Free The Gift by Lewis Hyde Page B

may be no necessary link between scarcity and exploitation, but the connection is not unknown, either. In the North Pacific, salmon stocks actually did decline as soon as European settlers began to treat the fish as a commodity to be sold for a profit. By the end of the nineteenth century a salmon cannery sat at the mouth of every major river on the Alaskan coast; many overfished the runs and drove themselves out of business. On the East Coast the salmon essentially disappeared, although they were once so plentiful as to have been the dietary staple of the textile workers in the mill towns along the Merrimac River. (In the summer of 1974 a salmon was found in the Connecticut River; it was dead, but it was the first to appear in those waters in 150 years.)
    * To say that coppers are images of
zoë
-life would explain why their exchange is accompanied by recitations of history and genealogy. Like the Kula articles, the passage of these gifts keeps history alive so that individuals may witness and affirm their participation in nonindividual life.
    Note as well the mortuary potlatch’s connection to my opening story, the first salmon rite, which also has the bones of the dead, their imagined reassembly, and a sense of increase.
    * A confusion between organic liveliness and cultural or spiritual liveliness is inherent in a discussion of gift exchange. As Mauss first pointed out, in an exchange of gifts, “things … are to some extent parts of persons, and persons … behave in some measure as if they were things.” In the case of the mortuary potlatch, a material thing symbolizes a biological fact, the survival of the group despite the death of the individual. But it may be that the group would not survive as a group (and individual life would not survive, then, either) if these “biological” facts could not be expressed symbolically. We are social and spiritual beings; at some level biological, social, and spiritual life cannot be differentiated.
    * In a typical example from a book of Russian folk tales, a woman walking in the woods found a baby wood-demon “lying naked on the ground and crying bitterly. So she covered it up with her cloak, and after a time came her mother, a female wood-demon, and rewarded the woman with a potful of burning coals, which afterward turned into bright golden ducats.”
    The woman covers the baby because she’s moved to do so, a gratuitous, social act. Then the gift comes to her. It increases solely by its passage from the realm of wood-demons to her cottage.
    † Barnett’s language, the language of gift exchange, has procreation at its root. Generosity comes
from genere
(Old Latin: beget, produce), and the generations are its consequence, as are the gens, the clans. At its source in both Greek and Sanskrit, liberality is desire; libido is its modern cousin. Virtue’s root is a sex
(vir
, the man), and virility is its action. Virtue, like the gift, moves
through
a person, and has a pro-creative or healing power (as in the Bible story about the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’s garment in the faith that it would heal her: “And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him turned about in the press and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’”).
    * Capitalism is the ideology that asks that we remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth. To move away from capitalism is not to change the form of ownership from the few to the many, but to cease turning so much surplus into capital, that is, to treat most increase as a gift. It is quite possible to have the state own everything and still convert all gifts to capital, as Stalin demonstrated. When he decided in favor of the “production mode”—an intensive investment in capital goods—he acted as a capitalist, the locus of ownership having nothing to do with it.

CHAPTER THREE

The Labor
of Gratitude
    My vocation [his sense, as a child, that he would be a writer]

changed