Positively Glorious!

You all know them. The people who give gifts of toilet brushes, or gifts of a steak dinner to a vegetarian. As I sit in the house of my wife’s parents during this Christmas holiday, it comes that I have a few spare moments to contemplate bad gifts, culture, and the phenomenon of gift-giving.¹

There is kind of cultural nuance that intrigues me about gift-giving. It is a nuance that I feel every Christmas when traveling home to the culture of my in-laws. It strikes me that every family is a blending of two cultures– whether ethnic cultures as ours, or merely familial cultures. These variations become very pronounced during gift-giving, and Christmas is nothing if not a time of gift-giving.

Coming from a multi-ethnic family, a mixed-race person like me sees these variations from a strange, internal perspective. I’ve seen the nuances of gift-giving from early childhood and never realized them until my training in anthropology placed a lens on the incongruities I’d felt for so long. Though I’d felt the fact as assuredly as I’d felt my own bones and tendons, it was only then that I had words and expression for the fact: gifts have meaning.

Even more importantly: The very act of giving has meaning.

In fact, I realize more and more that it is the act itself that is meaningful, much moreso than the gift.

Giving as…

There are many things that can be expressed as gift-giving, of course. Someone giving a gift of a very expensive car to a relatively poor person might be doing something kind for his fellow man. The gift of transportation. However, if that giver was a mafia boss, we might also have a “gift-giving as dominance” scenario out of any given mob movie.

Reciprocity is the key here. Reciprocity is the catch, the second edge to the sword that is “a gift.” Reciprocity is the culturally universal knowledge that “as they give to me, so should I give to them.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that reciprocity is bad. Quite the contrary, reciprocity is the glue that holds most cultures together. It’s the binding thread that ties people, families, and even peoples. Reciprocity is A Good Thing™.

The problem comes when reciprocity is misunderstood. More importantly, when it is misvalued. Such is the main nuance amoung two different gift-giving cultures.

That’s when people start giving out toilet brushes.

Giving as… ?

After nearly 7 years together, I have still not grown comfortable with the gift-giving culture of my Jessica’s family. Like a person watching a prairie storm approach, I’ve grown to know what to expect, yet am still buffeted by the discomfort of it’s coming.

“I don’t know if you like these, but I bought them anyway, just take it back if you don’t like it.”

How much cultural depth there is in this oft-repeated phrase, here. And how much more depth is displayed by the intensity of gratitude and the number of thanks that must accompany each gift. A gift that is unwanted, sometimes even obviously troublesome, must be praised and thanked as if it were the very prize of heaven.

It strikes me that nearly everything that is comfortable to Jessica about that gift-giving ritual is something that makes me the most uncomfortable. I struggled for a while trying to understand the reasons for this, and am only now beginning to understand them.

To me, gift-giving is primarily about listening, about knowing. It’s about sharing not gifts or even gestures, it’s about sharing emotions. It’s a deep game, gift-giving, and thus it is my responsibility as the gift-giver to play that game as deeply as possible.

I could not say “I don’t know if you like these…” because I, as the gift-giver, have a deep and even sacred responsibility to know whether the recipient does. I’m supposed to listen to their wants and desires, to their needs. I’m supposed to listen to their emotions.

The Responsibility Of Giving

For me saying “I don’t know if you like these” is exactly the same thing as saying “I don’t really care enough to find out even the most basic thing about you.” It’s bluntly put, but it’s true. It’s a casting of seeds. Throwing random chaff to the person in hopes that they will find a grain– and laying the responsibility of the search on that person. And after searching, and finding the grain, the person is expected to say “Thank you for giving me the chance to search this chaff.”

I needn’t take any time or spend any thought on who that person is, their wants or wishes. In a way, it’s saying “I have enough money that I can buy anything, and care so little about both the money and you that I invite– even expect– you to return it. I now expect you to thank me for expending even this minuscule amount of effort upon you.”

Sadly, in my culture, if I were going to insult someone, this would be a sure, and almost violently brutal, way to do so.

But cultures are different, and I try not to take offense. This is harder than I want to admit.

So, as Christmas approaches, I prepare myself for the cultural incongruity that is “gift-giving.”

Sometimes, I wish I could have them truly understand what I see as gift-giving.

1. This phenomenon has seen it’s share of study in the anthropological field– a great many anthropologists have studied reciprocity in every culture, most famously Bronislaw Malinowski, who’s pioneering work in the Trobriand Islands led to new understandings of gift-giving, and of the highly complex and subtle cultural nuances of so-called “savages.” [↩]