1AC Pawlett’s examples of gift giving are domestic labor, physical acts of affection such as kissing, emotional labor, and reproductive labor such as giving the gift of life via birth – those are all gendered roles – AND, Pawlett is explicit about the origins of gift giving being the exchange and sacrifice of women as commodities forming the foundation for human civilization. We read Blue

Long before objects were bought and sold, they were given, circulated, and venerated. The intensely meaningful, demanding, and ambivalent nature of gift exchange has long been recognized. In giving a gift, it seems, we give a part of ourselves; something of our emotions, hopes, and fears is embodied or carried along in the giving of a gift. Further, the acceptance of a gift, a remarkably formal process even today, somehow indebts and obligates the receiver, binding him or her to reciprocate. Where giver and receiver are of sim- ilar standing or are relatively equal in power, gifts are received with polite words of thanks, while the giver will often “downplay” the act of giving with words like “It isn’t much but . . . .” Where power relations are deeply unequal, gifts are often given anonymously, as in charitable acts, so that the giving does not humble or obligate the receiver. In mythology, the generous giver is sometimes masked, hooded, or exceptionally elu- sive so as not to confront the receiver with obligations. For example, Robin Hood is an aristocrat who appears poor and so may give to the poor as their equal, while the figure of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus “gives” without actually giving, or even existing, and allows families to give generously but indirectly through an enchanted medium. The children who hope to receive presents from Santa Claus are obli- gated only by a vague, yet significant, request to “be good” in a small reciprocation of Santa’s goodness. Complexity of Gift Exchange However, the force of reciprocity in gift giving is certainly not confined to mythical tales or what might be thought of as “sentimental” occasions, such as holidays and birthdays. The notion of give and take and the “special” relationships this can generate are central to the understanding of power, and of political and military alliances. In the field of new reproductive technologies, we speak of the giving or donation of sperm and eggs; but where the individu- als, biotechnology companies, or nation-states con- cerned seem to be acting solely in economic terms, their activities are widely condemned and sometimes judged illegal. In the realms of everyday leisure and entertainment, the force of giving, sharing, and reciprocating is vitally important. What is given often cannot be measured, certainly not by the abstract system of money: when a friend cooks a meal for you, the “value” of this act cannot be calculated in terms of cost of ingredients, cost of heating and light- ing, and cost of labor devoted to the production of the meal. In reciprocation, you may cook a meal for your friend, but you might do any number of other things, such as listen to their troubles or forgive them for their perceived role in a preceding event: persons, objects, and feelings seem to merge or travel together in gift exchange. The complexity and ambivalence of these reciprocal relations seem to persist even in the most high-tech forms of virtual social networking where photos, videos, and stories are exchanged with an expectation of reciprocation, though the sanctions protecting this expectation are largely eliminated by the distance afforded by the technological medium. To what extent new technologies might curtail, trans- form, or even enhance moral relations of reciprocity is a hotly contested issue that will motivate further research in the humanities and social sciences. In exchanging gifts, then, both parties seem to be drawn into a process that is not reducible to the economic. Indeed, where the economic value of the gift is low, negligible, or irrelevant, the emotional impact of gift exchange may be at its highest—such as in the giving of a kiss or the paying of a compliment. Most forms of gift exchange involve an expectation or even an obligation to “repay” the gift by reciprocation at some point in the future, but not immediately. For example, if you buy a friend a birthday present, you feel snubbed if he or she does not reciprocate at your birthday: the person who has not reciprocated may appear lesser, somehow drained of moral worth. Yet we would undoubtedly feel very uncomfortable if the birthday gift were reciprocated immediately; it would be as if your act of gift giving was cancelled out. The rule seems to be that if you receive, you must give, appropriately and in turn. There is, then, a moral or ethical dimension to gift exchange that is fundamentally irreducible to economic calculation, even as economic or financial value seems to dominate more and more aspects of modern life. Approaches The social meanings and consequences of gift exchange have been studied by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida; by soci- ologists and social anthropologists, notably Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu; by economists, theologians, and literary critics; and by feminist scholars such as Luce Irigaray. Many of these thinkers approach gift giving in the broadest possible sense, covering not only the exchange of presents but also the gift of being itself: the gift of being alive, of the giving of life in birth, and the giving of death in sacrifice. For Nietzsche, gift giving is the “highest virtue,” and many thinkers have explored the ethics of gift giving, arguing, in dif- ferent ways, that the gift exchange process involves, implies, or points toward a form of ethical relatedness that is vital for the well-being of individuals and soci- ety but that is, perhaps, being erased, forgotten, or replaced by