ABSTRACT
One of the primary challenges for gift theory has been to distinguish gift exchanges from market exchanges, and thereby to discriminate between gifts and commodities. Usually the distinction is presented historically: with the rise of bourgeois individualism and industrial (and then post-industrial) economies, the realms of gift and commodity have become ever more estranged. This is the position of, among others, Lewis Hyde, who further argues that market exchanges also alienate those who practice them; in contrast, he writes, gift exchange constitutes an "erotic commerce" that expresses and creates social bonds (1983: 155).1 This Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy subtends a number of other dualities in social theory: the domestic vs. the public spheres; female vs. male domains; "society" vs. "economy" (Carrier 1995: 192); Georges Bataille's general vs. restricted economies; the oikos vs. the agora (the home vs. the marketplace); alienable vs. inalienable objects. As Arjun Appadurai notes (1986: 11), the tendency to view the two realms as "fundamentally opposed" remains a marked feature of anthropological discourse. 2
These descriptions are not, of course, neutral; rather, in both Left and Right theory, in Mauss as well as in Marx, the commodity is treated as the sign of a fall from grace, a demonic phenomenon emerging horns intact from capitalism's drive toward total commodification. In Marxist discourse, commodification is always linked to alienation and fetishism - the reverse modalities of a utopian or prelapsarian economy of barter, gift, and pure use-value that was allegedly, as Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch describe it, "non-exploitative, innocent and even transparent" (1989: 9). But whereas Mauss describes systems of "total prestation" that blend barter, commerce and gift exchange, thereby mixing altruism and self-interest, analyses of contemporary society invariably emphasize the gulf between gift and commodity circulation. Yet this tendency may stem not from the diagnosis of a universal social reality, but rather from the fact that "our ideology of the gift has been constructed in antithesis to market exchange" (Parry and Bloch 1989: 9; emphasis in original): we lament the condition that our own discourse has helped to generate.
