2. No Thanks

Given all the work that goes into getting children to say "thank you," it is plain that people brought up in European and North American cultures greatly prize gratitude—and not only gratitude but its prompt and appropriate expression. Children do not thank unless they are taught to do so, however, and must therefore be induced to provide the words expected by adults. But we are also forced to realize that thanking is not "natural" behaviour when we discover that many other societies are found not to practise it.

Taking for granted the desirability of gratitude for civilization in general, explorers, anthropologists, and other European travellers from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries reported their horror when they came across groups of people, whole societies, who never thanked them. We might feel comfortably tempted, from our post-colonial vantage point, to find an explanation in the fact that the natives had reason to feel resentment rather than gratitude towards their unlooked-for "guests." But then, the natives did not thank each other, either. Many languages have no word for "thanks." And those that have one do not necessarily mean what we mean by it.

"The natives are ungrateful," travellers exclaimed over and over again; they were also selfish, obstinate, and sly (Europeans rarely thought them unintelligent).¹ "The Northern Indians," wrote Samuel Hearne in the 1770s,"seem to be entirely unacquainted even with the name of gratitude."² Richard Burton believed that there were no words for gratitude in any of the many "Oriental languages" known to him.³

Often the behaviour of the inhabitants seemed absolutely outrageous to Europeans who encountered them. "One of them wanted my waistcoat," wrote an eighteenth-century French visitor to Tasmania, "the bright colours of which had attracted his attention. He had already several times demanded it of me, but I had so positively refused that I did not think he would return to the charge. However, one minute, when I was not paying attention, he seized hold of me by the waistcoat and pointed his spear at me, brandishing it furiously.... I had hardly escaped this danger, when I found myself threatened, if not as perilously, at least as disagreeably. One of the large gold earrings which I wore excited the desires of another savage, who, without saying anything, slid behind me, cunningly slipped his finger through the ring, and tugged so hard that he would undoubtedly have torn my ear had not the clasp given way. It must be remembered that we had given them mirrors, knives, coloured glass beads, pearls, handkerchiefs, snuff boxes, etc; that I had stripped myself of nearly all the buttons on my coat, which, being gilt copper, had seemed specially valuable to them on account of their brightness."⁴

The writer saw greed as the cause of this violence. He may well have been right: we cannot think of pre-modern non-Europeans as ipso facto innocents. But whatever the morality of the situation in the Tasmanian's mind, it is beyond doubt that this writer experienced a flagrant impropriety, a flouting of his own rules of courtesy; added to which, the man was obviously ungrateful. The Tasmanians, however, were said elsewhere to have been "not ungrateful" when they received medical help, for instance, although it was not explained how this lack of ingratitude was expressed. Another account, of new English arrivals in Tasmania in the nineteenth century, described how they tried to eat toad fish, and the natives, "perceiving its preparation for food, endeavoured to show, by gestures, that it was not to be eaten, and exhibited its effects by the semblance of death."⁵ They also saved the lives of Europeans on several recorded occasions from drowning and from fire. Nevertheless, after many breakdowns of communication and violence on both sides, a "war of extermination" eventually wiped out the Tasmanians.

A few observers insisted that the foreign societies they were describing did have words for thanks. "Among some Indian tribes," wrote Washington Matthews in 1899, "it is said there is no word for thanks, but the Navahoes have one, and use it as we would."⁶ Medical help was repeatedly reported as having been gratefully received, as when, in North-Western Canada in 1793, a Scottish doctor came across an Indian with a festering hand and a thumb hanging from it by a small strip of flesh. The young man's life was in "a state of hazard," and his wound "in such an offensive state, and emitted such a putrid smell, that it required all the resolution I possessed to examine it. His friends had done every thing in their power to relieve him; but as it consisted only in singing about him, and blowing upon his hand, the wound, as may be well imagined, had got into the deplorable state in which I found it." The doctor, using methods only somewhat more advanced, managed to heal the wound, washing it with the juice of the root of a spruce fir tree, wrapping it in the root's bark ("a very painful dressing"), cleaning it three times a day, and applying to it Canadian balsam, wax, and tallow from a burning candle. The thumb was removed with the aid of vitriol. When he was well enough, the healed Indian joyfully set off on a hunting expedition and brought back with him the tongue of an elk, which he offered to the doctor, and there were, when the doctor finally left, "warmest acknowledgements" from himself and his family.⁷

