The gift

For at least a month, Helena Iara has been obsessed with giving things to Rita and me.  She wants to give us her toys, feed us her food, give us her clothes and her books...  Now, lest one think that we have been successful in creating a truly altruistic baby, I have to add that several seconds afterward, she wants those things back, which created some minor complications when she offered us food, at least until we understood what was going on.

Reflecting on this giving of gifts, as Helena and I sat in the hammock today, watching the monkeys play in the trees, I told her a little bit about how different anthropologists have looked at the gift.  She wasn't entirely interested in the differences in the way that Claude Levi-Stauss or Marcel Mauss or Eduardo Viveiros de Castro understand gift giving, but I think that she understood the basic idea: we give gifts to establish and strengthen social relations.  Whether we're talking about the formal gift-giving that happens in diplomatic meetings, the gifts exchanged between tribes when they encounter in the Amazon basin, or birthday gifts for babies, when we give a present, we get back trust.

Every Christmas, you'll see an article in the Times or some newsmagazine, in which a famous economist talks about the failure of the marginal utility of gift-giving.  My mother gives me a sweater; she paid $75 for it, but I would not have paid more than $30, so according to these orthodox (and Scrooge-y) economists, there is a $45 inefficiency in the market.  Their lesson, of course, is that we should all just give each other cash.

Gift-giving, fortunately, is not a capitalist activity, for all of the attempts to make it one.  It's a process of creating trust, building relationships.  I give a friend a birthday gift, he gives one to me, and we become better friends in the process, more mutually engaged, more willing to trust and depend on each other.  

What Helena has done, as I tried to explain to her, is short circuit the process.  She gives me her toy and then wants it back right away.  In the process, she built something like trust (she knows she will get it back) and something more than just "like" love.  We laugh, she smiles, and a family grows from it.