Money has been around for a an epoch, since the 6th century to be exact. Many of us wrongly believe that before money, man existed in a fairer, more diplomatic state of bartering and trading. Unfortunately, this is a myth. A thought-experiment that perpetuated itself into a social hypothesis. What really existed before money was most likely shared resources and ‘gift economy’.

Gift economies, though disappearing, still exist today -mostly in indigenous cultures such as the Trobrianders and the Native American Indians, but also in the sly form of charity, open-source project, time-banks and casual gifting. There’s even evidence that prehistoric man valued gifting, at least to the God’s, but also to the deceases. It’s ancient.

Gifting is an archetypal symbol of our psyche -it means a whole lot more than simple kindness- appearing in many cultural myths and many ancient cultures, gifting is a quirky trait of evolution speaking volumes about our true motivations and structure of civilisation.

ANCIENT GIFT ECONOMY

let’s start by exploring some surviving, ancient gift economies; full-scale societal practices of gifting (and, as importantly, receiving).

there’s the Longhouse communities of the Iroquis (and indeed, many tribal communities) that emphasise shared resources. There’s the Moka exchange in Papa New Guinea which entails a perpetually competitive ‘bigger’ gift of pigs to comment on social status and reputation. And there’s the potlach gifting of North America; a ceremonious distribution of gifts that re-affirms individual social status.

but perhaps the most studied is the Kula ring.

the Kula Ring is a complex, multi-layered contract of gift giving among the trobriand islanders in Papa New Guinea. It’s not structured like christmas, or birthdays, or new years; it’s no ordinary kind of gift-giving. No, the Trobrianders send their (completely ornamental and functionally unsound) gifts with their strongest men through treacherous oceans via wooden canoe, to be given to the neighbouring island. When the gifts (often ornaments with no inherent value, like shell necklaces and bands made from abundant local material) are given over to the neighbouring tribes chief, an ornate story of the journey is woven. Often the men fabricate giant sea creatures and deadly oceans, near-death, and mythological tragedies to explain their expedition with this gift. That story is half the value. The local tribe protect this wooden necklace with great care, until they’re ready to pass it on to the next island in the ring with their strongest men, their own stories and new ornaments.

there are many wild questions that arise from this; what is the point in risking life and limb for a handmade wooden or shell ornament? why the elaborate stories? why has it continued since time began?

the answers tell us half the story of why us humans must, on a pscyhological level, give gifts.

the handmade ornaments are nothing but symbols. The ornaments transcend their physicality to instead carry the almost biblical story of hardship that their neighbours endured in order to give them something, for free. It means sacrifice for the greater good, it means ‘we’re on your side’, it means ‘we can put ourselves aside for you, should we need to, and even if we shouldn’t need to’, it means ‘you can trust us’, it means ‘we care’. And that means a lot for a tribe trying to survive. Is it dissimilar to what we mean when we offer our friends birthday gifts? Not really. We still mean to say “i care”, “here’s my attention upon you which means that I accept you.”

so, why doesn’t the kula trade stop? why must we repay our friend if they give us something out of the blue? why is gift-giving a newton ball, swinging through time?

because gift-giving creates a ‘balance of debt’, and that’s the exact evolutionary benefit. That’s probably why the kula trade started in the first place.

When we receive, we feel an itch to give back. We’re creatures obsessive of balance and we feel disorder in our bones.

this is the form of gifting societies that existed before money, we gave selflessly, and we received as selflessly so, in the name of expressing a social contract to maintain care and harmony. And it’s most likely the reason we started to give to the God’s too.

GIFTING TO AND FROM GOD

We’ve always been religious creatures -we need to believe in something more, wether it be because it actually exists or must exist to give us our moral and meaning, it doesn’t matter, we need God’s to apease. And because God primarily exists as an expression of our imagination (wether it truthfully is or not), we tend to personify its needs. We believe the Gods must function under the laws of nature as we do, so we give to express our intention of harmony with our God.

What kinds of gifts do Gods give to humans? Tracking what we historically and culturally believe the Gods want to gift us might say something about the nature of our relationship to the divine, and to the reason we believe in Godly behaviour, and perhaps to the reason we want to maintain a relationship with them at all.

In ancient Greece the olive tree was believed to be a divine gift. It’s a symbolic part of many myths, the olive oil was used on the skin for good luck, and the olive tree was considered a highly valued prize. The olive tree; an abundantly resourceful crop.
In Aztec society, maize was considered the gift of life. The little corn pods and its growing patterns and its nutritious abundance each resembled something holey supportive of life.
In hinduism, there’s the cow. A scared animal offering milk, meat, work power, and clothes. Everything a civilisation needs to live.
There’s bamboo in chinese culture. Again, another abundantly flexible resource; something that ought to be carefully protected for the survival of a group.
The date palm of the middle east
Cacao in the Mayan culture (a resourceful material, but also transcendental - representative of a new value; attaining a higher-than-human vantage
The 5 sacred trees of celtic tradition - again, an important survival resource

The pattern is clear -gifts from Gods’ are that which helps us to survive. Perhaps, because our lives depend on the kindness of strangers (nature included), we must believe in the naturalness and moral standard of gift giving. Random acts of kindness have indeed been shown to reduce our blood pressure, and activate dopamine reward centres. Owning a gift has been shown to induce oxytocin release, a form of social bonding, and we do feel an increased sense of control. We are wired to give, perhaps for survival reasons, perhaps in mirroring how we perceive that the earth has given to us.

