8. The Three Graces

The ancient Roman Graces were three beautiful, young, naked (or, in earlier times, skimpily dressed) virgin goddesses. They were shown dancing with their hands entwined, sometimes in a circle but usually in a row, with two facing forward and the middle one backward. Seneca, writing a massive treatise on gift-giving in the first century AD, mentions the Three Graces irritably and in passing. He had to bring them in, he complains, because all writers invariably discussed what the Graces meant—as if they meant anything at all—when they talked of gifts. These people (whose writings have not come down to us) kept asking, says Seneca, why there were three of them. Why were they sisters? Why were their hands interlocked? Why were they happy, youthful, and virginal women? And why did they wear so little clothing?¹

The Graces, it was generally agreed, represented the social obligations of giving, receiving, and returning gifts and favours. They danced holding hands because a benefit passes from one person to another and eventually returns to the giver. This was so firmly believed that many did not think primarily of the giving of the first giver, but habitually jumped a step and called her "the one who earns benefits": she gave, but would eventually get something back.² The Graces are girls because both Gratia and Charis (the Greek for "Grace") are feminine nouns; abstractions are commonly feminine in European languages, and therefore tend to be embodied by women. Their beauty is the elegance of an uninterrupted sequence: they represent gifts circulating without hitch. They are happy because the whole cycle is joyous, virginal because gifts must not be bribes but rather "pure and undefiled and holy in the eyes of all,"³ and young because the memory of a gift should not "grow old": it must not be forgotten but should provoke a response, and not too late.

The clothing worn by the Graces in earlier times was loose because nothing should restrict the flow of gifts, and transparent because favours when granted "desire to be seen." The Graces later undressed completely; they became proverbial for their nakedness. "Nudae Gratiae" was a phrase a Roman would sagely produce in conversation: "Naked are the Graces."⁴ It meant that one should be open-hearted and without hidden intentions when giving, receiving, and returning gifts and favours. Erasmus, who comments upon the adage, adds that "some apply the proverb to ungrateful people, because they strip the Graces, as it were, by always accepting kindness in some form and giving nothing in return. It will thus be appropriate for those who are reduced to want by their generosity, because whatever they get they give lavishly to their friends."⁵

The Graces were three, and all alike: Giving was a Charis, Receiving a Charis, and Returning a Charis. But Seneca now brings up an important point: the first giver is more honourable, he says, higher and better than the other two; she is "the eldest sister."⁶ This idea has inspired—but also haunted—gift-giving, in the West at least, for two thousand years. Locking onto the Obligation to Return (the third Grace), it declares that even when—as he must—a receiver becomes himself a giver by returning a gift, the second giver can never match the virtue of the first.

In this model, to give first is to give without obligation, and therefore to be more virtuous, and also to place oneself in an impregnably powerful position. The receiver repays later on, but always because he or she is obliged, by the mysterious law of reciprocity, to do so; only the first giver gave freely. Subsequent giving can never erase the superiority of the one who gave first, any more than a younger sister can catch up with an older sister's age. In the early twentieth century, Georg Simmel, another of the founders of sociology, expressed the apparently still operative rule as follows: "Once we have received something good from another person, once he has preceded us with his action, we no longer can make up for it completely, no matter how much our own return gift or service may objectively or legally surpass his own. The reason is that his gift, because it was first, has a voluntary character which no return gift can have ... The first gift is given in full spontaneity; it has a freedom without any duty, even without the duty of gratitude."⁷ By "the duty of gratitude" Simmel meant not feeling thankful, but the obligation to "give back."

It follows that giving somebody something or doing something to help another (always because of the iron law of reciprocity) can actually be an aggressive act. We saw an example in the Japanese gift-giver who forced a man to do him a favour by means of his gift.⁸ This, in a culture with a powerful preference for modesty of demeanour, is the reason why the irruption of one's gift into another's life demands to be salved by conventional deprecations. The Japanese habitually say, when handing over a gift, that it has little value: Tsumaranai mono desu ga, "It's not worth having, but..."⁹ And offering a tidbit they murmur, "Although this does not taste good, please have it."¹⁰ We ourselves respond to expressions of gratitude from the receiver with "Oh, it's nothing" or "Don't mention it." A donor must always behave as though the receiver is self-evidently worthy of a gift, and therefore has no need to return anything. And etiquette, whether Japanese or Western, demands both modesty and a show of reluctance to create the first link in a chain of obligations to return. An assurance that there are "no strings attached" means that we wish the receiver to feel no obligation to give something back. The metaphor we use is that of being "bound" by obligations. The rule of reciprocity, we should note, is so widely known to be constraining that there is no reason to mention it: in saying "No strings attached!" we offer (adding to our generosity in giving) our polite release from what are understood to be its "ties." The word obligation itself derives from Latin ligare, "to bind," as in "ligaments."

