The Enigma of Christmas: Symbolic Violence, Compliant Subjects and the Flow of English Kinship

Abstract

Adopting a structural position, this chapter argues against the view of Christmas as an orgy of self-indulgent, hedonistic personal consumption. Instead, drawing on the myths and traditions of Father Christmas, the Nativity and Christmas Pantomime enacted in England every Christmas, it elaborates the notion of a hierarchical gift economy in which the directionality of Christmas gifting coincides with the flows of obligation, nurture and sentiment animating English kinship. Such unilateral gifting—from old to young and from rich to poor—serves to legitimize hierarchical structures of power by converting them into ‘soft’ domination through symbolic violence, thus creating compliant subjects—individuals who, as members of families, corporate organizations and the ‘family’ of the nation, are dialogically made through the imaginings of significant others. The simultaneity of millions of acts of consumptive giving each Christmas reproduces the imagined community of the nation, while excluding ethnic and religious minorities who, in effect, redefine themselves as internal stranger-citizens by their non-participation in this annual sacrificial potlatch.