 Cymru'n ddweud ar gyfer y sefydliadau wedi'i gweithio hwnnw. Felly mae'n dweud o'r unig dystigwysg y pannol. Mae'n David Moss, dyma'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Ac mae'n ddweud o'r pannol, ac mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Jacob Copman, ac rwy'n wedi ei gweithio bod ni'n gweld ar gyfer y pannol. Costas Redsicas, Morris Block, Johnny Parry, Keith Hart. Felly, we're going to follow the similar format of the first session, having a brief introduction, as I said, and then 15 minutes for each speaker, and then we'll have time at the end for questions and discussions. So, we will probably run a little bit over the scheduled advertised end time. So, we'll start with Jacob, Jacob Coban, who is at Edinburgh, Department of Anthropology. He's the author of a book, Veins of Devotion, Blood Donation and Religious Experience in North India, and editor of Blood Donation, Bioeconomy and Culture, a special issue of body and society. And through this work on blood donation, organ donation and related things, Jacob has explored the gift and its forms of life, as he's put it, in contemporary India and also comparatively. So, he's well placed to give some thoughts on Marsalmus and the new translation of the gift. So, over to you, Jacob. Thank you very much, David. Today, a gift day equally might have been called a meta gift day, since Moses' gift essay as itself a gift is its theme. Not only that, there is Jane Gaia's new translation as a gift, freely available, of course, of Moses' gift of the gift. In keeping with today's meta-ness, this very event is a kind of potlatch of perspective. How reworks anthropology itself in the mould of some of its greatest analytics. And I can't hope to offer a commentary on Moses' essay, like those who've spoken already. But instead, I want to say a few words about the themes of excess and balance so central to Moses' text. That is to say, I want to talk about the proportions of the gift. And specifically, the way in which this enables the gift to form a kind of criticism. The gift as a form of criticism, I suggest, operates, is able to critique through its proportional structure. Now, questions of the gift's balance and proportionality are usually looked at in the context of exchange partner dyads. Gift giving is construed in terms of assessing the proper proportionality between persons and the implied senses of reciprocity or obligation entailed in giving or receiving a particular gift. For instance, Chinese culture, it's been argued, has a sense of proper proportionality and reciprocity between those who exchange gifts. When similar questions are raised in reference to exchanges with God or gods, a proportional paradox arises. For if God as a giver is the big giver of all, and if the obligation to greet full responses is proportional in part to the donor's costs in giving, then for most of God's gifts we owe her little since most of what God has given would seem to have cost her very little. And yet Christians continually refer to God's generosity and giving primarily to indicate how great art gratitude ought to be. So perhaps the proportionality of gratitude lies elsewhere as proportional to the recipient's benefit in receiving the gift. Which brings us back to exchanges out of balance. The free gift famously gets short shrift from Mary Douglas for being all out of proportion. And John Davis makes the point that we tend to think that a purely altruistic person is, I quote, as unbalanced as someone who is only interested in commerce. A blood donor who denies all her blood is clearly mad. But also what a waste, not only destruction of wealth as in the potlatch, but what some economists see as the objective waste of resources of gift giving in Western societies with givers buying gifts that recipients would not choose to buy themselves and recipients valuing their gifts at less than market price. There's a lack of balance, a disproportion between the true cost of a gift and the value attributed to it by a recipient. Now following from David Graber's telling point in his book on value that saying that gifts incorporate a part of the giver's self leaves unanswered the question of just what part or proportion of the giver's self that might be and also Corson Jimenez's sustained attention to what he calls the proportional imagination we might suggest a different approach to the matter of the gift's proportions. My suggestion is simply that when we move the question of proportions away from the dyad of exchange partners then this can open up other aspects of giving. So Corson Jimenez then in his work on the proportional imagination only discusses the gift rather briefly but his observations deserve our attention in particular his point that the part that we give is an indication of the whole that is not given. What you see the gift is what you do not get the larger social whole. We've already seen ways in which gift giving is both an expression and effect of proportionality. When we look at giving in terms of relations of magnitude and not necessarily in terms of dyadic balance or imbalance we can start to consider more fully at the gift as a form of communication. Specifically the given over in being given over may illuminate disproportion between the given and the withheld a gap or a relation of magnitude which may become the basis of critical social commentary. Balance is still important here but significantly it is a balance of two partonomies that is partonomies as in hierarchical part whole relationship such as body parts also known as part of relations. Now in anthropology partonomies are usually discussed in reference to nomenclature with sharedness of conceptual schema an indicator of shared cultural membership. Though the terminology might seem oblique to consider gifts as partonomic is simply to draw attention to the relationship between the gift that is given and that which remains un-given. A net vine of course is also interested in that relation but as a matter of the relation between alienability and inalienability rather than of magnitude that's not to say that there can be no relations between these relations so to speak. So to return to critique then it is partonomy that can make the gift critical. Of course gift theory may be critiqued, Marilyn spoke about chile. Gifts may be criticised for instance when understood as a species of corruption or excessive or gifts can be proffered as a solution to critical problems for instance in Charles Eisenstein's work on the sacred economy as an antidote to capitalism's own disproportion. What I'm interested in here is how gifts themselves can criticise by way of partonomic relations between the given and the not given with that which is given underscoring that which is not. Specifically in relation to charitable giving gifts may critique not only in the sense of drawing attention to the human suffering it usually seeks to repair a kind of critique by implication or default but in addition with the part given over able to draw attention to that which is held back. Now Nirancarri guru devotees in North India who donate blood to the Red Cross are explicit about their doing so because relatives of patients requiring transfusions won't give theirs. Devotees thus imagine the possibility of reconstituting a social form through the act of giving blood. A differently scaled but still hematological familial order. The gift of Nirancarri blood gestures to critically is only required because of a prior counterfactual gift withheld by the family. In dramatic sketches performed by devotees the bad family is vividly portrayed too busy to care and donate blood for its own. The newly abstracted but still hematological relations made possible by blood donation simultaneously underscore, criticise and compensate for the passing of an older seemingly more concrete relation of biological blood. Blood giving as critique operates here potonomically. The gift that critiques is formed of a partonomic relation between the concrete practice of giving and a failure of giving that threatens the constitution of a social whole. I offer a further very brief example. Many of you will be aware that in 1984 a poisonous gas cloud leaked out of a negligently maintained union carbide plant in Bhopal leading to the immediate death of over 2000. In the last 24 years more than 20,000 have succumbed to the slower effects of the poison and about 100,000 more have been left with varying degrees of disability and impairment. For its part the Indian government has failed to provide adequate health care to the survivors refusing to recognise obvious signs of second generation effects. Faced with these circumstances over the last 24 years the survivors have organised a highly charged and widely networked international campaign for justice. I want to refer now to just one of the techniques employed which involves activist children cutting out paper hearts of various colours and penning a letter on these hearts to the Prime Minister. The name of this campaign reveals its effective ploy. The Have a Heart Prime Minister campaign is built on the idea that these carved hearts are donations to the Prime Minister to be transplanted for his obviously missing organ. If his heart were indeed in its place it would not allow him to turn a deaf ear to their suffering. So the conceits of the campaign is of course ironic. It entails medical philanthropy from