I posted this in the Facebook Group, and there was some interesting discussion. I don’t want to contradict what’s been said, I just like thinking about how these subtle bits of domestication can creep into psychosocial dynamics and the totalizing economic framings of life in this culture.
Never say ‘thank you’.
One of the most refreshing conversations I was part of when @Dennis visited last fall was on the topic of saying ‘thank you’. Or more accurately, on why saying ‘thank you’ is antithetical to hunter-gatherer social relationships. I think that’s worth exploring and putting into practice.
Of three (known) sets of neighbors in a 20 mile radius, all appear to default to a “gift economics” mode of interaction. I’ve noticed that at least two individuals among them seem to ignore being thanked for things—almost as if it’s uncomfortable for them to hear.
Below is a transcript of audio, and it’s unclear at times. But it touches on the issue of saying thank you among Greenland Inuit. I think it’s important because there is a quote I’ve often heard as an attempt to explain “gift economics” succinctly:
“Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”
The problem is that “gift” in the quote has a meaning different from how Marcel Mauss (and others) uses “gift” in “gift economics”. I think the poor translation of that sentence, resulting in conflation of two different ideas, has done a lot to damage the understanding of gift economics in primitivist/rewilding circles.
David Graeber: “One of the classic examples from a Danish writer named Peter Froichen who lived amongst inuit in Greenland for a while, people there had a terrible aversion to saying thank you. Y’know, you’d go on a hunt, you wouldn’t get anything, someone else would, guy would show up with a bunch of walrus meat or some present like that, and you say ‘oh thank you so much.’ Don’t say that! You’re saying thank you it’s like you’re saying you owe me something and that’s wrong because we’re humans, and humans, well, we help each other out. We say ‘gifts make slaves like whips make dogs.’ So if you say ‘thank you’ you’re saying its a gift and I owe you so that’s bad. What we do is we share. If you live in a society where you don’t have impersonal markets, that’s what you find. Y’know you give somebody something but you might be doing it to help them, you might be doing it to get them in your debt in some way, you might be doing it because you hate them you want to humiliate them by showing them you’re more generous and showing them that they need the help. There’s a million different motives. You can’t boil it down to simple greed or simple selflessness.”
The delineation between gifting and sharing in this interpretation requires some nuance, but its implications regarding the “gifts make slaves” quote are huge. With additional context, using one meaning of ‘gift’, would actually lead us to believe that the Inuit are against gift economics. With that meaning, all human interactions are reframed as ‘reciprocal’ exchanges which fall under the debt-barter rubric of neoclassical economics. Of course, this is an advantage to economists, because the oversimplification makes their theories appear universally true for all humans across time. I think there is good reason to reject this reframing. Rather, I think it is necessary—based on the data and on the kind of social relationships we seek to foster.
How to put this into practice?
Good Yule to you and your clan.