The Anatomy of Gift-Giving

If you thought Marcel Mauss' proposition of Gifting as surrogate for a socio-economic system was a revelation, you will find this deconstruction of the phenomenon rather enlightening. Here I have an exhaustive essay that shines light on the academic vocabulary for assessing gifting situations and contexts, practices and beliefs, and the attendant concerns through each phase of the gift-giving process. Armed with this vocabulary, you can approach any text on the subject and make meaning of it. Consider using the framework here to assess a dyadic relationship in your business context that merits examination as a gift-giving use case. Indeed as we saw in the last essay, any situation that involves a three-fold obligation - the obligation to give, the obligation to receive and the obligation to reciprocate and that enables an enduring social bond is one that can be examined through the prism of gifting frameworks. This essay is based on a 1984 research paper by J.F. Sherry Jr. in the Journal of Consumer Research which I have linked to in the Additional Reading section at the end for the full text. In the paper, the author has also made a sincere attempt to bridge the gulf between the ways anthropologists and consumer researchers study Gift-giving. With over a 1000 citations, this paper is illuminating and comprehensive. This essay here is what I hope, a consummate summary.

Rewind: The Gift of Magi  

Do you remember the O.Henry story 'The Gift of Magi' from high school? If you don’t let me refresh your memory - This is the story of Jim and Della, a young married couple who live in a small rented flat and generally lead a life of limited means. Their purses may be empty but their hearts are full of love for each other. The story is set on Christmas Eve. Della has only $1.87 on her and she is distressed about not being able to purchase a gift for her husband. She has beautiful knee length hair and in an inspired moment she decides to sell her lustrous long hair in the market to a ladies vanity store for $20. She uses the money to buy a fob chain for a watch that Jim has inherited and takes immense pride in. He has a weathered leather strap and she would like him to have a proper chain instead so he can look at his watch several times a day. Della comes home, primps her cut hair up into curls and begins to wait for her husband. Jim arrives in the evening and is shocked to see his wife with her beautiful long hair reduced to boy cut curls. As she assures him that it will grow back, he gives her her Christmas present - a set of tortoise shell combs that she had longed for but hadn’t been able to afford. Now she has no use for them. To cheer themselves up she presents him with the fob chain. Jim reveals then that he had to sell off his watch to buy the combs for her. The story ends with a note about how the three wise men may have come bearing gifts for infant Jesus, but the real wisdom is in sharing the kind of love that Jim and Della have for each other. The love that drove them to take well meaning if ill-timed actions. May their tribe multiply. The End.

Now if like me you remembered this story (and hadn’t yet sullied your memory of it with a poor Bollywood adaptation - Raincoat, 2004) then you remembered how Jim and Della bought gifts for each other that were made redundant at the conclusion of the exchange but love prevailed above all else! After I read through J.F. Sherry’s paper I revisited the story. Suffice to say I feel considerably less enthused about Jim and Della's intentions. Read on to find out why.

Gifting as Social Glue

Mauss presented gift-giving as a glue for social solidarity and as a total system of giving. He presented ethnographic evidence for gifting persisting between tribes and intra-tribe as a practice involving people and objects and rituals and customs that enabled ancient tribes to function without friction. Contemporary academics have brought the enquiry forward without undermining the gravity of this practice. Sociologists propose that gift exchange always involves a transaction that has a broader socio-cultural meaning. Consumer behaviourists have focussed on the psychology of gift exchange as it pertains to retail markets that focus on gifting.

With the knowledge that gift-giving is distinct from a marketplace exchange because it is an obligated exchange that is foundational to social and familial structures, gift-giving becomes more enduring than an objective value exchange. Understanding the social and personal dimensions in addition to the obvious economic dimension can yield new insights for positioning and communication in markets other than retail gifting.

Social, Personal and Economic Dimension of Gift-Giving

These are the three dimensions that contextualize gift-giving in the sphere of exchange, and also highlight why this for of exchange is beyond just an economic one.

In the social dimension, gift giving is a way of either increasing social intimacy or social distance. Each exchange ends up strengthening, maintaining, attenuating or severing the relationship between individuals or alliances. It is the communication of intent through the chosen gift, the time, place and value as also by the accompanying note or verbal presentation. The receiver has a response that addresses all of these and reciprocation then depends on the receiver’s hope of the anticipated relationship.

However, often the gift is accompanied not just by intent and consideration for the receiver but is also concerned with the representation of self by the donor. The donor has what is called in psychology a self-concept. The actual self-concept does not overlap with the idealized self-concept of the donor. She strategically bridges this gap through the choice of the gift and the performance of presentation. Similarly a receiver’s communicated response may be biased with the self-concept that the receiver wishes to present. This is the personal dimension of gift giving.

The economic dimension of gift-giving is not very different from a marketplace exchange and is straightforward to understand. The exchange creates balanced and unbalanced or asymmetric relationships based on the value of the reciprocal gifts. The nuance is in the sort of reciprocal pressure that the recipient feels that may have an economic implication.

Bribes lend themselves to academic scrutiny here with an explicit economic dimension and expectation of reciprocity. However, we discuss atypical exchanges like bribes in another blog.

Gift v/s Commodity, Donor and Recipient, Situational Conditions

But first, what is a Gift? . Combining definitions, and I paraphrase here -

A tangible or intangible commodity that is transformed into a gift by way of - a social relationship, an occasion, a context, an expectation of reciprocity and a relationship outcome that either increases intimacy or increases distance.

Objects are mere commodities. Their relationship with thought and action is culturally mediated. The object stays a commodity in a marketplace exchange. In a gift exchange the object comes alive and is now invested in the social relationship. Marketers have cleverly positioned objects as gifts and made sparkling business out of stone in the past. This comes from honing the vision to find, invest and communicate meaning in consumer transactions.