Bhopali children who have been deprived promised free medical treatment. The gift of the heart again is indicative of the gift not given. Here that of state assistance in medical care. So in a gesture then which is both playful and sobering the poorest and most medically deprived donate a pseudo organ to the person they see as responsible for their deprivation. The givers here are those without the resources to give in the first place. While their own lives are a testament to ways in which moral and meaningful lives may be forged in the face of stark impairment, survivors take pride in that this form of life is at least more vital than the disrepair of the body politic. Literally congealed in the metaphor of the Prime Minister's heart in this example. So to conclude well there doesn't seem to be any imminent danger of Moses gift gift ceasing to be the gift that keeps on giving. However I'd nevertheless hazard that with the new translation launched today we may be able not only to receive a fresh the gift of Moses gift gift but also press the refresh icon on gift theory itself with implications extending well beyond anthropology. And maybe thinking again about the proportions of the gift will be one way of doing precisely that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Jacob and for keeping so exactly the time. Next we have Costas Redsecass from our own department of anthropology here at SOAS. Costas is author of becoming an anthropological approach to the person in Java so another field of inquiry that takes Moses as foundational. Costas has gone on to study Islamic economics and especially through zakat practices and philanthropy and there's a new paper of his called the other side of the gift soliciting in Java and I'll hand over without a due to Costas. Thank you David. Some say that one should be wary of Greeks bearing gifts and I tend to keep true to this by entertaining a couple of unorthodox positions. The impression that Moses study has made in anthropology is massive and deservedly so for no other text has unearthed more archaeological treasure so to speak with every new excavation taking place and even if love is true is the reading of the gift as a reciprocity has exercised an enduring influence on the discipline. Subsequent critical engagements but many prominent anthropologists many of whom are here today have carried our lasting fascination with the gift to new heights. This is despite the fact that there is mounting disagreement amongst commentators about what most truly said meant to say and actually wrote. Such excitement is partly related to the way Moses study is organized discussing complex ethnographic and historical materials in a preliminary manner while speculating on an evolutionary path covering thousands of years. At the same time anthropological debate is also linked to the books political objectives in so far as most offer the gift as a point of contrast to commodity production conceiving it as essential to a socialist future. It is perhaps because of such qualities that anthropological enthusiasm over the studies significance addures and the potential for novel readings remains a diminished. Having recently read the gift I have to admit that I felt very cold of reciprocity. While there can be no doubt that reciprocity is firmly rooted in the text I was left cold of its promises and the presentation of an old to rosy picture of the social. This notwithstanding I found myself engrossed by a series of observations most makes of the Melanesian cooler which correspond to what is virtually hidden in the overall visibility organizing the study and in subsequent debates on its significance. In Moses text such observations are mostly ethnographic and have to do with the spells they will be gift receiver performs in advance of his or her encounter with the will be gift giver. The importance lies in recasting the so called gift receiver from a passive into an active figure. Giving full recognition to the actor who by a variety of means draws out elicits or solicits a gift. Such materials draw attention to the acts of soliciting that is moves which anticipate a partnership thereby creating the position of the donor and prefiguring the act of giving itself. Drawing on Malinowski's equally classic study of the troubriators, Moses talks about a magic formula called the spell of Concell. Such a formula is extensively used for invoking cooler valuables and is meant to charm and attract towards the will be donor the very objects the person who casts the spell he tends to ask and receive from him. At the same time the spell is also conceived as having the supplementary efficacy of bringing such a state of excitement to the mind of the donor to be causing him to be generous. Otherwise he might occur to him to keep the objects gathered for himself. The end of the spell is especially revealing for the tone of cwlla partnerships. I shall cwlla. I shall rob my cwlla partner. I shall steal my cwlla partner. I shall pilfer my cwlla. My fame is like thunder. My steps are like earthquake. A series of similar spells express the same idea. Casting the will be donor as a crocodile and a bird of prey. Working for the benefit of his partner, the will be receiver by collecting and bringing to him the very things he or she desires. The solicitation of the gift, particularly of the violent type, is not limited to Melanesia, and most makes no secret that the potlots of the northwestern American coast is especially animated by antagonism, excess, theatricality and destruction. Thus he writes that amongst the peoples of Alaska, the only way to demonstrate one's fortune is by expending it to the humiliation of others, by putting them in the sandal of one's name. He also notes that to take part in a potlots is to accept a challenge for failure to make a return is enslavement for death. With the ethnographic observations such as this, one is left wondering why moss associates the gift with goodness, espousing an alternative economy of values that is based on the joy of giving in public. In succumbing to these temptations, moss is not alone. An expansive body of anthropological work on the gift is pervaded by moral quests. And yet one cannot escape watering what the anthropology of the gift will be like if it had not been written from the perspective of a morally charged giving, but rather from the perspective of a moral soliciting. What if the gift was no longer to be conceived as the result of giving, but as the accomplishment of soliciting? What if we were to apprehend giving as a secondary operation, and instead of seeing it as productive of the gift, we were to describe it as the byproduct of taking? We have to be precise here. Soliciting creates value by means of drawing out wealth. As such, it involves a taking as its supplement. However, the taking involved is not the same as stealing. It is not also entirely depended from borrowing and totally alien to accepting. There is simply a taking that follows soliciting coming after it in the place of stealing, borrowing or receiving. I borrow soliciting from the vocabulary of Jacques Darida, who deploys it as a synonym for deconstruction. Solicitation denotes the shaking of totalities. Linguistically, it is composed from solus, which in Latin denotes the whole, and from citare, meaning to put in motion. For Darida's solicitation is threatening to any philosophy or morality, for it entails the possibility of illuminating the very secret place which any philosophy of morality must hide and repress in order to remain a philosophy or morality. As such, it bears the potential of allowing us to see the very element or quality which must be excluded in order to constitute meaning, truth and the good. As is well known, Darida has himself solicited Mossy's study and found the repressed element to correspond to the free or pure gift. According to Darida, the pure gift remains an impossibility in Mossy's study because the gift is always conceived as being contab in the circle of reciprocity. Reacting to this negation, Darida formulates two essential conditions for the gift to be rethought. A, that giving must be conceived independently of demanding or anticipating a return. And that B, that for A to be possible both the donee and the donor must not recognise themselves as such. For the moment such a recognition occurs, the gift and the relation to the other privileges, a relation unburdened by contract, obligation, debt and hierarchy, seizes to exist. A question inescapably arises, has Darida gone far enough in soliciting the hidden presuppositions and in freeing the potential of the elements otherwise repressed? I would argue that there is still more that needs to be done. The problem is mainly this. The ethics Darida espouses still pertain to the perspective of the donor, as it is the donor whom Darida is ultimately responsible for the forgetting to take effect. In other words, the distinction is still on the side of the donor. For it is still the donor who, in forgetting the gift, displays an undeniable superiority, itself steaming from his attention to save the donee from indebtedness and obligation. The quest must begin anew. Is there a different manner for the other to be conceived and value to be transferred? I would like to think so and to suggest that the answer hinges on describing the event of the social from the perspective of taking. The taking question involves