The place of grace in anthropology

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeThe place of grace in anthropologyJulian PITT-RIVERSJulian PITT-RIVERSFull TextPDFEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePrologueIn the introduction to this book we observed that the word "honor" had entered anthropology only in the 1960s and we gave some considerations to account for this, to my mind curious, lacuna. The word "grace" is today in a condition somewhat comparable to "honor" in the 1960s and it is one of the aims of this essay to endow it with the recognition it deserves. I have found only three authors who have called attention to its existence as a general anthropological concept -briefly only1- and none who has undertaken a detailed examination of its logic and potential usage.This, despite the enormous importance of a concept of this order in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the huge theological literature on the subject — (surely the anthropology of religion can no more ignore Western theology than the anthropology of law can ignore Western jurisprudence?) — and the fact that a large number of Christian heresies were provoked by disagreements as to the nature of grace, from the Pelagians onwards. But blindness in this matter can hardly be attributed simply to the parochialism of modem university disciplines or the social scientists' distrust of the expertise of the theologians: no anthropologist has to my knowledge asked himself whether there is anything remotely equivalent to grace among the concepts of Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, or Taoism, though the sinologists have used it freely to translate the extensions of the wordfu (in origin a sacrificial offering, but also, the return of grace, thanks), whether the problem to which the doctrines of grace tender an answer has no echo beyond the religions of the Book, let alone the peoples without writing, or whether grace can be treated as a universal concept or only as an element of Western culture, a question which I asked with regard to "honor" in the introduction to The Fate of Shechem (Pitt-Rivers 1977).Personal destiny, with which grace is very much concerned, looms large in the works of Evans-Pritchard, both on Zande witchcraft and on Nuer religion, [216] yet he who favored employing Catholic theological terms as the nearest equivalents to the concepts of the Azande or the Nuer, seems never to have used the word.2 But these are all petty reasons for astonishment in comparison with the immense importance of the derivatives of grace outside the realms of theology, in the notion of gratuity. (At least gratuity is an abstract, universal, and theoretical concept). Not only is "grace" said before and sometimes after every meal in an Oxford college, I doubt whether any Englishman can get through a single day of his life without saying "thank you" at least a hundred times. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Thank" is: "1) Thought (M.E.) [It comes from the same Old Teutonic root as "think"]. 2) Goodwill, graciousness, favor. 3) Grateful thought, gratitude. 4) Expression of the grateful acknowledgement of a benefit or favor."Is not "thank you" in the "hundred-times-a-day" sense, simply the recognition and acceptance of a gratuitous gesture? The romance languages connect the notion rather more explicitly with grace: French, merci, Spanish, gracias; Italian, ggrazie, etc. It may be that this notion is not evoked when saying thanks because the Old Teutonic root (thank), used in casual conversation is not recognized as having anything to do with it. The romance root (gratus), which recalls the word "grace," is reserved for more formal occasions when gratitude may really be felt. Yet it remains an enigma that the notion of grace should have escaped the anthropologists for so long. This is only the more remarkable in view of the attention they have given, in recent decades, to the problem of reciprocity. Can one explain systems of reciprocity adequately without considering the possibility of non-reciprocity, i.e. gratuity? Reciprocity is the basis of all sociation, in the form of systems of exchange, of women and of food, of labor and services, of hospitality and of violence. Anthropologists attach importance, rightly, to the detail of personal conduct in their understanding of human relations. And are not thanks the common coinage of encounters between persons? Yet what do they imply? What is their logic? Not even Goffman nor the ethnomethodologists have told us.This oversight might be accounted for simply by a regrettable tendency among those of a functionalist turn to mind to jump to conclusions regarding the significance of human actions on the basis of expressed intentions, without examining their mode of expression; to reduce each institution to "what it amounts to" or "what it does" in terms of practical results, ignoring its cultural roots, thinking that there is nothing more to be known about the culture of a people than what they themselves consciously recognize. Such accusations cannot be leveled at more than a minority of the profession today. That grace should have been ignored for so long is still puzzling.It is true one does not think of theology every time one says "thank you," or wonder why the word "grace" and its derivatives have such diverse [217] connotations in different settings: why grace is engraved on English coins (Elizabeth II REG. D.G.) as well as said before a meal, why it is used in writing to a duke as well as bestowed on the congregation at the end of Matins, why it is invoked to applaud a dancer as well as to explain the success of a politician, why it names the three pagan goddesses concerned with personal endowment as well as voluntary embellishments added to a musical score, why it is left on the café table for the waitress as well as implored of God in the hope of salvation. One is justified in wondering whether it is still the same word or has become through the wear and tear of time a virtual homonym (Pitt-Rivers 1967). Yet this semantic richness does not mean that there is no association between the different senses.The meanings which a single word has in different contexts, or had in the forgotten past, are guides to the premises which underlie its daily conscious usage, but daily usage is indifferent to contradictions arising between its various senses, and leaves them to be sorted out at the level of action. (This is the case of honor also). Thus it is not necessary to analyze a word in order to know how to use it correctly.Moreover, the implications of the concept differ from place to place; expressions