Is giving-in-the-first-place merely a bid for higher rank? Or does it express a higher rank already held? (It is necessary, after all, to have the means to give.) Granted the higher status of the donor, the receiver can reduce, in giving back, something of his or her subservience. But what if people receive gifts and have little or nothing to give back? Should they not rightfully experience resentment at being forced to accept a lower status, to acknowledge a gap that they cannot close between their social position and that of the benefactor?

Mary Douglas's introduction to the new translation of Mauss, The Gift, is called "No Free Gifts." The title is not only a statement of what she believes to be the truth about gift-giving, but also prescriptive, no matter what donors like to think. Douglas says that people who receive charitable donations, including anonymous ones, should not be made to feel that they have received gifts at all. They "do not like the giver," for they have no personal relationship with whoever it is and are allowed to have none. And a receiver, especially one denied a chance to "make up for" the gift by reciprocating, is relegated to a lower status.¹¹ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in 1844, used similar words, but emphasized not the donor's but the receiver's wish for independence rather than relationship: "We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten."¹²

Aristotle, four centuries before Seneca (who does not mention him), conceived the Graces as equals: he sees no "eldest sister" more powerful than the other two. Aristotle thought that the very existence of the State depended on exchange and proportionate reciprocity—good for good and evil for evil—and that the Graces embodied Exchange, the necessary underpinning of society. "This is why," he continues, "we set up in a public place a shrine to the goddesses called Charitai, to remind men to return a kindness, that being a special characteristic of Charis. It is a duty not only to repay a service done one, but another time to take the initiative in doing a service oneself."¹³ In other words, the first Grace was not an expression of power or of a freedom others could not equal, but of duty to the State: the Obligation to Give. The question then arises (for it is not enough for us today to say merely that "it is a duty"): what is it that underwrites such an obligation, there being no law that one must give? And why does anyone give in the first place? The second question might be thought to be as perplexing as "Why give back?"

Plato gives an answer to "Why give back?" in the course of his dramatization of Socrates' decision to die rather than disrupt the functioning of the laws in Athens.¹⁴ Socrates had been tried, then unjustly condemned to death; his judges could not understand the worth of his mission to seek the truth. But he refused to run away and avoid his sentence. He could have done so—he was offered a clear choice—but he decided freely to lay down his life instead. Socrates' reasoning was that it is a citizen's obligation to obey the laws of his city out of gratitude¹⁵ for benefits received from the order provided by law, and from the state generally. Socrates demonstrates, in the course of the Crito, that Athens had indeed benefited him, in the past and on the whole, before the moment came when it condemned him to death. He had at any rate chosen to live in Athens, under her laws. Socrates knew that in running away he would not have been true to his own principles, and also that, in the end and when all was understood, his death for his convictions would benefit Athens: his death is therefore a gift. The point is carefully made that Socrates' "gift" to Athens is in fact a response made in freedom, to gifts already given. Gratitude is also shown to be in part a predisposition and a principled desire not to damage the interests of somebody—or some institution—that has benefited us. It was gratitude that motivated Socrates to offer, in the form of a "return" to Athens, the paradoxical gift of his obedience to the sentence of an unjust death—misunderstood as it was, for the time being, by all but a few.

The second Grace—the middle one, with her back to us—is the Obligation to Receive. But why should we feel obliged to accept a gift? It can be imperative, in fact, not to do so. In an American prison in the 1950s, for instance, inmates who wanted to dominate certain others in the jail were observed using all their ingenuity to smuggle cigarettes into the cells of their victims. It went without saying, apparently, that to accept these gifts was to admit dependence upon and subservience to the giver; return favours would be required: "These intended victims, in order to escape the threatened bondage, must find the owner and insist that the gifts be taken back."¹⁶ Similarly, a woman may well feel that in accepting a gift, she is being pressured into offering "favours" in return and is perfectly entitled to turn it down.

Receiving can be dangerous—even, and sometimes especially, should gifts appear to supply one's wants. In accepting gifts we should be selective, even wary. Nec omnia, nec passim, nec ab omnibus, the ancient and medieval adage had it: "Not everything, not everywhere, nor from everybody."¹⁷

Normally, the "obligation" to receive will include expressing thanks and showing consideration for the person giving. Manners decree that a person invited, for example to a meal, must reply as soon as possible, if only to make some mendacious excuse for turning the invitation down. For failing to respond is itself a response, and a hostile one. Refusing a gift usually signifies rejecting not merely a thing, but the person offering it. It deliberately breaks off the possibility of a link that the other wishes to forge. To push the gift away is to refuse the relationship, or to destroy it, in some cases definitively. This risks making not a friend, but an enemy. When a couple's engagement breaks down, the woman returns the engagement ring she was given; the action, with great economy, symbolizes the end of the connection.