patriarchal, consumerist, and technologi- cal culture. Gift exchange, then, has been presented as a radical alternative to dominant liberal capitalist modes of economic exchange. Capitalist economic exchange is based on utilitarian and financial calculation that measures all values in terms of an abstract system of money—as general equivalent. The goal is the continual accumulation of capital, owned or invested privately. Gift exchange, by contrast, tends to generate social obligations of collective reciprocity, responsibility, and ethical relatedness. Moreover, these “values” cannot be measured or calculated in terms of monetary equivalence because their meaning cannot be separated from the acts of exchange themselves, which are often ambivalent and are bound to a temporality that is alien to financial calculation, as we observed in the case of birthday presents. The earliest instances of gift exchange are drawn from religion. The obligatory exchange of gifts, sometimes in the form of sacrifice to gods, spirits, or ancestors, was practiced widely in classical civiliza- tion and continued throughout Christian antiquity and into medieval societies. Gift exchange ceremo- nies also feature prominently in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism and in ancient Chinese law. Though not always obligatory, the tradition of almsgiving, the donation of money, food, or other goods to the poor or needy on request, are important components of Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism. Gifts and sacri- fices were, and still are, given to gods in the hope or expectation of protection, favor, or intervention. Further, gods give of themselves: they make sacrifices and perform deeds that, in turn, obligate and indebt worshippers, making demands on them in a recipro- cal but radically unequal relationship. While many gifts are expensive, none is as costly as a sacrifice: an act of giving that gives life as a gift to the receiver and “gives” death to the giver. Sacrificial giving remains a vital component of many religions. Contemporary academic interest in notions of gift exchange can be traced to Mauss’s hugely influential Essai sur le don (1924, translated as The Gift, 1990). Mauss, following the work of Emile Durkheim (his uncle and the founder of modern sociology), under- stood collective rituals of gift exchange as ancient and near-universal expressions of social “effervescence,” the very energy that binds society. Indeed, the social circulation of gifts and services has been understood as the foundation of human culture, as constitutive of the incest taboo and practice of exogamy through which women were circulated (as “gifts”) among neighboring tribes, forging alliances, deterring war, and preventing incest. For the influential French feminist Luce Irigaray, this circulation of women, as commodities rather than as gifts proper, she con- tends, constitutes the very foundation of patriarchy and the exploitation of women and nature by men. Gift exchange appears to forge social bonds by generating and maintaining relations of obligatory reciprocity between elements of the social system, both intersocial and intrasocial, but these social relations are not equal or symmetrical. Mauss studied the so-called totemic religions of aboriginal Australia, Pacific East Asia, and northwest America, arguing that gift exchange creates and sustains links throughout the “social totality,” not only between tribes and clans but also between ideas: between sacred and pro- fane, living and dead, persons and things. For Mauss, gift exchange consists of three interlocking moments: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. The ambivalent nature of gift exchange, that it is both happy and festive yet also demanding and solemn, is traced by Mauss to the etymology of the word gift, which in Greek, Latin, and German connotes not only a present or offering but also poison. Mauss suggests that ceremonies such as the potlatch in North America and the Kula of the Trobriand Islands were “both practical and mystical” (1990, 73). Participation is both “self-interested” and obligatory (not freely chosen). Social hierarchy, honor, and prestige are at stake and are contested. These are definitely not societies of communistic equality, Mauss asserts; nor is there a notion of individual freedoms and rights that characterizes modern capitalist societies. Wealth is circulated such that the participants “did not emerge any richer than before” (9), and, Mauss claims, there is no economic advantage in the ceremonies even for the chiefs. The gift objects are living wealth; they generate social meaning and value, and this value actually increases through the act of exchanging. These festivals, for Mauss, demonstrate that the notion of credit and loan predate the emergence of barter and money, so the attempts of both liberal and Marxist thinkers to understand the development of economy from bar- ter to money to credit are, for Mauss, quite simply wrong. As a result of these studies, Mauss proposed a new social democratic program of welfare and a general spirit of generosity distinct from either liberal capitalist or Marxist communist thinking. This was to be fostered by a reformed education system that Mauss hoped would heal modern societies dam- aged by war and egotistic individualism. However, as pointed out by Lévi-Strauss, Mauss did not elaborate on the power differences between members of the tribes, or on the existence of slavery in such societies, and has been much criticized for these omissions. Mauss focused particularly on the potlatch cer- emony practiced traditionally by First Nation peoples of North America, such as the Tlingit and Haida. Recognizing the imprecision and colonial history of the term potlatch, Mauss proposes the term total services and counter services (prestations et contre- prestations totales) to describe systems of