secrecy and stealth and welcomes the exercise of a soliciting force with this concealment acting as the main channel for affirming the primacy of the other. A return to ethnography and Java will show us how, despite the problems already identified, we can critically reassert the concept of soliciting and renew Darida's and Moses' projects. When a relatively new and expressive lab to a computer disappeared from the house of Haji Kamil in a well-off neighbourhood in Surabaya, the Haji suspected foul play. Although he was not 100% sure, he put the blame on his security staff and, in particular, on a young man he had dismissed the previous week for being lazy. The young man who had been for the job for three months had contacts in the city's underworld, the Haji asserted. However, the Haji refrained from contacting the police about the theft. These could have been either because of fear of reprisals or because of perceptions of the police as reluctant to intervene where there are no additional incentives on offer. So the matter of the laptop's disappearance was quickly forgotten, never mentioned again, either by the Haji or his family. A couple of months after the incident, a quite different version of events came to my attention. According to this version, the disappearance of the laptop was not down to theft. The bearer of news was a street food vendor living not far from the Haji's house. He had heard of the disappearance of the laptop himself, and he put it down to Zakat, the Islamic wealth transfer, claiming that the Haji was well known for his stinginess and for letting money on interest. A practice many Muslim jurists class as unlawful. The Haji was notorious, the vendor continued, for being lax in his observance of Zakat, adding that the payment of Zakat, as well as being a duty to Allah, is also the right of the destitute and the poor. The vendor's comments echo a popular understanding of Zakat as the entitlement of eight categories of people, all of which are listed in the Quran. Amongst them, the most important are the destitute and the poor. Furthermore, the vendor's remarks also resonated with another set of views that conceive of wealth, its proliferation and disappearance as connected with Zakat via the intervention of God. Some would simplify such views run as follows. If a will of Muslim pays Zakat as required, one's wealth, well-being, prosperity, will be protected and multiplied by God, for God rewards those who follow His commandments. However, if a duty-bound Muslim refrains from performing Zakat, his possessions will be destroyed, vanished or go missing. For God duly punishes those who disobey Him. In this regard, the implications of the vendor's comments that the disappearance of the bad laptop was related to Zakat could not have been clearer. There was no theft at all. The disappearance of the laptop was the result of the exorcise of a right. The laptop's rightful owner was not the haji, but the person entitled to the haji's Zakat. A person probably belonging to the category of the destitute and the poor had taken the laptop in place of the Zakat that the haji had failed to observe that is as his outstanding Zakat. Enforcing Zakaton in this manner rests on taking. Such taking neither succeeds giving nor presupposes presenting. It is neither equivalent to receiving nor requires formal acceptance. In general terms, it amounts to a wealth transfer accomplished by concealment. At the same time, such taking bypasses considerations over crime precisely because it is located on the outside of human law and on the other side of giving. Soliciting demands the radical reconfiguration of the other. It is not enough to recast the other from a passive recipient of a gift into an active figure in its presentation. The sweeping move is to perceive the other as the cause of and the occasion for the self. For the Muslims, with whom I am familiar, ownership rights are established after the Zakat during the property in question has been transferred to those entitled to it. It is a condition of such transfers having taken place that one's wealth is bound to increase. Viewed in this context, the concealment and anonymity soliciting a forge the other with begins to make new sense. For prosperity and well-being to be achieved, the other has to remain hidden. For vitality profusion to come about, the other has to persist as the known unknown. My claim is that the vital excess the other signifies is beyond the goodness of the gift, beyond the honour of the contract, beyond the lights of reason. Soliciting and the violence it requires is the ground of possibility of them all. Thank you very much, Costas. Now I invite Morris Block to come and give his presentation. Morris is Emeritus Professor at LSE from long-term field work in Madagascar. He's generated strikingly original contributions to understanding ritual language ideology with critically important publications. He's offered critical commentary on anthropology as a discipline and has things to say, a discipline that ought to have things to say about human universals, universals of the human condition as well as cultural specificity. So, in that sense, he falls firmly alongside Marcel Mose. Morris. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm not quite sure why I was invited. I suppose I'm the only person here who actually knew Marcel Mose, though that was his child. This is all the more surprising in a way because I don't really have that high an opinion of this essay on the gift. This actually presents me with a couple of problems. Why is it that it gains such a prominent place, kind of a holy writ in anthropology, especially in British anthropology? I think the answer is twofold. One of them, because it was publicised by Evans Pritchard and his gang in Oxford, when they were trying to move away from a sort of natural science approach of anthropology associated with Active Brown. Evans Pritchard was trying to break away from this and he smelt in Mose and Hertz this kind of rejection. The other reason is because Mose attacks an absolutely fascinating question, the obligation to repay. He tells us at the beginning of this essay that he's going to explain to us where this comes from. Does this in two rather odd ways, in sort of three odd ways. One of them is by telling us it's a leftover of an archaic period which existed somehow in the distant past, which has died out, but which is somehow surviving in modern institutions and therefore you can still see it going around in modern institutions. That's his main answer. The other answer, which Levistros rightly ridiculed, is that after having gone through a treasure hunt through ethnographies, he thinks that he's found the answer in an obscure Maori text. Now why that obscure Maori text would have the explanation of a human universal makes no sense at all, as Levistros points out. Levistros points out more that actually the way that Mose goes about is mistaken. That is if you think if you look at lots of ethnographies, you sort of look for a lowest common denominator, you say that's a human universal and then you try to build up some kind of evolutionary theory from that lowest common denominator. That's the basis of his view. Levistros points out that obviously you've got to make use of the empirical data, but if you want to move the argument forward you have to put it within a proper theoretical framework, a proper evolutionary framework, which is totally lacking in Mose. My conclusion is, which is that of several other people, is that the essay on the gift is theoretically sort of, I don't know, doesn't make sense as an answer to the question there isn't in anywhere. Now on the other hand, I think that's what people like Evan Sprechid liked about it. And I think how this comes about, I'd like to give you a bit of sort of intellectual history, which I think explains it. Dorcaim starts off as a sort of, or this is represented as starting off as a rationalist republican following court, and that is obvious in the earlier writings. By the 1890s, that position was thought of as terribly old fashioned. The reason why it was being thought of old fashioned was a number of, it was a complete shift away in intellectual ideas in France at that time, indeed generally in Europe, away from a kind of sort of revolutionary rationalism. Mose, whose work can be seen as a continuation of that of Dorcaim, is in this movement away, and indeed Dorcaim starts to bring in emotions, irrationality, intuition in his work. It's obvious by the time that he's writing the elementary forms of religious life, which is an anti-rationalist book, if ever there was, and of course this is also true of the gift. It really is ultimately a mystical explanation that Mose comes up with. The influence, the hidden influence behind all this, well there are two. One of the most hung around with all these artists who actually made fun of rationalism, the Cubists and then the Surrealists who were particularly interested in ethnography, and of course that's quite important for Mose's development. But the most important one was that the hated rival of Dorcaim, the hated rival of Dorcaim was incredibly more successful than Dorcaim was Berkson in France. Berkson from the 1890s becomes incredibly popular in France. He's given every possible decoration, he's elected to the College de France, he's elected to the Académie Française. In the end he's even given a