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The Most Ambiguous Gift: Cash and the Presentation Wedding Tradition in Manitoba

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13534640903478692

1460-700X

Pauline Greenhill, Leah Allen,

Cultural History and Identity Formation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1966), p.1. 2 Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser, ‘Strategies of Coding in Women's Cultures’, Feminist Messages: Coding in Women's Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner (University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp.1‐30. 3 David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London: Routledge, 1988), pp.124‐31, 133‐36. 4 Exchange value is not only the actualization of the price of goods; it implicates the amount of other commodities and paid labour that can be exchanged for them (see < http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/e/x.htm>). For a discussion of the role of money in capitalism, see Mark C. Taylor, ‘Capitalizing (on) Gifting’, in The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, eds. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp.63‐68. 5 We appreciate support from a Standard Research Grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 6 See < http://www.theweddingexpert.ca/2009/02/how-do-you-say-it-is-a-presentation-wedding-on-the-invitation-ask-the-expert/> (a Winnipeg-based wedding service provider). We also conducted a website search for wedding venues and supplies outside Manitoba for references to ‘presentation’ and found none. Several Winnipeg bridal and party stores offer decorated boxes for sale or rental which are specifically used to receive presentation, e.g. < http://www.labelleswedding.com/presentation_boxes.php>. Despite resistance from etiquette experts the term may be gaining wider currency in North America, as Jeanne Hamilton's colonialist, racist invective indicates: ‘The inclusion of ‘Presentation Preferred’ on a wedding invitation is a heinous scheme invented by some greedy, sneaky money-grubber who devised a way to inform guests of her avarice while clothing it in formal language implying that it is proper etiquette. Such highbrow wording gives the impression that this is a more socially suitable method of begging for money than boorishly obvious pleas for cash. In extreme examples of presentation, guests line up at the reception literally to present their monetary gifts to the newlyweds, evoking mental images of the subdued tribes of Africa paying homage to Pharaoh on his throne’ (Hamilton, Wedding, p.67). We note, however, that at one couple, who married in Toronto and held receptions both there and in Winnipeg, had ‘Presentation Only’ on their Winnipeg reception invitation, but no reference whatsoever to presentation on the Toronto reception invitation. Their plans to settle in Winnipeg suggest that these decisions were not simply a practical solution to the problem of having to transport gifts from Toronto. 7 David Cheal, ‘Showing them you love them: gift giving and the dialectic of intimacy,’ Sociological Review, 35 (1987), pp.150‐169. 8 James Carrier, ‘Gifts in a World of Commodities: The Ideology of the Perfect Gift in American Society’, Social Analysis, 29 (1990), pp.20‐21. 9 Carrier, ‘Gifts in a World of Commodities’, p.19. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Marginalia – Some Additional Notes on the Gift’, The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp.234‐5. 11 Marcel Mauss, Gift; see also Lawrence C. Becker, Reciprocity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). 12 Marcel Mauss, Gift, p.1. 13 Marcel Mauss, Gift, p.80. 14 For an attempt to render economic social relations in a mathematical formula, see for example Oded Stark and Ita Falk, ‘Transfers, Empathy Formation, and Reverse Transfers’, The American Economic Review, 88:2 (1998), pp.271‐276. On gift calculation Lorne Hugh Carmichael and W. Bentley MacLeod, ‘Gift giving and the Evolution of cooperation’, International Economic Review, 38 (1997), for example, suggest that ‘although the gifts themselves are useless, the institution is not’ (p.485). Critiques of traditional economics perspectives on reciprocal relations can be found in Frank Ackerman, ‘Foundations of Economic Theories of Consumption’, in The Consumer Society, eds. Neva R. Goodwin, Frank Ackerman and David Kiron (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997), pp.149‐158 and Neva R. Goodwin, ‘Visions of an Alternative’, in Consumer, ed. Goodwin, Ackerman, and Kiron, pp.333‐342. 15 See for example Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and generosity’, The Geographical Journal, 171 (2005), pp.384‐386; Alan D. Schrift, ‘Introduction: Why Gift?’ in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, pp.1‐24. A gender-sensitive consideration of generosity is by Iulie Aslaksen, ‘Gender Constructions and the Possibility of a Generous Economic Actor’, Hypatia, 17:2 (2002), pp.118‐132. 16 Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp.174‐175. 17 See for example the famous study of blood donation by Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship (New York: Pantheon, 1971). See also Thomas Murray, ‘Gifts of the Body and the Needs of Strangers’, Hastings Center Report 17 (1987), pp.30‐38. Gendered implications of bodily gifts are explored by Rosalyn Diprose, ‘The gift, sexed body propery and the law’, in Thinking Through the Body of the Law, ed. Pheng Cheah, David Fraser and Judith Grbich (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp.120‐139. 18 Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), p.4. 