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Give and take: how gift-giving forges society, and ourselves | Aeon Essays

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The gifts we exchange are both generous and yet fraught with social rules and obligations. Marcel Mauss explained why

‘To receive from kings,’ the Mahabharata tells us, ‘is at first honey, at the end, poison.’ Honey because who doesn’t want the gift of a king’s riches? Poison because how will we ever repay? We all know, because it is written by our sages and scripted in our norms, that receiving a gift carries with it certain obligations: to say thank you and to reciprocate with a gift in return. ‘These people invited us for dinner,’ Elaine Benes explains to George Costanza on the TV show Seinfeld. ‘We have to bring something.’ But why, George asks? ‘I just don’t like the idea that, every time there’s a…

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