 task of anthropology is to highlight the negation or inversion between familiar terms, a kind of disjunctive homonymity that can be resolved by formulation of novel worldviews, theoretical translations, and advancements. For this reason, one of our board members, Holly Hyatt, the University of Sydney, mentioned that Jane Geyer wanted to re-translate the gift and distinguish between some crucial emotion term, which she shall illustrate soon, we embraced immediately this project. As Jonathan Perry, Thomas Troutman, and others have shown, most concepts of obligation or reciprocity or prestation require the scrutiny and ethnographic sensibility, the same required to translate notion as how, mana, or renda. So this project proved soon to be far more challenging than we expected. But we're here today, finally, and it's my pleasure to celebrate our third translation, English translation, of most text in an expanded and critical edition. One of the magic that how has been able to perform was to gather an incredible number of marvelous thinkers in the same issue or under the same roof as of today. How incredible that some of the greatest interlocutors of most are joining us, and I'm honestly in disbelief and incredibly grateful that they made this effort to, because for them also, they haven't been discussing gifts for a while, so it was also a challenge to come back and here and gather together for us. And I think this is an incredible moment for the history of anthropology too. But as we shall soon realize from the debate that will emerge in the next few hours, there is not really a free gift as there are no free beers. How can succeeded out of the pro bono dedication of an editorial team and a community of reviewers and board members that had to find their sources of maintenance elsewhere? For this reason, I invite you to enjoy this free event and all the work at how has been donating you through these years, but while thinking what you could do to ensure that the flow of the gifts continue. One very small gesture for B2 purchase, what is currently a very low priced hard copy on most classic tests. If you can't find a hard copy, you will find a 20% discount code that will allow you to order a copy even for a lower price that is 13.6 dollars, American directly from the University of Chicago Press, but only in the next seven days. So welcome to the center of ethnography theory and how prime event, the how of the gift, the return and renewal of our foundational spirit. Allow me to leave with most words in the conclusion of this essay in the guy translation. We can and we should come back to the archaic to its elements. We will rediscover the motives of life and action that are still known to numerous societies and classes, the joy of giving in public, the pleasure of generous artistic spending, that of hospitality and festivals. I give you the greatest gift giver of the day, Jane Geyer. Good afternoon and thank you for for coming and being interested here. Yes. Yes, I've got a couple of slides. Maybe while they fix the slides, I'm going to share a personal thought review on the theme of partisan modernization and thought launching. Okay, when did I ask go to a lordship? Which made me think when was the first goes for launching? 1950, the art royal camel there shipyard book and head. All the school children were marshaled out to wave flags for the then queen, actually queen mother who came to smash the champagne against the art royal and to launch her off with the classic lessons. And so I looked up in fact online there is a little film of that. So if you want to see a classic launching look it up. And it's a very interesting little commentary on the thoughts of the day in 1950. So there's the classic blessing for all who sail in her. That's all of us going forward. And then there's an appreciation for all of the shipyard workers who have put things together, built the docks and so on. And the genius behind the design. So of course our genius of the day is muscle modes. And plenty of us who hammered away and put the rivets in and tried to create a new launching of this book. So if you want to look up classic launching, it's on Pathé news on the internet. So what I thought that I would first do, well before I even start on that, let me explain to you why I put Kenti cloth up here, Ghanaian Kenti cloth. Many of us who are in African studies we notice that Africa doesn't figure very strongly in the essay on the gift. But in the larger context it does figure and it figures very appreciatively in most's own voice. So I thought that just to bring in symbolically for the few minutes that I have to explain the background to doing this new translation, I thought that I would put up Kenti cloth and bring some. Okay so I thought that I would start with an explanation of my own reason to take up this translation. And it really comes from discussions around a paper that I had written for a conference in France that was organized by Keith Hart and Alain Cayet several years ago. It was called most vivant, the living most. And of course I was immediately posed with the question of what I was going to write about in that regard. What particular theme would I pick up? And this is in appreciation of all of you who are students here. I picked up a theme from a student of mine, an Argentinian student, Andres Dupuis, his name is, who had wanted several years ago to read the gift with me in French because he thought that in French he would appreciate it better than in English since both French and English were foreign languages to him. So we searched in our Johns Hopkins University library for a French version, the original French version of the essay on the gift. And the only one that we found was in the journal collection. So in the original edition of L'année sociologique when it was relaunched in 1925 after the Great War. This of course was Durkheim's journal. This is the journal that launched the whole French School of Sociology and Anthropology. And this was the edition. It was edited by Marcel Mose himself, the whole edition that relaunched the teaching publication of their particular group after in fact they had lost many of their junior people and their students in the war. They had been drafted and they had been lost as casualties. And we were very moved to find this. Let me do a comparison for you. I'm going to unwrap this gift from ex-Kenti Klopp and I'll explain the particular wrapping in a minute. So this is the original. This is it. The first edition of L'année sociologique after the Great War. This was my first copy of the gift that I bought in 1965 when I graduated from the LSE undergraduate. This is Connorsen's translation. So you see the difference, right? So this was the comparison that I was thinking about. I was thinking, my goodness, what was the context in which this was published? And of course Durkheim himself had died in the meantime. In part people always suggest because of grief at the loss of his son who was a casualty of the Great War. And so I decided to write my paper for the conference on this, instead of this, to see what I could do with it. And I was very particularly moved and the people at the conference were encouraging to me, especially Keith who is here, at the sequence of the thinking, at the end of the memorial to all of these people who had been killed in the war. And I'll show you a slide of the devastation that that war was to remind ourselves. These are the last words of the memorial. The sap will rise again. Another seed will fall and germinate. It is in this spirit of faithful memory to Durkheim and to all our dead. It is in continuing communion with them. It is in sharing their conviction of the usefulness of our signs. It is in being nourished like them by the hope that man is perfectible through it. It is in these sentiments held in common amongst us, beyond death, that we take up again strongly with heart the task we have never abandoned, namely a new era of sociology, social anthropology. And it's in this context that I felt very convinced that most turn to the other peoples of the world for inspiration in all their variety. In his own era and maybe in our own era, when in his era people remembered in our own era, we have only very vague memories of what a catastrophe World War I was. There may be some of us, well like me, whose own grandfathers fought in that war and I remember my grandfather talking about being at the front in that war. I thought that I would show you the numbers so that we would share what went on there. Look at these casualties. It's absolutely catastrophic and you can see very particularly that the French were particularly subject to devastation. About three quarters of the men mobilized ended up as casualties in that war. So you could imagine, I began to imagine, moving from the end of the memorial into the beginning of the essay on the gift. That sense that most I felt sure must have had that there is elsewhere in the world that one can find inspiration. Our own so-called civilization, we'll get to this later on, has produced something so catastrophic that we are going to try to move on. So then we turn the page to the essay on the gift which ends and here I excerpt from the last page. Thus the Klan, the tribe and the peoples have learned as tomorrow in our so-called civilized world classes and nations and individuals too will have to learn how to confront one another without massacring each other. We can also see how this concrete study can lead not only to a science of customs but even to civility and the various aesthetic moral religious and economic motives and the diverse material and demographic factors which together create a foundation for society and constitute a life in common. So although when we read it separately like this to our great inspiration, we do get that message, it's translated, but I think the sheer import of it is strengthened by connecting it to that moment in history and to the memorial that most was writing before moving in to the essay on the gift. So I decided to write my paper for Keith and Alan's conference on this whole thing. As far as I could master the parts of it that are written by most, the memorial, the essay on the gift and 80 of the book reviews. So here I wrapped it in color so you could see. This black is the memorial, this is the gift, the red in line with his own political convictions. This green is the sap rising again. This is him and his colleagues engaging with the European scholarship in the social sciences in the immediate post-war period when so many were engaged with the questions of how to reconstitute and move forward