Latest / PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy / Marcel Mauss - The Gift // 180 (unlock)

Transcript

Marcel Mauss - The Gift // 180 (unlock) · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

0:02
Speaker 1: All right, hello everyone, Hello patrons. We're doing a patron
0:12
Speaker 1: because we did too publics in a row, so.
0:16
Speaker 2: Oh did we I wasn't here for one of them
0:20
Speaker 2: we are covering.
0:21
Speaker 1: I want to call this something besides the gift, because
0:24
Speaker 1: the gift is quite a boring name for a podcast title.
0:29
Speaker 1: Maybe like primeval Economy, cult Economy, something along those lines.
0:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll have to think of something that comes up.
0:37
Speaker 2: That word he uses for gifts or services, prestations, could
0:42
Speaker 2: do something with that.
0:43
Speaker 1: Or potlatch.
0:44
Speaker 2: Well, it's a qualified potlatch. In some cases.
0:48
Speaker 1: The gift isn't very important for political are not political
0:53
Speaker 1: for French French theory types as we tend to be,
0:58
Speaker 1: because it's made use of extensively by Battai, Boudriard, Daried those.
1:06
Speaker 2: Tidy Strauss, Bordieu.
1:09
Speaker 1: Levy Strauss, especially Levy Strauss, would be impossible without this
1:13
Speaker 1: essay in particular, it's true and he's a nepo baby.
1:18
Speaker 1: He's a nepo bait, literally, a nepo baby sociologist. He
1:22
Speaker 1: is the nephew, the maternal nephew of Durkheim, who we've
1:28
Speaker 1: been talking about for a bit.
1:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he took over that journal. I think that
1:33
Speaker 2: Dr Khim had started and he yeah, he became the
1:37
Speaker 2: he became the shit after I think it was after
1:39
Speaker 2: nineteen thirteen. He was kind of the head and I
1:42
Speaker 2: think dirkhim died around World War One, but Mouse kept
1:47
Speaker 2: on going.
1:48
Speaker 1: Did you know that Mouse is also the cousin once
1:52
Speaker 1: removed of Maurice Bloch.
1:54
Speaker 2: Wow, I've seen that name, but.
1:57
Speaker 1: The Marxist anthropologist.
1:58
Speaker 2: But he's like, okay, not not the other block, Ernst Block.
2:05
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I mean, who knows. All these guys
2:07
Speaker 1: seem to be related somehow?
2:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe no, I did not know.
2:12
Speaker 1: But yeah, h the gift really important, referenced often, and
2:17
Speaker 1: it's really interesting and we have to read this. I think,
2:20
Speaker 1: in similar to Durkheim, there's enough. As I've been browsing
2:26
Speaker 1: the secondary literature, there's reasons to say, you know, this
2:30
Speaker 1: is anthropologically not up to snuff with modern anthropological methods.
2:37
Speaker 1: And they get accused of, you know, taking individual cases
2:41
Speaker 1: and generalizing it and say this is all sort of
2:44
Speaker 1: all primal cultures kind of do the same thing. And
2:48
Speaker 1: then specialists in the field now of the field that
2:51
Speaker 1: these guys created, will say, no, you're generalizing too much,
2:55
Speaker 1: or you're being a Western chauvinist or whatever it is.
2:58
Speaker 1: But I just want to point out this is still
3:00
Speaker 1: useful to us because sociology at this point and anthropology,
3:05
Speaker 1: which I guess you could fit this into, it's not
3:07
Speaker 1: a specialized discipline at this point. It's almost like a
3:12
Speaker 1: brands of history. They incorporate philosophy, and both of the books,
3:17
Speaker 1: including this one, they end with like a list of
3:20
Speaker 1: morals or ways to take this into our culture and
3:24
Speaker 1: look at our culture similarly. But theoretically the purpose and
3:30
Speaker 1: the purpose I believe is successful, whether or not the
3:32
Speaker 1: details are or not. But theoretical, theoretically they want to
3:35
Speaker 1: look at a primal, more primal society with whatever problems
3:41
Speaker 1: that may entail, but then just to use that to
3:44
Speaker 1: show that our categories and our schemas are not eternal,
3:48
Speaker 1: they're not self evident, and even if they make mistakes
3:52
Speaker 1: or generalize too much on the details, that doesn't impinge
3:55
Speaker 1: upon that goal. I don't think so if they do
3:57
Speaker 1: misread a culture that they don't really have access to.
4:01
Speaker 1: If they do misread, I still would argue that it's
4:04
Speaker 1: a productive misreading. What would you say about that? I
4:09
Speaker 1: know you were getting a little bit more sensitive about it.
4:12
Speaker 2: No, the these days of anthropology, and I guess you
4:18
Speaker 2: can the ethnographic method and ethnology I mentioned this practice,
4:23
Speaker 2: that of going to live with the natives, the subjects,
4:28
Speaker 2: the colonial subjects, whoever's being studied, and colonialism is a
4:33
Speaker 2: major background context of all of this, you know, and
4:36
Speaker 2: often putting your tent next to the highest ranking member
4:41
Speaker 2: in that community and forming a relationship with them, and
4:45
Speaker 2: getting an informant and sort of studying them and having
4:50
Speaker 2: this informant explain things and you learn their language, and
4:55
Speaker 2: the informant kind of translates things to you. Yeah, I
4:58
Speaker 2: mean that all of that has come a long way,
5:02
Speaker 2: you know.
5:03
Speaker 1: Which these guys didn't do by the way, they were
5:05
Speaker 1: working off the material of the people who did that,
5:09
Speaker 1: usually Christian missionaries.
5:10
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean reports would be coming back from
5:13
Speaker 2: the colonies and things, and a lot of their own
5:16
Speaker 2: biases would creep in. You know, we're a lot more
5:19
Speaker 2: reflexive now, we're encouraged to be reflexive in these things
5:23
Speaker 2: and try to understand when our biases and sort of
5:28
Speaker 2: our cultural norms are being looked through to other peoples. Right,
5:34
Speaker 2: they just sort of looked at the world through the
5:37
Speaker 2: lens of European civilization and that was the yardstick.
5:41
Speaker 1: And one of the accusations is like drawing false equivalence.
5:44
Speaker 1: Is so Dr Khim says, you know, we did the
5:46
Speaker 1: Mana episode last last time, and he says, oh, the
5:50
Speaker 1: Mana concept is the same as this Amerindian concept came
5:55
Speaker 1: remember the name. But then a specialist in the Amerindian
6:00
Speaker 1: culture goes, it's it's it's implausible that these are equivalent concepts.
6:05
Speaker 1: They mean completely different things. And you know, at a
6:08
Speaker 1: level of specialization that's true, but at a level of
6:14
Speaker 1: how it serves the culture that it's involved in, Like
6:18
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know if it's it's worth saying,
6:21
Speaker 1: you know, these aren't exactly equivalent, but it's also I
6:24
Speaker 1: think worth saying they're not unrelated. Like souls you can
6:30
Speaker 1: you can you can derive a general belief in souls
6:34
Speaker 1: cross culturally, I would say, if you're not being too specific.
6:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, these texts are very rich in ideas and they're useful. Uh,
6:44
Speaker 2: they're just often working off unreliable reports and unreliable information
6:49
Speaker 2: about the people that they're writing about, and it's it's
6:52
Speaker 2: interesting to read around these texts as well and look
6:56
Speaker 2: at sort of where they're crime and Mau and people
7:00
Speaker 2: like that are also coming from what's going on in
7:04
Speaker 2: their time, and then to go back to these texts
7:07
Speaker 2: and see, oh, you can sort of see their concerns
7:10
Speaker 2: coming through in these texts and what they're looking at
7:13
Speaker 2: and what they're interested in studying and in others so
7:16
Speaker 2: called primitive.
