What Gives? : Presents Help Tie Societies Together, Anthropologist Says

You do it. I do it. Everybody does it.

According to anthropologist Terry Y. Le Vine, the practice of giving and receiving gifts is so universal “it is part of what it means to be human.”

As a visiting curator at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Le Vine is organizing an exhibit of the roles gifts play in five cultures, including our own.

“It’s something everyone can relate to,” explains Le Vine, who has been scrutinizing the practice of gift giving professionally for 15 years.

Many gifts are quite beautiful, which makes them an obvious choice for display. But gifts are much more than art objects, according to Le Vine.

In virtually every culture, gifts and the events at which they are exchanged are a crucial part of the essential process of creating and maintaining social relationships, she says. Presents help glue societies together. And even in societies such as ours that maintain that giving is better than receiving, gifts are frequently given with the understanding that the recipient will reciprocate in time.

The exhibit Le Vine is organizing will open in 1993 at the Fowler Museum, then travel to four other cities. It will feature gifts favored by five societies: the !Kung of Southwest Africa, the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific, the people of modern Japan, and contemporary North America.

Le Vine is also coordinating the writing of a book on gift-giving that will bring together the work of experts in anthropology, sociology and law.

Le Vine hopes that visitors to the exhibit will share the experience she had the first time she looked at UCLA’s extensive collection of !Kung artifacts and realized, “Hey, all these things on all these storage shelves represent people. “ Although the objects given and received vary from culture to culture, gifts are almost always important social tools, she says.

Among the !Kung, for instance, newborns are given a gift that “introduces the baby to the idea of giving and receiving.” As Le Vine explains, the newborn is given necklaces by his or her grandparents. At 6 months or so, the necklaces are taken from the child, taken apart and incorporated into new necklaces that are then given to people with whom the mother thinks the child should have a gift-exchanging relationship. This process of exchanging necklaces and other gifts continues throughout the child’s lifetime.

The gifts exchanged by the !Kung may be evidence of the generosity of the giver, the prestige of the recipient or affection between the two, but they represent something even more basic as well. As Le Vine points out, the !Kung are people whose very lives depend on the uncertain bounty of the Kalahari Desert.

Relationships with fellow tribesmen in other areas, relationships cemented with gifts, are a kind of insurance against the day when your own garden fails to bloom and your survival hinges on the hospitality of others. Not surprisingly, the first gift was probably food, says Le Vine, citing the classic study of gift-giving, Marcel Mauss’ “The Gift.”

One of the issues that Le Vine and her consultants have been grappling with is the difference between a gift and a bribe. The definition is culturally relative. “In many cultures, what we would call a bribe is just a way of doing business,” she says. The Japanese, for instance, often give gifts in circumstances Americans would consider inappropriate. It is common practice in Japan, for example, to give your surgeon a gift before you go under the knife.

Among the artifacts Le Vine hopes to include in the exhibit are examples of the gorgeous envelopes, in different colors for different occasions, in which the Japanese give gifts of money.

Cultures also vary in what they regard as the ultimate gift. “Often it is something hard to get,” Le Vine says.

The relative scarcity of diamonds may explain why Americans value them for such important occasions as betrothals and anniversaries.

Among the Kwakiutl, or Kwakwaka’waka, as members of the Northwest tribe prefer to be called, copper was the premier gift after contact with Western culture, although grease continued to be an important gift as well.