into a different social world. So it was having written that paper that I then received suggestions by others who had read these versions and the WD Hall's version, both of which are very important translations. There were several people who said to me, we didn't know that. We didn't know that it was published in that way. Couldn't we do a new translation that included some of that, that repositioned the essay on the gift in this context? After this, in the recuperation phase from this, Keith, Alan, Wendy James and Holly High in another context all suggesting to me that an English language text that included at least some of that context could be very helpful to us in thinking forward in the applicability of the ideas and the relevance of the essay on the gift to the future. Let me show you what I decided that the whole needed to look like, and I'll go into a couple of these details later on. This page in the middle is to show to you how it was written by most in the original, that is that what are now end notes in our English original were then footnotes. So this is how the whole thing would look. Memorial, the essay on the gift with footnotes at the foot of the page and then reviews. I think we've lost a small part of that, but about 80 of those reviews were written by most himself, reviews of other work in the European intellectual community. Okay, so back to our shipbuilding here. Giovanni was very encouraging to do this through how as an open access contribution. And so with all of these people leaning on me saying, come on, let's do it, I decided to take it up and I added these two further features besides translating the memorial and some of the reviews by most himself, his own reviews, particularly of works that he cited in the text of the essay on the gift and more philosophical discussions of works that were analyzing, for example, a place of religion in modern Western life. So in addition to those inclusions, that's what the expansion is about, the expanded edition, I added two things. I put the footnotes at the bottom of the page rather than as end notes so that the reader can go back and forth if they want to, if that's interesting to them, or just to be impressed by the sheer volume of the scholarship that went into this work. The ways in which most was sounding out this vast body of ethnographic work and taking all of the cases so seriously in people's own words. So when you see this new edition, you too will be going back and forth from the text to the footnotes if you want to do that. You don't have to, you can sail across in the big print at the top of the page, but you can also glance down and say, what was that about? Who wrote that particular ethnography? Even the page numbers, I mean the editorial effort, the sheer, must have been 24-7 effort that went into this are very evident when you can see the footnotes at the bottom of the page. So then secondly, the other change that I made over the editions that we have already is to note what some of the words were in French. Most is in fact using four different words that could be translated into English as gift. So we have prison, which I've just kept as present, cadeau, don and prestation. We'll go into that in a minute. And he's using all of those words in a way that is never defined by him, why he's using one versus the other. He's using a rich vocabulary in order to seem to me to encompass a richness of practice and ideas and ideologies of exchange. And he himself says the terms we have used, present, gift, don, are not themselves altogether exact, we simply cannot find others, that's all. So now that we have the digital means of counting up, I counted up the ways in which don, cadeau, prestation, present are used in his text. And it does have this extraordinary musical quality, it seemed to me. There's a crescendo and a diminuendo going into the ways in which the terminology is used. Don is used relatively infrequently in the beginning, even though of course that's the title, essay sur le don. But by the end, it's much higher profile. Cadeau, which is much more frequent in the beginning, is falling. Prestation, which has a certain kind of status quality to it. Is somewhat less frequent, falling a little bit. And présent is just there, on and off, as I suppose, as a, as recourse in making a particular point that doesn't have a very strong theoretical or ideological claim to it. But this is something that maybe all of us will perhaps look at as we, as we examine this text as it was written with the richness of the vocabulary in French and the richness of the illusion in the footnotes to people's own terms for these exchanges. So, so doing this work has been a real inspiration for me and I was grateful for the friends and colleagues who were leaning on me to do it. I felt that I was in a certain conversation with Moose himself and with the group that he was part of since he was alluding to their work throughout. But I think that I want to move very quickly to the end of these thoughts to mention some of the people who have been very particularly prominent in being part of the shipbuilding team, working in the docks here. Of course Giovanni Dacol has been very important. Sean Dowdy, who is editor, who is in Chicago at the moment, right? Yes, yes. Elissa, it's Elissa here, who in Birmingham started to help me look up quotes that Moose himself had translated from English. There are certain interpretive dimensions to Moose's own use of the English sources when he puts them into French. And so we had to decide shall we put them back into the original English or shall we re-translate Moose's interpretation? And for the most part in the end we tried to put them back into the original English. Justin Dyer continued that task. And then there was an editor who helped me with the French translation editing. Matthew Carey. See her? I don't know who's here. No. But there were many others who put in very important work in just the creation, the building of this particular text. And then of course Bill Morrow who wrote the forward. And then of course Keith Hart, David Graber, Maurice Godellier and Alan Cahier who added their endorsements on the cover. So then you too as readers will continue the critiques and the engagements with this text, carrying it forward, steaming on, we're in the launching mode again now, steaming on, taking the inspiration in yet new directions of your own as I'm sure most intended. The sap will rise yet again. So I end with one comment that is inspired by the occasion of the launch of the Center for Ethnographic Theory here at SOAS. Bill Morrow mentioned in his forward that everybody has their favorite footnote from the essay on the gift. And he quoted Keith as having a favorite footnote, having written somewhere that he had a favorite footnote. There you go. So perhaps everybody in the room has their favorite footnote. But one of my favorite sentences is in the text and it's probably one that we just float by most of the time. But I thought it was inspirational for how itself as a Journal of Ethnographic Theory. And of course the first inspiration for this came as I understand from Marshall Salens and it was certainly embodied in the lecture from yesterday. And it will be embodied in the Center for Ethnographic Theory. So this is on page 114 of the new edition. It's very short. Le point de départ est ailleurs. The point of departure lies elsewhere. I put lies in order to say the lay of the land, make a trip, make the journey, go there. And this seems to me that this is fundamental to an ethnographic approach in anthropology. The point of departure lies elsewhere. And Moose is saying this in the context of a critique of what he calls our so-called civilized standpoint, our self-styled standpoint of thinking of ourselves as the context in which civilization has developed. This is the context in which that sentence appears. He wrote, current economic and juridical history is enormously mistaken on this point. That is that time-framed contractual arrangements are original to modernity or civilization. He says, imbued with modern ideas, it makes up, this is the modern theory, makes up a priori ideas about evolution, as if from a superior phase of civilization. In fact, he says, the point of departure lies elsewhere in Le Dôme. And another thing that I discovered and hadn't realized before, that his essay, it's titled Essay on the Gift, Essay sur le Dôme. Essay is also, in French, an assay, assay in the sense of testing out on a sample. And he in fact uses the term, the word fragment, fragment, quite often, in his argument. So what he's suggesting there is that this is a beginning, his own engagement with this ethnographic corpus, which can get bigger and bigger and bigger, is a beginning, an exploration, a start, on a fragment of what will be a much bigger topic and much more important than our, quote, modern civilization has thought up to now. So I thought Le pointe d'éparer d'ailleurs is a foundational assumption for our inspiration in anthropology, and one that has been taken forward by how journal, how books, and the new center that we're launching here. So I hope that this new and expanded edition of the gift can make its own contribution to the realization of this conviction as we launch it out into the turbulent waters of another theoretical world political and technological era with its own tensions 90 years after the original. And as if by total happenstance, this morning I got an email saying there's a new book on the fourth industrial revolution suggesting that we're going to be in the era of robotics and genomics and so on and so forth, a totally different moment in economic life. Can we take the essay on the gift, its inspiration, its engagement with the tragedies of the world and the hope for the future? Can we take that into this new era that we seem to be moving into? So my thanks in advance to all the speakers who constitute, I decided as I was thinking back to launching, they must constitute the first officers of the, of the boat, right? Captain first mate, the person who's going to make the engine work and so on and so forth, and then the rest of us passengers who are going to be inspired to take different journeys into these new and turbulent waters. So it seems to me that this is the moment to turn over to those who are going to navigate us out of this harbor and into the choppy waters of the present world. