By “exchange and reciprocity” what we are really talking about is the daily give and take of human relationships. The give and take can be very straightforward: a ‘hello’ or a smile, even a silence when you expected something to be said can be meaningful. The give and take can also be very elaborate and complicated, such as a feast or ritual get-together, a raid on an enemy or an agreement upon a marriage. Commercial items are bought and sold, but religious “things” are given and taken as well, e.g., Christmas gifts or attendance at a confirmation.

QUESTION

By “exchange and reciprocity” what we are really talking about is the daily give and take of human relationships. The give and take can be very straightforward: a ‘hello’ or a smile, even a silence when you expected something to be said can be meaningful. The give and take can also be very elaborate and complicated, such as a feast or ritual get-together, a raid on an enemy or an agreement upon a marriage. Commercial items are bought and sold, but religious “things” are given and taken as well, e.g., Christmas gifts or attendance at a confirmation.

First, I’m going to talk about a theory of reciprocity by Marshall Sahlins that is pretty old now, but still very important to anthropology. Then I’ll give some examples, focusing on the video (“The Feast”) you’re watching this week, and on the articles you’re reading about Richard Lee’s Christmas in the Kalahari, and McNamara’s article on bribing a policeman in Bolivia.

Marshall Sahlins’ theory of reciprocity

Marshall Sahlins wrote a famous article back in the 60s that built on the work (Essai sur le don) of Marcel Mauss, one of the founders of anthropology. Mauss was interested in what he called a total prestation, by which he meant a gift that had implications for every aspect of social life – religious, economic, political, familial.

Sahlins, like Mauss before him, uses the comparative method to present his case. By comparative method I mean the notion that the range of human cultures in the world is similar to a lab full of different varieties of the same species, so that we can understand and explain cultural variation by comparing one culture to others that are closely, but not totally alike. Finding cultures that vary in only a few respects gives us a kind of natural “control” when we study them.

Sahlins divides prestations – now called “reciprocity” – into three types, generalized, balanced, and negative. Each of these three types of reciprocity differs in terms of the degree of overt calculation of the cost of a gift, the amount of time that can elapse before a gift is expected to be returned, the types or categories of persons for whom a particular type of reciprocity is most appropriate, and the moral value identified with the gift of that category. We’ll also see that the categories of reciprocity can be manipulated to express power, and that persons can be moved from one category to another to show a change in their standing vis-à-vis the giver of the gift.

Generalized reciprocity is the “pure” gift: in generalized reciprocity the gift is given ideally with no expectation that it will be returned. The cost of the gift is not to be calculated, and its moral value is typically very high. Remember that this is an ideal! In actual practice, there is often at least some calculation, and some expectation of return. A simple example would be the way in which parents take care of their children. Parents are supposed to give to their children without expecting a return – Sahlins says that the best test of generalized reciprocity is that there is a one-way flow of gifts for which many years can pass before a return is anticipated, if ever. Another way to look at this is that parents and children are related forever, so even if I give my children gifts for thirty or forty years, I can expect them to take care of me when I reach old age.

In real life, you do ask for a return, e.g., following the rules of the house as determined by the parents, taking out the garbage or running errands, but notice that the overall value of the return is relatively small compared to feeding, clothing, housing, and educating your child. Notice also that there is often a nonmaterial return, i.e., children should respect their parents for what their parents do for them. The nonmaterial recognition that respect involves is not quantifiable, but is nevertheless considered important in most families.

Finally, the category of persons most typically associated with generalized reciprocity are “blood” relatives or “close” relatives or “close” friends, depending on how a given culture identifies the people who share your immediate life chances.

Negative reciprocity is on the opposite end of the scale from generalized reciprocity. In fact, it might be hard to understand why we would think of negative reciprocity as reciprocity at all. By “negative reciprocity,” Sahlins refers to situations in which you take as much as you can get, and give as little as you can get away with – precisely the opposite of the ideal gift! Even so, negative reciprocity involves a relationship of a certain kind, just not one that you would want to have with your close friends and relatives.

The importance of calculation in negative reciprocity is very high, since you are trying to get as much as you can while giving little away. The timing, as you can imagine, is also very short: if you are trying to maximize your returns, you aren’t expecting a long relationship; in fact, the shorter the better. (Remember that this contrasts sharply with a parent-child relationship that lasts a lifetime.) So what sorts of activities would count as negative reciprocity? Theft, for one, e.g., stealing cattle or horses. An attack on an enemy would be another example, since you want to get as many of “them” as you can while losing as few of your own warriors as possible. A third example would be a straightup market exchange, buying and selling, since you want to pay as little as you can get away with while maximizing your return.

