Inalienable Possessions

The concept of Inalienable Possessions coined from Annette Weiner’s observation regarding the many objects of the Trobriand islanders who view those objects as culturally imbued with a spiritual sense of the gift giver (Wilk 2007). Thus, when they transfer in physical form from one individual to another the objects reserve meaningful bonds associated with that of the giver (Wilk 2007). It is important to understand that these gifts are not like those that we give in regular gift giving in the West on birthdays for example. Rather, these gifts can’t be sold for money or auctioned off of ebay because the value and the significance of the gift cannot be alienated or disengaged from the relationships of those who own that object (Wilk 2007).

What makes a possession inalienable is its exclusive and cumulative identity with a particular series of owners through time. Its history is authenticated by fictive or true genealogies, origin myths, sacred ancestors, and gods. In this way, inalienable possessions are transcendent treasures to be guarded against all the exigencies that might force their loss (Weiner 1992).

Barbara Mills put it another way by saying, “Inalienable possessions are objects made to be kept (not exchanged), have symbolic and economic power that cannot be transferred, and are often used to authenticate the ritual authority of corporate groups (Mills 2004).” “Inalienable possessions provide a way of making kin out of non-kin (Weiner 1992).” Marcel Mauss though, first described inalienable possessions in the classic anthropological text called . See below excerpt:

It is even incorrect to speak in these cases of transfer. They are loans rather than sales or true abandonment of possessions. Among the Kwakiutl a certain number of objects, although they appear at the potlatch, cannot be disposed of. In reality these pieces of "property" are sacra that a family divests itself of only with great reluctance and sometimes never (Mauss 2000).

However, as Maurice Godelier points out in his book, The Enigma of the Gift, that Mauss is not concerned with the relations that men form while they end up producing things; he only concerns himself with the relations formed by the circulation of things that men produce (Godelier 1999).

Why is this important?

Economists have often shunned at the idea of pondering exactly why people want goods (Douglas 1979). Goods serve many purposes beyond what classical economists might theorize. Goods can serve as systems of social communication according to Mary Douglas, a prominent anthropologist (Douglas 1979). In fact, anthropology in general is important to economics because it talks about the socio-cultural relationships in economy and economy itself as a cultural system that is not just market-based (Erem 2007). Moreover, entire industries are often based on gift giving such as the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, gift giving plays an important role in the cultural development of how social and business relations evolve of major economies such as in the case of the Chinese.

About Annette Weiner

Annette Weiner coined the term Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving in her seminal work of 1992. Her views countered those ranging from Adam Smith to Malinowski regarding reciprocity in how the definitions that arose were and are culture bound in that they impose our cultural values and systems of thinking on others through our own cosmologies (Weiner 1992).
Annette B. Weiner is a Professor of Anthropology and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts at New York University, and serves as current president of the American Anthropological Association (Weiner 1992).

Undoing Cosmology

To undo the cosmological identities that we have placed on possessions, Annette Weiner proposes the following:

1. Acknowledge that cosmologies act directly on social life mediating and, at the same time, fomenting society's most irresolvable problems (Weiner 1992).2. See how power is constituted through rights and access to these cosmological authentications that give value to certain kinds of possessions which are fundamental to the organization of exchange(Weiner 1992).3. Notice how differences arise through exchange rather than through homogeneity(Weiner 1992).

"Cosmologies are active forces in social life that, in mediating systems of meaning, also entail material or verbal objectifications that actively become the agents or instruments of change(Weiner 1992)."

Weiner believed that exchange acts fuel tension because all exchange predicates on a paradox that she considers universal – “how to keep while giving (Weiner 1992).” This occurs because some objects go beyond just commodity as they become imbued with intrinsic qualities of their owners in a closed knit system of kinship and descent otherwise known as inalienable possessions (Weiner 1992). "Certain things assume a subjective value that places them above exchange value." She gives the example of a Maori Sacred Cloak and says that when a woman wears it "she is more than herself - that she is her ancestors (Weiner 1992)." Cloaks act as conduits for a person's hau or life giving spirit (Weiner 1992; Godelier 1999). The hau can bring strength or even knowledge potentially but a person may also have the risk of losing their hau. In this way, the Cloak actually stands for the person (Weiner 1992).