Gift-giving necessarily involves a donor and a recipient. Self-indulgence is when the donor and the recipient are the same. A spa appointment for self on your birthday is one example. Shell companies established for money laundering could be another? Donors and recipients may be appointed by ceremony, occasion or social bonds. Occasion may be formal or ad hoc. The gift may have been elicited by the receiver or not. Gifting may be altruistic or agnostic - in full consideration of the recipient at one end and self-serving indifference at the other. A good example in the essay is that of greeting cards and how much time you would spend picking one as a determinant of where you lie on the altruistic-agnostic scale.

But wait. It is 36 years since this research paper and Hallmark now sells home decor. Here is a more updated example - perhaps consider the birthday texts you send on Whatsapp. The content of the text, the length of exchange, the emojis you add are indicative of your donor-receiver relationship.

The situational conditions that affect gift-giving include the relationship of the dyad, power differential, temporal context, antecedents, motivation, intention, stage of the relationship et al (Sherry, 1984). As intimacy decreases, gifts shift from personal objects to objects with direct economic connotation. Temporal dimension includes factors like occasion or decorum, reciprocation or initiation. It also includes the timing of reciprocation and ill-timed deferment or untimely haste have a bearing on relationship status. Spatial dimension of gift giving includes the physical aspects of where you purchase and where you give.  It also includes norms of the interaction and antecedent and consequential questions which impacts the mental space in which the bond resides.

The Process of Gift Exchange

Through an elaborate flowchart in the paper, J.F. Sherry has explained the various stages of gift-giving. I will briefly explain each stage reinforcing terms that help situate later academic research. This is a framework through which any gifting interaction can be understood with a degree of attention and clarity that is often not available to us in everyday life. I was most struck by the detail provided about the process here, the flowchart that seemed flippant at first quickly endeared itself to me as I immersed in the text. And I am afraid my relationship with gift-giving has been forever altered.

Sherry has developed upon prior research and consolidated vocabulary from myriad papers to provide this understanding. The three stages of gift-giving have been identified as: gestation, prestation (I confused this with presentation but no, this is prestation, a French word that means performance or execution. Click on the link for pronunciation.) and reformulation. The three stages have the donor and recipient on either side and as they move through the stages, their thoughts and perceptions affect their actions. Let’s take a look at all three.

Gestation is the stage where the gift is transformed from an abstract concept or idea to a concrete object or action. This is the stage where to believe Mauss, the donor imbues their intention into the gift. This often happens as a result of what has been called a precipitating condition - a formal or ad hoc occasion or an elicitation by the receiver. Elicitation could be verbal or non-verbal, overt or incidental. A good example is alms giving- the appearance of a beggar may elicit a charitable action even in the absence of explicit solicitation. The process of choosing, the place, the objective expectation of the relationship status and self-concept all tie in to this stage to create symbolic meaning.

Prestation is the middle stage of the process. When I wondered why it wasn’t in fact called a presentation since it involves the actual gift exchange, I realized that this is because a gift exchange is not a mere presentation, it is indeed an entire performance, the execution of a strategic plan. Time, place and mode of giving are considered by the donor. The recipient has a two-fold response to the gift - affective association and reflective judgement(Sherry, 1984). Affective association is the interpretation of the substance of the gift, and reflective judgement is the inference. This inference comes to bear on the recipient at the reformulation stage. Let us also consider the donor here. The donor also has expectations of how the gift is received and an anticipatory response. The actual response may or may not align with the one anticipated. This is a source of joy or anxiety to the donor and changes how the donor approaches the reformulation stage. Simultaneous exchange of gifts between donor and receiver is fascinating and complicated for the underlying energy on both sides and in both roles.

Next time you participate in Secret Santa at work, imagine the air charged with the electricity of all these simultaneous symbolic interactions for all the people attending. It makes my head hurt to just think of it.

Reformulation is the final and most meaningful stage of the gifting process. It is this stage that determines whether the relationship is strengthened, maintained, attenuated or severed. The disposition of the gift is assessed by the receiver and the gift is subsequently consumed, displayed, stored, redistributed or rejected. The relationship realigns and perceptions formulated for both the donor and the receiver. They both contemplate the future course of action and a role reversal happens for strengthening or maintaining the relationship. This is the stage that the author feels lends tension to the gift-giving exercise and thereby determines the vibrancy of the exchange cycle.

Conclusion and Implications

This sort of an elaborate deconstruction of the gift-giving process is necessarily of interest to anthropologists but even for consumer researchers this is a rich area of exploration. By studying gift-giving between brands and consumers, one can reverse-engineer a relationship from an expected outcome. For product marketers of platforms, it is possible to study dyad personas and engineer features that foster peer solidarity and increase network strength. Further, it is possible to use these insights to assess product categories in light of gift giving behaviour and experiment with pack sizes or pricing. The knowledge of consumer psychology at this level of detail is helpful also in research design when working with consumer research agencies and in interpreting research results in novel ways. Take ten minutes to think about any immediate connections that you can make for your product or brand. And next time you get a gift and are unable to fully revel in it, my apologies in advance!

Additional Reading

1. The Gift of Magi - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7256/7256-h/7256-h.htm
2. The previous blog on "The Gift" - a book essay by Mauss https://www.ricochet.ink/gift-giving-mauss/
3. John F. Sherry, Jr., Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 10, Issue 2, September 1983, Pages 157–168, https://doi.org/10.1086/208956

Ricochet Ink is a publication for contemporary research on consumption, behaviour science, responsible communication and product design. The pieces here are informed by foundational texts, published and ongoing academic research and practitioner case studies from around the world.  

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