of gratitude are wont to follow different rules of etiquette in different social milieux, as in different cultures, and it is only by reflecting on all potential differences that one comes to understand the concept as a whole, and I maintain that grace is a whole. Thanks can in some situations be interpreted as a reluctance to pay what the recipient expects as his due; in others, on the contrary, to thank is to recognize indebtedness and represents a promise to return the gift or service in the future. (Such cultures might be described as "Maussian," for they have already understood "the necessity to return presents," as Mauss put it in the subtitle of his great essay on the gift). But the etiquette concerning the return of gifts contains more subtleties than Mauss explained.The only general rule that can be cited is that grace is always something extra, over and above "what counts," what is obligatory or predictable; it belongs on the register of the extraordinary (hence its association with the sacred). Nevertheless whenever a favor has been done the return of grace is always expected, whether in the form of a material manifestation (regardless of the material value of that which is returned) or merely in verbal expression.However, there are also conventional formulae for the acknowledgement of thanks which follow the same principle in all European languages. They consist curiously enough in denying that a favor has been done. Hence in Spanish de nada, in Italian de nulla and in French de rien (though this is considered undistinguished; it is more elegant to say c'était un plaisir or je vous en prie as in Italian prego, in German Bitte). In English "Don't mention it," but in American English "It was a pleasure" is the most explicit form. The [218] denial is not in fact the denial of the sentiment which inspired the act of grace but rather that any obligation has been incurred. It is a way of asserting that the grace was real, that the favor was indeed gratuitous. It is a guarantee of the purity of the motives of the gratifier, a way of saying (as we shall see below) you owe nothing for this favor, it is an act of grace. Without wishing to sound cynical, I must nevertheless point out that by, so to speak, stressing the gratuitous nature of the gesture by denying that any obligation has been incurred, it not only maintains the purity of the motives of the gratifier, it maintains his moral supremacy, which is not to be modified simply by verbal thanks but leaves him a creditor, should the occasion ever arise where a more serious return of grace is possible.The modem tendency in England to say "thank you" when no thanks are conceivably due, almost as a pause-word when one does not know how otherwise to bring the conversation to a close, appears to me to impoverish the notion and things have gone so far that it has now become common custom in commercial aeroplanes to use the phrase to terminate an emission over the intercom system, indicating thereby that the unknown, unseen, uninvited speaker has finished what he had it in mind to announce and is switching off. He thinks perhaps that he is giving thanks for the attention that has been paid to his message. But little does he know it when there is an anthropologist in the cabin who responds to this proffered hypocritical gesture of grace by cursing the interruption of his reading or his snooze. (A curse is, of course, an expression of negative grace — like witchcraft as we shall later see — and on that account alone is worthy of attention.)Such excessive use of the catch-phrase of thanks does not always ingratiate the thanker and among the simple folk of southern Europe to thank when no thanks are due was commonly regarded as "uncouth" behavior and raised suspicions as to the speaker's ability to recognize when gratitude was due.3This devaluation of thanks, encountered in British or American airliners is, no doubt, inspired by the feeling that some attempt at sociation is due between the crew and the passengers in their charge, even if one cannot determine what: a wave of the hand or a wink suffice in some contexts to establish it, but the trouble with intercom systems is that you cannot actually see your interlocutor. Reciprocity is the essence of sociation, as has been said, whether in mechanical or organic solidarity, whether in exchanging salutations or in business and whether the return be immediate or protracted; it is, as it were, the cement that holds any society together, for it establishes relations between persons; once you have exchanged something, you are related. The often meaningless salutations on the path have no other function than this (Firth 1973).Exchange is not merely an economic fact making the division of labor possible and enabling peoples of differing ecology and cultural achievement to make their products available to each other and thus extend the potentialities of [219] their lifestyle, it is above all a social fact, for, as a principle, it governs much more than the exchange of "useful goods" and functions: one can exchange pleasures, woes, secrets, women, insults, vengeance, hospitality, conversation, stories or songs, and above all gifts, but the economic justification for exchange is, as often as not, subsidiary or lacking altogether, even in the exchange of goods, as in those Somali marriages, studied by L. M. Lewis (1961: 139), in which camels, paid as bride-price, return as part of the bride's dowry to their original owners. Yet morally they are no longer the same camels. For something of the giver always accompanies the object exchanged, and if in the first place the camels were exchanged for the bride; in the second they testify to the rights of her kinsmen in regard to her children.That the principle of exchange reigns over many more aspects of society than the economic has been recognized ever since Mauss' essay on the gift, and Lévi-Strauss later applied the principle to kinship and marriage, stressing the importance of the groups between whom exchange takes place. This was the point of departure for the structural study of kinship. Yet an aspect that has attracted less attention is that which determines the ways in which, and the extent to which, reciprocity is evaluated and equivalence is established. In the elementary structures of kinship there is no problem: one woman is fair exchange for another. But in other forms of exchange the degree of specificity varies; one man's labor is known in advance not to be as productive as another's, even though this can rarely be admitted openly, yet when it is a matter of exchanging goods their relative values are discussed freely. This