Gifts, Commodities, and the Encompassment of Others

T his article attempts to outline an alternative account of the distinction between the gift and the commodity. It does so from the view that clarifying their relationship is a good idea because the distinction between gift and commodity has deeply informed the way in which the scientific field comprehends those who live(d) within the compass of kinship and community. The pairing of gift and commodity has served as a metaphor, trope, and conceptual opposition in the construction of the comparative discourse of who our others are, and it is also reflexively one of the critical oppositions through which the cultures of capitalism imagine themselves (e.g., as evidenced by the museology of primitive art). The relationship has an equally powerful historical dimension in that the progressive displacement of gifts by the commodity is central to understanding the ways in which capitalism is subsuming the economic breath of others. An analysis on this order is inescapably a tribute to Mauss, whose work on the gift is still present in its consequences, and in a different register to the power of capitalism to socially replicate itself through forms of self-recognition that only enhance a deeper concealment. Beginning in the 1970s, theorists began to realize that because theory and ethnography are inherently comparative we must organize our thoughts as a confrontation between the social logic of the commodity and that of the gift. The key claim here is that the epistemological integrity of the ethnographic project depends on appreciating the character of this opposition because science can only understand others when we interrogate the “metaphors” through which we think our analyses.