Values and Rights

Weiner believes that authentic or transcendent value remains everlastingly affiliated to inalienable possessions and hence, people resist disconnecting with them (Wilk 2007). Essentially, "gifts link things to persons and embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations, (whereas) commodities are held to represent the drive - largely free of moral or cultural constraints - of goods for one another, a drive mediated by money and not by sociality (Appadurai 1986). These inalienable possessions may also exceed that of mere gifts and may also include property itself as being inalienable. In fact, property can be thought of as being a “bundle of rights – the right to use something, the right to collect rent from someone, the right to extract something (as in oil drilling), the right to hunt within a particular territory – that can be owned in common or by groups of individuals or lineages, the property becomes impossible to separate from the group owning it (Weiner 1992).” A good example of this would be how Muslims believe that mining rights such as for oil, metals, and precious gems belong collectively to the Muslim Ummah (Muslim People) rather than to private entities and, that it is the obligation of the governing bodies to distribute profits to the people from those rights regardless of which private entity currently owns the land itself. “To give in this instant means to transfer without alienating, or to use the language of the West, to give means to cede the right of use without ceding actual ownership (Godelier 1999).” Essentially, Weiner contended that an economy built around the moral code of gift giving provides the giver rights over what he/she has given and in turn “subsequently benefits from a series of advantages (Godelier 1999).” Thus, when one accepts a gift one also accepts that the giver now has rights over the receiver (Godelier 1999).

Main Ideas

Many main ideas stem from Annette Weiner’s idea on Inalienable possessions. In fact, Maurice Godelier theorized two theses from her work.

First Thesis: Interplay of gift and counter gift doesn't completely dominate the social sphere even in a society dominated by gift giving's economic and moral code. In other words there must be something’s which are kept and not given and these things such as valuables, talismans, knowledge, rites provide a deep identity and continue over time. Moreover, they acknowledge differences of identity linked by various kinds of exchanges (Godelier 1999).

Second Thesis: Women or the feminine element also exercise power providing legitimism and redistributing power, political and religious, among societies groups. Godelier contends that Weiner revitalizes the role of women in constructing and legitimizing power (Godelier 1999). For example, in Polynesia, the woman as a sister appears to be closer to the sacred, the ancestors, and the gods. Weiner acknowledges the source of this idea as first originating from Mauss and in how he classified two categories of goods in Samoa: Oloa and le'tonga or immovable and movable goods exchanged through marriage (Godelier 1999). Interestingly enough, women in many cultures share a similar role of being closer to the sacred. For example, Muslims have a famous saying from Prophet Muhammad which states that "Verily, Heaven lies under the feet of our mother." Likewise, Christians, hold mothers and thus women sacred in their opinion of Mary as "Mother of God." Moreover, Muslim's believe that on the Day of Judgment, people will be called by their mother's names rather than by their father's names.

"The motivation for keeping while giving is grounded in such heroic dynamics - the need to secure permanence in a serial world that is always subject to loss and decay (Weiner 1992)." So, in other worlds it is a means of establishing homeostasis between change and stability. In essence, "An inalienable possession acts as a stabilizing force against change because its presence authenticates cosmological origins, kinship, and political histories (Weiner 1992).” This can take the form such as when the possession may be the symbol of change such as Gandhi’s invocation of hand spinning traditional cloth, khadi, in which Nehru referred to as Gandhi’s, “livery of freedom (Weiner 1992).”

The transmission of inalienable possessions reconstitutes social identities over time by legitimizing kinship. “These possessions then are the most potent force in the effort to subvert change, while at the same time they stand as the corpus of change (Weiner 1992)." “Essentially, social value must be created and recreated to prevent or overcome dissipation and loss (Weiner 1992).

Other Key Concepts brought forth by Annette Weiner:

Inalienable possessions exist beyond the life of their owners as they pass on thus making transferability an essential part of preserving them (Weiner 1992).

"The motivation for reciprocity is centered not in the gift per se, but in the authority vested in keeping inalienable possessions (Weiner 1992)."

"Hierarchy resides at the very core of reciprocal exchange (Weiner 1992)."

"There is an innate, mystical, or natural autonomy in the workings of reciprocity. What motivates reciprocity is its reverse- the desire to keep something back from the pressures of give and take (Weiner 1992).”

What is most essential about the trajectories of inalienable possessions, however, is not their individual ownerships but the source of their authentication (Weiner 1992)."