So these are all recognizable situations, and just as with the gift, every human culture recognizes this type of reciprocity. The type of person with whom you would engage in negative reciprocity is either an enemy or a stranger, someone who is outside the limit of your moral obligations. These are typical short-term transactions, though the mutual raiding or the buying and selling may actually continue for a very long time (think of the Hatfields and the McCoys), even over several generations. The moral value of negative reciprocity can be seen from several different perspectives. On the one hand, it’s not very nice to kill people and steal their stuff. On the other, if this is a way of life for your particular culture, then you may get a lot of approval from your family and fellow villagers for being really good at killing and stealing. In fact, isn’t this the basis of our notion of warfare: it’s very bad to shoot and kill people, except during war when you are absolutely obligated to do so? Negative reciprocity provides a very emphatic boundary mechanism between culture, a way of defining who is included and who is excluded as part of your group.

Balanced reciprocity is halfway between generalized and negative reciprocity. Sahlins says that balanced reciprocity has some of the characteristics of each, so let’s go through and see what that means. Suppose I invite my friends over for dinner, and several months down the road they invite me over? That exchange isn’t immediate, because I trust my friends to repay a favor with a favor. At the same time, it isn’t something where payback occurs only after decades – I do expect to be invited back to their place within a reasonable frame of time, or else that’s a signal that they aren’t “friends” any more, at least in the same sense of the term (maybe just “acquaintances” instead).

Similarly, we try to balance out not only the timing of the exchange, but also the nature of the exchange itself: if I provide a nice dinner for my friends, I don’t expect them to run out to KFC and pick up a bucket when they invite me over! The same principles apply to other kinds of balanced exchange, e.g., giving and receiving holiday cards, birthday presents, invitations to each other’s weddings or other important events. Maybe the simplest and most basic balanced exchange is just saying hello and shaking hands, a mutual recognition that places us on the same level (though in this case there’s no delay at all).

The moral value of such balanced exchanges is typically rather high, and often tied to status or prestige of the giver and receiver. Giving a good party is a classic example, or organizing a class reunion, or hosting a great wedding. Many cultures engage in mutual feasting which is both competitive and a means of alliance. During these feasts cultures may make political arrangements, marriages, conduct financial transactions, or engage in religious observances as well, as a way of establishing a long-lasting relationship.

The types of people involved in balanced exchange are often closer than strangers, but more distant than “blood” kin. Neighbors or work-based acquaintances would be examples. In many cultures, the typical example would be in-laws: people who are not quite kin, but who are not strangers or enemies either.

So those are the three types of reciprocity that Sahlins identifies, and that he claims to be in some ways universal in human societies. He also argues that these types of reciprocity can be used to define power relationships. For instance, generalized reciprocity by its very nature ensures that the giver will be deferred to over a long period of years – the godfather is a type of powerful figure – giving favors, gifts, and material resources in return for recognition of his superiority – in a lot of cultures. Balanced reciprocity, in the case of competitive feasting (for instance, the Northwest coast of North America was noted for “potlatches” in which each chief tried to outdo the other in the scope and magnificence of the feast), can show power if you can give a bigger and better event than anyone else. Negative reciprocity, again by definition, involves beating up or stealing from someone else without their being able to retaliate, a very clear demonstration of power.

And finally, Sahlins points out that we manipulate these categories to manage our own relationships. For instance, when I meet a stranger, we may get to know each other by exchanging increasingly intimate bits of information on a balanced basis, and eventually become close friends for whom generalized reciprocity would be appropriate. If we have a friend who betrays us, we may stop seeing that friend altogether, and cut them dead on the street, which means that negative reciprocity has become the rule for that relationship. In cultures such as Highland New Guinea, neighboring groups would move from warfare to mutual feasting, then solidify their alliance with marital exchanges, although they could just as easily go the other way and wind up enemies again if the marriages didn’t work out!

Some have argued that all human relationships can be understood as forms of exchange, whether material goods are involved or not. Whether we want to go that far is something we don’t need to decide. What is important is that this typology of reciprocity gives us a useful language to talk about different kinds of relationships among individuals and groups, and suggests to us how to predict the variables – calculation, timing, moral value, category of person involved – in those relationships.

Here’s an interesting question: we’ve been dealing only with human agents so far as actors in reciprocity situations. How about supernatural agents? What sorts of exchanges do people have with the spirits of the dead, with gods or goddesses, with witches? Those sorts of exchanges can also be analyzed as forms of reciprocity.

The Feast

Here are some questions related to The Feast, the video you are watching this week.This is a culture in which mutual feasting is an important part of political life, since all politics involves small neighboring villages, sometimes allied but just as often in a state of hostile standoff.

• What forms of balanced reciprocity do you see here that are related to “performance” in public? Why is performance so important to the Yanomamo?
• What forms of balanced reciprocity involve nonmaterial sorts of status recognition?
• What forms of balanced reciprocity are material in nature?
• What sorts of alliances are being arranged on the basis of balanced reciprocity?
• Where do you see signs of a potential for negative reciprocity?
• How does the role of leader in this culture reflect the importance of balanced reciprocity?