GIFTS TO THE DEAD

On our side of the realm of the dead, mortuary gifts can act as a transfer of knowledge. We know this person in terms of their status and their identity, and this knowledge can be represented in the form of objects and paraphanelia. We don’t want this person to lose their identity on the other side of the unknown, for how are we ever to stay in touch with them? And so we preserve what we want to know of them and their soul and send them on their way. The earliest gifted burial found (that, by default, hints at a religious-esque belief in something beyond) may date back to 2,800 BC in ancient Greece. There is further disputable evidence that gifted burials took place even earlier among the Neanderthals about 65,000–35,000 years ago. Perhaps gifting is a product of evolution. This concept of soul entiwined with gift mirrors the maori concept of Hau, which was discussed in Marcell Mauss’s study of Gift economy where he eventually concluded that the objects we are given "are seen to partake of something of the personality of the giver".

MYTHS + THE ARCHETYPAL NATURE OF OUR GIFTING

One angle we can explore the truth of gifting from is myth and fairytale. We bury all of our truths in myth and fairytale, light enough for a child to absorb, deeply engrained enough so that the message will stand the test of time.

Perhaps the most famous example of a gift-giving archetype is Father Christmas. Typically Father christmas is a figure manifest in various ways in European folklore, but there are similiar figures as far as Japan. It might be that father christmas -in all his different forms- might be an incarnation of winter itself, seeing as the places in which the archetype prevails are distinctly seasonal. It would serve ancient peoples well to believe that harsh winters, typically robbing them of resources, had a softer, more benevolent edge. That there was a reward for their suffering, a gift for the good who don’t surrender to the bitterness of winter.

Another famous legendary ‘gifting’ story is the trojan horse. The trojans horse is a gift given by the enemy to a rival town. A gift that was supposedly a peace offering but which contained a belly of enemy warriors. Once the gift was (literally and figuratively) accepted and bought inside, the warriors leapt forth and destroyed the relationship. This story teaches us that gifts can function politically, and that they aren’t always an act of goodwill.

The story shows us the implicit danger to the receiver in accepting a gift. To accept is to enter into a interdependent relationship so that you want to be sure you understand the givers intentions. As is not the case in the trojan horse

“every gift calls forth a counter gift” - even in the idea that we are naturally ‘gifted’ at something (by kindness of the God’s) we know that there is a shadow or a counter to that.

PSYCHOLOGY OF GIFTING

On the flip side, in a more usual and un-political setting, there’s something naturally quite reassuring about gifting. It’s like we understand that if a person can give a gift, then they must have control over their emotions and they might not be as likely to explode in a volcano of unfelt, unexpressed emotion. Gifting is also reassuring because it solidifies theirs or our identity.

Think about a time when a good friend (or, supposedly good friend) gifted you something you were less than pleased with. Sure, you buried your contempt but secretly you boiled with confusion. Do they not know me at all? I would never identify myself with this. And that’s that -a misfired gift is an attack on personal identity. On the other hand, a well-fired gift is a pleasing, cathartic, satisfactory solidification of the identity we’re always trying to solidify in this uncontrollable world. We solidify our identity with external paraphernalia, it’s why we own things in the first place. So, to be given something is a complete reflection of how well a job we are doing at articulating the identity that we feel aligned with. It’s important that the world reflects back to us who we believe that we are.

Occasionally, the gift also reflects the identity of the giver. What parts of you they’re likely to consider, what they focus on, what they understand, and such. But there’s a dangerously destructive line here; you never give a gift that topples the scales of equality. You never gift a rolex to your friend on the poverty line, it’s an insult, despite its use. You’re procliaming your higher status than them, and that’s no contract of harmony. The only case you’d gift up the gradient is in the case of political interest -you want something from them.

GIFTING TABOO

Another sticky -but deftly dealt with- aspect of gift giving is life necessities. This is where charity and real gift-economy blur lines unhealthily. It’s typically taboo to frame life necessities as a gift when one person has them freely and the other doesn’t. Typically, in gift societies, life necessities are collected collaboratively, stored together, and distributed evenly. Excesses are gifts. You can see that this collaborative effort of collecting life necessities depends on knowing thy neighbour -the system breaks down under an engorged population. This area is where market economy, such as owns the world today, comes in well, and where charity becomes a surrogate sharing effort.

GIFT ECONOMY TODAY?

let’s pause and look at what creates a gift inside a gift economy :

the value is loosely / informally tracked
indirect and cross-directional value
delayed reciprocation
the emphasis in a gift exchange is on strengthening the bond between the givers and receivers through positive debt
intangible / spiritual reward like karma

Gift economy seems idyllic, it seems like a gold-standard to strive towards as a global population of too-many. But there are ,of course, major drawbacks. A gift economy relies on utter faith in the goodwill of your tribe, and unfortunately, we have no evidence or reason to believe in the selfless motivations of our neighbours anymore. Their selfishness is more beneficial to their survival than the selflessness of our gifting ancestors. We’re also never taught ‘reciprocity’ as an honour or ,indeed, even a norm. Gifting depends on the belief in selfless reciprocity as a value.

what do you think? could we make a mass scale gift economy work? or do micro gift-economies radiate the same positive influence on the world?

what we don’t understand about gift-giving.