is the basis of all bargaining and indeed of commerce itself. But this is not at all: the mythology of our times assumes that agreement as to economic equivalence is the condition of all exchange, and to establish this, some kind of estimation must be made. Yet, in fact, such equivalence is necessary only if the aim is commercial, not if it is moral, for example in the field of religion, as the parable of the widow's mite made quite explicit.There are also reciprocal relations which do not involve a contract of any sort, nor any estimation of value, for they are between participants whose interests are solidary (in the legal sense that all responsibilities are shared and all benefits are held in common). Nothing is specified by way of a return. The nature of the relationship suffices to determine what is due and when. This is what Meyer Fortes called "kinship amity," "where there is no mine nor thine but only ours." The basic distinction between the parties involved, which is essential to the notion of commerce, is missing and in the field of reciprocity we must therefore differentiate between relations of equivalent exchange and relations of amity, between contract and benevolence, between precise commitments, entailing estimations of equivalence, and mutual aid whensoever needed.Yet beyond the realms of kinship amity where all is held in common and [220] without entering the field of exchange as the law defines it ("a mutual grant of equal interests, the one in consideration of the other," Blackstone in O.E.D.), it is possible to speak of the exchange of favors. Both favors and contracts involve reciprocity, but contractual reciprocity, the basis of trade, is not the same thing as the reciprocity of the heart. The latter escapes the attention of economists (and fiscal authorities, though they have introduced "gift tax" in the attempt to frustrate the evasion of other more onerous taxes). The ties of kinship or of friendship, the hidden incentive, the act of forbearance, the incalculable benefits of favorable decisions, the aim to please, evade the notice of both, for they cannot be evaluated, yet at the micro-level that concerns the anthropologist they are the very of social and in the end they at the of society and the of those who they can be for the problem of in has much from who have to it as a in the if not in "the The "the (and the word is used in in the in quite the same is sometimes for the various of the it is indeed quite that those by the to their to the which are subject to to be for giving it, for personal relations personal in of the legal function of the This of the return of may be from the of modem yet what be more than the principle from which the that a favor to be and all the more when the possibility is that it may be if reciprocity is not in as in most of the the values of the are than those of the and the between the sometimes to as in the case of that of the of who his by to from the moral of his which were by those he it was that such a not be in personal relations. is it not also the case in Europe that the values of the over legal and economic The example of between be the of gratuity and legal the and the of grace takes Yet the is never and from the that grace reigns over the order of the the the and the to their Hence it comes as no to that there are of people in who having to a to an who is already paid to do his yet if they are not they it all the But since the of the are paid in it is to see what have in entering its service if he not to making something on the as things at those who the are those who pay for What more applied at a of rather than of petty these a rather different the of in the of a whose existence is not recognized by the of the the of law the personal of the and the values of the are by their of how to their or their of even if they are not always which to the between the and the that which is and that which is the and the of the the and the the and the They are by the principle of grace and by the principle of that is to as well as and the law which order in human — from which a the of "grace" it is possible to all the that evade the conscious of theological and first of all at the notion of grace in general before with its different the root we get and so from the from it, etc. The origin of the word is it is a theological which has found various of outside the of it to an the a or of or of grace, or to He also like all other economic its economic sense from the of human relations or relations with rather than the is the of the that which is undertaken not in order to a return but to must with the theological concept of grace, for it appears that the of the notion is to account for the of the senses, though whether theology is from the of the or whether the latter have their doctrines on the premises which they in — an that has for a with regard to other aspects of culture — is an that we not but it is grace seems never to have quite forgotten its Without entering the subtleties of the of grace and the or doctrines which have been as from time to we can as its the gratuitous gift of defines it as gift of God by de part de de part de According to it is the gift of the but it is also, in the with whose from original through it is the to as a an to with the of and this human also, which the of God in It is a in our nature in such a as to it to in the says of the of grace is to be found in the and reciprocal of and human the and heresies regarding grace have their point of departure in de de de de point de And he the relations between grace and is that the the of human which is by to but which cannot be with without is the essence of the essence of grace is the of which the in some but the of grace can only be with the of human since God his to be the of the Catholic the on the part of the in order to be The Catholic to the of in this of the of God and the of is with the in way also, for it is with be a of is to be to be through from the of which our all human has be in a condition to grace one must be of not only of original of which one was by the grace of the at but of the which from a to the of Yet such are to the of grace, since the of God on which this is by account of this grace comes in usage to mean that which cannot be rather than grace in less to for one who is not in in the in giving service for without this or gratuitous service in return the manifestation that is called un service service en manifestation And that to economic is to much which bring the of human with and above the of that which one in order to a there is a second that of and which i

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