Richard Lee’s Eating Christmas in the Kalahari

This article is quite well-known, very much as Chagnon’s article on doing fieldwork among the Yanomamo is. Richard Lee was doing fieldwork in the 60s on a people – the !Kung San – who live in the middle of a desert in Southern Africa. As you can tell from the article, he felt an obligation to the people whom he was working with, and wanted to please them with a gift. But the gift went wrong, a little bit, and it turned a situation that was intended to be generalized reciprocity into one that looked a whole lot more like negative reciprocity, with Lee being teased and feeling rejected because his gift wasn’t good enough.

This is a nice object lesson on the relationship between reciprocity and power: the !Kung San didn’t want Richard Lee to feel too powerful, so they denied the value of his reciprocity. Here are a few questions to think about as you read the article:

• How is material gift-giving related to nonmaterial recognition in !Kung San terms? Is the same thing true in North American culture? Can you think of an example from your own experience?
• One purpose of the !Kung San’s dismissal of Lee’s gift is to keep everyone equal. Is this a tactic that would work in American society? Why/why not?
• Why do you think egalitarianism is so important to the !Kung San? Would it be just as important in our culture? What does this tell us about them? What does it tell us about us, by contrast?
• Typically, the !Kung San believe that the value of things – like oxen – is realized when they are given away, not when they are kept. Why do they believe this?
• A famous quotation has to do with reciprocity as the recognition of an “obligation to give, to receive, and to replay” – did the !Kung San have an obligation to receive Lee’s gift? How did redefining that obligation affect the nature of the gift itself?

Sean McNamara on bribing a policeman in Bolivia

I think this article is kind of interesting, because it describes a set of rules for reciprocity that are on the one hand very local, but on the other could be imagined to apply to a lot of similar circumstances.

“Taking bribes” used to be the expected way of doing business in the Western world. For instance, in 16^th and 17^th century England you never expected someone to perform an official task without being given a gift, sometimes quite a substantial one depending on the importance of the task. The assumption was automatically made that acting in an official capacity was part of the recognized status of the public official, and that anyone who wanted that official to do his (usually) job had to show due deference to the social standing of that official.

Eventually, the idea arose that there was (or should be) a separation between the individual who held the public office and the office itself, and doing the work of the office should occur irrespective of the nature of the person who held it. This idea – that there is a strict separation between a person and the work he is supposed to be doing – is relatively recent in Europe and America, and in many parts of the world is still more the exception than the norm. We speak of the “rule of law” as if it were obvious, but it isn’t. Personal contacts still count for a lot, and the act of bribery is one way to recognize personal contacts, the individual behind the desk.

In McNamara’s experience, this issue is complicated by the fact that the government simply doesn’t pay police officers enough for them to get by, so they have to make enough money somehow to make up for their low civil service salaries. Their only opportunities to make this money is by demanding what looks like to us (but not necessarily to them) as bribes, a gift to offset the cost of doing business.

Notice how McNamara ties the size of the bribe to “place” (does the transaction occur closer to the center of authority and away from public view?), to the rank of the police officer (higher ranks must be recognized by larger bribes), and to the presentation of self of the citizen expected to pay the bribe. In the latter case, there is a clear difference between insiders, who know how the system works and may simply walk away and ignore the demand for a bribe, and outsiders such as North American tourists, who typically expect to do what a police officer tells them to, and more or less automatically pay the bribe – though they may be obstructive enough to wind up with a substantially higher payment if they demand to see the police chief!

So is this a form of negative reciprocity, i.e., I’m demanding something from you to which I am not strictly entitled? Is it a form of balanced reciprocity, i.e., because of the tasks performed – such as retrieving your passport from the hotel – a payment in cash is expected to recognize the social value of the police? Is it even a form of generalized reciprocity, in which the police collectively give the gift of “law and order” to the general public over the years, and expect that they will get respect in return? It’s probably not generalized reciprocity, given the very specific material nature of the return. And negative reciprocity appeals as an interpretation, since it so clearly marks the boundary between insider and outsider. But it’s worth considering balanced reciprocity as an option, since in order to do so we have to set aside our ethnocentric assumptions about how government and bureaucracies work, and acknowledge a different set of norms altogether.

Question: did a public official ever treat you in a way that you thought was undeserved? Did you ever find yourself in a situation where you were expected to recognize symbolically the importance of a public official in order to get her or him to perform a job for you? (I’m not just thinking about bribes here, merely a kind of nonmaterial recognition or respect.)

