From Dillinghams' Greatness to the Flames of Mogadishu: How Pure is a Perfect Gift?

Reciprocity and gift-giving are recurrent themes in today's social sciences. Ever since Marcel Mauss (re)invented the subject in his "Essai sur le Don," the paradigm of reciprocity has been presented as a counterpoint to the economical standard models, entirely based on rational calculation, utility maximization, and opportunistic orientation. Many go as far as claiming that the world of gifts offers clever departures from the money economy and the "sins" of the capitalist order. This type of reasoning usually forgets that Marcel Mauss himself presented his formulation of the reciprocity thesis as a mix of freedom and obligation, introducing cautionary remarks in a realm where most only see purity and perfection. Using two literary examples separated in time and space – O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" and Nuruddin Farah's "Gifts" – as starting points, we will claim that purity and perfection associated with gift-giving generally lead to a situation dominated by romanticism, solidarity, and love, but also by social paralysis, isolation, and autarchic communities. In turn, money-mediated exchanges may create suspicion and anticipations of distrust but pave the way to the development of sophisticated contractual arrangements that are fundamental to the constitution of cosmopolitan and decontextualized social relations. Using these two ideal types (money exchange vs. gift exchange) as working tools, we will try to develop a comprehensive theory of reciprocity, considering its multidimensional aspects and its contradictions. Reciprocity will be presented as a way of building up paroxysmic and competitive social relations among peers (its potlatchian dimension) and establishing symbiotic relations among actors with different social standings (its stabilizing element).