7:17
Speaker 1: People's yeah, because they and they're also very interested in
7:21
Speaker 1: saying there's really not really a big difference between us
7:24
Speaker 1: and these people. And then yeah, you can investigate that
7:28
Speaker 1: claim and be like, well, you're overwriting the difference, but
7:30
Speaker 1: that's kind of their intention. And you see it in
7:32
Speaker 1: the conclusion that there's like, here's the lessons that we
7:36
Speaker 1: can draw from this analysis of a gift economy as
7:40
Speaker 1: opposed to a capitalist economy. So you know, I just
7:45
Speaker 1: say take it with a grain of salt. However, that said,
7:48
Speaker 1: I found this incredibly useful and inspiring as an object
7:52
Speaker 1: of theory. Myself.
7:54
Speaker 2: What I've found myself thinking about when I was reading
7:56
Speaker 2: this is thinking back to reading Greek mythology, right, because
8:02
Speaker 2: it's interesting to look at these texts and then go
8:06
Speaker 2: back to some mythological texts, and you see the importance
8:10
Speaker 2: of gift giving, for instance, in the ancient Greek texts
8:14
Speaker 2: like Aliad, in the Odyssey. Right. In ancient Greek culture, right,
8:20
Speaker 2: hospitality was a major sort of thing. Zeus was the
8:25
Speaker 2: protector of beggars and wanderers. And when you go ask
8:30
Speaker 2: somebody for hospitality, they have to give it to you
8:33
Speaker 2: because it's part of just the rules. Right, It's a
8:36
Speaker 2: kind of religious obligation, and they're obligated to feed you
8:41
Speaker 2: and give you things. Right, And there'll be also gift
8:45
Speaker 2: exchanges going on that bind people together, like you see
8:49
Speaker 2: this in the Iliad. Often even warriors coming together from
8:54
Speaker 2: two sides, and then they realize, oh, like our fathers
8:57
Speaker 2: were sort of gift friends exchange gifts. So like we
9:01
Speaker 2: should sort of not fight each other right now, we
9:04
Speaker 2: should part ways and go fight somebody else. All the
9:08
Speaker 2: all these things, like, I mean, they do pop up too,
9:12
Speaker 2: So there is something universal, I guess you could say
9:18
Speaker 2: about what mouse is getting at here. But you know,
9:21
Speaker 2: it's also good to be very careful with these things
9:24
Speaker 2: and not you know, steamroll the important differences.
9:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, So before we get right to the heart of
9:31
Speaker 1: the matter, which is that gift giving is the basis
9:35
Speaker 1: of human society. In a sense, this got me to thinking,
9:40
Speaker 1: you know, Rousseau's noble savage like compared compared to this,
9:45
Speaker 1: that is extremely chauvinistic in a sense that it's like
9:50
Speaker 1: these people are not fighting. They live off the land
9:54
Speaker 1: they have, they have wars with other tribes, but they
9:58
Speaker 1: have a peaceful, independent exist And whereas if you read this,
10:03
Speaker 1: this feels much more human like these are extremely competitive.
10:09
Speaker 1: They are rank obsessed. Everything that they do has to
10:13
Speaker 1: do with like whether your family goes up the totem
10:17
Speaker 1: pole in some cases literally up the totem pole or
10:20
Speaker 1: down the totem pole. Rank is the most important thing
10:24
Speaker 1: to society. So we see, like if you look at
10:27
Speaker 1: this from the outside, compared to whatever tribes Rousseau is envisioning,
10:32
Speaker 1: they're not just chilling in some Edenic paradise and eating
10:37
Speaker 1: deer and eating apples. No, they constantly have an eye
10:41
Speaker 1: on their status. They have an eye on the chief.
10:44
Speaker 1: They're looking for the opportunity to move up and get
10:47
Speaker 1: that good mana you know. So this is like it's
10:51
Speaker 1: much more humanizing, I think, than these myths of how
10:56
Speaker 1: we lived before private property was invented.
10:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, Ever since this idea of the state of nature
11:04
Speaker 2: became important in political debates, I guess it goes back
11:08
Speaker 2: to even like Hobbes, right, comparing a civilized state to
11:14
Speaker 2: a state of nature. It was kind of a very
11:17
Speaker 2: simple binary, almost like a hypothetical, right, And obviously Rousseau
11:23
Speaker 2: takes that up and inverts it. Right. The state of
11:26
Speaker 2: nature for Rousseau is the state of the noble savage.
11:30
Speaker 2: For for Hobbes, it's the uh, the war of all
11:34
Speaker 2: against all, where you were short, nasty and brutal lives.
11:40
Speaker 2: But in any case, they acted as almost like a
11:42
Speaker 2: hypothetical foil to their political their own political discussions about
11:49
Speaker 2: the social contracts theory, right, And that's what he's interested
11:53
Speaker 2: in here too, contractual law, entering into contracts, how this
11:59
Speaker 2: all works.
12:00
Speaker 1: And you can see in Mouse and also Durkheim, there's
12:04
Speaker 1: a critique of liberalism in here, a latent critique that
12:09
Speaker 1: your vision of the individual and then trying to like
12:12
Speaker 1: do thought experiments to put it onto the prime evil
12:16
Speaker 1: people that you see they're completely false. Like you have
12:20
Speaker 1: this notion of the concept of the individual as something
12:24
Speaker 1: independent from society prior to society. That's completely false. Their
12:29
Speaker 1: Kim and Mouse would both agree. It neglects social changes
12:33
Speaker 1: with an eye to the mode of production. I think
12:37
Speaker 1: Marx even falls into this. Marx does too much economic
12:42
Speaker 1: analysis of who owns what in a society as opposed
12:45
Speaker 1: to these other rituals that form the glue and English empiricism.
12:51
Speaker 1: When you say we start with this like blank slate,
12:55
Speaker 1: it doesn't explain the role of social norms in giving
12:59
Speaker 1: individual as. Any possibility like this is prior to individuals.
13:05
Speaker 1: And they really didn't have a notion of society as
13:07
Speaker 1: prior to individuals. They thought individuals come together to form
13:10
Speaker 1: a society. And Enlightenment liberalism is a huge target, I think,
13:16
Speaker 1: an implicit one, not a direct one, but an implicit
13:18
Speaker 1: one in this early sociology.
13:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, der Kymian sociology abandons the notion of society. It's
13:28
Speaker 2: too abstract, right. Only groups are concrete the group like
13:34
Speaker 2: groups maybe come together and form societies. But it's the
13:39
Speaker 2: relationship of the individual to the group that's the sort
13:43
Speaker 2: of key thing to look at here. And so there's
13:46
Speaker 2: a kind of relationship where the individual is shaped by
13:49
Speaker 2: the group. The group has these dynamics, these values, these behaviors,
13:54
Speaker 2: these morals, and the individual is shaped in that context.
13:59
Speaker 2: So there's a kind of almost conflict or a process
14:02
Speaker 2: of socialization that any individual goes through. And so the
14:08
Speaker 2: group is the primary level of for Durkhime, we're looking at,
14:13
Speaker 2: you know, exchange like gift exchanges, which are much more
14:18
Speaker 2: holistic in what Mouse is looking at, these holistic exchanges,
14:23
Speaker 2: these sort of what does he call them, total calls
14:27
Speaker 2: them total social phenomena because they involve everything is kind
14:32
Speaker 2: of involved, religious, juridical, moral, political, family, but also economic,
14:38
Speaker 2: you know, gift exchanges. You can't disentangle these things so much.
14:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, and basically the difference between what they're calling a
14:47
Speaker 1: primitive society and ours is that are those all those
14:51
Speaker 1: things you just mentioned, religious, family, juridical, you know, what
14:56
Speaker 1: do you call it? Modern society? These things are very functional, differentiated,
15:01
Speaker 1: whereas in a primitive society, you know, whatever problems there
15:05
Speaker 1: are with calling it that, they are all involved in
15:10
Speaker 1: the rituals that form the glue. And mana is one
15:14
Speaker 1: of those glues. But in this one, in this reading,
15:18
Speaker 1: it's gift giving that is one of the glues. And yeah,
15:24
Speaker 1: we still have this we still do this. Our economic
15:26
Speaker 1: exchange is the same sort of economy, except specialized, and
15:31
Speaker 1: we do it with capital. They did it with other stuff,
15:35
Speaker 1: which is exactly what we're linking to. So I wanted
15:38
Speaker 1: to start with Oh sorry.
15:40
Speaker 2: I was gonna just add so what you were saying
15:42
Speaker 2: earlier about sort of rank and hierarchy and stuff is
15:46
Speaker 2: also connected to material wealth and gift giving too, especially
15:52
Speaker 2: again in the ancient Greek myths, right, it's connected to
15:56
Speaker 2: their honor and prestige culture as well, forming alliances, fighting battles,
16:02
Speaker 2: getting access to the best stuff, and then distributing that
16:07
Speaker 2: amongst your kinsman, your warriors. Prestige and social rank and
16:13
Speaker 2: status and all that are definitely all tied up in
16:17
Speaker 2: materials and wealth and objects and exchange.
16:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean this is okay. Today capitalism, we have
16:27
Speaker 1: this problem, a social problem that constantly leads to instability,
16:33
Speaker 1: economic instability, political instability, which is that the wealthy hoard
16:37
Speaker 1: the wealth and increase inequality and then people will eventually
16:42
Speaker 1: wake up to it. Mark saw this the course. But
16:45
Speaker 1: these societies have I guess the same amount of conflict,
16:51
Speaker 1: but the conflict doesn't arise over the resources because of
16:55
Speaker 1: this gift giving ceremony, the potlatch or potlatch adjacent types
17:00
Speaker 1: of ritual that involve redistribution, and you're paid in other forms.
17:09
Speaker 1: You're basically paid in honor and prestige to redistribute the
17:14
Speaker 1: wealth of a society. So you can kind of imagine
17:17
Speaker 1: that these societies lasted in an autopoietic state for much
17:23
Speaker 1: longer than ours does. You know, every society is subject
17:26
Speaker 1: to disturbances and random natural events that can cause instability,
17:33
Speaker 1: but like relative to us, where we have the wealthy
17:38
Speaker 1: with no incentive to redistribute wealth, they went through much
17:42
Speaker 1: less political instability and upheaval than we would. And it's partially,
17:49
Speaker 1: i think, because of this sort of redistributive ritual that's
17:53
Speaker 1: involved in keeping their society together.
17:58
Speaker 2: Well, one thing, in a sort of context of say
18:02
Speaker 2: a capitalist market, right, the exchange is complete after you
18:10
Speaker 2: whatever you hand over the money, you receive an equivalent
18:14
Speaker 2: and that's it. That's it's done. There's no lasting obligation.
18:19
Speaker 2: You're not entering into some kind of contracts with the
18:24
Speaker 2: person you're exchanging with that goes beyond that individual encounter.
18:30
Speaker 2: There's no lasting obligation, there's nothing that keeps that interaction
18:35
Speaker 2: going with gift exchanges. In this sense, they're sort of infinite.
18:42
Speaker 2: They just keep going round and round and round, like
18:45
Speaker 2: they circulate. You're obligated to then reciprocate once you've received,
18:50
Speaker 2: and then that reciprocation creates another obligation, and so on
18:55
Speaker 2: and so forth in this complex patch or network of
18:59
Speaker 2: exchanges that is something like what leads the fabric of
19:05
Speaker 2: all their social relations together. They take place through the
19:09
Speaker 2: gift exchanges. They're not these impersonal transactions that we're used
19:15
Speaker 2: to in our economies where you know, you don't really
19:19
Speaker 2: know the person, you don't have any personal relationship with
19:22
Speaker 2: the person frequently or buying things from.
19:26
Speaker 1: Right now, that's well put. We we only have a
19:29
Speaker 1: concept of economic debt. Really in modern society. The only
19:33
Speaker 1: form of debt that there is is economic debt. And
19:37
Speaker 1: what Mouse points to in this reading is that social
19:41
Speaker 1: debt is the thing that keeps society together, which is
19:46
Speaker 1: not just you owe money to somebody, but it's you
19:50
Speaker 1: owe esteem, you owe loyalty. And these are like very
19:57
Speaker 1: they're they're they're minutely calculated. Right, there's an exchange between
20:02
Speaker 1: honor and esteem and getting a gift. Whereas we only
20:08
Speaker 1: think an economic terms, so this is a little bit foreign.
20:10
Speaker 1: But they have the concept of social debt. It sounds
20:14
Speaker 1: bad because you know that's that's a something bad, but
20:18
Speaker 1: it is really what keeps non modern societies together, is
20:23
Speaker 1: that right? So social debt leads to less fragmentation.
20:27
Speaker 2: I'd say, yeah, yeah, it creates this it's a voluntary
20:31
Speaker 2: but it's also creates a debt. Yeah, and obligation.
20:36
Speaker 1: You're obligated to give freely. Yeah, this is funny. This
20:39
Speaker 1: is a Darida in the nineties gets on with this.
20:43
Speaker 1: But the free gift doesn't exist. It doesn't exist in
20:48
Speaker 1: their culture, doesn't exist in our culture. But a free
20:52
Speaker 1: gift is one with zero obligation attached. And these are rare,
20:57
Speaker 1: if not impossible, because Adam minimum, you expect gratitude when
21:02
Speaker 1: you give someone something, you know, the you know, the
21:06
Speaker 1: Christmas game secret Santa.
21:08
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, and.
21:10
Speaker 1: Then then you establish a price limit. This is it's
21:14
Speaker 1: meant to expunge the social it's meant to expunge the
21:18
Speaker 1: awkwardness of the gift economy because you know that you're
21:22
Speaker 1: going to walk away with the same value that you
21:25
Speaker 1: you entered with, and you're going to get exactly what
21:28
Speaker 1: you put in, so there's a zero surplus. The surplus
21:30
Speaker 1: is eliminated because surplus entails social debt. So secret Santa guys,
21:38
Speaker 1: this is this is periodology ideology at it's purest.
21:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's the kind of way of regulating it.
21:45
Speaker 2: But yeah, there is a kind of echo of the
21:47
Speaker 2: gift exchange type of thing and in trying to outdo
21:52
Speaker 2: each other in presence, like when you're going to a
21:55
Speaker 2: wedding or something like that and you're bringing wedding gifts,
21:59
Speaker 2: which is kind of again that's been kind of regulated, right.
22:03
Speaker 2: You have like a registry and you go on there
22:05
Speaker 2: and buy something that the that the couple wants. But
22:09
Speaker 2: I guess before it would have been more you know,
22:13
Speaker 2: informal you bring a gift and maybe you're trying to
22:16
Speaker 2: outdo other people by bringing the most lavish or the
22:19
Speaker 2: best gifts.