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We'll take a two-minute break. So if you have a pressing need, there's toilets at the end of the corridor. We quickly rearrange the stage here and I would ask our panelists to please join me on stage. Thank you. Minions on stage, please. Good afternoon. My name is Fabio Igigi. I'm a lecturer in anthropology with reference to Japan here at SOAS and I'm honored to be chairing the first panel today. Now the chair's task is twofold to introduce the speakers who really do not need any introduction at all and then to tell these same people to hold their peace after the allotted amount of time has passed. So no heckling. You will have a chance to air your views during the discussion at the end of the first and again at the end of the second panel. To boldly go where no man has gone before, to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, these are not only the voyages of the Starship Enterprise but they also describe the intellectual trajectory of our first speaker. More than anyone else, she has shaped the way and apologists think about gender relations and to particular social matrices they give rise to. Her gift to anthropology is an ethos of questioning the most basic assumptions that underlie our theorizing both everyday and academic about exchange, kinship, reproduction and feminism. Her gift to anthropology lecturers is her most well-known book, The Gender of the Gift, a text so brilliantly complex and startingly innovative that it is used all over the world to make undergraduate brains bleed. The ones who get the point after reading it generally sprout wings, the other self-combust, which makes the exam process a much more straightforward. She's a fellow of the British Academy, she was the William Wise Professor of Social Anthropology in Cambridge, she was the mistress of Gerton College and she was made the Dame Commander of the British Empire for Services Rendered to Social Anthropology in 2001. Please give it up for Professor Marilyn Turn. Thank you for that and Jane, thank you for your words, I'm going to use first names if I may and I shall tell you in a moment of a rather special reason to be thanking you. This is an inspirational moment for how and if I may say for the Centre for Ethnographic Theory at SOAS. Giovanni has just reminded us of how staring rubric and its recall of the days when anthropology gave concepts to the world such as taboo and manna not so not so far off from the days when most was writing. Interestingly however, what most did was take a concept, gift-giving, as thoroughly evident from his own world as it was to be found everywhere else. There was an inquiry to be made into the conditions of contract and exchange wherever the law of things connects to the law of persons. Indeed, without treating the whole range of his material seriously unfamiliar or familiar, he could not have mounted a political commentary of any purchase. One consequence, of course, is that the concept of gift-giving seems everywhere. It certainly doesn't belong to sociology and certainly not to anthropology. Across the arts and humanities, of course, and outside academia altogether, it flourishes with its own momentum. So, anthropologists should not be too dazzled by the way it travels in our midst, cropping up in issues to do with charity, with corruption, with inheritance taxes, with the ethics of open-source software and so forth. What is dazzling is something else, the way Marcel most travels, the way it's his name that is so often on, so often attached to discussions of gift-giving. Thus, a professor of medical ethics writing on property in the body, who could perfectly well have kept with the passionate argument for blood donation that Titmus made in his book The Gift Relationship, feels compelled to cite most as the classical text. And there it is, amidst all the references to DNA samples, the UK Biobank and World Health Organizational Guidelines, in the words of its second translation, the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. And as with most in mind, this medical ethicist suggests, that a French jurist has been marshalling arguments against the French state's absolute insistence on the irrevocable alienability of the gift in organ transplantation. If he'd had the benefit of Jane's title, we would also have encountered the gift, the form and sense of exchange in archaic societies, as the very title of an installation by the New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson. Wanting to engage art collectors, in this case in Germany, with the concept of reciprocity, he staged his installation with this title through numerous transactions that meant they were caught up in various giving and receiving relationships with him. The focus through which he channeled their attention was a replica of a wartime raft from which an impoverished artist had years ago been saved. His press release quotes Mos on Malinowski, a passage about the recipient's commitment to make a return gift. And a review of one of Stevenson's traveling exhibitions at the Herbert Reed Gallery says that among the exhibits was a vitrine stopped with relics and inside was a copy of Mos's anthropological study and the review spells it out the gift, the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. Now I'll come back in a moment as to why I'm particularly happy that the word archaic is there, because at first sight seems a bit awkward. Now near a home in the humanities, one might have some expectation of encountering Mos's traveling name. One could include an academic lawyer here referring to the gift culture of research scholarship who does not just cite Mos but draws on the connection Mos himself made between literary works and the authors enduring interest in them. Mos was talking about the then recent shifts in French intellectual property law and the belated recognition of the person in the thing. Not so surprising then that a professor of Victorian literature writing on mementos and collectibles as ambiguously at once fungible objects and ineffable relics should turn to anthropology and who should be leading in the small caste but Mos. That said the Victorianist specifically argues against the idea that this ambiguity was a residue of an archaic gift impulse rather than being understood as part of capitalism's success. Indeed anthropologist friend in history and comparative literature Natalie Ziemann Davis made a similar comment and proposed the political significance of gifts in 16th century France. Mos is there of course on her very first page again leading in a number of anthropologists although they are in her view by no means the only scholars to have implied that gift exchange inevitably gives way before the market. Recent work she says has since made the gift landscape much more open. However the anthropologist has to get really close to home to contemporary sociology to find the objection to archaism being made vehemently I would even say nastily. David Chihl in his version of the gift economy is withering in his dismissal of most anthropological work and heading the queue once more of course is Mos. Chihl's problem is that he wants to reinstate the gift he Chihl that is to reinstate the gift as indicative of a moral economy symbolizing the central values of a love culture based on the free and choice full disposition of objects and Mos's sin was to maintain I quote that the study of the gift involved a return to the old and elemental. Most happily our new translation suggests that Mos wrote something closer to we can and should come back to the archaic to its elements not quite the same but all the same archaic. Well I'm glad that Mos referred to archaic societies and that Jane has kept the title that way. Of course from today's hindsight we can read archaic ironically in a way I'm sure Mos himself never meant nevertheless what the effort what the epithet wonderfully does is bring a huge elephant into the room in fact it creates an elephant in the room. If there is the faintest hint that there might be something of interest to present circumstances in the form and sense of exchange in archaic societies then archaic can only be read ironically I mean they have never been archaic. This is said another way in the English term itself now I've no idea if any of you would agree but to me the epithet sounds a bit different from primitive or antiquated or outmoded. It's self slightly archaic it makes one sit up archaic carries the resonance of something that is characteristic of an earlier period so no longer current but nonetheless a style that once had its own integrity. I'm not defending the temporality implied but rather the hint all over again that there might be elements from possibilities beyond our horizons to which it would be good to attend and this of course was the moment of there was the conclusion of what Jane has just been talking about. The point is an old one precisely because it recurs I mean the old goes on coming back because it needs to be there with us each new day so why dazzling as they are those examples I gave of Mos's name being brought in all over the place sometimes his name travels alone sometimes it brings in its trail other anthropologists perhaps it's too optimistic to imagine that the invocation of Mos's name beyond anthropology carries a gesture however uninformed towards anthropological sources of knowledge in peoples everywhere as though there were larger truths even if one does not go there oneself that anthropology might hold an awkward hope for anthropologists to respond adequately of course but this is one of the places where the new translation will have its impact I was deeply moved by the contextualization of the essay on the gift and there is more of course as the approaching most people have been telling us for years precisely as the memorial should do this contextualization makes one think of a larger world beyond the immediate horizon not something one can do alone I've indicated a few places where beyond anthropology people have found in anthropology something of a larger world to which they would no doubt aspire to be part of or else dramatically get rid of we can glimpse our discipline as momentarily on the horizons of others the actual examples are rather small in the bigger order of things but they make the structural point we might find illumination not only by forever worrying at the perspective anthropology has on the world but also appreciating how for well or ill others have perspectives on anthropology a gesture towards a wider world contained in the gesture towards most and that exchange of perspectives is something we might listen to more closely if we attend to its dynamic as an explicitly enacted element of some forms of gift exchange for all that in its work of detachment the gift has the contours of