ABSTRACT

So long as one only considers practices which, like rituals, derive some of their most important properties from the fact that they are "detotalized" by their unfolding in succession, one is liable to neglect those properties of practice that detemporalizing science has least chance of reconstituting, namely the properties it owes to the fact that it is constructed in time, that time gives it its form, as the order of a succession, and therefore its direction and meaning. This is true of all practices which, like gift exchange or the joust of honor, are defined, at least in the eyes of the agents, as irreversible oriented sequences of relatively unpredictable acts. It will be recalled that, in opposition to the ordinary representation and to the famous analysis by Marcel Mauss, whom he accuses of placing himself at the level of a "phenomenology" of gift exchange, Levi-Strauss holds that science must break with native experience and the native theory of that experience and postulate that "the primary, fundamental phenomenon is exchange itself, which gets split up into discrete operations in social life" (Levi-Strauss 1987: 47), in other words, that the "automatic laws" of the cycle of reciprocity are the unconscious principle of the obligation to give, the obligation to return a gift and the obligation to receive (1987: 43). In postulating that the objective model, obtained by reducing the polythetic to the nomothetic, the detotalized, irreversible succession to the perfectly reversible totality, is the immanent law of practices, the invisible principle of the movements observed, the analyst reduces the agents to the status of automata or inert bodies moved by obscure mechanisms toward ends of which they are unaware. "Cycles of reciprocity," mechanical interlockings of obligatory practices, exist only for the absolute gaze of the omniscient, omnipresent spectator, who, thanks to his knowledge of the social mechanics, is able to be present at the different stages of the "cycle." In reality, the gift may remain unreciprocated, when one obliges an ungrateful person; it may be rejected as an insult, inasmuch as it asserts or demands the possibility of reciprocity, and therefore of recognition. 1 Quite apart from the trouble-makers who call into question the game itself and its apparently flawless mechanism (like the man the Kabyles call amahbul), even when the agents' dispositions are as perfectly harmonized as possible and when the sequence of actions and reactions seems entirely predictable from outside, uncertainty remains as to the outcome of the interaction until the whole sequence is completed. The most ordinary and even the seemingly most routine exchanges of ordinary life, like the "little gifts" that "bind friendship," presuppose an improvisation, and therefore a constant uncertainty, which, as we say, make all their charm, and hence all their social efficacy.