22:20
Speaker 1: Why don't we just get this term out of the way.
22:22
Speaker 1: The potlatch is an example of a like you said,
22:26
Speaker 1: a total system of gift giving. It includes all of
22:31
Speaker 1: society and at the bottom it's religiously motivated. I think
22:36
Speaker 1: you could say, uh, it's how you get mana Generally,
22:41
Speaker 1: the mana economy. So at the bottom is religion, which
22:45
Speaker 1: is again for Durkheim, what society is. But as opposed
22:51
Speaker 1: to this being like, oh, peaceful, you know, peaceful primitives
22:55
Speaker 1: giving each other gifts. This, every single potlatch is a
22:58
Speaker 1: contest for honor. The potlatch is where you can move up,
23:03
Speaker 1: where you can move down, where you can be embarrassed
23:06
Speaker 1: or esteemed. But in a capitalist economy, everything is accounted for.
23:11
Speaker 1: And I think what I got out of this reading
23:13
Speaker 1: especially is that here everything is minutely accounted for. Everyone
23:18
Speaker 1: knows what everyone brought, what is sacrificed, what is burnt.
23:24
Speaker 1: And the difference is just that in a capitalist economy,
23:27
Speaker 1: every expenditure is paid or repaid with a capital value,
23:32
Speaker 1: whereas in a potlatch there is no money. But you
23:36
Speaker 1: can exchange these gifts for esteem or honor. But it's
23:40
Speaker 1: no less exacting, it's no less calculated. Social cohesion is
23:47
Speaker 1: produced in these rituals. Every gift has to be returned
23:52
Speaker 1: in some way. There is absolutely no such thing as
23:54
Speaker 1: a free gift. He's pretty clear about this. Every gift
23:58
Speaker 1: entails a return, and this sort of sets up the
24:02
Speaker 1: perpetual cycle of exchanges between generations because there aren't really
24:07
Speaker 1: individuals in a society like this. It's based on your family.
24:10
Speaker 1: So your family's esteem is what is at risk of
24:13
Speaker 1: going up or down. And we kind of actually had
24:17
Speaker 1: to looking back, we had to cover mana first, because
24:20
Speaker 1: mana is the resource here. If you can't give gifts
24:24
Speaker 1: good enough, or you don't have enough to sacrifice on
24:27
Speaker 1: the altar, then you're losing mana, You're losing your energy.
24:32
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Mana is kind of the name of that.
24:35
Speaker 2: In this context, Mana is kind of the spiritual substance
24:39
Speaker 2: that travels through the gifts almost it travels from person
24:45
Speaker 2: to person as the gifts are passed along. But yeah,
24:48
Speaker 2: his whole question here, the way he puts it, he's like,
24:50
Speaker 2: what's compelling this? Like when someone gives a gift, Like,
24:54
Speaker 2: what exactly is it that compels the person to then
24:58
Speaker 2: reciprocs quote? What rule of legality and self interest in
25:04
Speaker 2: societies of a backward or archaic type compels the gift
25:09
Speaker 2: that has been received to be obligatorily reciprocated. What power
25:14
Speaker 2: resides in the object given that causes its recipient.
25:18
Speaker 1: To pay it back?
25:20
Speaker 2: So he's really end quote, So he's really you know,
25:24
Speaker 2: it's funny, like they must be self interested. This must
25:27
Speaker 2: have self interest in rules of legal systems. So he's
25:31
Speaker 2: trying to zoom in on this this compulsory force, which
25:36
Speaker 2: which is a lot like we talked about with Manna.
25:38
Speaker 2: It's like an external moral force that compels individuals to
25:44
Speaker 2: do something. But it's essentially like collective and social in
25:48
Speaker 2: its in its being. And yeah, the potlatch is like
25:52
Speaker 2: one of those contexts in which exchanges will occur, like
25:56
Speaker 2: the feasts and the festivals and the celebrations. The potlatch.
26:01
Speaker 1: If you even just go to a wedding and you
26:03
Speaker 1: have all the ceremony of gift, you have like the
26:07
Speaker 1: esteem of who's sitting at what table, how closes the
26:11
Speaker 1: table to the front, You get into all these like
26:14
Speaker 1: little political games and who brought the who brought the
26:19
Speaker 1: best gift? Oh, you brought You invited a person who's
26:22
Speaker 1: known to be rich, and they only gave you a
26:24
Speaker 1: fifty dollars present. This is considered rude because everyone knows
26:27
Speaker 1: that they're rich. You know, all of this stuff, it's
26:30
Speaker 1: not it's not foreign. But let's get into it the
26:33
Speaker 1: actual text. What is the potlatch? All that stuff this
26:36
Speaker 1: is again Mouse looking back, He says, there's not We
26:40
Speaker 1: don't have written contracts in the society, but the gift
26:43
Speaker 1: exchange may as well be a contract. It's made in
26:48
Speaker 1: front of the gods rather than you know, what, would
26:52
Speaker 1: we make a contract in front of the courts or
26:54
Speaker 1: like the threat of the police, yeah, dishing out justice.
26:59
Speaker 1: But here it's the gods that oversee the contracts being fulfilled.
27:06
Speaker 1: And you can make contracts with the gods, which is
27:09
Speaker 1: why you offer sacrifices to them. But the more important
27:13
Speaker 1: thing is that you're offering other people gifts, which reinforces
27:17
Speaker 1: this social glue that you can't break. But you can
27:20
Speaker 1: also make contracts with your with your own ancestors, you
27:24
Speaker 1: make contracts with other tribes, and instead of writing something
27:29
Speaker 1: down and putting your signature on it, gift giving is
27:32
Speaker 1: that kind of universally understood exchange, which is why it's
27:38
Speaker 1: so important because it involves everything. It involves politics, material wealth,
27:43
Speaker 1: keeping your promises and all that stuff.
27:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess you would call what we do simple
27:50
Speaker 2: exchange of goods or wealth or products and services, like
27:55
Speaker 2: a simple exchange, I don't know, like what you know,
27:58
Speaker 2: even signing a contract and buying an apartment or renting
28:02
Speaker 2: an apartment, right you enter into a contract or even
28:08
Speaker 2: just the more you know, abstract social contract, we all,
28:12
Speaker 2: you know, give up our right to harm each other
28:15
Speaker 2: in order to live together. It's like a sort of
28:18
Speaker 2: a simple exchange of services, whereas he says, quote, in
28:22
Speaker 2: the economic and legal systems which have preceded our own,
28:27
Speaker 2: one hardly ever, finds a simple exchange of goods, wealth
28:30
Speaker 2: and products, and transactions concluded by individuals. So it's collectivities,
28:37
Speaker 2: he says, that impose the obligations of exchange, and the
28:42
Speaker 2: contracting parties are legal entities. And again these are groups,
28:48
Speaker 2: like I mentioned earlier, clans, tribes, families who confront and
28:53
Speaker 2: oppose one another, either in groups who meet face to
28:56
Speaker 2: face in one spot or through their chiefs and so
29:00
Speaker 2: sort of by mediation of the chief. But it's actually
29:04
Speaker 2: those are acts of politeness that are involved in these exchanges. Banquets, rituals,
29:09
Speaker 2: military services, women, children, dances, festivals, and fairs. And then
29:15
Speaker 2: he brings up this other estrange thing. Again it's a
29:18
Speaker 2: voluntary form, a somewhat voluntary form. But although in the
29:24
Speaker 2: final analysis he says they are strictly compulsory on pain
29:29
Speaker 2: of private or public warfare.