Nobel Prize. Dorcaim never got any of these things, he was sort of never really approved of by the establishment and therefore he's continually jealous of Berkson. Now what did Berkson stand for? Well Berkson stands for anti-rationalism, intuition, he wrote a book about intuition, and he's continually in dialogue with Dorcaim. Neither Dorcaim, Dorcaim never quotes Berkson, Berkson never quotes Dorcaim, but a lot of recent writers have pointed out how they're actually echoing each other and criticizing each other. Once it must have been particularly galling for Dorcaim in the last years of his life, is that his pupils, Mose and Hertz, are strongly influenced by the sort of mysticism which actually becomes a kind of intellectual Catholicism in the end, this is where Berkson goes, which goes right against the very principle that Dorcaim had started off with. Indeed you get this incompatible combination of intellectual ideas, which you find in late Dorcaim, but you find it absolutely in this essay on the gift. So this is why this article, this essay is in my view theoretically sort of blighted, it doesn't go anywhere, it's just completely lost as you go along. It's trying to combine two contradictory traditions, you couldn't carry on with the old rationalist, provincial rationalist views of Dorcaim, it was so out of fashion during the Third Republic. There was no question of anybody going on to this and you can see that in Mose, I think that's how one should interpret that essay. And then let me just go back to Evan Sprichard, we understand why Evan Sprichard liked Mose and liked the essay on the gift, liked Hertz so much. Evan Sprichard was engaged in destroying the natural science rationalist Dorcaimian positions it was understood then of Ratleaf Brown and replacing it by an anti-scientific religiously inspired notion. And he saw it because he was rightly there, so he saw it rightly in those late writings of Dorcaim, but especially in writings such as the gift. So he found his tool for moving anthropology towards this kind of literary mistico kind of stuff that he was going in for towards the end of his life. I remember Evan Sprichard giving one of his last lectures called Mysticism, where he was quoting, interestingly enough, the gift Edith Corsberg. Thank you. Thank you very much, Morris. Next will be Johnny Parry, Professor Emeritus at the LSE, well known for his ethnographic work in the subhumane and cungra area Benares. And more recently a body of work on industrial workers in the Central Indian town of Belay. Johnny has a central place, of course, in anthropological engagement with the gift, with his important paper, the gift, the Indian gift and the Indian gift, as well as with Morris, the critically important edited volume money and the morality of exchange. Johnny, over to you. The problem with these people from the LSE is if you invite them, you can't trust them to behave properly. I'm afraid. But I'd like to start by saying that for the analysis of my earlier field research on traditional India, I found Morris very stimulating, especially the essays on sacrifice and the gift. Even though the gift essay got the fundamentals fundamentally wrong. In the Hindu law of the gift, it's not the recipient and not the donor who is the superior. And what the spirit of the gift explains is not why the gift must be reciprocated, but why it must not. For the analysis of more recent data on industrial workers in modern India, I'm afraid I find Morris limp. That may be the spirit of our times. In an as yet unpublished sequel to a famous essay on theory and anthropology since the 60s, Sherry Ortoner identifies the major theoretical strands since the 80s. Preeminent amongst them is the rise of dark anthropology, which issues of power, inequality and exploitation come to dominate. That's a reflection, she suggests, of growing inequalities and insecurities in our contemporary world. Her discussion focuses on studies of neoliberalism, which has done so much to promote those trends. In these studies, the legacy of Durkheim has unsurprisingly suffered an eclipse, especially at the expense of Marx and Foucault. But there's also, she acknowledges, a countercurrent to which Durkheimian thought is more congenial. And this sees dark anthropology as a species of misery porn and says that what's needed is an anthropology of the good, of well-being and of ideas of the moral. How has devoted an issue to happiness. Important questions, Ortoner concedes, but why treat them as separate. How can we have a serious anthropology of the good without looking at the context of power and inequality in which such ideas exist and with which they interact. For that kind of inquiry, Morse is unhelpful. It's perhaps telling that the comprehensive index to Fornia's substantial biography has no entries for power, exploitation or inequality, nor class. It's not that Morse's writings don't touch on these issues, but that their significance is suppressed. If you suppose that you get a serious consideration in his sociological assessment of Bolshevism, you'd be disappointed. That little known work is relevant here because it's contemporaneous with the gift and it bears a fairly close kinship to it. Is Bolshevism socialism? Morse's yes, but an experiment in it that went terribly wrong. In the economic field, the attempt to abolish money was a disastrous error. Communism of consumption is absurd and even more absurd was the destruction of the essential constituency of the constituent of the economy itself, the market. A society without markets is inconceivable. Industrial and commercial freedom is essential and the authoritarian direction of industry is opposed to the exchangeist nature of modern man. And all that should pay to any notion that Morse was simply opposed to the market. Another reason for Bolshevik failure was Lenin and Trotsky's unwillingness to conceive of the revolution as a national one. It never became the work of the nation. The Tsarist regime was chronically enfeebled when it almost spontaneously collapsed and the Bolsheviks assumed the powers of the Tsar and ruled through much the same methods. The takeover was, says Morse, the work of a jackery of peasants and soldiers and their tyranny was not in essence more social and less anti-social than that of the aristocrats, officers and bourgeois. To be durable, he says, socialism must be the work of the general will of the citizens. The takeover must be conscious and organized in perfect clarity by considerable numbers or a very large number of enlightened citizenry. But what Morse does not tell us is how this general will of the citizens is supposed to come about. Nor does he identify the enlightened citizenry who will manage the transfer of power. And we get absolutely no sense that there might also be an unenlightened citizenry with machine guns who care more for their own interests than the national will. The Bolshevik essay follows Durkheim's rejection of revolutionary class struggle as a route to socialism and seems uninterested in the role that class interests may play in holding socialism at bay or in promoting its development. The familiar thesis of the historical mission of the proletariat, says Morse, is no more than an insight into the part to be played by one class in the general advance. It was only the more reasonable second generation revisionist Marxists like Bernstein and Kansky who developed a notion of a revolution which would not be the exclusive property of the industrial proletariat, but one made by it in the name of its historical mission for the community as a whole, which sounds very like Polanyi. But that's as close as Morse comes to acknowledging the part that class might play in the struggle. In some brief remarks on Britain, which he believed had far more possibilities of socialism than poor agricultural Russia, he makes not a mention of its organised labour movement. His whole discussion floats in the ether above the ground level realities of power. In that it recalls the gift where in the conclusion we learn that we are returning, as indeed we must do, to the old theme of noble expenditure. It is essential that, as in Anglo-Saxon countries and so many contemporary societies, the rich should come once more to consider themselves the treasurers of their fellow citizens. We are returning? Where's the evidence of that? How come the services of Mossack Fonseca are in such demand? It's essential that the rich, etc. Well, we might agree, but those Panamanian clients do not and they thumb their noses at us. Or take Morse's parable of King Arthur's Round Table. With the help of an astute Cornish carpenter, Arthur ensured that his knights would never come to blows, so that wherever he took his table, contented and invincible, remained his noble company. And this today is the way of the nations that are strong, rich, good and happy. That's not sociology, it's fairytale. Wouldn't most of us think that it's the sociologist's task to explain why the knights agreed to sit at the table? Perhaps because the king could coerce them or the peasants would refuse to pay their taxes. It's all very well to say that by the end of his essay, Morse was more interested in making normative statements about how things ought to be ordered than sociological ones about how they are. But it's surely inadequate to tell us how our world should be ordered without giving us any reason to suppose