the commodity whether in the french jurist's vision of effective alienation or as a precursor to the utility of trade the gift that compels a return compels an exchange of perspectives that is not quite captured in the usual vernacular notions about the endless points of view that we all have on one another the new translation is not just another point of view it surely arises from a literary counterpart to the exchange of perspectives although the translator has to act roles as it were as both donor and recipient at once for it's only by seeing the text as it is taking from both the form and sense of it that the translator can produce its counterpart and give back to the original a version of itself from another world chain you've animated this extraordinary work you've made us think again of the form and sense in which anthropological knowledge circulates now i know you wouldn't want me to wish that your name travels alongside moses and he will continue to do his work for us all but i secretly hope that it will the gift that makes us think never outruns its gifts thank you thank you very much our second speaker on this glorious afternoon is none other than professor marshall sarlan's known to his ex students and colleagues simply as mds d clearly standing for defiant professor sarlan's ethnographic work on the pacific his contributions to anthropological theory and historical anthropology are well known to all of us the debates that his work caused among scholars about the death of captain cook about the relative abundance in so-called primitive societies about the danger of homo economicus is the stuff that today's classroom discussions are made on never satisfied to be confined to the ivory tower professor sarlan's in many ways is the model for anthropological activism during the protest against the vietnam war he invented the teach-in a creative form of academic resistance to the status quo when sociobiology emerged in the late 70s he proved to be a staunch defender of the human condition versus the newly invigorated idea of human nature championed by evolutionary psychologists for example more recently he has been involved in a debate about the presence of the confucius institute on campus well hosting a propaganda institution on campus who would do such a thing well the answer is we do but you'll know about that preceded by his reputation as an intellectual giant for the second day in a row all the way from chicago illinois please welcome professor marshall sarlan's thank you very much i didn't really prepare a paper but it's i want to talk about something that's been bothering me for 47 years which is relevant to the name of our our hallowed institution how namely what is how and what is meant by this famous text which introduces the the gift the text from the maury sage run a period i don't know when most put this in the text uh he said he got it from davi on somebody else's i recall but in any case it seems to be curiously uh out of touch with some other parts of the text and i would like to sort of just go through the the problem most says that this is an imprecise text uh you might recall what happens is a gives a a gift we'll call it that for the moment to be who who passes this on to see who gives back some other thing to be which um which most says it must be obligatorily returned to a because it is the how of the gift that a gate to be uh this is the only place in the text is i can recall where the three parties are necessary to talk about reciprocity so i think that something else is obviously going on when i say that uh most said it's imprecise he is in the first place he and i'm afraid all the translations have also been somewhat imprecise for one thing he says it is clear that the bond of law in maury the bond occurring between things is one of souls because the thing itself has a soul is of the soul and what he's talking about is says first of all we we we're talking about something called a taunga in maury which is cognate to the Samoan valuable mats and which is a valuable quite unlike any ordinary good unfortunately in the original translation in english uh following closely in the french where most calls it an article de technique and which uh jane rightly translates as a certain article there's also parenthesis taunga which means that it's not an ordinary article and we can't treat the the discussion between the abncs three individuals exchanging some ordinary article it has the soul of the clan it itself as an animated being and in fact it subsumes the being of the donor rather than representing the being of the donor and most says of these kinds of gifts that precisely they are productive that is to say they bring life uh through their transactions and he gives uh later on in the text when he's talking about coccutal and fling it on the northwest coast a distinction between exchanging ordinary things which in fact he doesn't even consider to be reciprocally required uh return and exchanging treasure which is what this is now in uh in the one translation that i know a recent translation is called a valuable rather than a determined article or a certain article the word how it seems to me means the increase on the gift that is due to the spirit of that is in the gift that is the spirit of the clan etc and the ancestor which is a productive spirit the causative in Maori fukahau means to inspire to command to initiate the gift is what is the gift as it goes from b to c is what has been commanded by the gift from a to b what has been initiated which is an increased value uh and it's due of course uh i mean i made this argument 47 years ago but without the proper animism the proper animism it seems to me is that the gift itself is what is animated by a person by uh by human power it is not necessarily the power of the donor in the case of a valuable we're not even talking in this text of chiefs who might claim to have a certain priority with regard to ancestral goods we're talking about any particular people quite anonymously identified in that case it's not as he wants to say in the next sentence from this it follows that to present something to someone is to present something of oneself in the case of valuables the person is actually included in the gift itself that is the person of the gift because he's a member of the clan of the hapu of which this gift is an ancestral form so it seems to me that we have to understand how the how as the productive quality of the gift due to its animistic properties derived from the ancestors and the gods which is what he says about quacudil and so on maybe a hundred pages later that being the case uh how is a justifiable notion for this center and this enterprise of of uh Giovanni's and company it is a productive in its own right Giovanni I guess is the ancestral form who has brought us all together to produce something beyond what we do individually as this gift did something beyond the individuals who in fact were cited in the in this text that's about all I have to say except for one thing I guess uh this melange that most does between the individual soul of the giver and the and the clan spirit in the gift seems to me a kind of imprecision that runs through maybe french anthropology of that period I don't know Durkheim was always interested in contagion most is interested in the melange of total prestation which I think is a very rare quality total prestation I think it actually happens only in exogamous moieties that most gifts are not so total as as as implied so I think that there's a lack there's a certain lack of precision I don't know I didn't we didn't come here to criticize most so I won't go on but it's something to consider thank you thank you very much it is very rare in London that somebody comes up to you on the tube and says I approve of your reading matter this happened to me not once but twice when reading our next speaker's opus Mugnam debt the first 5000 years similar in scope and breath to the gift it addresses not only many of the core questions of economic anthropology with great erudition but has also become something of an activist bible for the Occupy Wall Street movement a leading figure of which our next speaker has become a student of professor salience at Chicago his first position was at Yale and we have to be eternally grateful to the reactionary forces at Yale that propelled him over the Atlantic first to goldsmith and later on to his present position and the lsc word on the street is that the lsc is far too circumspect to let him anywhere near their undergraduates in case such an encounter could trigger an accidental revolution all the better for us here at so as please give a warm welcome to professor David Graber well is this working yet um Giovanni asked me to talk about the ongoing importance of of most's gift so I thought I'd say a few words about that um both in the positive and the negative sense um I mean say we're not here to critique most but we should do a little um I mean most this book is has been so influential in so many different ways it can't help but have had you know profoundly positive and and profoundly confusing effects um it's it's a book which launched a thousand intellectual projects um so I think that you know probably the weakest thing about the book is the title the gift the fact that that it you know has framed the gift as the great problem of anthropology has been a little confusing because the gift is essentially a negative casual category for anything that isn't a commodity relation um so the assumption that all forms of transactions that are not commodity transactions based on economic self-interest and calculation are somehow the same um why do we assume that there's a particular reason why that should be the case and I don't think it actually is so in and and second of all one thing that's been rather confusing about the book I think has been don't worry I'm gonna get to the good stuff so um but one thing that that's I think been a little confusing about the book is is that it also encourages us when we do think about the gift as if it were simply one thing unifying all of these different forms of of non commodity transaction um is that it's sort of muddled on on the heroic gift that you know the sort of most magnificent aristocratic forms of gift giving or the paradigmatic form um that's very interesting at some point at the end of of of the book he actually comes up with a almost Gramscian theory of how the sort of most characteristic mode of transaction of the dominant class of a particular era becomes their definition of humanity itself it's not much observed but he points out that it