29:31
Speaker 1: He divides the two case studies, I guess between the
29:36
Speaker 1: North American West, which is the Haida. That's I think
29:40
Speaker 1: where the word potlatch comes from. And then he also
29:42
Speaker 1: compares it to the Melanesian ones that Durkheim was talking about.
29:47
Speaker 1: But this kind of looks absurd because in a potlatch
29:50
Speaker 1: you have potlatches for different reasons. One of the main
29:54
Speaker 1: ones is like a marriage between tribes, if we can
29:57
Speaker 1: just use that. For example, you have a marriage where
30:01
Speaker 1: like one chief's daughter will marry another chief's daughter to
30:05
Speaker 1: ensure I mean son, to ensure an alliance or something
30:10
Speaker 1: like that. So what you may observe from the outside
30:12
Speaker 1: is there's a bunch of feasting, there's a bunch of ceremonies, dances, fights,
30:19
Speaker 1: and then this weird thing that to us, which is
30:24
Speaker 1: when they gather cases of oil and expensive blankets and
30:30
Speaker 1: even sometimes they're houses and just light them all on
30:32
Speaker 1: fire and everyone gathers around and watches them burn. Or
30:38
Speaker 1: another one is like they would have their most valuable
30:42
Speaker 1: possessions and then just go out on a boat and
30:44
Speaker 1: throw them into the ocean or the sea. So the
30:48
Speaker 1: destruction of your own stuff. You know, for us seems foreign, weird, crazy,
30:54
Speaker 1: but it's kind of the only way to progress up
30:57
Speaker 1: the social ladder, or to compete against arrival. So destroying
31:02
Speaker 1: your own stuff is an act of competition. It's agonistic.
31:07
Speaker 1: And the reason that Mouse goes into this so much
31:10
Speaker 1: is it's to say like I am so blessed, which
31:15
Speaker 1: is to say I'm in the favor of the gods,
31:18
Speaker 1: or i have so much mana that I have enough
31:21
Speaker 1: stuff to burn. I don't even need to worry about
31:23
Speaker 1: the future because I'm so powerful. And this connects to
31:28
Speaker 1: the notion of sacrifice. Obviously, like destroying your own property
31:32
Speaker 1: to gain social I was gonna say social capital. Maybe
31:36
Speaker 1: it is social capital. You move up the social ladder
31:39
Speaker 1: by destroying your own stuff, and now sacrifice the course
31:42
Speaker 1: is pretty universal in ancient cultures. You know, you burn
31:47
Speaker 1: animals to give them back to the god or to
31:50
Speaker 1: earn favor with a god, but also like when you're
31:54
Speaker 1: giving a gift to someone that you want to make
31:56
Speaker 1: a deal with. Mouse describes how the ceremony goes in
32:01
Speaker 1: New Guinea as opposed to the hida potlatch in my
32:05
Speaker 1: New detail. He describes the ceremony of the gift giving.
32:11
Speaker 1: You don't put it in their hand. You don't come
32:13
Speaker 1: up to them and say, here's my gift, please accept
32:17
Speaker 1: it now. You throw it on the ground, because throwing
32:21
Speaker 1: it on the ground shows how unimportant the object is
32:26
Speaker 1: to you. And then as instead of saying, I present
32:29
Speaker 1: you this gift, this very nice thing. It costs me
32:32
Speaker 1: very much and it's very valuable, No, you just say
32:35
Speaker 1: I'm sorry for bringing you my leftovers. I just found
32:39
Speaker 1: this laying around the house and I thought you might
32:41
Speaker 1: like it, even though it's probably one of the most
32:44
Speaker 1: valuable things that the giver owns. But the point of
32:48
Speaker 1: course is you're doing your best to flaunt your wealth,
32:52
Speaker 1: or flaunt your capacity or your blessing with the God,
32:57
Speaker 1: whether or not you have it. You know, it's going
32:59
Speaker 1: to be a huge sacrifice to give this, this special
33:03
Speaker 1: object up, but you have to act like it's unimportant.
33:06
Speaker 1: And this is coded into the ritual.
33:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean, the language is always interesting.
33:13
Speaker 2: Everything through this, everything is woven into an inextricable network
33:17
Speaker 2: of rights, of total legal and economic services, of assignment
33:22
Speaker 2: to political ranks in the society of men in the
33:25
Speaker 2: tribe and in the confederation of tribes and even internationally.
33:31
Speaker 2: So he's saying here even it even applies amongst individuals
33:35
Speaker 2: within a tribe, across tribes, and even you know, across
33:39
Speaker 2: larger groupings as well, and across even you know, geographical locations.
33:47
Speaker 2: So it's a yeah, it really is totals. He's not
33:52
Speaker 2: using that word arbitrarily.
33:54
Speaker 1: And one thing that's totalizing. You see this, You see
33:58
Speaker 1: this in basically every culture, but the notion of sacrifice,
34:01
Speaker 1: which in some cases means like burning up your animals,
34:06
Speaker 1: your best animals, and in some cases sacrificing humans. But
34:12
Speaker 1: it's one of the most original human conceptions of our
34:17
Speaker 1: own existence, is that your life is lent to you
34:20
Speaker 1: for a time by the gods, and that that debt
34:24
Speaker 1: has to be repaid at some point, and you repay
34:26
Speaker 1: it on death. But if you repay it earlier, I
34:30
Speaker 1: guess by sacrificing stuff, then you can get the gods
34:35
Speaker 1: on your side. You can exchange what they've given you
34:40
Speaker 1: for like immediate benefit. And then these human exchanges, the
34:44
Speaker 1: ones between people, are sort of meant to imitate the
34:48
Speaker 1: original notion that your life is the primordial gift. So
34:54
Speaker 1: the gift in the potlatch is a higher order of exchange.
34:58
Speaker 1: It's marked by ceremony and ritual. But this is supposed
35:02
Speaker 1: to be. This is where he kind of drifts into
35:04
Speaker 1: a little bit of universality, is saying that all humans
35:08
Speaker 1: of all times have recognized that they have their life
35:12
Speaker 1: not on purpose but as a gift.
35:15
Speaker 2: Well, that seems to just go back to a kind
35:19
Speaker 2: of that tenant of dur Kimian sociology is that religion
35:24
Speaker 2: is at the origin of any kind of social organization.
35:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, and religion and ritual also transfers into political authority
35:35
Speaker 1: or political justification too. If you want to if you
35:39
Speaker 1: are the chief and you want to stay the chief,
35:44
Speaker 1: you have to keep throwing these potletches. You have to
35:46
Speaker 1: keep throwing big parties where you give your stuff away,
35:50
Speaker 1: where you feed everyone else. And this is in a
35:55
Speaker 1: sense humiliating them because they couldn't They couldn't reciprocate that
36:00
Speaker 1: they could They don't. They don't have the money or
36:03
Speaker 1: enough land or whatever to be able to feed everyone
36:07
Speaker 1: in the village. The reason you are the chief is
36:10
Speaker 1: because you have so much stuff that you can feed
36:13
Speaker 1: everyone in the village during these parties. So you humiliate them,
36:18
Speaker 1: and then the reciprocation is that they don't try to
36:21
Speaker 1: overthrow you. And I thought this was a funny contrast
36:25
Speaker 1: to the way we perceive our oligarchs today, which is like, no,
36:29
Speaker 1: they worked hard, they earned it. I might be one
36:33
Speaker 1: of them one day, so I don't want to put
36:35
Speaker 1: too many rules on them. But the reason that these
36:37
Speaker 1: societies were like politically functional was because there was this
36:42
Speaker 1: redistributive process where you're humiliated by the fact that you
36:49
Speaker 1: receive gifts from the chief, and then that's why you
36:53
Speaker 1: accept their authority, not because they did anything extraordinary, but
36:59
Speaker 1: just because you can't pay that back.