ANSWER

Reciprocity in Human Relationships: Insights from Anthropological Perspectives

The concept of exchange and reciprocity lies at the core of daily interactions and human relationships. These exchanges can range from simple gestures like a smile or a greeting to more complex transactions such as feasts, rituals, or commercial activities. Marshall Sahlins, a prominent anthropologist, presented a theory of reciprocity that sheds light on the dynamics of these interactions. This essay explores Sahlins’ theory and examines its relevance in various cultural contexts, including the Yanomamo society portrayed in the video “The Feast,” Richard Lee’s experiences in the Kalahari, and Sean McNamara’s observations on bribing a policeman in Bolivia.

Marshall Sahlins’ Theory of Reciprocity

Sahlins built upon the work of Marcel Mauss, emphasizing the significance of gift-giving in social life. He categorized reciprocity into three types: generalized, balanced, and negative. Each type differs in terms of the level of calculation, the expected time frame for reciprocity, the categories of individuals involved, and the moral values associated with the exchange. Sahlins also highlights the manipulation of reciprocity categories to express power and the potential for individuals to move between categories, signifying changes in their status (Giving Social Ties, Reciprocity in Modern Society on JSTOR, n.d.).

Generalized Reciprocity

Generalized reciprocity represents the ideal form of giving without expecting a direct return. It is characterized by a high moral value and a long time frame before reciprocation is anticipated. An example is the unconditional care and support parents provide to their children. Although some expectations and obligations exist, the overall value of the return is relatively small compared to the sustained provision of necessities. Generalized reciprocity typically occurs between close relatives or friends who share immediate life chances.

Negative Reciprocity

Negative reciprocity stands at the opposite end of the reciprocity spectrum. It involves taking as much as possible while giving as little as one can get away with. Examples include theft, warfare, and market exchanges aimed at maximizing personal gains. Negative reciprocity often occurs between strangers or enemies, representing short-term transactions with limited moral value. The asymmetry of power and the exclusion of certain individuals define this form of reciprocity.

Balanced Reciprocity

Balanced reciprocity represents a middle ground between generalized and negative reciprocity. It involves exchanges where both timing and the nature of the return are relatively balanced. Parties engage in mutual give-and-take, expecting reciprocity within a reasonable time frame (Barone, 2020). Balanced reciprocity can be material, such as gift-giving, or non-material, such as recognizing status or performing acts of service. It often occurs between acquaintances, neighbors, or in-law relationships.

Reciprocity in “The Feast”

In the video “The Feast,” the Yanomamo people engage in mutual feasting, which serves as a form of balanced reciprocity. The competitive nature of these feasts fosters alliances, political arrangements, marriages, financial transactions, and religious observances. Performance plays a crucial role in public settings, where individuals demonstrate their ability to organize grand events, thereby gaining social recognition. The importance of balanced reciprocity is evident in the formation and maintenance of relationships within the Yanomamo society.

Reciprocity in “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari”

Richard Lee’s experiences among the !Kung San highlight the complex interplay between material gift-giving and nonmaterial recognition. The !Kung San emphasize egalitarianism, and the dismissal of Lee’s gift serves to maintain equality within their society. By challenging Lee’s attempt at generalized reciprocity, the !Kung San demonstrate their commitment to keeping everyone on an equal footing. This raises questions about the importance of material gifts and nonmaterial recognition in North American culture, prompting us to reflect on our own experiences.

Reciprocity in “Bribing a Policeman in Bolivia”

Sean McNamara’s article explores the practice of bribing police officers in Bolivia, where low civil service salaries force officers to rely on bribes for income. This raises questions about the nature of reciprocity involved in such transactions (D. C. North, 1991). While negative reciprocity may seem apparent, considering the lack of entitlement, balanced reciprocity and even generalized reciprocity can be alternative interpretations. The context of local norms, power dynamics, and the separation between individual and official roles influences the understanding of these exchanges.

Conclusion

The study of reciprocity, as discussed by Marshall Sahlins, provides a valuable framework for understanding the dynamics of human relationships. The three types of reciprocity—generalized, balanced, and negative—offer insights into the different degrees of calculation, timing, moral value, and categories of individuals involved in exchanges. By examining specific examples, such as the Yanomamo feasts, Richard Lee’s experiences in the Kalahari, and the practice of bribing in Bolivia, we gain a deeper understanding of how reciprocity operates in various cultural contexts. These anthropological insights invite us to reflect on the nature of exchanges and the underlying social dynamics that shape our relationships.

References

Barone, F. (2020, August 13). Reciprocity & Exchange: The Kula Ring. Human Relations Area Files – Cultural Information for Education and Research. https://hraf.yale.edu/teach-ehraf/reciprocity-exchange-the-kula-ring/ 

Giving Social Ties, Reciprocity in Modern Society on JSTOR. (n.d.). https://www.jstor.org/stable/23999564 

North, D. C. (1991). Institutions. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1), 97–112. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.5.1.97