19 Myra Hird, ‘The Corporeal Generosity of Maternity’, Body & Society, 13:1 (2007), p.5. See also Morny Joy, ‘Beyond the Given and the All-giving: Reflections on Women and the Gift’, Australian Feminist Studies, 14:30 (1999), pp.315‐332, and Genevieve Vaughan, ‘Mothering, Comunication, and the Gifts of Language’, in The Enigma, eds. Wyschogrod, Goux, and Boynton, pp.91‐113. On the gift implications of new reproductive technologies, see Roselyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity, pp.45-58; Marilyn Strathern, ‘Partners and Consumers: Making Relations Visible (1991)’, in Logic, ed. Schrift, pp.292‐312. An early feminist critique of economics’ blindness to women's gift labour and ‘kin work’ is Michaela Di Leonardo, ‘The female world of cards and holidays: Women, families, and work of kinship’, Signs, 12 (1987), pp.440‐453. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), uses the concept of the gift to explore the fundamental contradiction between anthropology's search for social structure and feminism's search for alternatives/undermining structures. 20 Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). As social scientists, we resist such attempts to take the gift outside the domain of the reciprocal, the interactional, and thus the cultural. Our gift is Mauss's, not Derrida's. 21 Ethnomethodologists have elucidated some of the usually inchoate ‘rules’ that underlie notions of gift giving. For example, in ‘Middletown’ in the third quarter of the twentieth century, ‘unwritten and largely unrecognised rules […] regulate Christmas gift-giving and associated rituals […] and the effective enforcement of these rules without visible means’ (Theodore Caplow, ‘Rule enforcement within visible means: Christmas gift giving in Middletown’, American Journal of Sociology, 89 (1984), pp.1306‐23, p.1306). These include the tree rule (specifying who should put one up and who need not); the wrapping rule (gifts must be wrapped in emblematic paper and displayed); the decoration rule (where gifts are distributed there must be Christmas decoration); the gathering rule (where gifts are distributed at gatherings, everybody gets one); the dinner rule (family gatherings with gifts must include a traditional Christmas dinner); the gift selection rules (gifts should demonstrate the giver's familiarity – they may surprise by showing greater affection or knowledge by giver – and should be scaled to the emotional value of the relationship); the scaling rules (the spousal relationship is most valuable, followed by parent-child, and then by others); the fitness rule (money goes senior to junior but not vice versa, regardless of affluence); and the reciprocity rule (at least one gift must go to mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and their spouses, husbands, and wives). Caplow concludes that ‘[T]he participants […] who enforce [these] complex rules […] do so unknowingly and without conscious reference to a system. The dialect, once learned, imposes itself by linguistic necessity, and the enforcement […] is the more effective for being unplanned’, pp.1321‐1322. 22 Perhaps the classic example of such a commodity would be a beautiful quilt skillfully pieced from scrap material and expertly hand-quilted. Its direct cost may be minimal, but the object is valued beyond any cash outlay (see e.g. Susan Shantz, ‘Frances Mateychuk's Quilts: Mapping a Place’, in Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, eds Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), pp.173‐188. 23 Paul Camenisch, ‘Gift and Gratitude in Ethics’, The Journal of Religious Ethics, 9 (1981), p.11. 24 Camenish, ‘Gift and Gratitude’, p.12. See also Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 25 Colin Camerer, ‘Gifts as Economic Signals and Social Symbols’, American Journal of Sociology, 94 (1988), p.S180. 26 Leah Allen 2007/1-2, interview with Jayne Arlington. This is a pseudonym, as are those of all other research consultants. 27 See Sidney Eve Matrix, ‘“I Do” Feminism Courtesy of Martha Stewart Weddings and HBC's Vow to Wow Club: Inventing Modern Matrimonial Tradition with Glue Sticks and Cuisinart’, Ethnologies, 28:2 (2006), pp.53‐80. 28 Pauline Greenhill 2007/1-2, interview with Paulene Repat. 29 Allen, Arlington. 30 David Cheal, ‘Showing them you love them’, p.159. 31 David Cheal, ‘Showing them you love them’, p.164. 32 Jacques T. Godbout, The World of the Gift, trans. Donald Winkler (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), p.172. 33 Leah Allen 2007/3-4, interview with John Bannatyne. 34 Marcel Mauss, Gift, p.10. 35 Allen, Bannatyne. 36 2007 Questionnaire #2, respondent Karen. 37 Leah Allen 2007/8, interview with Cathie. 38 Marcel Mauss, Gift, p.63. 39 Leah Allen 2007/10‐11, interview with Lynn. 40 Lorne Hugh Carmichael and W. Bentley MacLeod, ‘Gift giving and the Evolution of cooperation’, p.487. 41 Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p.10. 42 Viviene Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money, p.10. 43 Joan Radner and Susan S. Lanser, ‘Strategies of Coding in Women's Cultures’, p.5. 44 Robert. 45 Susan. Sometimes a cultural understanding precludes the necessity for coding. The expectation of cash gifts is simply taken for granted by all insiders. For example, ‘if it was a Slavic wedding, it was our culture that we knew what was accepted – cash gift (Darowane, Polish for presentation). [Thus originally, it was] not worded on [the] invitation. Later, when people other than Slavic were involved, it was printed on [the] invitation’ (2007 Questionnaire #13, respondent Wanda Kulczycki). 46 Robert. 47 Leah Allen 2007/7, interview with Lois.