This week I began reading a book I’d heard about for years: Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. Now out in a 25th Anniversary Edition, it reminded me once again of how often I feel belated about reading. But shouldn’t we all feel that way? We can never catch up, and a book—new or old, and especially one recommended or passed on by someone else—is a gift of the highest order.
This book explores the meaning of gifts—and particularly the significance of the work of art as a “gift” that comes from someone who is “gifted.” But it also asks, in a consumer culture where art is bought and owned: what happens when a “gift” becomes a commodity? And Hyde prefaces these questions about art and artists by reviewing the classic work of anthropologists Marcel Mauss, Claude Levi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins and by developing his own theory of gift exchange.
The Gift provoked me to think about the particular kind of “gift exchange” that we in higher education are engaged in. In many ways, our work is the work of gift-giving, passing along what we received from others—and seeing where it goes. As I reflect on what really happens in this endeavor, I feel compelled to quote Ira Gershwin: “Nice work if you can get it.”
So why should we look at our work in this context? At the end of his introduction, Lewis Hyde says:
The primary work on gift exchange has been done in anthropology not, it seems to me, because gifts are a primitive or aboriginal form of property—they aren’t—but because gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended families, small villages, close-knit communities, brotherhoods and, of course, tribes.
I believe that, at Stonehill, we are—at our best—such a community, and that we exchange gifts of knowledge, talent, creativity, imagination, and self. Obviously, students pay for a college education, and faculty members and other college professionals are paid for their work. But when an individual, a department, or a college goes beyond the minimum expectations of that market transaction—when we share our knowledge, talent, creativity, imagination, and self more generously than strictly “required”—we set a gift in motion.
In our classes, our office hours, our casual meetings with students, the co-curricular events we plan and participate in, our collegial relationships, and more, we create a form of exchange that transcends commodification. And if we think about it, that gift transforms students (and each of us) beyond our expectations. The extra time and effort we put into students is freely given back in the time and treasure they share with the college as alumni—and in the expertise and personal values that they share well beyond the gates of the college (but to the College’s credit) in the wider world.
Indeed, the gift exchange involved in education illustrates Hyde’s point that gifts cannot stand still: they have a kind of momentum that requires that they be handed on to a new party. He tells the story of an Englishman who is delighted when he smokes a pipe with a native American and is then given the ornate pipe as a gift. While the gift still adorns his mantel, another tribal leader arrives at his home, and it becomes clear that the Englishman is expected to share a smoke with him and then give away the pipe. The Englishman’s confusion produces the western notion of an “Indian giver”—but the deeper truth in the story is that a gift is meant to be consumed. It has to keep moving. If the pipe becomes a commodity—owned by the Englishman, made a “collectible”—it loses it property as a gift. In Hyde’s words: “a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of anything in return. There is little difference, therefore, between its consumption and its movement.”
Hyde gives many other examples, such as the Kula gift exchange in the South Sea Islands, where custom dictates an elaborate gift circle in which it takes ten years to cycle any one gift through the islands. This is not precisely a reciprocal arrangement—people give to one person and receive from another. But Hyde points out the core of the social code: “To possess is to give. . . . A man who owns a thing is naturally expected to share it, to distribute it, to be its trustee and dispenser.”
And this sounds a lot to me like teaching and the activities that accompany it. Teaching consumes the teacher. At the end of the day, one is “spent.” We plan events, extend ourselves to prepare and make everything work in order to “give” an experience to our students and colleagues. And in a profound way, when we are consumed by our work, we are satisfied. Hyde notes that this “seems at first to be a paradox of gift exchange: when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.” Back to the chorus: nice work if you can get it.
So as I look back over a number of weeks during which I did not write a Friday Note, I want to thank you all for the teaching and advising you have engaged in so far—and for the co-curricular work you have championed: Focus the Nation, the Be the Change Series, the Social Justice and Public Policy Research Series, the Independent Film Series, and the first visit from a Woodrow Wilson Fellow—to name just a few. And as I look forward, I hope that you can all find that the same “nice work” that sometimes seems simply to consume you is what also nourishes you.
Best regards,
Katie
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