potlatch

The gift is to the giver… it can­not fail. –Walt Whitman

Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift has taught me a lot; for one thing, it explains how gifts are the cur­rency of com­mu­nity. The les­son: if you want to make some­one a part of your com­mu­nity, be gen­er­ous to them. If they accept your kind­ness (and espe­cially if they are gen­er­ous in return) they are sig­nalling to you that they want to be in your group as well. In this way gift-giving binds us together. We become increas­ingly in each oth­ers’ debt. 

Early Euro­pean set­tlers to Pacific North Amer­ica noticed a lot of the native peo­ple apply­ing this idea through rituals:

When some­one in one of these tribes was mis­tak­enly insulted, his response, rather than turn­ing to a libel lawyer, was to give a gift to the man who had insulted him; if indeed the insult was mis­taken, the man would make a return gift, adding a lit­tle extra to demon­strate his good will, a sequence that has the same struc­ture (back and forth with increase) as the pot­latch itself. When a gift passes from hand to hand in this spirit, it becomes the binder of many wills (Page 36).

Hyde explains that this kind of response would do far more than make for a healthy, happy com­mu­nity, it would cre­ate a spir­i­tus mundi (a unan­i­mous heart) within the tribe. They were show­ing that they con­sid­ered their strength to be in each other, rather than in their own mate­r­ial gain.

Apply­ing this idea

We all like to feel we have strong, sup­port­ive rela­tion­ships. But how, in these rushed times, with friends

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