The North American Indian Term ‘Potlatch’ - Essay Writing Arts and Humanities Assignment Help

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Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so- called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free- gift gesture has created, it might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction. 

Mauss says as much in reply to Bronislaw Malinowski who was surprised to find such precisely calculated return gifts in Melanesia. He evidently took with him to his fieldwork the idea that commerce and gift are two separate kinds of activity, the first based on exact recompense, the second spontaneous, pure of ulterior motive. Because the valuable things that circulated in the Trobriand Islands and a vast surrounding region were not in commercial exchange, he expected the transfers to fall into the category of gifts in his own culture. So he expended a lot of care in classifying gifts by the purity of the motives of the giver and concluded that practically nothing was given freely in this sense, only the small gift that a Trobriand husband regularly gave his wife could count. ‘Pure gift? Nonsense!’ declares Mauss: the Trobriand husband is actually recompensing his wife for sexual services.

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