37:02
Speaker 2: So I'm guessing. I'm guessing here that the fact that
37:07
Speaker 2: there's a chief and that this can all be sort
37:11
Speaker 2: of mediated through the person of the chief is a
37:14
Speaker 2: very advanced form. He seems to regard it as so
37:18
Speaker 2: you have different forms of this total services thing, this exchange,
37:26
Speaker 2: so he could he considers potlatch to be a very
37:29
Speaker 2: sort of advanced form of and he classifies it as
37:32
Speaker 2: the agonistic type of total services.
37:36
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's because having stuff demonstrates that you are
37:41
Speaker 1: in the favor of the gods. And if you're in
37:42
Speaker 1: the favor of the gods, then you have some also
37:47
Speaker 1: immediate authority, or a justification at least of your authority
37:51
Speaker 1: to lead, because if you weren't in the favor of
37:55
Speaker 1: the gods, they wouldn't have given you this stuff. But
37:57
Speaker 1: then we have this note this carefully. We have this
38:00
Speaker 1: very strange event. And I don't know if he's anthropologically
38:05
Speaker 1: correct about this or not, but in this economy you
38:08
Speaker 1: also have precious metals being stamped with the insignia of
38:13
Speaker 1: the tribe. Now we see this as currency, but he
38:17
Speaker 1: describes it as basically having happened by chance, by accident,
38:22
Speaker 1: and then it gets turned into money as an abstracted
38:25
Speaker 1: form of exchange, but only much later. So it exists
38:29
Speaker 1: here in Germ and for them it's nothing particularly special.
38:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, once money comes into play, it's I mean, it's
38:38
Speaker 2: the same thing in many ways, but it's also the
38:40
Speaker 2: beginning of I guess the modern era.
38:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that specific because
38:46
Speaker 1: this is a form of exchange and our version of
38:50
Speaker 1: money as precious metal. For him, this starts like the
38:54
Speaker 1: money has no value at all, because you can't like who,
38:58
Speaker 1: you can't eat copper, you can maybe make some decorations
39:00
Speaker 1: with it, but beyond that it's pretty much useless, except
39:04
Speaker 1: that it's soft enough that you can like stamp your
39:07
Speaker 1: insignia onto it, which is why metal becomes worthwhile they
39:11
Speaker 1: weren't using it for war right in North America. They weren't.
39:14
Speaker 1: They weren't forging metal weapons, which is different from Eurasia,
39:20
Speaker 1: of course. But no, this is a The form of
39:24
Speaker 1: exchange is very different because we have capitalism is these
39:32
Speaker 1: sorts of processes, except they're abstracted. They're abstracted away from
39:35
Speaker 1: the actual material. The material in itself is no longer
39:39
Speaker 1: a symbol for anything, and we have an abstract accumulation.
39:44
Speaker 1: How do you think that plays? Or does this pass?
39:48
Speaker 1: Does this crossover in some way? It seems like we've
39:53
Speaker 1: we have a rather paltry understanding of exchange by having
39:58
Speaker 1: excised all the social obligation and the concept of social
40:03
Speaker 1: debt from purely economic debt. Yeah.
40:08
Speaker 2: Well, we didn't really get to the part where he
40:11
Speaker 2: talks about money, or at least I didn't read that far.
40:17
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, the basic notion is copper is not treated
40:22
Speaker 1: as a metal as opposed to an organic being. Copper
40:24
Speaker 1: is a living thing, and it's associated with the salmon,
40:28
Speaker 1: which is a sacred symbol. So the only value that
40:33
Speaker 1: copper had was relative to the sacred symbol that it represented.
40:37
Speaker 1: It had no value on its own, So you could
40:41
Speaker 1: read that as a form of abstraction. But its value
40:44
Speaker 1: was not special. It was not different than anything else.
40:48
Speaker 1: It was not over and above anything else, even though
40:50
Speaker 1: that's what it became. But if we turn instead to
40:53
Speaker 1: the prior, the notion of sacrifice, because this is what
40:57
Speaker 1: Buttai picks up like you burn, you burn stuff to
41:00
Speaker 1: show how blessed you are, you destroy surplus, and that
41:05
Speaker 1: destruction of the surplus. You know, you can say this
41:09
Speaker 1: is anti utilitarian. Why are you burning your own house
41:13
Speaker 1: that you just have to rebuild? Why are you burning
41:15
Speaker 1: blankets and oil that you just have to accumulate again?
41:20
Speaker 1: But this is obviously showing that the social fact or
41:25
Speaker 1: rank or prestige, these are of direct equivalents to material value,
41:32
Speaker 1: which is just something that we can't even conceive of anymore,
41:36
Speaker 1: or can we. Maybe I'm wrong about that, maybe we can.
41:40
Speaker 2: At one point he says that you know, every society
41:43
Speaker 2: has a market, there's no every group, every people has
41:48
Speaker 2: a kind of market. So I guess that is would
41:51
Speaker 2: be understood in very abstract terms. The market would just
41:55
Speaker 2: be sort of the place where gifts are exchanged. And
42:00
Speaker 2: so those kinds of things like money seems to almost
42:04
Speaker 2: just mean something that the mana can travel through, some
42:09
Speaker 2: material thing that the man can travel through. Or so
42:13
Speaker 2: when you're when you're burning something, either you know, two
42:18
Speaker 2: at the potlatch to show that you're you know, your
42:21
Speaker 2: chief is more powerful than the other chief as a
42:25
Speaker 2: kind of friendly competition, or in a sacrificial kind of thing,
42:29
Speaker 2: you're still you're still doing a form of exchange there.
42:34
Speaker 2: You're just maybe kind of exchanging insults or friendly barbs,
42:40
Speaker 2: or you're exchanging with you're you're communicating with the spiritual realm.
42:46
Speaker 2: Then he'll he'll say, you know, once we get into
42:49
Speaker 2: money proper, which requires a new institution, more different forms
42:56
Speaker 2: of contract and sale, he calls them then, and then
43:00
Speaker 2: we get money minting and the kinds of you know,
43:04
Speaker 2: stamping money, inscribing it with the whatever, the face of
43:08
Speaker 2: gods or the face of the leaders. It's a transformation
43:11
Speaker 2: of the institution of the market. But it's essentially, I
43:16
Speaker 2: guess the same underlying thing, and I guess the reason
43:20
Speaker 2: we can't understand it is that we're just so used
43:23
Speaker 2: to our form of exchange, which is again remember the
43:27
Speaker 2: central question of this, like what compels you know, the
43:31
Speaker 2: receiver to reciprocate? What is it that compels it?
43:34
Speaker 1: Right?
43:34
Speaker 2: Like you know, for us, it's like, well that's the price.
43:37
Speaker 2: The price is there. I take the product, I have
43:40
Speaker 2: to give them this money. I can't just walk out
43:42
Speaker 2: of the store with this thing. I have to and
43:45
Speaker 2: the legal system compels me to because I can be
43:48
Speaker 2: arrested or maybe it's just being polite or something like.
43:52
Speaker 2: It's yes, So it's almost impossible for us to conceive
43:57
Speaker 2: of it in its original form, it's primitive form, whatever
44:02
Speaker 2: you want to call it.
