Tipping Behavior as a Semiotic Process

Abstract

In this paper I draw attention to semiotic aspects of the tipping custom, i.e., to patterns of interpretation associated with the giving and receiving of gratuities. The transfer of money tips, of Trinkgeld, pourboire, to waiters, taxi-drivers, beauticians, etc., may of course be viewed simply as economic-utilitarian transactions, whether they be classified as gifts or as due payments or as something in between. But money in general, in the words of the sociologist Talcott Parsons, can be treated as “a very highly specialized language,” economic transactions as “types of conversations,” the circulation of money as “the sending of messages.” To the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, economics is part of an integrated science of communication, dealing with the exchange of commodities, just as linguistics deals with the exchange of (verbal) messages and social anthropology with the exchange of mates. The exchange of commodities and money, Umberto Eco explains, can be considered a semiotic phenomenon because in the exchange the use value of the goods is transformed into their exchange value, which involves a process of signification or symbolization. Along this same line of thinking, Roman Jakobson has called for the investigation of the symbolic aspects of economic transactions as one of the most worthy tasks of applied semiotics.¹ What is true of economic transactions in general is true, I am sure, of the tipping custom to a much greater extent; for, as I hope to show, gratuities allude not only to the use value of services performed, but, more importantly, they are manipulated to affirm or affect a whole network of social relationships.