Gift-Giving in the Academic Tribe
By W.B. Carnochan, professor emeritus of the humanities at Stanford University
The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2009
Gift-giving and reciprocity are a big subject of modern anthropology, and some anthropologist searching for a dissertation could do worse than steal a look in faculty mailboxes for offprints of articles or books, inscribed by their author to a colleague, usually accompanied by a formal note. Each tribe has its own customs. English departments being the tribe I’m most familiar with, I offer our imaginary anthropologist a starting point after almost 50 years of experience with giving and receiving. Who gives what to whom, and why? With what expectations of reciprocity, and in what form?
One category of offprint giver is the young faculty member who proudly, though with calculated humility, passes on an article to the department chair or a senior faculty member with an interest in the subject: “To Ellen, with appreciation and thanks. … ” The payoff is tenure, or not, as the case may turn out to be, but there can’t be any harm (can there?) in a gesture of respect. The giver hopes for a response that might telegraph some good news (“brilliant analysis”) rather than routine thanks (“congratulations on your interesting essay”). If there is no response at all, expect the worst.
Another category of exchange is that between equals, signaling friendship on the one hand but also, on the other, a less overt but no less real competition, a surreptitious scorekeeping. Friendship is often a competitive game, if in a minor key. But who gets the gift? Not everyone, of course. That would be promiscuous and would diminish its value. Selection matters, if only in the ideal world of the giver’s imagination; a cohabitation of mailboxes is not enough. The giving of gifts, whether Christmas cards or offprints, demands some calculations, including the expectation, or not, of reciprocity.
Reciprocity is not what it used to be. With Christmas cards, the idea of it is easy: like for like. Yet, these days it may not be expected, and those who never send cards may not be stricken from one’s annual mailing list. Those who send a letter about the year’s weddings, births, deaths, and travels do not expect everyone to respond in kind. But when it comes to offprints, some like myself still hope for a comment or two, evidence that the thing has been read, not stuffed in a drawer or dropped into recycling. Those hopes often go unrealized; offprints have suffered the same fate as Christmas cards, as Victorian politesse, perhaps itself a primitive survival mechanism.
When it comes to books, not offprints, more is at stake—but perhaps also less. More because books cost money. But because they are longer than articles, the assumption that the recipient might actually read one’s latest may be extravagant. I think we all recognize that. A common gambit with books, as sometimes with offprints, is the “I’m terribly busy now but will get to it soon and I can’t wait” response, an evasion so well known that it will, even if it’s true, cause the author to give up hope of ever hearing more. But a book can be kept on a shelf, its title and author’s name open to more or less public view. That is a kind of modest reciprocity. When shelves become overloaded, however, and if sufficient time has passed, presentation copies have a habit of finding their way into the marketplace.
Three times that I’m aware of, a book of mine, presented to a friend or colleague, has turned up on the market. I know because circumstances brought each of them back to me. In Portland, Ore., browsing in Powell’s vast bookshop, my son came upon and bought an inscribed presentation copy of my first book. A colleague found another copy in London. And, no farther away from Stanford than a used bookshop in Menlo Park, I discovered and bought a presentation copy of a later book, then tore out the page with the inscription in a fit of pique. The clerk behind the counter looked surprised but realized what was going on. I wonder how many other presentation copies of this or that book of mine are out there in the marketplace? A diligent search of the Web might provide an answer, but I’d as soon remain in ignorance.
A classic study of reciprocity, The Gift, by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, begins with verses from the Scandinavian Edda, including these:
With weapons and clothes
Friends must give pleasure to one another. …
Those who exchange presents with one another
Remain friends the longest
If things turn out successfully.
Things turn out successfully, in Mauss’s account, when gifts enhance a spirit of community and are reciprocated. Offprints and books as gifts are the weapons and the clothes of our academic life, remnants of a lost warrior world. But they have lost much of their value.
The anthropologist Maurice Godelier, recasting Mauss’s theories, ends his The Enigma of the Gift with a sober observation of how things are now: “We live in a society which liberates, as no other has ever done, all of the forces, all of the potentials slumbering within the individual, but which also encourages people to make their own way by using others. Our society lives and prospers only at the cost of a permanent deficit of solidarity.”
Solidarity in English departments, once upon a time, was gauged by, among other things, mutual reciprocity in acts of giving. Now a deficit of solidarity prevails. But maybe that is not a totally bad thing. When I arrived at Stanford in 1960, senior members of the department, intent on solidarity, would invite newly arrived junior faculty members to their homes. Those events could be excruciating. One I remember in particular: My wife and I were invited for, I think, 6:30 on a Sunday night. Would we like a drink? Well, yes please, a martini would be nice. And then it turned out that the invitation was not for dinner but for dessert. Solidarity has its ups and downs.
As for those offprints that go to recycling and the presentation copies that go to the shops, how much does it really matter? All the offprints are destined for recycling sooner or later, all the books for the secondhand trade. Need we worry if they find their way there sooner rather than later?
W.B. Carnochan is a professor emeritus of the humanities at Stanford University and author, most recently, of Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley (Stanford General Books, 2008).