44:04
Speaker 1: I think though, that we don't, like we're not that different.
44:07
Speaker 1: We still have our conception is like a mana value
44:13
Speaker 1: of money. The value of the money is that everyone
44:19
Speaker 1: believes value has money. If the belief were to collapse,
44:22
Speaker 1: if the social were to collapse, money wouldn't be every anything,
44:26
Speaker 1: and everybody knows that. So to me, that's the same
44:30
Speaker 1: function that mana has. Like whether or not, I don't
44:35
Speaker 1: know how you believe in mana in a primitive society.
44:38
Speaker 1: I can't really contextualize that, but we have the same thing. Like,
44:41
Speaker 1: that's what makes it kind of easy to understand, is yeah,
44:45
Speaker 1: everybody knows the money has no intrinsic value, but it's
44:50
Speaker 1: our form of abstract exchange that shows what you as
44:55
Speaker 1: an individual are worth. Your net worth as your worth.
44:59
Speaker 1: There's a lot of here.
45:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I got what you're saying. Yeah, we worship
45:04
Speaker 2: wealth obviously, you know the people who love Bill Gates
45:09
Speaker 2: or Tesla Gui. I guess it's the kind of they promote.
45:14
Speaker 2: I don't know, what do you say. Modern society promotes
45:17
Speaker 2: a kind of worship of of of wealth and money,
45:21
Speaker 2: and the aristocrats of today are just the rich people,
45:25
Speaker 2: the people who make a shit ton of money, and
45:29
Speaker 2: everyone else wants to just be like them or worship them.
45:32
Speaker 2: Yeah but yeah, good, good, good call money. Money doesn't
45:36
Speaker 2: really make someone more valuable?
45:39
Speaker 1: Well, yeah it does. But I don't want to. I
45:42
Speaker 1: don't want to fall into the stupid analysis that, oh, yeah,
45:44
Speaker 1: we worship Elon Musk like they used to worship the
45:48
Speaker 1: wolf god. That's a silly equivalence. The more profound equivalence
45:53
Speaker 1: is that modern religiosity, is it the same form. It's
45:58
Speaker 1: the form of the necessity of images of the thing
46:02
Speaker 1: that's valuable, that demonstrates to everyone that our society is
46:06
Speaker 1: still working, that is still intact, I think, in the
46:11
Speaker 1: same form, unless it's being reductionists. But in the case
46:15
Speaker 1: that loving billionaires or hating billionaires, having any thought at
46:19
Speaker 1: all towards billionaires is agreeing on the totem Elon Musk
46:25
Speaker 1: is worth x billion dollars because of Tesla stock. What's
46:30
Speaker 1: the value of Teesla stocks tied to production? It isn't,
46:34
Speaker 1: and everybody knows that it isn't. It's based on the
46:37
Speaker 1: agreement or even the disagreement that still enforces the thing
46:41
Speaker 1: at the center of the economy. That's faith, and whether
46:46
Speaker 1: that's faith in mana or faith in value, it's based
46:49
Speaker 1: on what other people believe about the thing.
46:53
Speaker 2: You know. It's this possessive individualism right where what Mouse
46:59
Speaker 2: is just describing is almost like an inverted world, like
47:03
Speaker 2: he takes his own post revolutionary world of individual human
47:07
Speaker 2: rights and inverts it into the sort of group based
47:10
Speaker 2: model where it's not about possessive individualism, where the possessions
47:17
Speaker 2: don't I mean, they do empower the individual in a
47:21
Speaker 2: kind of prestige mana authority sense. But it's not the
47:27
Speaker 2: same as you know, all this guy has so much money,
47:32
Speaker 2: therefore he must have like a huge brain or have
47:35
Speaker 2: done like amazing things. It'd be really really smart, really
47:39
Speaker 2: really daring, and have all this business acumen, which is
47:43
Speaker 2: more like our possess, Like the possessor of the wealth
47:46
Speaker 2: is the focus for us. But but in this inverted world,
47:51
Speaker 2: it's it's the it's the possession itself and what it's
47:54
Speaker 2: carrying with it and it's and it's and it's movement
47:59
Speaker 2: between different people and taking different forms is what's more important.
48:04
Speaker 2: Like it reminds me almost of the way Marx talks
48:07
Speaker 2: about value right like value exchange, money form, commodity form,
48:14
Speaker 2: money form MCM right, value goes from one thing to
48:20
Speaker 2: the other, it changes form and it travels along right,
48:26
Speaker 2: And it's kind of how David Harvey defines capital is
48:32
Speaker 2: value in motion.
48:34
Speaker 1: There's also something missing, I feel, and I don't know
48:36
Speaker 1: if I could exactly put my finger on it until
48:38
Speaker 1: we actually read but tie. But the thing that's missing
48:41
Speaker 1: is you become more valuable here in potlatch by burning
48:47
Speaker 1: your shit in front of people and it has to
48:50
Speaker 1: be in front of people. You can't just go to
48:51
Speaker 1: your closet. Presumably you can't just go to your closet
48:55
Speaker 1: and burn something expensive and get all the benefits. The
48:58
Speaker 1: benefit is to the destruction of wealth in front of people.
49:03
Speaker 1: And there might be some parallels, you know, like the
49:07
Speaker 1: American industrialists building universities and art galleries and naming it
49:12
Speaker 1: after themselves. That might be something to show, like I
49:16
Speaker 1: have so much that I can destroy it and still
49:19
Speaker 1: have the favor of the gods. But that destruction is
49:24
Speaker 1: like something be tie, for example, will draw specific attention
49:28
Speaker 1: to You can take stuff out of the economy, but
49:33
Speaker 1: it's not really out of the economy because it's exchanged
49:36
Speaker 1: for prestige, honor, your right to rule, that kind of stuff.
49:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, but wealth is essentially like a public thing. Here
49:42
Speaker 2: to use those terms in the modern era, it's say,
49:47
Speaker 2: like what enables capitalism is property, the property system and
49:52
Speaker 2: the idea of private ownership that what's mine is mine
49:55
Speaker 2: and not yours. But the obligation to give is sort
50:00
Speaker 2: of based fundamentally on that. You know, it's not yours,
50:06
Speaker 2: it belongs to everyone, and you're just a kind of
50:09
Speaker 2: temporary possessor of something that's essentially will will need to
50:15
Speaker 2: go to somebody else. Its value in this context is
50:19
Speaker 2: that it can be passed along.
50:21
Speaker 1: Well, this is why some of those post sixty eight thinkers,
50:25
Speaker 1: notably dairy Dye and Baudeerriart, focus on this within capitalism.
50:32
Speaker 1: He gave up on it, but you know, symbolic exchange
50:35
Speaker 1: as a way to get out of capitalist exchange because
50:41
Speaker 1: the purpose of capital is to make everything equivalent. It's
50:44
Speaker 1: to flatten all forms of value to one, which is
50:48
Speaker 1: its capital value. And he was looking at this in uh,
50:53
Speaker 1: I guess Boulder in the sixties, like what do you
50:56
Speaker 1: how do you reincorporate an exchange? It's irreversible because in
51:01
Speaker 1: capitalism everything's reversible. You know exactly how much parashoes cost,
51:06
Speaker 1: how much some plates for your wedding costs, or if
51:10
Speaker 1: you're buying someone I don't know, kids, toys, every everything
51:14
Speaker 1: is cost registered. And he looks at this as a
51:20
Speaker 1: form where you know there's there's exchange that's irreversible. If
51:25
Speaker 1: you burn up your house and give it to the gods,
51:29
Speaker 1: you can't get it back, right, So I don't know.
