Letter from Lhasa, number 223. (Weiner 1992): Inalienable Possessions. The Paradox of Keeping-while-giving
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Weiner, A. B., Inalienable Possessions. The Paradox of Keeping-while-giving, University of California Press, 1992.
(Weiner 1992).
Annette Barbara Weiner
“This book is an experiment in a new kind of ethnographic interpretation regarding those critical and perennial problems centered on the norm of reciprocity, the incest taboo, and women's roles in reproduction.” (Weiner 1992, p. ix).
“Human and cultural reproduction, however, are sources of power for women as well as men. Since power is always surrounded by contradiction and ambiguity, it must be carefully located in each particular ethnographic case to document how power gives scope but also limits political authority. For example, the rules of behavior that people appear to be following in reciprocal gift exchange or sister exchange are actually surface phenomena constructed out of a deeper social priority that can never solve but only approximate the central issue of social life: keeping-while-giving.” (Weiner 1992, p. ix).
“The theoretical thrust of this book is the development of a theory of exchange that follows the paradox of keeping-while-giving into the social and political relations between women and men with foremost attention to their involvement in human and cultural reproduction.” (Weiner 1992, p. x).
The concept of inalienable possession rotates around the concepts and, sometimes the realities, of not fully ceding what one has and of not fully disposing of what acquired. It may be applied both to people and things.
“Some things, like most commodities, are easy to give. But there are other possessions that are imbued with the intrinsic and ineffable identities of their owners which are not easy to give away. Ideally, these inalienable possessions are kept by their owners from one generation to the next within the closed context of family, descent group, or dynasty. The loss of such an inalienable possession diminishes the self and by extension, the group to which the person belongs. Yet it is not always this way. Theft, physical decay, the failure of memory, and political maneuvers are among the irrevocable forces that work to separate an inalienable possession from its owner.” (Weiner 1992, p. 6).
If they are subject to such entropic decaying they are not so inalienable. People are adaptive animals. What seems inalienable may be replaced by something else. The same permanencies are in constant evolution.
Assume, for instance, the Torah in Hebraism. It is always the same, while the material cultures around it are sometimes or frequently radically changed. Take many North American Jews. Contemporary customs are radically different from traditional ones, although formal culture and religion are presented as inalienable. The form seems inalienable, while actual behaviours are radically different and absolutely adapted to the North American customs FBI-imposed by its totalitarian media and cultural control. What is inalienable, imagination or actual behaviours?
Or, perhaps radically different, think of that atheist and non-practising people in the now ex-Yugoslavia who, under Titoism and Yugoslav said to their children: “We are a Christian-Orthodox”, “We are a Roman-Catholics”, “We are Muslims”, and since that “identity”, their children, once become adults, frequently acrimoniously and bloodily fought for preserving such an inalienable possession, such an “identity”.
Is it the need to be [pseudo-]different, to invent differences, to fight against the other, to eliminate the other invented as different or obliged to seem different, of is there some inalienable possession, actually only a label, transformed in an excuse for justifying barbarianism, actually just a Freudian unconscious urge toward death dominating people?
In this work, the paradigm of keeping-while-giving is applied to some ethnic groups of the South-Western Pacific Ocean with specific attention to the role of women in it. Individuals and their families, both inside their families and in interrelation with other families, establish relations of keeping-while-giving at different levels and about different matters. To the keeping-while-giving correspond forms of limited acquisition, if the keeping-while-giving characterises both sides of an interrelation.
Weiner, A. B., Inalienable Possessions. The Paradox of Keeping-while-giving, University of California Press, 1992.