takes a long time before the idea of economic calculation and the current um as we now conceive to be universal in economics existed for a long period of time but it just never occurred to anybody this is a defining feature of humanity it was a something certain people did in certain contexts and it's only quite recently that it became so that and sort of dominant dominant or most characteristic mode of the most character of the dominant class who becomes projected as our model of humanity um in earlier stages um you know it's say the aristocratic gift which is again not what aristocrats did all the time but what they thought of as their most characteristic mode of transaction becomes the model for humanity and in a way people have read this uh taken this book rather rather confusedly to make it so um partly because the the aristocratic gift has as so much drama intensity um and and human mystery packed into it um whenever i teach the gift i always give the example of um most work this very very short um little piece it was a commentary on the greek author posedonius uh in somewhere in an asociology uh um it was like a three page commentary but i think it packs a lot into it um posedonius was observing Celtic nobles and the sort of festivals they had and they would engage in all these contests poetry contests and duels and they would get engage in gift giving context uh and and every now and then when in the midst of these contests one of one player was basically checkmated and received a gift so huge he couldn't possibly return it um the only appropriate thing for him to do would be to commit suicide and then distribute the the pieces of of the overwhelming gift to his followers since sort of ultimate uh replied to someone who who who checkmated you it's the only honorable thing to do we're thinking about this and and comparing it to a piece i read on a viking about vikings and one of the isolandic sagas that um were two vikings the story einar and agiel if i remember um one was sort of semi-retired viking and the other one was still doing raids and they're both they were also poets um and um they like to sit around writing poetry together um one day i think einar was the name of the younger one came to visit agiel agiel was out so he left him a gift this beautiful shield this magnificent object that no one had ever seen anything like it it was covered with mysterious writing and jewels and um left it hanging from the rafters went off about four hours later um agiel comes home and says my god what's that and the thralls all say well you know it's your friend um einar came over and gave it to you said it was a present so he looks at it and said oh so i suppose he now expects me to write some sort of a poem celebrating his generosity to hell with it i'll kill him um so he gets on his horse and rides after him he can't catch up and the sun goes down he says damn okay fine i wanted to praise poem so he sort of brings home everything that can be at stake in a gift there's a lot going on here but you know as a result these things draw you in and then they do seem to show something intense about human nature but um as a result of this um i think we get lost as to you know there are many many different sorts of things going on that get collapsed together i by self tried to disentangle them and the aforementioned book on debt um that you have this sort of communistic relations where you just give to people because you assume that they would do the same which is the basis of all sociability is just sort of the um the sort of communist gift i call it baseline communism um and this is actually an idea that comes from most most himself not in the gift but in other um in his ethnographic lectures actually said that you know the mistake is to assume that communism and individualism are opposed principles actually uh communism can be the basis of individualism um you can have individualistic communism relations with two people who are just communists with each other but not with anybody else um and then these kind of like networks of individualistic communism actually are the sort of bedrock of society um and you know an exchange the gift exchange of the which can turn into this heroic competitive form is a very particular form which is actually in many ways much more analogous to commercial exchange than either of the other things that get classified as gifts and then you have hierarchical gifts um which defy the logic of reciprocity entirely in fact they're the opposite they're based on logic of precedent you give a gift to it someone is clearly an underling or a superior rather than their feeling obliged to reciprocate they'll they'll expect you to do it again um the gift becomes a precedent um so you know a lot of this becomes obscured because of the emphasis on the heroic gift so okay that i think is the title of us therefore is the weakest part of the book uh and its ongoing legacy on the other hand um it's also true that the book was written in a hurry for a very particular reason it wasn't a book it was an essay and and most himself said you know i put off writing this just like he put off writing all those books that he actually wanted to write um because we're just not quite ready yet we don't have enough data um to really resolve these questions uh which according to him was a ongoing investigation into the origins of the notion of contractual obligation that's what the book was actually supposed the ongoing research project was actually about but the reason why he published it was actually political um in effect the book was his response to Lenin's new economic policy most people don't know this um he was you know uh very ambivalent about the Russian revolution he was himself a revolutionary co-operativeist he he um helped or he ran a cooperative bakery in in paris um and used to go off on he never did any ethnographic field but he did a lot of cooperative field where he would go off and sort of study the cooperative system in different countries try to link up producer and consumer co-ops and um and um you know so during the Russian revolution he was like he wrote that you know on the one hand you know these are my ideas as a socialist being put into practice on the other hand i can't stand these guys and the way they're going about it the fact that they were like killing off the cooperatives didn't help you know help um and um he and then what really got him was that they couldn't just simply abolish the market you know if Lenin first tried to simply institutionalize a non-market society he didn't really work and he went back with a new economic policy reintroduced the market and most sort of sat down and said well we need to rethink these things what is it about the market we really have a problem with what is it what can we get rid of what can't we i mean if russia which is the least commoditized least marketized society in europe can't just get rid of it something all deeper is going on um and thus he initiated a series of sort of intellectual uh project political projects in this um essay which are in a weird way are only now beginning to bear fruit um i think mary douglas were really obnoxious introduction to the last translation i felt was um you know it went on and on about there is no free gift which isn't true of course there are um but um she did make the very uh cogent point i thought that um the book kind of never realizes political potential because it came out at the wrong moment and she's hypothesized the moment might actually now be coming about that the the arguments that he's making here are really relevant and and actually can reach a larger audience um and and i think the greatest sign of this was actually a um a report put out by the bank of england a few years ago a couple of two years now uh that people didn't much notice an anthropology but i think was quite significant um because one of his big themes here is getting rid of the assumption well two assumptions um one is that you know you start with barter that economic utilitarian transactions are somehow primordial um and while it is true as as it's a very much mistake to read this uh his argument that there's like gift economies there's commodity economies these are totally different things um on the other hand um he's definitely arguing that the economic uh you know the sort of economic textbook version he goes right after it quite early on um talking about captain cook as a matter of fact and you know how people misinterpreted gifts as attempts at barter um so that that sort of basic economic fairy tale we're all taught is wrong and this is one of the key um points he tries to make in the book and then he uses that to attack social contract theory and says that you know the assumption that economic rationality and therefore property are primary and therefore social society itself is our means of of protecting that whereas you know it ultimately giving the most subversive blow possible to that idea by saying actually no the primordial contractual relation is the agreement to completely ignore all property relations and nullify them um but i think it's really significant that um um that argument about the myth of barter this is which is really the foundational idea of of our entire social order in a certain way it's the prime it is like the key myth that everybody everybody knows everybody's been taught no one quite knows where they got it from but is this a sort of basic common sense which under uh which lays the foundations for the very principle of economics as the sort of master discipline um has kind of been blown away this and and it's happened i mean i had played a part in it but i'm just channeling people like mosin anthropologists who've been saying this for years and i just sort of culled the best arguments that has come out of this mosin tradition other people have done a lot of work as well and um i i thought you know there's a milestone uh that was hit a couple years ago when the bank of england came out of report with its sort of authoritative statement on the creation of money it was actually very important because among other things they announced that um you know monetarism and the entire philosophical basis of austerity is completely wrong at heterodox economics is right um it was it was really a bombshell um but but it also contained you know a little thing about the origin of money where they had these bank of england guys saying well imagine you have these two primitive people and one has berries and the other has fish and it just sounds like they're about to start the myth of barter but they don't do it and they say well