Gifts as Language

Abstract

This chapter addresses the issue of gifts as a language of sociability. The culture of our industrial and post-industrial societies over the last centuries has largely become a culture based on mass-produced and mass-distributed objects. There is no doubt that people use these commodities as part of processes within which social and moral considerations come into play, but this is hardly explained in phenomenological terms. This chapter proposes to analyse consumption as a cultural practice, pointing out the instrumental role of commodities as a language available to social actors to express and to communicate. It highlights some aspects of the gift code between relatives, the key purpose of which is to explain how interpersonal relations are produced through the exchange of gifts between subjects, in this case linked by family ties. There is a significant degree of diversity in the exchange of gifts between relatives, encompassing emotionally charged contexts. The author conducted a qualitative research consisting of in-depth interviews and ethnography in Northern Portugal.