The world of the gift

Abstract

There was a time, not long ago, when the principles of the Christian tradition permeated Canadian society. The church shared with law, medicine and education the aura of being the employer of choice for the brightest graduates of colleges and universities. Theologians and Christian philosophers articulated ideals that motivated the whole culture, and politicians appealed to a shared understanding of a world under the benevolent care of an omniscient God who blessed the faithful and chastised the improvident. Young people responded with enthusiasm to the call to go to the far reaches of the world, not only carrying the Christian understanding of the natural and human cosmos, but introducing education, medicine and social services to regions that had not yet been touched with Western culture.Those times seem far removed. We live in a society that has forgotten, and repudiated, its past. Our young people do not know, nor do they care to discover, the values that moulded their grandparents and the world in which they lived. This is not simply a result of the religious pluralism that became characteristic of Canadian society once government policy no longer gave precedence to European immigrants. There is a deeper malaise, which stems from the individualism of modern culture. Ever since the Enlightenment attacked the superstition of faith and put reason in its place with its interest in manipulating nature and society to achieve useful results, and ever since the modern world, inspired by Descartes, put the ultimate standard of truth and goodness in the human subject, the trend has been towards individualism, where each person determines for herself or himself what ideas make the most sense, what values are most worth achieving. Lacking any sense of a tradition that transmits standards and norms, the modern world has espoused the principle of individualistic self-determination. Young and old delight in offending ingrained sensibilities. Those who appeal to ultimate standards as a bulwark against the contemporary values of expediency, personal fulfilment and self-interest are condemned as reactionary.Christianity has been forced to adapt to this brave new world. No longer able to assume the truth of its traditional world-view, where God created and redeemed the whole world, it has retreated to the spiritual, the realm of personal feeling and the sense of something beyond--not as defining the way the world is, but rather as a component of human psychology, necessary as a way of coming to terms with the impersonal contingencies of natural and human affairs.In the five books considered here, we have five different examples of how Christian men and women are coping with this new world--the world after Christendom.Godbout's and Caille's The World of the Gift is not explicitly Christian. It builds on an academic tradition initiated by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who explored the forms and function of gift exchanges in archaic societies: the potlatch among the natives of north-west British Columbia and the kula practiced by the Trobriand Islanders. But the practice of giving resonates with fundamental themes of Christian doctrine. Creation is a free, uncoerced gift of existence, and the incarnation is described as an act of grace, unconstrained goodwill. Christians are urged to practice agape: love not as sexual desire, not as a devotion to something transcendent, not as friendship, but as charity.Anthropologists and others have examined how gifts function as a medium of exchange in various cultures. While no return is expected immediately, the giving of gifts produces a sense of obligation, which in due course requires a gift in return. Yet the Christian tradition has canonized Nicholas as the embodiment of charity, a simple good man whose gifts were always anonymous precisely because anonymity removes the opportunity for any reciprocity.In the World of the Gift Caille explores the structure of the gift in archaic society. …