they'd set up an elaborate credit system of debts and you know they went the other way you know and i remember thinking like oh if only i could tell mos we should summon his spirit we won we finally did it um so this is surely a sign that something is changing i think that what jane's comments that you know we're moving into a period where the very basic economic questions that we're asking are different um that mos is relevant and i think that's really true i think that you know once again they're saying what happens when they robotize away the jobs what are we going to do basic income are we going to have to like actually base our entire economy on on simply giving people money um at this moment i mean the sort of intellectual project which had been foundering for almost 80 years is finally bearing fruit and and and mos is sudden i think more relevant than he's ever been before oh thank you some are born great some achieve greatness and some have a great thrust about them by idolizing the bar in this way gives you a very accurate picture of the last speaker on this panel the driving force and inspiration behind how the journal of ethnographic theory and how books he has been waving a flag for open access since 2011 against the prediction that how would fall within a year he not only persevered but made it into a flagship anthropology journal of extraordinary intellectual caliber all entirely for free a true gift of ideas debates and discussions he is house editor in chief and the director of publications of the center for ethnographic theory meets the man on top of the pile to vanita call thank you very much i wish to start with two provocation my so and the two provocation in questions can be summarized as follows so many of the social instances traditionally encompassed by anthropological inquiry within the category of gift-giving are rather manifestations of hosting situations and events what if hospitality constitutes the transcendental field of value creation and relation of exchange and the second what does anthropological theory do anthropological theories of gift-giving how they how do they speak to contemporary ideologies or gratuity in open access scholarship so merlin's return once argued that methodology is always regional the some regions of the world seem to provide location for the pursuit of particular problems in anthropological theory whereas others do not a crucial anthropological strategy can be deployed by taking inventing concepts in different anthropographic invented concepts in different ethnographic context to rearrange negate or invert a relationship between familiar terms the gift proved to be the egregious anthropological construct to be sector to such negative strategies this is the case of inquiries such as paris transposition of the Maori gift in India who showed that the status of the Indian gift Dana is not predicated on an ideology of reciprocity but rather relies on a soteriology the gift which is returned is not a is uh that it's subject defining relation of master hood I would say also replicated linguistically on different scale for example the duck in Tibetan used for indicating both the householder the spirit and the landmaster and the owner the patron the same in ed the Mongolian or in other Turkey and Siberian languages so and this relation of mastery to a sense simple expression uh and relations of ownership authority or domination in this zone which I and my colleague Adam Chow a colleague completely arbitrary cumulus cultural zone uh we find a surprising propensity for social practices related to hosting and hospitality sacrifice to gain favor from a patron the host land or spirit master and very subjecting and uh concerns for accumulation storage hoarding container ship and related preoccupations with leakages and parasitism now Ben Veniste also noticed that there is an obvious connection that joins the notion of the gift and that of hospitality and indeed hospitality emerges over and over in anthropological literature entangled with the gift as an implicit or passing reference point so it is it is then time to return to one of my previous thought experiments imagine what anthropology might look today if Marcel most had chosen hospitality rather than the gift as a subject of his 1924 treaties so this alternative future for anthropology could be brought into being by an alternative theoretical scenario what if the logic of hospitality encompasses relation of sharing giving or trading what if hospitality is the transcendental field of value production and transformation it may well be that in most essay hospitality does not appear appear indeed as a subcategory the gift but rather one of the conditions of the possibility for gift giving and forms of generalized exchange I quote to trade the first condition was to lay the side of spear from then all ones own world society succeeding in exchanging goods and person no longer only between clients but between tribes and nation and above all between individuals the epigraph from the north's collection of religious point of hava mal chosen by most to introduce the gift is indeed concerned with reciprocity yet it is named guest stutter the guest section um of which which comprises the rules manner of relationship for being a guest while traveling and handling relation with horse in north ancient society indeed for more so hospitality intertwines with gift giving as the most basic human acts foreground in or relationship of alliance and affinity I quote again for a clan a household a group of people a guest have no option but to ask for hospitality to receive present to enter into trading to contract alliances through wives and blood kinship to refuse to give to fail to invite jester as refused to accept his tantamount to declaring war it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality yes his last chapter contains most most famous invitation to return to the joy of expenditure which is also the pressure of hospitality once again we shall discover those modes of action still remembered by many society in classes the joy of giving in public the delight in generosity artistic expenditure the pleasure of hospitality in public or private feast in the conclusion most does return to the law of hospitality as a juridical and economic institution developed in advanced society quote again until legal systems and economies evolved not far removed from our own it is always with strangers that one deals even if allies right most pre-modern society have to rely on travel festival and ceremonies where peace had to be maintained by the law of friendships and contract with the gods his then hospitality and ideological abstraction or an institution or a most specific cognitive orientation are filled for the for the transformation of values we had to wait until Nancy months work on the value creation and transmission among the massing of papa new guinea for a perspective in which hospitality appears as encompassing the logic of sharing an exchange month's focus is how actors control the social world through transformational acts of value creation instead of focusing on the partition of a person achieved by gift exchange man highlights how a person is equally extended and dispersed by actor hospitality hospitality is the transfer if correct as as i read it as i read month is the transcendental field of value transformation which allows sharing to take place and the potency of a person to be deployed in concrete material exchanges which extend the intersubjected space time defined by man as the space of self other relationship form in and through acts and practices for man hospitality has constitute this transcendent the this transcendental field where the contractions and extensions of the end intersubjected space time occur which craft selfishness and greediness serve as space time by negating and consuming one's capacity to extend and diffuse their influence while this act of sharing food predicated upon the framing device of hospitality is that is the template of value creation which externalize the self beyond the physical person hence achieving control over space time hospitality activates the possibility of first the construction of value by enabling alliances higher level of exchange the acquisition of cruel shells and the value conversion of trading acts and localized influence into virtue of fame aware form as we know as many have written before for most gift giving ground our conceptions of society and relativists but a paradigmatic form of the gift was an extension of was was the sacrificial theory developed with Hubert where a part of the person is relinquished to another being in order to elicit a reciprocation of grace favors substance spirit or body as it is a field of participation hospitality is also the ideal field for sacrificial action this is certainly not unheard for the 10 every feast in ancient Greece was a sacrificial moment feasting in our tradition is a way of reclassifying and eating what may otherwise not be eaten to make available for human consumption what cannot otherwise be consumed but the ability to give and still keep also as a special is a special position that the lord of the state or a pattern of a sacrifice or a wealthy host enjoys his generosity being not a sort of an investment designed to bring great turn by an expression of the sort of permanent inalienable wealth he already has title to land status and fame this is an eight vener's attempt to displace the most unjustification of exchange in an ideology reciprocity by showing that possession of certain things can never be relinquished as gifts it is to the paradox of retaining things and are with high value or money while other goods are exchanged that the status of the donor is increased and his relationship with the gods maintained as I earlier argued it is the capacity to control the leakage of fortunate energy during hospitality events which preserve the Tibetan household internal productive sources of prosperity and the capacity to redistribute external wealth for vener malinoski's kula exchange cannot be justified by an ideology or reciprocity she rather suggested the accumulation of kula cells which will later become an inalienable possession resemble the price wealth acquired in ancient greeks but she to describe this form of ancient greeks social form use she used the word senior which is the greek form of guest ritualized friendship so we can see for that and we can notice in vener how the retention the the the objects retained which become also inalienable are also the ones which constitute the condition for hospitality and and generate