Felicity kindly pointed me in the direction of Marcel Mauss, another French sociologist, who wrote about gift economies.
“In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never “free”. Rather, human history is full of examples of gifts that give rise to reciprocal exchange.”
“The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: “the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them” (1990:31). the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate.”
“Gift exchange therefore leads to a mutual interdependence between giver and receiver.”
To borrow an example from Northern Exposure again, an episode titled “Our Tribe” (S3.EP12) deals with a tribal intiation ceremony of potlatch, an example Mauss used in describing gift giving among native indians. The potlatch ceremony involves Dr. Fleishman, the in-house capitalist, having to give away all his posessions to other members of the community. He is angered when he receives other people’s items in return for his - “this isn’t my toaster. My toaster was a four slice. This is a two slice.” This intersection between native values of eros and capitalist value of logos is discussed in Hyde’s critique of Mauss, in which he positions the gift as eros in opposition to the market economy as logos. (Hyde, 1983).
When Mauss says “the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given” (1990), he touches on not only gifts, but on secondhand objects themselves. Movies such as The Eye (2008) centre themselves around the continuation of a person when their objects or body parts are transferred to other people. The fear of such object-personification is dealt with in rituals of ‘cleansing cursed objects’.
But having an object marked by hand is also a site of fetish: The value of hand-made objects is often loosely determined by their closeness with the creator. People almost wish to believe when they purchase an overpriced Bob Dylan LP, that he sat there carving the music directly into the grooves with jagged fingernails. If they can’t get that, then they go for a signiture…
References:
Mauss, Marcel, Essai sur le don. (The Gift), trans. W.D. Hall, Routledge, 1990
Hyde, Lewis; The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property , Vintage, 1983