Manners in all cultures are rules that cause us to pay attention to others and consider their feelings. We saw how the Japanese, who say "I am sorry" instead of "Thank you," are made by means of this convention to realize how their own presence has obliged the giver to give. And we, in giving presents, have to work hard to imagine what it is that the other would like to receive. In return the receiver must appreciate the trouble taken. She is constrained, by good manners, to thank the giver, and if possible to say how much and why she is pleased—even should the gift not be what she wants at all. Above all, the receiver of a gift is not supposed to criticize it. "Never look a gift horse in the mouth," we say, meaning "just take it and be pleased, or pretend to be so, even if it is an old nag." For the gift itself is not the point; the giver is. A Japanese adage goes

As a gift, a wadded garment is acceptable even in summer.¹⁸

And it is up to the receiver to make distinctions (and not confusions) among the thing, its giver, and the giver's intention.

Giving a first gift breaks into somebody else's life; it decisively changes a relationship between the two people involved. Claude Lévi-Strauss describes a popular French restaurant where a fellow diner would introduce himself to a neighbour eating at the same table by filling the other's glass with wine, emptying into it his own small bottle. His glass was left empty, and the other had either to respond by filling it with his own wine and so enter into conviviality, or to eat his lunch with a very frosty diner opposite him. The first gift had irrevocably destroyed both anonymity and neutrality. The giving was not requested, yet the giver's glass, should it remain empty, constituted a standing reproach.¹⁹

Charles Lamb in his Essays of Elia complains about the annoyances that unwanted gifts can cause. A gift requires a return, and human beings are always capable of trying to get back a lot after having invested little. Lamb denounces the unfairness of having to receive and then being required to give back. (He gives as an example "a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author" who "expects from you a book of yours which does sell, in return.") He says it is simply stupid having to show appreciation, as we customarily do, by displaying gifts received. "Not an apartment in the fine house of a friend," he writes, "but is stuffed up with some preposterous print or mirror—the worst adapted to his panels that may be—the presents of his friends that know his weakness; while his noble Vandykes are displaced, to make room for a set of daubs."

That we ought to put up with this sort of thing is, he says, a popular fallacy.²⁰ We might ask ourselves, however, whether we would wish to live in a world in which the "fallacy" no longer holds at all. Just because accepting a gift brings with it almost ineluctably a future relationship with somebody else, receiving can be a generous act. Accepting is agreeing. It can therefore be a form of giving. A friend of ours, a French curé, always displays in the middle of his dining room table a large, gaudy soup tureen, covered in china flowers and pierced with holes so that it can be used only as an ornament. On being asked why he never removes this "tasteless" article from his table, he replied that it was a gift from his cleaning lady. And he added, "She has plenty of taste, even though it might not be the same as ours."

Social scientists have begun to realize only fairly recently that Mauss was wrong to see his model of the Gift as universally followed.²¹ A Chinese student of anthropology, first being introduced to the study of Mauss in the 1980s, received with a shock the news of the manifest superiority of the giver and the iron obligation to return—which was felt, he was told, the world over. Yanxiang Yan was twelve years old when, during the Cultural Revolution, his father was accused of being "a class enemy of the people." The family was driven out of Beijing in 1966, and Yan went to live for twelve years in farming villages in northern China. At seventeen Yan was living on his own in the village of Xiajia. When he was eventually able to leave China and began to study anthropology, he remembered what he had seen: he knew that the rules of Mauss did not always apply. He returned to Xiajia to do fieldwork in the 1990s, and this resulted in a book called The Flow of Gifts (1996).

Gift exchange, Yan explains, has been central to all of Chinese culture throughout its long history. From time immemorial in the villages he knew, gifts have been obligatory at all ceremonies—at weddings, for example, on birthdays, or at the lunar New Year. Social networking, rather than social institutions, continues to structure Chinese life. Reciprocal gift-giving still plays an important role among circles of people who are more or less equals.

However, in China people of lower status also customarily give to those higher than themselves. These gifts in no way raise the givers' status. On the contrary, they add to the prestige of the recipient, and the more gifts received, the greater the prestige; there are far more donors than receivers. Furthermore, higher-ups need never give anything back. They have to be "kept sweet"—that is, not irritated by failure to receive gifts they consider to be their due. They are very capable of harming a non-giver.

