The Gift, and Empathy
Marcel Mauss and Rosemary Wahtolla Trommer
I read Marcel Mauss’s ‘The Gift’ for the first time last year. It was part of a reading list for a course I was studying at the time. Of all the works I read during those 6 months of intense engagement with various perspectives on the “social”, this work affected me the most. Initially, I read the text cold - ignoring the preface, and other supporting secondary material, including the translator’s introduction.
A text can deliver you from the dystopic real in a way that no living thing can. Sometimes the dead whisper to us through the immortal syntax of their ideas. Thought lives in language the way certain rocks, embedded in riverbeds, serve as sentinels. For decades they brace themselves against the current. They stand firm - unflinching, even, in the torrent of the writer’s meandering poetry. In the quiet topography of the book, the idea grows. Lines form on its surface, and it begins to evolve into its true shape. The epiphany is always unexpected. Perhaps the idea senses it - the moment when it will be dislodged from the page.
One encounters intellectual arguments with humility. The dead are far more demanding than the living. You have to surrender to their instruction; their dictation. Make no mistake, it is nothing else but that. One could romanticise the philosopher’s rumination, their untethered imagination. One could call The Gift a love letter, a revelation, or even a prophecy. But at the end of the day, you have to surrender. You have to suspend the self in order for the writer to lead you by the hand through a forest of their own creation. At some point, when the foliage is thick, and you can only hear the anxiety of birds, the forest opens its heart to you. The writer starts to speak. Quietly at first; but with a tenderness that no living thing could simulate.
The encounter with a philosophical text is one of humility. When the room is empty, light streams in with the persistence of intuition, falling on the bare walls of the curious mind. The only indication that something miraculous has taken place is the frenzied dance of dust, in the illuminated corridor of a stray beam of sunburst.
I remember the exact moment when the encounter soared into something sublime; when something leapt from the text and planted itself in my body. I was walking towards the library, after getting some breakfast. I had spent the entire night with Mauss. The book didn’t pull me in immediately. But I read it, like one was reading a book of fiction, getting familiar with Mauss’s style of storytelling, rather than the conceptual implications of his narrative. On the first reading, I felt like a ladybird on a window, able to see clearly, without touching - a room, in which each static object, moved into its rightful place. But after I finished the text, and as I walked, I felt his words settle down in my mind. There was moment, when a thought occurred to me - a specific realisation.
Mauss was speaking about the ‘soul’ of things. How something lives in objects, and how it mediates social relationships, and hierarchies. While I felt that his analysis wasn’t always sound, and there were gaps in his survey of literature, his belief in the sequential logic of his argument was firm. He spoke also of a familiar trope when speaking about the economy - ‘wealth-in-people’. The movement that brought home his argument to me was when I felt a resonance, a familiarity with a certain trope, but in the discipline of psychoanalysis. In the Lacanian paradigm of desire being a chain that is never fully closed, that always extends, there is a vacuum. This vacuum is the means that desire is never truly fulfilled - its essential character is that of the lacuna; of anticipation, but never completeness. It is this same movement that my mind became awake to in Mauss’s gift.
Bill Maurer, in his foreword to Jane Guyer’s translation of the canonical text refers tangentially to this movement:
In Guyer’s hands, we see the gift is just plain weird, a never-completed action involving always more than the transacting parties (Italicisation mine), a not-seamless coming together of perspectives or worlds or contending abstractions. The text itself is like this, too, of course. That is why so many of us continually return to it. We know the big story. Yet we mine the footnotes for the other stories that lie within.
I will not presume to share Mauss’s theoretical propositions in this post. On the contrary, my intent in sharing a couple of ideas from the text, is to try and interrogate the way in which a reader feels their way through a piece of writing; any piece of writing. For me the text is the terrain. I am able to navigate the world (a text in itself) with the tropes that I receive from texts which speak to me. These gifts are not intellectual. The transmission occurs through sensation. The body learns to sense modes of ‘being’, and ‘having’, in the writer’s words. It is attuned to the language of expression, not merely the idea. I speak here of the form, not the content. I believe that even Maurer is referring to this, when he says: ‘The text itself is like this, too’. Of course, these categories are inextricable from each other. But it is important, I feel, to highlight the affective role of genre in the reading of theoretical works.