51:33
Speaker 1: It's it's interesting to look for outside of our system
51:37
Speaker 1: for non equivalent exchanges because our minds, I think too,
51:42
Speaker 1: our minds are just so totalized. We can't we can't
51:46
Speaker 1: think of non equivalent exchange because we basically only have
51:49
Speaker 1: one form. And the only thing we can talk about is,
51:51
Speaker 1: you know, I thought you would like this. I thought
51:55
Speaker 1: you would specifically like this. I thought about you. So
51:58
Speaker 1: that's all I can give you besides the monetary value.
52:01
Speaker 2: And there's and it's not quite so spiritual. He sort
52:05
Speaker 2: of there's this informant with the Maori and they're talking
52:09
Speaker 2: about the I don't know how to pronounce it, the how,
52:11
Speaker 2: the spirit of things. It's not the things, but what
52:16
Speaker 2: passes between them or what what comes from the giving,
52:20
Speaker 2: the passing along.
52:22
Speaker 1: What's left out of the exchange on paper, that reciprocal
52:26
Speaker 1: that that that motion, that double motion, that that giving,
52:29
Speaker 1: and then and then obligation to reciprocate that like.
52:33
Speaker 2: The how travels in that kind of motion. And so
52:38
Speaker 2: it's not the object, it's it's what passes between the
52:42
Speaker 2: givers back and forth, that is. And and then he says,
52:47
Speaker 2: this is this is the nature of the how, the
52:49
Speaker 2: how of personal property, the how of the tonguea the
52:51
Speaker 2: how the forest is connected to the land. So it's
52:54
Speaker 2: got this this this deeply spiritual, I mean not even spiritual.
53:00
Speaker 1: We might just give a gift and call that the
53:03
Speaker 1: thoughtfulness behind the gift, Like the thoughtfulness is somehow being exchanged,
53:08
Speaker 1: but it's a it's a surplus that's in the exchange,
53:14
Speaker 1: and it's also reciprocal, like if you give me a
53:17
Speaker 1: thoughtful gift, then I'm going to want to also give
53:20
Speaker 1: you a thoughtful gift back if we have that kind
53:22
Speaker 1: of relationship. So it's it's an excess above the material
53:28
Speaker 1: that's being transferred. Yeah, and that's kind of the glue.
53:32
Speaker 1: That's a sort of another source of this social glue
53:38
Speaker 1: that mouse is drawing attention to.
53:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does sound a lot like, you know, the surplus,
53:44
Speaker 2: what's sort of created in the exchange, right, what sort
53:50
Speaker 2: of overflows what's not there?
53:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, the social is the excess. But it also shows
53:56
Speaker 1: how there's no waste, there's no true scess. Everything is
54:01
Speaker 1: sort of marked once it enters the social even what
54:05
Speaker 1: is directly wasted when you just burn.
54:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the effects of the effect of the how
54:12
Speaker 2: it's not the it's not the personal property that's important.
54:17
Speaker 2: So the burning of it doesn't matter because you're losing
54:20
Speaker 2: some material thing doesn't matter.
54:22
Speaker 1: Once you have enough, you give it to a university
54:24
Speaker 1: to get your name on a.
54:25
Speaker 2: Building exactly, some other kind of prestige.
54:29
Speaker 1: Or a foundation that you can launder your money through
54:31
Speaker 1: and give it to your kids without paying taxes on.
54:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, because who wants to be like an anonymous donor?
54:37
Speaker 2: Nah that then you really get nothing out of it
54:41
Speaker 2: except just.
54:44
Speaker 1: Accept tax breaks.
54:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess that that could be true. Or
54:48
Speaker 2: unless you're just one of those sick fucks who gets
54:51
Speaker 2: satisfaction out of true charity. It does mention alms here
54:57
Speaker 2: so that there is a bit of that carre hangover.
55:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'll be rewarded for it in the next life
55:03
Speaker 1: if you're lucky. Anyway, A good place to end. We
55:07
Speaker 1: will cut it there, and yeah, there's a lot more
55:11
Speaker 1: to go into, but we're going to need our secondary
55:13
Speaker 1: our secondary sources to cover it properly. But that's yeah,
55:17
Speaker 1: that's it.
55:18
Speaker 2: Before we go, I did learn one thing, it's more
55:22
Speaker 2: of a contextual secondary source. Thing is that actually gift
55:26
Speaker 2: giving was quite popular before the eighteenth end of the
55:31
Speaker 2: eighteenth century, it fell out of favor but then Mouse
55:36
Speaker 2: was kind of responsible for bringing it back into political theory.
55:41
Speaker 2: So political theory up to the end of the eighteenth
55:45
Speaker 2: century regarded gift exchange as a model of good governance
55:54
Speaker 2: modern nations giving gifts, but then by the end of
55:59
Speaker 2: the eighteenth century it became regarded as a kind of
56:02
Speaker 2: source of corruption, right like campaign donations today kind of stuff.
56:08
Speaker 2: And it was Marcel Mouse who wanted to rehabilitate gift
56:11
Speaker 2: exchange as this model for good governance. And you know,
56:17
Speaker 2: this isn't the context of arguing that Mouse was a
56:21
Speaker 2: kind of a colonial reformer trying to make make colonialism
56:26
Speaker 2: more friendly. So part of the reason for studying people's
56:32
Speaker 2: under colonial rule, it's been said, is to you know,
56:35
Speaker 2: maybe maybe it's to help, you know, manage them better.
56:40
Speaker 2: So it has a kind of instrumental role. But in
56:43
Speaker 2: this case they're sort of arguing that Mouse actually like
56:46
Speaker 2: wanted to make colonialism better for the colonial subjects, like
56:51
Speaker 2: genuinely by bringing back gift exchange, and maybe even make
56:57
Speaker 2: European society and improve the relationship between nations by bringing
57:03
Speaker 2: back gift exchange. So if you think anthropology and sociology,
57:09
Speaker 2: you're just fundamentally like pro colonial disciplines. I mean, there's
57:15
Speaker 2: some arguments against it, but I think that sort of
57:18
Speaker 2: still also generally is the case.
57:21
Speaker 1: Well, reading this, it does seem like there's something fundamental
57:25
Speaker 1: that we've just destroyed, or you know that the big
57:29
Speaker 1: bad capitalism has destroyed. There's something like you know, I feel.
57:34
Speaker 2: That, Yeah, like we've lost something.
57:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, the loss, the disenchantment.
57:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, the way we just instrumentalize each other. There's no
57:44
Speaker 2: deeper meaning to these sorts of exchanges anymore. Yeah, does
57:50
Speaker 2: feel like we've lost something and bringing it back would
57:53
Speaker 2: really make things better. And I think Mousa's already sort
57:56
Speaker 2: of thinking that. In different it was also genuinely interested
58:01
Speaker 2: in sociology and objective scholarship. But yeah, these things argue
58:07
Speaker 2: that their ulterior motives. And interestingly, Mouse wrote a text
58:12
Speaker 2: called The Nation that wasn't actually published until twenty thirteen,
58:17
Speaker 2: and he kind of expands his gift theory and he's
58:21
Speaker 2: talking about the relationship between European states. So anyway, I
58:26
Speaker 2: thought i'd throw that in before we go.
58:29
Speaker 1: Well, that's good, all right, We will talk at you
58:33
Speaker 1: next week, Thank you, Eric
58:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, we'll see ya later.