Free The Gift by Lewis Hyde

feeds us in return. The gift and its bearers share a spirit which is kept alive by its motion among them, and which in turn keeps them both alive. When Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux holy man, told the history of the Sioux “sacred pipe” to Joseph Epes Brown, he explained that at the time the pipe had first been given to him, his elders had told him that its history must always be passed down, “for as long as it is known, and for as long as the pipe is used, [the] people will live; but as soon as it has been forgotten, the people will be without a center and they will perish.”
    The increase is the core of the gift, the kernel. In this book I speak of both the object and its increase as the gift, but at times it seems more accurate to say that the increase alone is the gift and to treat the object involved more modestly as its vehicle or vessel. A Kwakiutl copper is a gift, but the feeling involved—the goodwill of each transaction—is more clearly embodied in the excess, the extra blankets thrown in at the end by each new recipient. And certainly it makes sense to say that the increase is the real gift in those cases in which the gift-object is sacrificed, for the increase continues despite (even because of) that loss; it is the constant in the cycle, because it is not consumed in use. The Maori elder who told of the forest
hau
distinguished in this way between object and increase, the
mauri
set in the forestand its
hau
which causes the game to abound. In that cycle the
hau
is nourished and passed along, while the gift-objects (birds,
mauri)
disappear.
    Marshall Sahlins, when he commented on the Maori gift stories, asked that we “observe just where the term
hau
enters into the discussion. Not with the initial transfer from the first to the second party, as well it could if [the
hau]
were the spirit in the gift, but upon the exchange between the second and third parties, as logically it would if it were the yield on the gift. The term ‘profit’ is economically and historically inappropriate to the Maori, but it would have been a better translation than ‘spirit’ for the
hau
in question.”
    Sahlins’s gloss highlights something that has been implicit in our discussion, though not yet stated directly—the increase comes to a gift as it moves from second to third party, not in the simpler passage from first to second. This increase begins when the gift has passed
through
someone, when the circle appears. But, as Sahlins senses, “profit” is not the right word. Capital earns profit and the sale of a commodity turns a profit, but gifts that remain gifts do not
earn
profit, they
give
increase. The distinction lies in what we might call the vector of the increase: in gift exchange it, the increase, stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit. (These two alternatives are also known as positive and negative reciprocity.)
    With this in mind, we may return to a dictum laid out in chapter i —one man’s gift must not be another man’s capital—and develop from it a corollary, saying: the increase that comes of gift exchange must remain a gift and not be kept as if it were the return on private capital. Saint Ambrose of Milan states it directly in a commentary on Deuteronomy:
    “God has excluded in general all increase of capital.” Such is the ethic of a gift society. *
    I have explained the increase of gifts in three ways in this chapter: as a natural fact (when gifts are actually alive); as a natural-spiritual fact (when gifts are the agents of a spirit that survives the consumption of its individual embodiments); and as a social fact (when a circulation of gifts creates community out of individual expressions of goodwill). In each of these cases the increase pertains to an ego or body larger than that of any individual participant. Thus to speak of the increase of gifts is to speak of something simultaneously material, social, and spiritual. Material wealth may