further fame for the host and the house of all the hoof or a coating are I quote from vener just as a feudal lords through their authority vesting in their estates attracting merchant peasants and monks so from so talking about hospitality and this and and and the and the relation between us between hospitality and the gifts brings me to a final point a brief final phone I want to make so each each year from December 13 to January 6 my daughter has three kind of what I call cosmoeconomic encounters one is called Santa Lucia one is called of course Santa Claus and one is called a befana the first two figures incarnate that mystery human phenomenon that geerson called which is cited by most in his essay families promoted a silent trade that is the exchange of goods between two parties will never meet face to face never communicate directly never discuss the nature of the trade Santa Lucia will expect a sweet carrying donkey to be fed with yellow polenta flour and a glass of milk left on the balcony Santa Claus will enjoy some cookies near the christmas tree american children might add milk and carrots for your reindeer's or a british children may lay out some means by a sherry befana is an old woman which who rides a broom and hunter houses to feel thick woolen stockings with children leave hanging about the fireplace with either candies if they have been good during the previous year or coal if they have been naughty all these clandestine happenings represent not just silent trade but what uh david graver called ingeniously gift by stealth a kind of reverse burglary where the donor forces himself into the recipient's house to leave a gift in his radical form like with the fauna with the fauna the profits of the gift by stealth is that no counter gift is expected and sometimes the donor can be neither identified nor thanked now this is a condition that as open access editor i felt very much the question of pure and pure gift has been fairly debated in anthropology especially by paris articles which make clear that the whole ideology of pure nearest is just our invention carry two as i said ideologies of pure gift accompany the rise of industrial capitalism the dilemma does not affect the gift per se but rather our ideology of gratuity in most society a gift is never really free although we did develop a theory of how it should be free now that is not really preposterous to say that the association of open access with the free gift that how also used for the beginning is a gimmick too a theory of gratuity that we use quite effectively there are few doubts that the whole discourse of gratuity affecting academic publishing may be an ideological side effect of an increased corporatization of academia and they've seen profit or commercial publisher rather than reality into itself so i want to leave you with this reflection so how can we analyze the social life of open access in a graphically and through the corpus of anthropological theories of gifts how and why open access should be free how how it should be sustained and and whether is precisely in a sense the freedom and the facility of access they may always an influence of the value of the publication in a sense that if we want to think for example with zemel and alpha gel more resistance in a sense to reach a certain desire object more the value is increased and that is also a value of the object increased and then maybe that could be also reason why open access also has a limit so i wanted to conclude with this and ask you uh with with these two provocations which i think have been somehow uh coming out one from my field one from my experience as editor which is a field within itself and thank you very much for for this and uh if you have to if i had to conclude with with with the centers actually i will conclude that uh how is paid by as much would say by the counterfeit coin of its dreams thank you very much for your contributions we have 30 minutes of discussion and questions and then we'll take a break there are two roaming microphones one on this side one on the other side so please make your intention to speak clear to whoever holds the microphone if you could stand up please and yes we are open for questions there is yes there's one over there if you if you could state your name and affiliation thank you uh my name is chamber from uh citron university china and recently failed at the lc unsupported department i'm very interested in to hear it's a very grand event i'm interested actually about um martial sunnies you mentioned a little bit about your critic to master most but you just stopped i want to hear more about the total presentation my translator thank you my criticism is that the trans the transactions are always are often very specific they don't involve uh necessarily exchange of marital uh spouses they don't involve necessarily exchanges of uh respects of particularly uh they might have all kinds of they're all kinds of exchanges which are uh which are quite reciprocal but without uh these larger implications most wanted to leave out all of these things he called sharing for example sharing he said it's not reciprocal well of course it is in the in the long run of uh of time or it tends to be uh he also was imprecise in uh when he talked about the potlatch the kula as a potlatch because you know the people who are going to kula are competing with each other for the valuable of their partner it's of course totally different from the the opposition between chiefs in a potlatch in in the northwest coast so there there are a lot of these things that i head scratchers when you read the book i i i have found especially recently when i when i read this great translation i wondered about uh the the uh accuracy of all the the the way he's writing he calls also potlatch the he calls the potlatch the the trobriander's chief's redistribution of goods i i i i doesn't seem to be correct yeah i i think actually um johnny parry did a quite lucid analysis of of of there's an implicit evolutionism where you start with total prestation and then it kind of goes to potlatch as the next stage and um then the commodities lying underneath the text but he never actually is entirely clear which he's using when and how it works um i mean the one thing i'd add you know you have moieties the other example he gives is when two clans sort of meet each other and there's a choice of either to go to war give everything to each other i think that the biggest examples of total prestation that you actually have are in accounts of explorers often uh columbus or or cook um you know we'll meet people and they're like okay do we kill these guys do we hide or do we just meet them on the beach and then it's sort of people do give everything to each other and and it's often you can tell the accounts are very amusing because the columbus in particular never figured out what was going on so one day he's writing these people are the best people in the world they just give you everything you know they show up they give you their women their pigs they're um and then the next day it's like these people are all thieves i can't believe it they didn't take anything they want you know that's total prestation but it's a very very specific thing that happens under very specific circumstances where you have to lay the ground for everything else i think also we we uh we owe a great debt to jane about the work the war issue in the book when i first read it i understood it as a a very common sort of implicit hapsianism in our thinking about society it's certainly true in britain uh where all the juridical notions had to be brought to bear uh in order to uh as it were prevent the war of each against all even matrilineal patrilineal dissent rights in persons divided so that people didn't fight over persons according to redcliffe brown um all kinds of sort of sub rosa ideas of an underlying hapsian state and when i first read the gift it struck me as he was he was also arguing against this i mean you have a choice he said either you're going to exchange or you will fight or or take or disappear from each other's view and this was so much like hobs description of the state of nature but on the other hand i now realize from jane's translation from the wonderful contextualization that's involved by putting the memorial speeches the memorial tribute story to his fallen comrades how much the war has influenced his know his his desire to produce a contractual amnesty amity between between peoples uh and uh and and you know the attempt to make peace loyalty integrate opposing parties has to be very meaningful in the terms of the first world war uh and its casualties so i think it could still possibly be true that the hapsian underlying state is a premise of our anthropology i think it has been a largely a premise certainly in britain and all this emphasis on contract and juridical uh means of preventing arguments violence contests over goods or persons implies a situation like tyler's even our notion of incest we had if the tylerian theory was correct you know you had a choice of dying out or or or bonding together as if if you didn't have uh exogamy and relations between people you were going to fight so there was a and there still is i think some sort of uh deep hapsianism but but certainly in this case it was uh perhaps even overcome overshadowed or encompassed uh by the tragedy of world war one and the necessity of his time our time of um of a peaceful coexistence by means of exchange thank you can we actually ask to uh professor jenga would you like to join us on stage i think you should be up here um there is an added chair and i'm sure there may be questions as to the particular work of translation for therapies i wish you got some mike too most people would read that in greek maybe ebru and uh and wouldn't know very much about what the anthropologists were discovering and then we always say that that there was any more than one discipline by turning these classical stories in an analogous way to the the new ethnographies so what what i would suggest is that a good definition of it would be societies that are available to us through ancient languages remember also that ancient languages was um uh moses thing when you look at his reviews in hanay sociology i mean he lives very heavily on his mastery of sanskrit and he grew and wasn't agreed to get one of all the people he's reviewing so i think we could define it as that the prime reference would be uh societies accessible principally through ancient languages uh with the addition of some of the latest consent from ethnographies anybody want to take some yeah