"Face" or honour underwrites the system of gifts flowing in one direction, to the powerful. In former times Chinese tenants would have to give presents to landlords on ceremonial occasions. The landlord would in return throw a banquet for his tenants—which he would not attend because his "face" was "bigger" than theirs. The Communist Revolution replaced landlords with cadres, and the upward flow of gifts continued. Cadres were invited to celebrations and conferred enormous prestige if they came, but they seldom did consent to come, and if they did, they never brought gifts. They themselves, meanwhile, were kept busy collecting the wherewithal to give to people higher than they were in the Communist hierarchy. In addition, the State designated "four bad elements" and placed them beneath everybody's feet. The four were former landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, and a vague category known as "rotten elements." Rejection by the State as well as complete social isolation was their terrible lot.

Yan says that the formation of a market economy is changing everything in China. But his account—should what he describes become merely "an ethnographic account of the past," as he says it will—remains an important reminder of what the alternatives are to certain"inexplicable" customs of gift-giving. In China, Yan shows, compulsory gifts to superiors were alienable: there was no "spirit," no hau adhering to them. Where such is the case, the mystery Mauss drew attention to falls away. What could be more natural than to take if you can and give nothing back? To be compelled to give to the powerful hoping to placate them? What sociologists call "inalienability" in a gift, or the presence of a hau that ensures that reciprocity will follow, belongs to exchanges where people's status is approximately equal. Such equality is not "natural," however: it cannot be achieved without considerable energy and intelligence expended on achieving and then supporting the arrangement.

Until not long ago in Europe, as in China, country tenants had to supply their landlords regularly with gifts of their produce, such as game, poultry, and fruit.²² A relationship did exist, certainly, and was reinforced through things offered and received. But the idea was also that people lower in status owed respect to their betters, and gratitude if their superiors decided to be benevolent. They had therefore to offer their employers and patrons "gifts" of appreciation. A further tightening of this syndrome is achieved in the situation described by one of the subjects of the oppressive Duke of Savoy: "We are not so much offended with the Duke for what he takes from us, as thankful for what he leaves us."²³

As social equality spread in Europe, what remained of the custom of gifts automatically passing from people of lower status to those high up gradually died out. It was consciously and specifically abolished in the United States: people can choose which customs to keep and which to discontinue. A Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving was organized in 1912, with the purpose of eliminating presents that department supervisors in retail stores expected to receive from all clerks working under them. People realized that these presents were symbols of the clerks' subordinate position; they were "gifts unsupported by true affection." The society eventually succeeded in its aim, but felt it had to begin by calling gifts to superiors "useless" in order to attract people's attention and secure their support for abolishing the custom. Later on the organization proclaimed that these had not been gifts at all, because they were often almost compulsory.²⁴ A belief in social equality notably coincided with a conviction that gifts must be freely given.

The third Grace was often depicted holding hands with the first Grace, and so making the dance of the Charites a round, a circle. This arrangement in itself expresses a major problem with reciprocal and in-group giving: a circle is a closed figure, as indeed is giving and returning from one to another and back again. One has to be a participator in order to benefit from cycles of gift-giving. And human beings—for the usual reasons, of status and class, of racism and sexism and "ageism"—are always capable of excluding others from the "dance," and also of convincing themselves that it is perfectly right and reasonable to do so.

Yet it is possible for the image of the three Graces dancing in a round to mean something very different. When somebody gives without expecting reciprocity, the object given is his no longer. It begins a journey where it is passed along from one person to another, provided that each is generous, as the first person was. The gift may be a service or some other sort of kindness. Continual motion is essential to this picture: anyone receiving and then not giving—who refuses or otherwise fails to "pass on" the gift or favour—cuts off the flow of giving. The principle is that a person gives because once given to, and not in order to receive anything back. The dancing circle of the Graces proclaims moreover that when people are relating well with one another, such a giver will one day find herself on the receiving end: perhaps unexpectedly, and often in a surprising manner, the gift will "come back."

But for this to happen, the gift must first have been "lost" to its original owner—given away, as we put it in English. There being three Graces, not two, can express the "disappearance" of a gift when it is bestowed on another. The dancing in a ring would signify the gift's return, not through obligatory reciprocation, but as the result of a series of free givings. "It is as if the gift goes around a corner before it comes back," writes Lewis Hyde. "I have to give blindly. And I will feel a sort of blind gratitude as well. The smaller the circle is—and particularly if it involves just two people—the more a man can keep his eye on things and the more likely it is that he will start to think like a salesman. But so long as the gift passes out of sight it cannot be manipulated by one man or one pair of gift partners. When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith."²⁵

Not "keeping his eye on things," not calculating for a return, both holds each giver in relationship and sets him free.