that it could be ordered in that way. Anyway, it's not clear which moral lesson we should learn from which exchange system the essay considers. Keith Hart rightly stresses that Morse does not simply oppose their gift economy to our commercial one. But in his moral conclusions he nonetheless comes very close to contrasting us to an undifferentiated them, who collectively represent something we are in danger of losing. But what? They're all very different. King Arthur's table is about establishing equality between his knights. The gift of Darn is about acknowledging the ineffable superiority of the Brahmin and the potlatch about humiliating rivals. Even in Morse's sanitised version of it, who really wants to return to the spirit of the potlatch? Don't I remember that pre-contact supposedly included sacrificing slaves to the far and was associated with some rather unheroic forms of violence in which the heads of rivals were severed to acquire potlatch positions? And isn't it accepted that the system went into overdrive when the quarchietal began to participate in the market economy of the whites and devote the resources they derive from it to the potlatch? As Morse might have learned from Boas, for quarchietal women that participation included much prostitution in the slums of Victoria, these women going home with savings that presumably went on potlatching and with venereal diseases that decimated the population. But Morse never considered what happens when the two kinds of economy meet. Far less the possibility that gift exchange might directly boost market activity of that self-destructive sword. Potlatch ethnography adds real edge to Herschman's story of how in our own history the sinful passions of greed and avarice were ideologically transformed into a relatively harmless interest in material accumulation in the quest to bridle even more dangerous passions like the lust for power. Compared to that lust, we might even develop some sneaking sympathy for Dr Johnson's conclusion that there are a few things in which a man can be more innocently engaged than in getting money. But Johnson and Morse predated dark anthropology which, with its emphasis on power and inequality, might have given both pause for thought, the one about the perils of commerce, the other about those of the gift. Morse exercised a profound influence on the sociology of India, especially as mediated by Louis Dumont, whose work dictated the debate throughout much of my professional life. That debate was largely concerned with the sociology of values, and it was on this terrain that Morse seemed suggestive for my earlier work. But, as Henri Beté has long since protested, we also need a sociology of interests to complement it. There, Morse is not a good model. And if we're interested in the interaction between ideas and interests, as we certainly should be, his work has little to offer. His canonisation should be resisted. Thank you, Johnnie, very much for that. Next, and last in the speakers now, we have Keith Hart, currently Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology at the LSE, if I'm right. Keith has, of course, published widely, apart from early and very influential work on the informal economy. His important book, The Memory Bank, Money in an Unequal World, led on to an innovative digital archive and blog by the same title, The Memory Bank, developing his ideas, and a forum for vital commentary on our current turbulent financial times and questioning what is happening to money. Keith, over to you. Thank you, David. I want to argue that the gift can be rescued from these scurrilous attacks, although I agree with a good deal of both of them. But I think what Kane said is that an economist depends on friendly readers, and if you don't get friendly readers, then you're finished. Most, I think, was a highly compartmentalised character. One of the reasons why we have difficulty with the gift is that a good deal of his work was politics and journalism, which is available only in French. I mean, acrypolitik is 700 pages. It includes the long essay that Johnny was just referring to, the attack on the Bolshevik Revolution. A fifth of it is financial journalism. He wrote extensively on the exchange rate crisis of 1922-24. Notice that the years that he's a financial journalist is also when he's writing the gift. I mean, I'm pretty sure he was gay and, you know, living with his mother's brother and having to fend enquiries every week into when he's getting married and all that kind of stuff, I think definitely persuaded him to keep those two parts of his life separate. And it's not so obvious why, but he kept his politics and journalism separate from his academic life also. And this is very important for an understanding of the gift because a sophisticated understanding of the gift is that everything kind of comes together in a variety of exchange phenomena. But the way that he writes the book, it's actually, I mean, some very important parts like capitalist markets, for example, are left out completely. So, I mean, it took me 19 years to understand this essay, you know, from 18 to 37. And I only understood it, you know, I think, because I managed eventually to grasp something from Capital Volume One and saw that they were related. So, I mean, people have mentioned already that he was a cooperative socialist. And the big difference between Marxist socialist and cooperative socialist was that the cooperatives believed in markets. You know, so that, I mean, he's by far the greatest, and he was, you know, very, I mean, if you look at his political writings, I mean, the three countries that are in them most frequently in the index are Britain, Switzerland and Germany, which were the three places in which the cooperative movement. I mean, there's no reference in these political writings to anything that we would recognize as anthropological ethnography. So, he's really kind of keeping himself in different compartments. But it's also the case, I mean, what is not known so widely is that he was a passionate internationalist, and he saw the kind of destiny of humankind after the war as movement towards more inclusive forms of human association. He was very proud of his uncle's notion of the division of labour, which in the 20s was being seen as an international mechanism and not just a national one. And you'll find, anyway, he does have some theoretically coherent things to say in the gift. He says that all local societies aspire to a degree of self-sufficiency, economic self-sufficiency, and they try to base their systems of rights and duties in a way that they can do. On those self-sufficient premises, and they seek to regulate movement across the boundaries of their society in order to limit it. But he says there never has been a human society that was self-sufficient. I mean, and that means that they must all go outside their boundaries in order to make good what they're deficient in. And the things that the institutions that do this for them are markets and money. He says, you know, just because they're not like our money or our markets doesn't mean, you know, he says basically anything that performs the function of enabling people to take part in foreign trade and supplement their local needs is money and the markets that it makes possible. And these, you know, I mean, so that, I mean, there are many, many different ways in which this function is performed. And, you know, Malinowski, for example, insisted that the cooler was not a market based on money in our terms because it didn't have the qualities and elements that our money does. So he's saying, you know, we got a good deal of the book. If you look at the chapter heading for chapter two, it's about, you know, money and free trade and all that kind of thing in which he's trying to combine these elements. So markets and money take many different social forms and we are blind to most of them because we don't see the social forms that they're based on. Now I argue that the gift is, in fact, a logical continuation of Durkheim's first book, The Division of Labour in Society. In fact, I mean, he doesn't say it, but both of these books have as their principle aim to attack English economism, English utilitarianism. And even in the gift, early on, most attacks two principles of evolutionary English economism. One of them we've heard from David already is the myth, the bottom myth origin of money, Adam Smith, which is basically, you know, I mean saying that the aboriginal form of economic transaction was based on private property. I mean the only thing that's missing is the money and the only reason to have money is because it makes this private property exchange more effective. So I mean the first thing he goes against is Smith's economic individualism as a kind of primeval force in human nature. But for both of them, the person they were much more concerned with because they were contemporaries was Herbert Spencer. Herbert Spencer had a theory that primitive societies were communal and their basic forms of exchange were altruistic. And that means they were really nice, very nice, but ours, you know, are based on selfish market transactions, individualism, denial of any kind of social interdependency. He says, I know it's awful, but it actually works better than the other stuff. I mean that's his argument then is that there has been an evolution from altruism to individualism and the individualism