Over the past weekend, in the tense anticipation of the winter's biggest storm, I moved around my house, from desk to table to couch, with my dog-eared copy of Lewis Hyde's classic text from 1979, The Gift.

dog eared book and dog companion

I read it, I re-read my notes on it, I read essays about it. I went on tangents and came back. The text is equally impossible to either categorize or forget. In the several years since I have last read this text, I have found myself returning to many of its central arguments: that a gift economy functions differently from a market economy in that more intangible and yet more valuable effects are produced through exchange. Gifts are different from commodities in that they must be given and must continue to circulate in order to be valued. A commodity, on the other hand, may be stored or hoarded or sold, and its surplus profit tends to be saved outside of the stream or flow of social relationship that are generated by the alternate gift economy. The gift economy maintains links between people-- it is a flexible connective tissue that produces a sense of community. Hyde implies that this is what we under-value because our contemporary culture excessively conflates monetary value with the total worth of cultural production.


The first three chapters move quickly through a range of examples culled from from anthropology, history, literature and folk tales that show what he means by a "gift economy" at work.The example of the Puritans and “Indian Givers” (3) demonstrates cross-cultural misunderstanding of the nature of the gift which must stay in motion; “The Girl and the Dead Man” (6), a folktale in which the gift of bread stays in motion and the girl survives because of her generosity which functions as a conduit for the flow of life.

Chilkat Tlingits at a potlatch hosted in Klukwan in 1900.

 www.sheldonmuseum.org

a Kula bracelet

The classic anthropological example of Potlatch (10) practiced by North Pacific coast Native Americans is discussed at length for it provides an example of the disastrous effects that resulted from a collision of western frontier capitalism and traditional gift ritual practices.


The hunger for things, the rapacious greed to hoard, rather than to nourish, is punished by a horrible toad who appears in the tale of “The Ungrateful Son” (12). In the account of the ceremonial Kula gifts exchanged by the Massim peoples (14), Hyde points to the importance of the circular flow of these ceremonial objects in maintaining social equilibrium.

Trobriand women wearing Kula necklaces

Rather than simply giving back and forth with expectations of reciprocity, this notion of giving without an expectation of immediate return is crucial and it leads Hyde to state that gift economy is the basis of ecological thinking (23).

 “Ecology as a science began at the end of the nineteenth century, an offshoot of the rising interest in evolution. Originally the study of how animals survive in their environments, one of ecology’s first lessons was that, beneath all the change in nature, there are steady states characterized by cycles. Every participant in the cycle literally lives off the others with only the ultimate energy source, the sun, being transcendent. Widening the study of ecology to include man means to look at ourselves as part of nature again, not its lord. When we see that we are actors in natural cycles, we understand that what nature gives to us is influenced by what we give to nature. So the circle is a sign of an ecological insight as much as of gift exchange. We come to feel ourselves as one part of a large self-regulating system” (23).

Nature gives to us, but if we take without giving back or acknowledging our place within natural cycles we suffer environmental decline. Whereas the gift economy is one of abundance, modern capitalist societies create scarcity. (28).

 Ann Percoco Indra’s Cloud, an ecological mobile public sculpture made from discarded plastic water bottles which brought to life a local myth and drew attention to the severely polluted condition of the Yamuna River. http://www.annepercoco.com/indrascloud.html

This usage of the term "ecology" is very pertinent to the growing field of eco-criticism in cultural studies today. Influential philosopher Timothy Morton writes that “ecological thinking is to do with art, philosophy, literature, music, and culture…Ecology includes all the ways we live together. Ecology is profoundly about coexistence.” (The Ecological Thought, 2010, 4). Morton observes that “[e]cology talks about areas of life that we find annoying, boring and embarrassing. Art can help us, because it’s a place in our culture that deals with intensity, shame, abjection and loss. It also deals with reality and unreality, being and seeming. If ecology is about radical coexistence, then we must challenge our sense of what is real and what is unreal what counts as existent and what counts as nonexistent. The idea of Nature as a holistic, healthy, real thing avoids this challenge” (10). I would like for us to follow up on some of these ideas about ecology and community in our conversations and writing.

Societies with little material wealth can still live in atmosphere of abundance, Hyde tells us. This is in contrast to the meagerness of commodity culture with its focus on possessing property rather than circulating it. Yet, Hyde also points out that at the risk of falling into a myth of the "noble savage", this is something the poor and disenfranchised have always had to rely upon.  One of the critiques of Hyde (see the piece in The Nation from 2010, cited below) is that he romanticizes the practices of pre-capitalist western and non-western cultures. This general attitude is often critiqued under the category of "primitivism." Artist, writer and critic John Berger has outlined some common uses of the term "primitive" to describe cultural production: this includes European culture before the High Renaissance, Non-European culture (such as items collected as "trophies" from a colonial context) or the production of "outsiders" to official circles of cultural production such as working class people, children, etc. (About Looking, 71).

Hyde comments that  "[t]he mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction . . . obscures the harshness of modern capitalist poverty, but it does have a basis, for people who live in voluntary poverty or who are not capital-intensive do have more ready access to erotic* forms of exchange that are either exhausting or exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty” (29).

 Berger makes comments similar to Hyde in noting that “[t]he poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied...but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”

 Fernand Pelez, Without a Roof (1883)

Primitivism is a loaded, complicated, and difficult term that is, like it or not, embedded in critical language. In Critical Terms for Art History, Patricia Leighton and Mark Antliff summarize many of the debates surrounding this term, including the appropriations of imagery and celebrations of this range of imagery and and conclude that it "attitudes of racial superiority based on ethnic and cultural difference have been operative throughout history, the colonial period beginning with Columbus's “discovery” of the Americas focuses the question firmly on the issue of power ... the concept of the primitive engages issues of time and space, gender, race, and class in thoroughly inseparable ways."

So how are we to learn from gift economies from cultures that might not be not parallel to our own? Or, better yet, in a culture that worships wealth, how can we take a resistant stance in the valuing of community and creative generosity?  What do we give away? What gifts have we received? How can Hyde's text still be relevant?

And, furthermore, how might our thinking about environmental issues change if we viewed ourselves as involved in reciprocity with nature? Please join the conversation.

 A few leads....


 DANIEL B. SMITH "What Is Art For?"   November 14, 2008

 Ann Bauer  “Sponsored” by my husband: Why it’s a problem that writers never talk about where their money comes from."

David Wallace-Wells "The Pirate's Prophet: On Lewis Hyde" October 27, 2010

Novelist Jonatham Lethem's use of Hyde:

The Ecstasy of Influence, A plagiarism

about this, with some images.

and more...