social exchange that include the giving of presents but also loans, entertainments, and hospitality in the widest sense. The term potlatch Mauss reserved for “total ser- vices of an agonistic kind” with “very acute rivalry and the destruction of wealth;” such ceremonies are “rare but highly developed” (1990, 7). Among such tribes there is, according to Mauss, honor in destruction; consumption, he suggests, goes “beyond all bounds. . . . One must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is richest and also the most madly extravagant. Everything is based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry” (37). The potlatch and its relationship to gift giving, reciprocal social relations, and the possibilities for a new or alternative ethics, have been explored by a number of influential thinkers. For Georges Bataille, dissident French Surrealist and influential theorist of “excess,” the potlatch was a form of “unproductive expenditure” (dépense). Potlatch ceremonies, Bataille declares, provoked intoxication, vertigo, and ecstasy; they had “no end beyond themselves” and fundamentally excluded bargaining and calculation in an open destruction of wealth (1985, 118). The destruction or consumption of wealth had a purpose, however—to defy, humiliate, and obligate a rival clan in a contest for honor or prestige. Honor itself is not a commodity, and the value it possesses can- not be bought or accumulated. In contrast, modern consumer capitalism, for Bataille, is an impoverished social system where “everything that was generous, orgiastic and excessive has disappeared” (124). For Bataille, the rapturous collective effusion of potlatch suggests an alternative ethical relation might be possible in modern Western societies. For Bataille, violence is an inevitable and constitutive feature of any society, and he hoped that violence might be dramatized and expressed in ritual form, rather than “accumulating” or festering into the hatred that pro- motes war. The very destructiveness of potlatch illustrates that there are values higher than commercial and rational calculation. In potlatch-like rituals, even the separateness of individual identities—for Bataille, the condition of narrow and calculative behavior— might be swept away in a convulsive moment. Like Mauss, Bataille supported increased welfare and aid spending such as the U.S. Marshall Plan as a form of gift giving vital for postwar reconstruction. The controversial work of Baudrillard offers one of the fullest explorations of gift and reciprocity in contemporary consumer societies. Baudrillard, deeply influenced by both Mauss and Bataille, argues that consumer societies can be understood in terms of a gift, or potlatch, given by society to individual consumers that cannot be reciprocated and thereby humbles and obligates. In consumer societies, Baudrillard argues, “the commodity becomes once again . . . by virtue of its very excess the image of the gift, and of the inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterises the feast” (1998, 33). For Baudrillard, like Bataille, consumer societies are societies of waste and violence. Examples related by Baudrillard include war and automobile crashes; even advertising and celebrity culture possess “the whiff of potlatch.” However, the essential difference is that, in our current system, this spectacular squandering no longer has the crucial symbolic and collective significance it could assume in primitive feasting and potlatch. This prestigious consummation . . . has been “personalised” and mass-mediated. Its function is to provide the economic stimulus for mass consumption. (46) For Baudrillard, even the violence of 9/11 can be understood as a violent countergift, an attempt to pay back the West with interest for its ambivalent gifts of consumer goods, democracy, and sexual liberation— images, “signs,” or “simulations” of freedom. Derrida also engages in a reading of Mauss and gift exchange, focusing on the temporality of the gift: the interval or term between the moment of giving and the moment of reciprocation. Derrida argues that the gift, at least as present or simple act of generosity, can never take place, precisely because of the ambivalence of the process: that giver and receiver are all too aware that a gift is given and that something is owed. The exchange of gifts is, strictly speaking, impossible because the notion of exchange under- mines the possibility of a gift being a gift. However, this very impossibility suggests, for Derrida, a form of ethical relatedness that exceeds or escapes the ambivalent logic of gift exchange. As an exemplar, Derrida (1995) discusses the Old Testament story of Abraham, on whom God (Yahweh) has placed the terrible demand that he sacrifice his eldest son Isaac. Abraham must give what he values above all else; he must violate his instincts and social morality by making the ultimate sacrifice. Only in accepting God’s demand is he released from the demand, and for reasons he cannot fathom. In this story, Derrida finds a basis for an alternative ethics, one that reaches beyond reason and calculation. Following the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida writes of “the absolute other,” of a uniqueness and incomparable singularity beyond language, beyond definition, beyond calculation. For Lévinas, this absolute other is God. However, for Derrida, we are all, in our unique and fundamental singularity, absolute other to and for each other. We are all capable of absolute sacrifice in an uncalculating ethical response to the demands of the absolute other. According to Derrida, only the gift of death that is sacrifice, the sacrifices involved in giving birth, and the openness to absolute otherness are truly disinterested and suggest an ethics untainted by the calculation of a return or reward.

underlying incentive of an insurance policy against covetous evil spirits.