wins, you know, essentially. So one of the things that both these books are concerned with demolishing is the idea of altruism and self-interested transactions being in some sense the opposite of each other. I mean what there and certainly in the gift, I mean one of the arguments is that essentially as I think people have been saying, yeah, Johnny for sure, you know, altruism is always interested, you know, and self-interested behaviour in markets is always social. So this whole book is about the opposite of the contrast between gifts and commodities, gifts and markets. It's saying this is a bourgeois ideology, moreover it's English, and it gets, you know, it really messes it up because we are both individual and social and the issue is how are they combined. And this ideology, this ideological contrast makes it impossible for us to see that. And what Durkheim and most are arguing is that contracts look like they're individual but that's because the social context that makes them possible is hidden. You know, we don't actually see the social basis of our contractual commercial society. We only see it when we get mugged and lose our stuff and have to call the cops and see what they can do about it. So this is, I think, I must get on. So the basic idea of the division of labour in society is that the contract is framed by non-contractual elements. He called it the non-contractual element in the contract. And this is a body of social customs, shared history, state law and so on, which is present in commerce but largely missing from our consciousness most of the time. Moreover, and this is something that Durkheim shared with Marx, I mean, individuation is strongest in societies where society itself is strongest. I mean, his argument is that the division of labour binds us together in very powerful ways and that's why we're more individualistic than many societies that are weaker in that respect. Now, my, you know, just to throw it out, I would argue and say, well, what is the gift? I say first of all, there is no theory of the gift in the gift. I mean, he sees the gift as part of a whole series of transactions, exchanges, possibilities which have more in common than they have. And the gift is the non-contractual element in the contract in terms of Durkheim's theory. What he's presenting here is an ethnographically founded attempt to demonstrate how the hidden forms of social exchange are revealed in archaic societies. I mean, the great, and he says this in the book, the really important feature of this, all these ethnographies is that they show what's going on in a way that is very difficult for us to see. So they're transparent and, you know, and yeah, I mean, sure, I mean, they show persons behaving in generous ways. But the fundamental reason for showing this ethnography is so that the study of archaic exchange can help members of contemporary France and similar societies to see the non-contractual elements of commerce. As I said already, and I think Johnny and Morissau, also the depiction of modern economies in this book is very poor, very weak. And it's partly because he's actually assuming that most of the people he's addressing would know all that stuff. You know, well, we don't, and maybe, you know, they didn't. It's also, you know, I mean, one of the questions that we have to ask for this book and interpreting it is what is the relationship between anthropology and politics in the writing of this book? Well, to some extent he brings them together in the conclusions, but, you know, I mean, that you will only find out what his politics are, what he thought this was about by reading the journalism, the politics. So that, I mean, he aspired to what he called an economic movement from below. And that economic movement from below had three components, cooperative societies, workers' associations and mutual insurance. So it's not that he didn't have, you know, okay, he didn't have a class analysis, but he definitely, you know, he had some notion of how the economic movement that he was part of and wrote about in his journalism might take place. So to conclude, okay, sorry just to repeat, the point of the ethnography is not so we can learn about the fucking Maori. It's to give his French audience some sense of, you know, what they might find around them. I mean, he's saying that if you read the last chapter he's saying that there are very powerful contracts in capitalist societies, rental contracts, wage contracts, which are composite and combine many elements of the gift and it's hard for us to see that. But if we can read, you know, the Trobion Downers and, you know, the Quacky Little, you know, he thinks this will make it more obvious and will lead to an economic movement from below, which he actually believed in. I mean, his party, which was the French section of the Workers' International, actually won national political power in 1924. So I want to leave you with these questions, which it seems to me are not resolved in the interpretation of the gift. First, are gifts and markets the opposite of each other or are they in some way implicated as similar forms of exchange? In relation to the archaic societies we've discussed already, what is the relationship between the audience of contemporary freshmen of the left, which is what is hoping to reach? What's the relationship between them and their experience of the world and the kind of world that is being described by Malinowski and Boas and the others? I mean, these are, you know, and I think that we still have, especially in the Anglophone world, an evolutionist approach which sees these people as evolutionally inferior to us. And even, you know, a lot of anthropologists who think that the point of the essay is to teach people anthropology. You know, I mean, this guy, you know, was, he shouldn't read if he can't read French. It's a shame that it's not available in English, but these political essays, financial journalism and so on reveal most as quite the opposite of the way he comes across in this essay. He's very sophisticated, very sure of himself, very able to say, you know, out front what it's all about. And yet the essay confuses all that and makes it extremely difficult. The final thing is, yeah, I mentioned already. I mean, is it about them versus us? Is it about the gift versus market? Is it about them versus us in some way? I would argue that the whole point of the essay was to say no to those questions, both of them. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Keith. And thank you to all the speakers, Jacob Costas, Morris, Johnny and Keith for that wonderful set of comments. Right, we have half an hour now for questions. I think we're not going to extend too much over the time we anticipated ending. So I think there's a microphone, there are microphones going around. Okay, so let's open it up for questions or comments. So, yes, at the back. Sorry, I can't see you, but yes, please. Thank you. Patrick Neveling, Ydrecht University. Very interesting panel. Thank you very much. I would side with Jonathan Perry if we were doing a vote on the question of canonisation of the essay or not. But my question actually points in a different direction, which I find is maybe not so, has not been as central to the debate as it might have deserved, which is the question of this Schmittian perspective on history that has emerged quite on inside remarks here. And around the time after the Second World War in Germany, there was a very big debate about the work of Carl Schmitt and how he portrayed the question of continuity or discontinuity of the modern era. And one of the evolutionary perspectives in Moss essay is of course to say that it's a continuity and there's no moments of historical rupture when something fundamentally changes so that we can't replicate certain phenomena of our present by looking at some past whichever. And the question is, if we are here also discussing the opening of a centre for ethnographic theory, then how do we deal in reflection on Moss with this question of history and continuity and discontinuity and the kind of replicability of phenomena in history in our analysis, I would be interested to hear opinions on that. Can we take a comments response from anybody on the panel? My instinct is that you shouldn't be asking us, you should be asking Ed Simpson and the people who are running the centre. My pitch is that starting from Moss you start from ideas and ideas without the context of interest, power and inequality are not enough and there's an ethnographic centre therefore has to pitch itself rather firmly in some ways as a critique of parts of Moss. To be provocative. Can I just say something? Yes please. Right I just want to say, I mean one of the, he saw the job of his group to make ethnographies known because this was linked, so I think you know there's a bit of a problem as we tend to make him sound as though he was only interested in his general theories. He also saw very much the job of getting ethnographies such as trobrans, such as the potlatch, known in France, which they weren't. That's why he goes, I mean if it was just a theoretical thing he would need to go on and on and on and on about what trobrans are like. He does because you know a lot of that essay is also informing the general public and it's linked with his internationalism, somebody mentioned his internationalism. He was very, I mean both him and lots of the