In this way, a kind of tareeka is passed on. I am somewhat sentimental about knowledge production, and art. I celebrate collisions and convergences, affinities, and even rivalries. I think it is important to form such networks of support and accountability. Is this not the temperament that was applauded during the peak of Modernist enquiry when the individual talent stood before the pantheon of tradition?
What face must I prepare for the future, without absorbing the expressions of those who tread similar paths before me? Reading is an emotional activity. Writing, on the other hand is about sensation. When feelings sit in the body, transmitted through the vehicle of knowledge, their surge for freedom inevitably sets the imagination free through writing. Writing, in this idealistic proposition, happens without the express acknowledgment of knowledge. Language moves with such momentum that it outruns, even thought. Have you felt this? Have you felt the surprise of encountering a fresh line of poetry that has coalesced on the page, without you knowing how it got there? Have you wondered how it all made sense, without craft, or logic?
I share with you, only two ideas from The Gift in the hope that you find your own way into its generosity. Even these allusions are not direct - I submit to other, more intelligent readers of Mauss, who words have helped me fortify my own learnings from the text. Maurer cites Keith Hart’s reading of two impulses that lie at the core of the text:
…The expanded edition creates an expanse—a new (to us), vast, open yet dense territory, which also permits new relations as we explore afresh our existing connections to this foundational text.
And a method of companionship. It was central to Mauss’ politics. As Keith Hart has summarized, in making sense of Mauss’ cooperativism: “Mauss held that there are two prerequisites for being human: we each have to learn to be self-reliant to a high degree and we have to belong to others in order to survive, merging our identities in a bewildering variety of social relationships” (Hart 2000: 192).
These two contesting tropologies, seemingly at odds with each other, are quite radical in their combined impact. Self-reliance and belonging. We have to belong to others in order to survive.
Is this possible? How does one empty oneself of the very thing that makes us whole? How do we negate the self, and identity, trusting our futures completely, with the ethic of the transaction, and the ‘other’? This is economics at its romantic best, in some sense. This is pay it forward, but it also a psychosocial rendering of empathy.
I have been thinking a lot about empathy recently. I am still finding the words to describe, for example, the feeling I had when I found out that the great dictator was not going to win the complete mandate of the people. That much was enough. I remember telling a friend at that time: “The last time my heart beat this fast was when I was in love!” That realisation was somewhat unexpected. I did not believe, then, that an external event could have this kind of impact on me. In retrospect, I observed, for myself, that the supreme leader had reassured us all of two things: 1) the people aren’t as unthinking as they let on to be (or they are made out to be). 2)politics is personal.
Even as we are united in the shared stain of violence, or the inability to process what is happening to us. I feel that empathy is, in the last analysis, another kind of chain that is never really completed. Like desire, it eludes us.
Last night as I settled into my room in a homestay with a friend, we heard a loud, frantic yelping outside. We ran into the balcony that overlooked the road by the river. A child was leaning on the railing. She had seen everything. She told us that a speeding car had driven over a puppy, injuring both its back legs. It was a hit-and-run.
We rushed down to the street, to get a closer look. The poor animal was howling in pain, and shock. Both its back legs were useless, almost sliced into 2 - the feet were barely attached to the knees. As I looked into the puppy’s terror filled eyes, I remember thinking that we were the worst species on the planet. I remember, also, being acutely aware of the fact that I could never really empathise with the puppy, that I could never presume to understand, or even feel what she had felt. At the most, I could reassure her trembling heart, even though I had absolutely no way of knowing, that everything would be alright. I could cradle her pain, and her grief, for a moment. But how could I ever feel what she was feeling?
Thank you for listening to my meandering thoughts. It is a beautiful sunny day. The people who are hosting me managed to track down the driver of the vehicle that had injured the dog. He was stopped at the check-post further down the road. The dog did eat some milk and rice, eventually, before it was rushed to the hospital. I pray that she made it out alive, and that she will find a caregiver who would help her navigate the world on two legs.
Feel free to write in (to poetly@pm.me) with any questions, queries, or comments. We will write back as soon as we find the space, and the time.
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This made my day! Thank you for expressing it all w such empathy🌻