Unpinning Economies of Desire: Gifts and the Market in “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have no Points’”

Abstract

In 1925 Virginia Woolf’s contemporary, Marcel Mauss, published his ground-breaking ethnographic study, The Gift (Essai Sur Le Don),¹ in which he analyses the central significance of exchange practices to the social organisation and meaning of a culture with a focus on several non-Western cultures and also ancient European ones. As European societies struggled to recover, socially, politically, emotionally and economically from the First World War, debate about ways of managing the economy and criticism of existing economic systems came to the fore notably, in Britain, where issues of economic adjustment were ‘perhaps more prominent than most’ (Aldcroft, 1983, p. 2) and more specifically in the Bloomsbury circle with the radical economic ideas of John Maynard Keynes, advocate of deficit spending and credit for the consumer to boost the economy.² Mauss draws on the studies of several prominent ethnographers and the key tenets of his study is that gifts are never freely given, and social bonds are formed and consolidated, and cultural continuity ensured, by the obligation to reciprocate. Gifts exchanged are also never simply material, but inherently spiritual, even magical, imbued as they are with the identity or the soul of the donor — an idea most clearly encapsulated in his understanding of the hau of Maori exchange systems. Using his theory of gift economies, Mauss casts a new and critical light on the increasingly commodified, impersonal and anonymous nature of Western culture, a culture impoverished by capitalist values and practices: ‘the mere skimpy life that it is given through the daily wages doled out by employers’ (Mauss, 1990, p. 69).