other people in that group were very very keen in playing down the uniqueness of the unique value of modern society. But that one should pay into attention the unique value of completely different other forms. So he's keen on ethnography, I think that's what actually kills his theoretical position in the end because he just hopes that by looking at the ethnographies he's going to find something universal about human beings which is a sort of besetting sin of anthropologists. You can't just sort of look at the lowest common denominators but you don't understand what he saw his job as. If you don't understand the importance he saw, rather like Marshal Salim's earlier, in making French people think about what it would be like to be a trobran, what it would be like to be a quokyw to Lord Hello. I mean you got the wrong one for Carl Schmidt. I mean I, in fact I can't believe that he's as respectable as he is today. And you know I mean we can't really discuss at that level but as far as I'm concerned you know he's a Nazi carpet bagger. Oh right, yes. Y Llywmber Cretig of Carl Schmidt I could have maybe laid that out a bit longer but then it would have been a ten minute comment. Further questions? I wonder if I could just say one thing. I really do think the introduction by Levi Strauss to the collection of Moses Esses is by far the most subtle and profound discussion of his theoretical position and its weakness. I was amazed that this wasn't a bibliography in the book. It just goes right to the heart of what's wrong with what's wrong. Did you read Lydria Sego's article in 2002, Social Anthropology, which is called the vicissitudes of the gift? And she develops quite a strong attack on Levi Strauss for writing that. But if we're the only ones here who know about it. I mean you know the point is that he hijacked Moses as the kind of Moses to his Messiah. And he's already written the elementary structures of kinship based on the concept of reciprocity. And he tried to make out you know that the gift in some way prefigures his theory of reciprocity. I mean Jane gave us the numbers you know present and cadeau and prestation. Preciposity occurs in the gift twice. So I think there is a certain amount of self-promotion there. Maybe clever and important I don't know. I'd just like to say that I'm not entirely in agreement with Morris's admiration of Levi Strauss. Particularly this point about the Howe being just a Maori theory. And you know maybe Jane would comment but it's my memory of the text that you know the basic point of the Howe is endlessly repeated. And my private view which I can't actually prove is that Morris didn't get it from the Maori. He got it from Brahminical theory where it is very very clear that the person is in the gift. And the person is in the gift in the form of the person's sins and evil deeds and so on. Which is why the gift can never be reciprocated. No there's no question that I mean this is where I would never forgive Levi Strauss. He invented an ethnographic mistake based on the Maori and then Raymond Firth he said oh good that's New Zealand I know about that. And so he then wrote an article saying most was really wrong. And then Marshall kind of took it up later and it became part of the canon. You know most made an elementary mistake. I think you're both completely misunderstanding what he's saying. I mean this was making a most fundamental theoretical point. And that is that the obligation to reciprocate is somehow most suggests a human universal. Something a kind of human predisposition which exists before and outside in a particular kind of context. And that you could find this human characteristic psychological characteristic and this most is very unhappy about this. The psychological characteristic which presumably he assumes is evolved in some sort of way. You could discover that by trawling through the ethnography. So what Levi Strauss is arguing is that you don't trawl through the ethnography and hope to find a few resemblances. What you do if you do that is what Leitch denounced as butterfly collecting. You have to have a kind of theory which generates the specific ethnographies. But whatever it is which are the constitutive elements of this are not to be found at the ethnographic level. So it is an attack on the usual way of anthropology going about. If I give you lots of ethnographies look what these different things remind you of then you've got anthropological theory. The point that Levi Strauss is making is that you don't get anthropological theory and it actually makes no sense. You're just getting lowest common denominators which are just arbitrary. Can I suggest that Jacob and Costas chip in here given that they are very much ethnographically based contributions. My understanding is that Mos and the gift go together with the reciprocity because he comes up with the three obligations. So you have the obligation to give the obligation to accept and the obligation to reciprocate at some point. However my understanding of the Levi Strauss's contribution to this is slightly different. That he makes he provides the condition of possibility for reciprocity. The condition of possibility of reciprocity is the law. It's prohibition. It is incest. In this respect he makes the social to be dependent on something which is not human because he doesn't explain where the law comes from. This might be universal but it's also non-human. My presentation of Zakat also hints on Levi Strauss's understanding of the law as something that comes from a non-human source. From the divine because it's a divine commandment to transfer part of your wealth so that you keep the rest on a legitimate grounds. So in this case reciprocity is a legal problem rather than economic. We've got another question about before that. Jacob do you want to chip in here? Only to say how fascinating it is to hear Jonathan come up with his personal theory about the derivation of the spirit of the gift in Moses' text. And flippantly to say surely a comparative analysis of the politics of the prefaces to Moses' works is waiting to be written. So a question at the back. You've got the mic already. I also am going to respond to the provocation. First of all I think Levi Strauss also reading the most leads to a very main conundrum which is how do you, why establishing exchange as a basic principle of human relationship. I mean because the problem is that what the accusation that Levi Strauss says to Moses is that he took, he separated the tree obligations. He failed to see the philogenity mechanism behind that which is exchange and he missed the forest for the trees. And that's a mistake he makes. Well he should have seen that, you know, what is behind there is exchange and all that. So he uses actually most to generate a universal theory of exchange. And as David actually is now talking, but he made it very clear in the depth book which is the whole point is that you cannot reduce human relationship to relational exchange. That's why he presents communism hierarchy and exchange rather than basic or basic communes as he described as a kind of replacement for this generalised category exchange that Levi Strauss gives us. I wonder, so for me, Levi Strauss just, I mean he's wrong and also Philip, now the Scholaus recently presented how exchange it is one of different modes of relationships which includes a predation, protection and different others which I can't remember fully now which defines where human relationships are about. But the other thing to respond to with Johnny provocation about dark anthropology is that, well, yeah, why the gift is still important today is not about canonising but it invites us to reflect rather on a category which it pertains both to the world, to the motion world and to the invitation to noble expenditure than to dark anthropology which are figures like the fiscal evasions, parasites, people in China who refuse to help the so-called good Samaritan problem, the people that refuse to help victims of accidents because the victims of accidents, they misuse them when they go to hospital. That's a brilliant article on that. So if you should never help, so these figures which can be still read, these figures of anti-gift or negative reciprocity or parasitism which can be still illuminated by engaging with most. So I think this is where, so there is no need to canonise most and I think neither the centre of enogravity or how wants to canonise most but it was actually just to use a starting point for more challenging ideas. Okay, maybe there will be responses to that in due course but there's another question at the back. Hi, my name is Julia Modden, I'm a PhD student at Cambridge. I actually have a question for Costas which is fairly specific because thinking about what you were talking about ethnographically, I found your discussion of focusing on soliciting instead of gift-giving really provoking actually. It's something that I've been thinking about recently but it takes a very, very different form in the area that I'm working so whereas you were talking about it leading to secrecy and stealth, in fact in Africa soliciting is incredibly important but it's very open. The idea of asking for a gift as a sign of showing that you love somebody so you will ask someone for something to show that you love and therefore it has to be open. So I just wanted to ask you to expand a bit more on that to talk about, is