{"id":2850,"date":"2019-11-20T10:43:56","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T15:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/?p=2850"},"modified":"2020-09-24T00:10:41","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T04:10:41","slug":"private-property-and-the-romance-of-holiday-gift-giving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/2019\/11\/20\/private-property-and-the-romance-of-holiday-gift-giving\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Property and the Romance of Holiday Gift Giving"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh<\/a><\/p>\n

Book the First. \u00a0Chapter the First. \u00a0Of the Absolute Rights of Individuals.<\/em><\/i><\/strong><\/b>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0As I noted in my \u00a0Christmas post last week,\u00a0this chapter\u00a0<\/a>is where Blackstone identifies \u201cprivate property\u201d as one of the fundamental values of English common law. \u00a0The chapter maintains the shifty now-you-see-it, now-you-don\u2019t \u00a0view of law as a flexible social instrument and law as an immutable gift of god. \u00a0Thus private property is an \u201cabsolute right, inherent in every Englishman,\u201d whose origin \u201cis probably founded in nature.\u201d \u00a0But the practices that actually constitute the legal right of property \u00a0\u2014 \u201cthe method of conserving it in the present owner, and of translating it from man to man\u201d \u2014 \u00a0are part of the web of social constraints, \u201cin exchange for which every individual has resigned a part of his natural liberty \u201d in order to gain the \u201ccivil advantages\u201d of society.<\/p>\n

Reading Blackstone around the holidays couldn\u2019t help but make me wonder about how gift giving reflects and helps create our concept of private property. \u00a0 A piece in the\u00a0New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/i>\u00a0on \u201cre-gifting\u201d\u00a0<\/a>caught my eye. \u00a0The article describes the frowned-upon, but apparently widespread, practice of passing on presents one has received and passing them off as newly purchased items. \u00a0In a series of anecdotes a few brave souls confess to the sin of re-gifting with a guilty shrug, a knowing wink or a pragmatic recitation of economic necessity. \u00a0 But the stories told by re-gifting victims have a darker emotional cast. \u00a0These are the people who tore off the glittering wrapping only to discover an obviously recycled gift or somehow found out that an object they previously bestowed was being packed off to another recipient. \u00a0Even incidents from long ago are recounted with outrage, sadness, longing and a pervasive sense of betrayal. \u00a0It\u2019s not that these people are completely around the bend. \u00a0They seem to recognize that getting a used Christmas gift is a small, even trivial, complaint. \u00a0Nevertheless big feelings are in play.<\/p>\n

Maybe because I recently re-read Lewis Hyde\u2019s wonderful book,\u00a0The Gift<\/a>, it occurred to me that \u2014 but for those feelings \u2014 the shadowy world of re-gifting the Times describes is not unlike the gift economies in traditional societies \u2014 most famously the Kula Ring in the South Pacific. \u00a0In those systems, a limited inventory of ceremonial objects circulate continuously from person to person in a set pattern of trade relationships. \u00a0\u00a0Kula objects \u2014 shell necklaces and bracelets \u2014 travel in two simultaneous circuits, in opposite directions. \u00a0\u00a0As Bronislaw Malinowski explains, participants in the Kula \u201creceive the goods, hold them for a short time, and then pass them on.\u201d \u00a0Argonauts of the Western\u00a0<\/a>Pacific 81<\/a>(Dutton 1961). \u00a0Likewise, according to the Times, holiday gifts in our own culture continue to circulate: \u00a0\u201cnobody keeps anything these days. . . . Put a trace tag on a bottle of Champagne you give someone, in the manner of scientists that study the migration patterns of birds, and you\u2019re likely to see it make a half -dozen stops.\u201d \u00a0The difference is the feelings that result \u2014 that sense of betrayal. \u00a0What is that about?<\/em><\/i><\/p>\n

A functionalist account would say each society gets the gift system that supports its mercantile economy. \u00a0And sure enough, the continuously circulating Kula gifts create a trade network in which the barter and exchange of all kinds of necessities flourish alongside the exchange of ceremonial objects. \u00a0In contrast, our \u201cre-gifting\u201d \u00a0taboo against Kula-like circulation requires that a new item be purchased for each gift partner on every ceremonial occasion, and thus maximizes the consumer spending that keeps our retail economy healthy.<\/p>\n

But I think our holiday gift practices support \u201cprivate\u201d property in another way that comes closer to explaining the emotional heat stirred by re-gifters. \u00a0Our gift culture seems to replicate in a thousand small exchanges the \u201cone true love\u201d model of romantic attachment that is the most desirable of all \u201cprivate\u201d relationships and activities in our culture. \u00a0Like a monogamous romance, the bond of gift exchange entails an exclusion of others \u2014 \u201cThis is for you \u2014 and only for you \u2014 I found it, chose it from among all the rest \u2014 the one, true present meant for you, from me, now and forever.\u201d \u00a0 \u00a0Giving it to someone else is like refusing to accept a proposal \u2014 and like falsely proposing to the someone else, who deserves better. \u00a0She is entitled to her own true romance \u2014 \u00a0the one chosen just for her \u2014 \u00a0this color, not that, this particular softness, flavor, shape, texture that will be hers always. \u00a0No wonder then, that the person whose gift is repackaged and sent elsewhere feels the ghost of simultaneous shame, loss and betrayal she might experience if her romantic partner was fooling around, and no wonder the person who receives the \u201cre-gift\u201d finds it in some way deeply insulting, even if he laughs about it.<\/p>\n

I have to think that\u00a0all this romantic intrique projected onto the consumer objects we exchange over the holidays affects our sense of the meaning of such personal property. \u00a0How exactly, I\u2019m not prepared to say \u2014 but surely it participates in the often observed connection between shopping and desire. \u00a0And just as surely it infuses these bits of private property with the eroticized privacy of the idealized romantic relationship that remains our greatest object of cultural desire.<\/p>\n

\n\n

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Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh Book the First. \u00a0Chapter the First. \u00a0Of the Absolute Rights of Individuals.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0As I noted in my \u00a0Christmas post last week,\u00a0this chapter\u00a0is where Blackstone identifies \u201cprivate...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[268,255,492],"tags":[132,200],"class_list":["post-2850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jurisprudence","category-law-and-philosophy","category-william-blackstone","tag-news","tag-william-blackstone"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pasVL2-JY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3010,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions\/3010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}