The Inuit, explorers said, often failed to have "the courtesy" to thank people when gifts were offered them. But these unacknowledged presents were often remembered for long periods of time, in fact, and their givers were astonished when, much later, they were suddenly offered presents in return. A visitor to the Bushmen of southern Africa in 1822–24 admitted that he could not understand their language, but when he gave them food, "their looks" expressed their thanks; the women were more expressive than the men. And he added that he felt ashamed to receive so much gratitude for having done so little.⁸

Many cultural systems, in controlling everyday behaviour among their members, simply do not call for people to say "thank you." Even where thanking formulae exist, they are often kept for purely formal use—for deference before strangers, for instance, who might possibly prove to be unpredictable, dangerous, hostile, or overbearing. In family groups, within the household, or the band, or the tribe, it is often actually rude to thank: people feel the practice to be cold and distant, not the way people close to each other and who understand each other should speak. Members within the family or the extended family or the carefully defined group are obliged to help one another and give to one another whenever there is a need. And the required actions are not expected to result in thanks.

"I have often watched toddlers," wrote Audrey Richards of the Bemba of Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, in the 1930s, "starting on a slow and arduous progress from hut to hut, wherever they might expect to find dainties and knew they could take them without rebuke. Within this circle of relatives the child early realizes that he is only getting what is his due." And conversely, the child was learning who the people were from whom he could definitely expect to receive. One day Richards asked why a young man who had received a present from his relatives simply took it without saying thank you. She was told, "He doesn't thank because they are his own people. If it had been an outsider, he would have said: 'Thank you, Sir,' because it would have been from pity they gave to him. To one's own people one does not thank, not at all! You say that is good. That is all."⁹ Outsiders gave "from pity" because they were themselves moved to give, although they were free not to. Insiders did so because they had to. "That is good" was all one said to one's own: there did exist a necessity of expressing satisfaction at the supplying of one's wants.

People in groups where such obligations exist may complain if they think they have not received enough. Both they and others might discuss the transaction, and criticize any lack of generosity or impropriety in the giving—taking too long to comply with a request, for example. People are allowed to ask, and they expect to get what they asked for. Others outside the transaction have the task of exerting pressure to ensure that duty is done. "Gratitude" within such a system is irrelevant.

Members of small, self-sufficient traditional groups must share what they have to eat. Those who live by hunting depend on the luck of the hunt. Victorious bringers-down of game for meat have from time immemorial carried home their catch, first having eaten the most perishable bits of the animal—the liver and the other innards—immediately after the kill. They then proceed to carve up the animal and give pieces of it to their relatives and the members of their hunting band, each of whom may have a right to a particular piece—a flipper, a foreleg, a rib—whatever the nature of the beast and the pre-established rules of the group. Each of these pieces is then cut up again and given to people dependent upon the receiver.¹⁰ Nobody can be said to be grateful for receiving his or her part. There may be thankfulness, however, for the fact that an animal has been provided to feed them, and when this is the case, a piece of the creature may be offered to the people's divinities, who in this way are given their shares, just as human beings in the group are granted theirs.

The Inuit hunter hauling back a seal he had killed was required to give away all but his own carefully defined portion of the meat. He knew that he had been lucky, and he enjoyed his good fortune and the honour it brought him. He was praised for the skill with which he hurled the harpoon—but not thanked for kindness or generosity in sharing out the meat. He gave almost everything away in the knowledge that somebody else, not he, might be lucky next time. Then it would be his turn to receive—indeed, to expect—gifts in kind from the latest catch. Such behaviour constituted a sort of insurance, a security for everyone. In 1824 William Parry commented that "the regulation does credit to their wisdom, but has nothing to do with their generosity."¹¹ Ethnographers constantly reiterate that the sharing principle is not dropped when there is little to eat; it is maintained, rather, with more vigilance than ever.¹²

Children are "brought up" in such societies to share, just as our own offspring are made to say "thank you." Audrey Richards describes how infants were taught in the African society she studied: "An unexpected present or find must be divided with any other babies sitting near. Any European food, such as an orange or a bit of bread, that I might happen to give away was torn into the tiniest fragments, and mothers who are such lax disciplinarians in other respects, speak quite sharply to their children on this one issue. I have seen a woman seize a lump of pumpkin out of a baby's hand and say in most vehement protest: 'You give some to your friend, you child, you! You sit and eat alone! That is bad what you do.'"¹³ Eating is not something one should do alone. Food is not merely nourishment, but also an expression, in its sharing, of relationship. The sharing is not a matter of how one feels: it is demanded, and the demand is enforced by parents and later by everybody in the group.