it's also true that that most had a very unusual idea of evolutionism whereby he felt that the only people who are actually primitive were australians and everybody else weren't um so he often used the word archaic as a stand-in um because this is owing to his sort of hyper-diffusionist theories where he felt that like everybody was in contact with everybody else and what's to understand is not how influences traveled but why occasionally they were refused uh he was convinced for example with the pacific ocean that people were just sailing across it all the time and the quacutal were heavily influenced by china and vice versa and so on so those are all archaic archaic was a word he used to substitute for primitive what he didn't think was appropriate because people weren't living in isolation which he thought only australians actually were uh can i can i just add to that and thank uh Keith for uh the illumination of what most might have meant um but i've translated of course into our contemporary elephant in the room uh which is what we've created through um what you would call 150 years of ethnography and what we do with that but thank you very much for the for the classical references i think in one of the great things about reproducing this book about 150 years of ethnography i complain all the time about my own university that we are now ignoring 150 years of ethnography we who are the custodians of this knowledge about humankind are not teaching it and it's going absolutely into the way that dustbin of history because of our lack of curiosity about this ethnography i think it's very timely that the book came out a new edition came out and i hope it has a great effect my fear is that uh this ethnography that we've been doing for 150 years will be lost for several centuries until somebody finds it again will have a renaissance as good as the one that happened when they discovered the greek and roman classics well i might just add keith your inclusion here of archaic that some of most of these examples are the peoples of france the peoples of europe the peoples who are still living in the country side still creating life in rural europe so archaic in that broad sense that you're indicating it does include in this this way that is original to him i think at the time the highly literate records that we have of greek and roman and sanskrit and in he were and so on and so forth but also the peasantry of europe and the the the epics and the jessip expedition and so on and so forth all put together in this in one big category of a reservoir really of inspiration together not as separate evolutionary stages but as as a an archive later this thank you uh john tresh university of pennsylvania and i actually don't want to change the subject because i thought the comments about the awkward archaic were very provocative and the choice of professor geier to keep that in the translation and i wonder rather beyond the kind of philological debate about um archaism's roots in philology which we've just been having i wonder if there is a chance here with this republication and with all of you uh in front of us um to think about maybe reclaiming that awkward archaism kind of explicitly is is this a sense um is this a moment perhaps to rethink and reframe the the discipline against the insistence on co-evilness on the present on the constant looking to what's going on and the contemporary as the definition of the proper field of application of anthropology and does this discussion about most and this rereading of most and rereading of the archive that most mobilizes um create the possibility to rethink archaism a deliberate archaism which isn't the return to primitivism or the primitivism that is so much more awkward and so much more properly dismissed is there a possible uh deliberate and conscious return to archaism that would be perhaps the most contemporary and most forward looking move that could happen in the field right now uh yes but it would be a brave that would be a brave world indeed um the um impetus of course behind the stress on co-evil carries with it a whole political baggage to do with uh contemporary issues inequality and so forth one would have it would be quite an uphill struggle but uh yes resounding yes but since you chimed in over to your chain I think I'm on the same pages as as you with respect to this Marilyn that that I mean this is um our field in anthropology is the human experience wherever whenever uh as uh expressed by the people themselves in their own words this is an immensely rich archive on which to draw uh just as Marshall has been suggesting that this is not just the present present that is 2016 this is people living in their present and the ways in which they have been doing that and most does say explicitly that this is a source of wisdom on which we could draw so that we don't go on massacring each other the way we have just done that it has that potential and perhaps I could just add a further further a further footnote um under the rubric of um co-evilness which of course I mean you know like like all such all such propositions they're not only very powerful but there's a lot there's a lot to want to support and there's something else which is the demand that we can only like people if they're like us and I think there's a real political issue to do with the way we think about people who are not like us and actually able to say that and that and making that a basis from which one one proceeds yeah it's not as if this material didn't have present relevance I think that's what's fundamental too I mean we're not just going to talk about the archaic societies in archaic terms it is uh it is a fact that the cultural differences that exist in the world are still operative even within and are extremely important even within the global system that we live so I think it's not a question of either or it's a question of putting them together and for that of course we do need to study the older ones because we we aren't doing it anymore and in all you know the the idea you started with I mean the statement you started with people only studying their contemporary situation well 40 years from now nobody will pay paying any attention to what they're doing they should take that into consideration thank you David Wengrove from UCL just to pick up on a comment of dame marillons I think there are two elephants in the room the ethnographic record and the archaeological record most was was fascinated by archaeology as it was at the time and in that nice collection of his essays that Nathan Schlanger put together he's already picked up on these little shreds of evidence of paleolithic peoples moving bits of red ochre bits of minerals over extraordinary distances and you can't help thinking if he was around today he would be talking to archaeologists because these questions about archaic societies are properly archaeological questions to which there are these days actually answers emerging but I don't think we'd have the first clue how to frame those answers were it not for the ethnographic record and the range of human behaviors that it attests to which we would otherwise consider simply ridiculous or impossible so I wonder if we need to define anthropology a bit more broadly and I would apply that also to professor salin's lecture yesterday which in many ways deals with properly archaeological questions my experience is that it's the archaeologists who are the best anthropologists unfortunately in the united states that is not here partly because they have no choice yeah many familiar faces who dare not say anything yes please over there John Campbell so as thank you for your contributions and for the book which I look forward to reading and renewing my knowledge of anthropology's foundations but I want to in a sense I'm reflecting an earlier question to two persons before me and that is to to reflect on the relevance of most day and the issue of exchange and the importance of social relationships which current states current forms of governance tend to ignore and I wonder if I could ask the panel to to discuss at least in general terms what they think most an understanding from world war one and the contributions and the metahumans which he was dealing with the paraphrase martial solace last night would uh would speak to you today in contemporary terms yes I would say something very briefly on the relationship between self-interest and other interest I think there are numerous contacts not least the organ donation situation that I referred to very briefly where issues to do with kinship and so forth arise and we simply do not know how to deal with the interested nature of say kin relations in that kind of context where the international community has seized this word altruism and cannot conceive the way in which altruism is modified with interested relations in the kinship context that's a very obvious one but I think most is actually extremely helpful there well this is a very large question to put your own mind in the mind of somebody from 90 years ago but I think that the the encouragement that we would get from his work would be to be deeply attentive to the details of transactions that people think of under rubrics that we might define or they would define as gift and how they actually work we had this wonderful example didn't we of the books arriving and where is that a gift you know well if it's a gift then what about what about taxes what about is there I had in my mind immediately ah these people have got marijuana packed into these boxes or something else but the the the the current ways in which these terminologies are deployed I think would be the the grounding that we would need to be standing on and searching from to be in the spirit of most at that time so as I mentioned at the end of my talk this very morning this this this message about the future of the next industrial revolution robotics and genomics and and everything is going to be uh rejigged and I wrote it down somewhere but we could be attentive ethnographically attentive to what are the words here what are the concepts are people creating new concepts for this world a robot's going to exchange things with each other what are they going to exchange they're going to have hands to exchange with they're going to have ears to listen to each other in a some deeply tangible sense we would be following most if we were checking out exactly what this implied for the present thank you very much I think we'll take a break 30 minutes we'll reconvene 10 to 5 please come back afterwards and thank you very much for our panelists no one expected you to