it a particular feature, where does that come from, the emphasis on stealth and secrecy? I don't know, maybe it can be linked to what Jacob was talking about in terms of proportionality as well. That may be a way of thinking through the difference between those two different types of solicitation. To be perfectly honest, soliciting, I started thinking about this issue with respect to Marilyn Strathen's gender of the gift, where she's talking about elicitation. But in this case, in case of Melanesia, elicitation, this bursting forth of gifts, takes place in public with respect to performances, if I understand Melanesia correctly. It's all out in the open. So then this case is where there is a wealth transfer, which cannot be construed as a gift, cannot be construed as a commodity, cannot be construed as stealing. I've encountered only two recently in my ethnography, and the whole paper is a response to come to terms theoretically with these two cases. In both cases, the people involved remained anonymous. Nobody knows who they are, and nobody has been trying to find out who they are. In Java, there is a very close connection between concealment, invisibility, and power. Cow power always comes from the outside, is the force that makes you do things, but always remains unknown. There is a theology to go with the politics of all this. So I'm just trying to turn this into a positive value. So far, concealment, secrecy has been understood in the ethnography in terms of sorcery, anti-social, violence, and I'm trying to give it a positive spin in terms of these are the conditions that guarantee the non-objectification of the other. Both for the people concerned and for me as an ethnographer. I don't give them names. This is important. It recreates the other as an aporia. This I feel is very much the opposite of what's involved in the gift which makes the other inferior, dependent. It locks them into a state of dependency. By giving him the opportunity or her to solicit or elicit the gift, it provides another sign of the social in terms of a different perspective than the Amazonian one. Can I respond to that? I think that's interesting. I think in terms of what Johnny was saying earlier as well, the idea of the gift making the recipient lower than the donor. It's hugely important in many places but it's not the only thing that can be the opposite to what you're talking about to solicitation. In the African case, you could argue that all of the literature that's on dependency at the moment and that's saying we really need to stop thinking of freedom as the ultimate thing that everyone's trying to get towards and that you need to get out of gift relationships. Instead people are actually trying to get into them. They're asking to be dependents and to get gifts from people. I think it probably relates to something that David said earlier about the gift being a negative category in relation to commodities. What you've got in mouse and what all of you have been saying is that there's such a multiplicity of different discussions of gifts and different types of gifts and we're getting the same thing with soliciting as well as gift giving. Whereas with commodities you've got something which is very strictly defined and in fact the essay is in a way telling us more about that even though it doesn't talk about it directly. I know that points were made before. I just want to go back to some of the earlier points even in relationship to what has just been said. It seems to me that what the essay sets out to do is to make a general point about human beings. At least that's what it says it wants to explain. Now there's a great problem. You can go round and round within ethnographies, that's fine. That's what we do most of the time. But the problem which Levystras stresses is how do you go beyond this internal going round and round of a specific ethnography. I found that in what you were saying. It made a lot of sense what you were saying to put it all together. But how do we get that from there to an explanation for the obligation to repay? That's where there is a disconnection and that is the point Levystras is making. Just a small point. In the French Revolution gifts were made illegal. But what they were concerned about was not gifts and commodities. They thought it was extremely unfair that parents could bestow one of their children but not all of them with family property. So basically the negation of the gift was observed rules of inheritance. Of course it led directly to the Napoleonic Code. The idea that all the children of parents should have equal rights and so on. But it is extraordinary. There's a book that I got this from. It's by Richard Hilland which is H, Y, L, A and D. It's a 700 page Oxford book on the law of gifts in 15 different. It's a wonderful book. The French Revolution stuff is really, really gripping. Thanks. I think there's one last question if there is one. Otherwise I'm going to invite Ed Simpson to come up and close our proceedings. Do we have any last questions that we need to get the mic up? Elizabeth Corey-Piers, Tava Stock Institute. My question is for Keith. Thank you. I found your insights into the financial journalist profession of most compelling. I didn't know that at all. I can't read French. I did field work in New Zealand where I didn't find his essay on the gift helpful. Although I was taught that it should be. But it seems to me that what you're describing is the failure of his project, of his intentions. That if ethnographies were a way of showing French economists and financial journalists and experts to see what they couldn't see. I don't know. I haven't studied economics but it seems that his work has not had that influence on economics. In the country what you've said we shouldn't be doing is exactly what is happening. It has been seen as a way to understand Polynesian society or to teach anthropology. It seems to me that you're describing exactly the failure of his project. Perhaps you're trying to redeem that now to address that. It depends. The people he was working in a very disciplined way within one of the most radical parties in France, indeed globally. He was essentially a follower of Jaurès who was the president. I think you're right it's a failure. But why? I think partly it fails because he's assuming too much from the readers. Partly who is the audience. He makes out in his party newspaper that he's trying to give the co-operativists and the syndicalists and the people operating mutual insurance a way of envisaging what are the real social contexts in which they can push for their revolution. He was a revolutionary. He believed in markets and stuff like that. He wanted capitalism out but he had a particular co-operatives socialist way of doing it. My feeling is that if it fails as a project it fails because he compartmentalised himself in such a way that half the things you need to know to make sense of the project are not there. Thank you very much. Can I just thank everybody on the panel for really engaging sessions? It's been a long day. I'll only take a minute. Hours ago Jane mentioned the launch of a ship and I want to end by returning to that theme. On November 10, 1941, Frederick Guggenberger sent a gift to the British Royal Navy, a torpedo into the midships of the Ark Royal. This was the ship that Jane had seen launched from the Camelard shipyard in Birkenhead to the wonder and vivid memory of thousands of school children. I know at least two anthropologists who also were there to witness the launch of that ship which is strange. With the thinking of the ship went the dreams of a generation, the end of a technological era. The things that went to the sea bed with that ship were the wonders of the day. Things called arrester gear and compressed steam catapults, let alone the void liquid void technology that the hull was built of. Incidentally, this ship had also had a rather difficult launch and it took four swings of the bottle to break champagne onto the bowels. Had that happened in another country it might have been a sign that the ship should not perhaps be launched, but we've given up seeing such things. In time the wreck became something else, it became an ecosystem, a home for fish, coral and all manner of marine life. A treasure trove for hunters. However, the spirit of the Ark Royal cannot be destroyed. It doesn't work like that, it's a flagship of the Royal British Navy. Its name must live on, so they just built another one. I'll ask you rhetorically, was there a Frederick Guggenberger amongst the speakers today? You can take that question with you. In other words, the Royal Navy is built around the Ark Royal. The Ark Royal is not an idea or an institution. It is both of those things but the Ark Royal itself is not really a ship. No Ark Royal, no Navy, or at least the Navy as it is currently recognised. With no Ark Royal, the Navy would have to be made anew, it would have to be something different. Might the gift be Anthropology's Ark Royal? No gift and the Anthropology has to be remade anew. Question mark, I'm going to end there. I want to thank all of those people who have spoken and listened today. It's been a day of wide-ranging, challenging and thought-provoking discussion. I would also urge you all to become part of the people network that is the centre for ethnographic theory. So one final round of applause for everybody who has given something today.