Africans today who travel abroad must take home presents for family and friends left behind. Huge suitcases full of goods are hauled onto airplanes; very little inside may be for the traveller himself. A Congolese man I met was spending two more years in France although he badly wanted to go home: he had not accumulated enough presents yet to return decently to his family and friends. A Solomon Islander, according to an ethnographer writing in the 1880s, would return from working three years on the plantations of Fiji or Queensland, and everything he came home with would be taken, as a matter of course, by others.¹⁴

People have often created a network of security and excluded violence among themselves by not being possessive about what they owned. They have felt they could ask for, and get, what they wanted. The ethnographers and others who arrived in ships on their shores, and who were shocked at signs of a lack of courtesy, failed to realize that, as outsiders, they simply were not implicated in any of the existing gift-giving and sharing networks. They appeared to the inhabitants bizarre in the extreme, hostile or foolish strangers who could not be imagined fitting in. Not the least odd was their refusal to part with the goods people wanted. They did offer their beads and knives and handkerchiefs, but they inexplicably refused their waistcoats and earrings.

And they came, after all, with so much. William Parry saw that his ships, with their wood and iron—substances as valuable to the Inuit as "hoards of gold and silver" to a European—must have been a temptation, and so he allowed for a certain amount of pilfering: "We must not fail to make due allowance for the degree of temptation to which they were daily exposed, amidst the boundless stores of wealth which our ships appeared to them to furnish." (An earlier traveller, however, the Comte de La Pérouse, despised the Indians of Hudson Bay whom he invited to visit his boat, and who "never disdained to steal a nail or an old pair of trousers" while they were on board.¹⁵) But Parry admitted disappointment when he found that the high degree of honesty the Inuit showed at first gradually relaxed "as they grew more familiar with us."¹⁶ Apparently, neither Parry nor La Pérouse could see that, to these people, he who has much is expected to give his surplus away; that a stranger is to be treated with respect (that is, distance), but someone known begins to join the group, with its attendant requirement that he should share. If somebody who is "one of us" wants something, the "courteous" thing to do is to give it to him. In the Solomon Islands, they went further. When someone was asked for a thing, he gave it because "by a refusal he will incur the enmity of the person who has made the request."¹⁷

H.B. Guppy described the "disposition" of the Solomon Islanders in 1887: "Often when during my excursions I have come upon some man who was preparing a meal for himself and his family, I have been surprised at the openhanded way in which he dispensed the food to my party of hungry natives. No gratitude was shown towards the giver, who apparently expected none, and only mildly remonstrated when my men were unusually voracious."¹⁸ Sharing, in other words, went on not only within the (family) group, but also between the group and visiting outsiders—even should strangers arrive unexpectedly. "Open-handedness" of this kind is what we call "hospitality." It is offered by hosts to guests—by those at home, who are expected to give to those who are away from home (and by definition "foreigners" to the hosts), and who therefore receive. They receive because they are in need, and also for the same reason that the Inuit seal hunter gave most of his meat away: because one day the host himself might be travelling and need assistance either from this guest or from somebody else who keeps the rules of courtesy. Furthermore, this sudden guest—or even a previously invited one—is, at least relatively speaking, unknown. He is a possible threat, a potential enemy. He is to be placated, therefore, honoured with attentions, and if at all possible given what he wants.

In languages that have developed from Indo-European roots, the words host and guest come from the same stem, which contains both the g of guest and the h of host: ghostis. Hosts and guests play different roles, but they are actors in one "play," a hospitable action. Ghostis also provided us with the word hostile, so close is the idea of hospitality to the possibility of animus lurking in either host or guest, or both. (A hostage is a person forcibly, and therefore discourteously, detained by a group not his own. Originally the word meant a person held as guarantee to a treaty of peace between two previously antagonistic sides.) A guest is an outsider who has been ritually "domesticated," made temporarily part of the host's domus, or house. He is given food, offered gestures of affability, and sometimes presented with gifts on his departure—for he must be free to leave. There may be genuine interest in him and delight in his company. But underlying the performance is the formal and primary aim of "disarming" him, of forestalling any likelihood of violence or resentment.¹⁹

No matter how "ungrateful" the inhabitants seemed to their European visitors, according to early ethnographical reports, they were nearly always credited with generosity when they were allowed the role of hosts: they were at home, giving, while the foreign adventurers accepted the role of guests, away, receiving. For ritually speaking, the host is always the powerful one in relation to the guest. He is on home territory, and the guest is likely to be outnumbered in the encounter. The guest is treated well on that very account, so that the host can show his magnanimity, his self-control, and his authority over the others in his group.

The other side of the same coin that is hospitality is the fear that can accompany the arrival of another, especially of an unknown other, inside one's own house. That person must be turned into a guest, given a guest's role, with the rules attendant upon it: accept your host's attentions, be seen to receive them passively and admiringly, and do not attempt to advise your host, order his family about, or criticize him. Look pleased by his kindness. And finally, show yourself disposed to invite your host back one day: you shall then be the host and he the guest. If there is a place for gratitude, it is here, on the part of the guest. A host, in turn, often feels that guests in his house honour him and give him pleasure by their presence. This too could be construed as something like gratitude. He should certainly show pleasure at their presence, whether he feels it or not.

There is every indication from travellers' tales that they received plenty of hospitality. "Both as to food and accommodation the best they had were always at our service," William Parry wrote; the Inuit showed hospitality and "good breeding." "The kindly offices of drying and mending our clothes, cooking our provision and thawing snow for our drink, were performed by the women with an obliging cheerfulness which we shall not easily forget."²⁰

Of the Ila of Zambia, Edwin Smith and Andrew Dale wrote in 1920,"Ba-ila houses are open; a visitor may enter by the open door without speaking or knocking, though it is considered more polite to ask permission to enter." The host then had food prepared especially for the visitor. The neighbouring Barotsi had a duty to give all guests presents of uncooked food to take away with them, but the Ila felt that wives should cook food for guests—it showed less compulsion and less perfunctoriness, especially when the head of the house or one of his wives served the food in person. The host tasted the food first, within sight of his guest, to prove that there had been no tampering or witchcraft: the guest was recognized as possibly being even more nervous than the host. It was rude to make the guest eat alone; one of the villagers had to share his meal. "On receiving food the visitor is not expected to say anything," but when he had finished eating he announced, "I am satisfied. You have given me food. Nda lumba."We are not told the literal meaning in English of this phrase, but it is translated in this text as "I return thanks."

Though he had received hospitality, the guest was permitted to give a present to his host only if the guest was a hunter or a passing trader. Ordinary people, while they were guests, were on no account to give anything in return for hospitality. The host would be offended. He would say, "Do I sell food?" The guest, on the other hand, was supposed to show pleasure, and a desire to come again and visit: "Ozona ozona!" he might exclaim: "Tomorrow and tomorrow!" meaning "Give it to me again and again." For, as the Ila say, "The fly that loves you is the one that sits on you": one must visit and so show affection. (Nothing is said of how irritating flies can be.)²¹ In hospitality, first one gives, and then, later on, it is the other's turn to do so. A guest must agree to be passive. One should accept, give nothing, and save up all of the obligation one has incurred. One must then pay it back—with interest—on some future occasion.

A web of obligation is created over time. It is a form of security—but it can also cause resentment. One carries around a need to pay somebody else back: where the duty is strongly felt, it can seem like a menace. This metaphor of weight being borne exists in European languages: when we carry out an obligation, we say we "discharge" it, lay it down, and so relieve our aching backs. Peter Freuchen said he was put straight by Sorqaq, an Inuit host, on the matter of thanking: "You must not thank for your meat; it is your right to get parts. In this country, nobody wishes to be dependent on others. Therefore, there is nobody who gives or gets gifts, for thereby you become dependent. With gifts you make slaves just as with whips you make dogs."²²

This statement questions various European assumptions about "societies of the Gift," as such groups are often called. First, according to this Inuit host, his people see themselves as independent. They are not simple, blind, ant-like components of communal patterns. Second, Sorqaq, at least, refused to call the sharing of meat "gift-giving" because to him gifts meant subordination. They were therefore painful to receive and degrading. He would have much preferred to feel that giving and receiving were obligatory. And so a foreign man had to be advised to refrain from repeating his entirely inappropriate ritual of thanking.