Weiner states that even though these societies are relatively egalitarian someone still has to transmit and create the inalienable possessions. The extreme form of this can construct hierarchy. "Taking a possession that so completely represents a group's social identity as well as an individual owner's identity and giving it to someone outside the group is a powerful transfer of one's own and one's group's very substance. This transfer is the most serious step in the constitution of hierarchy (Weiner 1992)."

Other Examples of Inalienable Possessions

Inalienable Possessions in Medieval Times
John Baldwin, a historian, showed how Inalienable Possessions enabled the "nobility to hold monopolies over mills, wineries, roads, markets, marriages, and even ecclesiastical rights (Weiner 1992). Through the ownership of landed property everyone.... was held together through what historians call gifts of patronage and charity (Weiner 1992; Mills 2004)."

"The moral force behind the ownership of inalienable estates was authenticated by the status of nobility or the sacredness of the Catholic Church (Weiner 1992)."

In addition, “… chiefs and aristocrats strive not just to access contexts of origins but also to take unto themselves durable regalia associated with forms of Other that expresses not just the potency but also the stability and order of the universe at large (Helms 2002).”

Inalienable Possessions among the Australian Aborigines

Annette Weiner went one step further in her ideas about inalienable possessions by looking at the meta-context of cosmology within which those objects derive meaning. Her analysis of the dreaming provides a good example of this.

"As an ideology, The Dreaming is immaterial but in another sense, The Dreaming flourishes because it consists of material and verbal possessions—myths, names, songs, ceremonies, and sacred objects inherited from one generation to the next. In this way, The Dreaming itself encompasses vast inalienable possessions that are authenticated by the very cosmology under which they are produced. These possessions created in and authenticated by The Dreaming circulate from one person or group to another in a limited way. The possibilities of transmission in the face of the canon for guardianship establish for ritual leaders a domain of authority that in certain situations leads to a formalized position of rank(Weiner 1992)."

"Both Mauss and Durkheim failed to read into these accounts that the ritual authentications of social identities defined, promoted, and even exacerbated difference even as these events linked people together under the rubric of “one group (Weiner 1992).”

Conclusion

The idea of Inalienable possessions provides new meanings in areas of economics, kinship, power, and social relations. “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things.... human actors encode things with significance...it is the things in motion that illuminate their human and social context (Appadurai 1986)." Moreover, ownership may be more plural than we think with many groups and individuals having superimposed levels or types of ownership over the same things (Godelier 1999). Also, “over time, objects acquire new meanings and what was once a humble pot may become a sacred vessel (Frans Theuws 2001).” Usually, this may take a form of ritualization or a change in cosmology (Frans Theuws 2001). Furthermore, ritual regulation tends to take place around major events such as births, deaths, marriages, initiations, etc…(Helms 2002). In fact, “Ritual Knowledge is often a source of political power (Spielmann 2002).” “In conclusion, Weiner subtitled her book Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-while-Giving, but it may be that another paradox present in her work is more salient: that inalienable possessions are simultaneously used to construct and defeat hierarchy. Investigation of this paradox opens a boxful of new theoretical and methodological tools for understanding social inequality in past and present societies (Mills 2004).”

Background and Other Related Anthropologists and their Works

Emile Durkheim: Durkheim was a sociologist rather than an anthropologist but had a great affect on many anthropologists and the origination of their ideas. Durkheim “describes how exchange involves an intensive bonding more formidable than mere economic relations. Social cohesiveness occurs because one person is always dependent on another to achieve a feeling of completeness (Weiner 1992).” This comes into being via the domain of the sacred ritual that involves communal participation even as it encompasses the moment in a higher order of sacredness.

Bronislaw Malinowski who wrote Argonauts of the Western Pacific: Malinowski was a pioneer of ethnographic fieldwork in Melanesia in particular to the Trobriand Islanders and his observations on Kula exchange. His work was later analyzed by Mauss and subsequently by other anthropologists.

Marcel Mauss who wrote The Gift: A pioneer in the study of exchanging gifts concerned himself with “the relations men entertain in the course of producing things, only with those formed between men by the circulation of the things they produce (Godelier 1999). Mauss advocated that the obligation to reciprocate was based on religious or spiritual reasons (Mauss 2000). In fact, he contended that inalienability is based on or legitimized by the belief that there is present in the object a power, a spirit, a spiritual reality that binds it to the giver, and which accompanies the object wherever it goes (Godelier 1999)." This spirit then wishes to return to its source the original giver. However, he was perplexed why some things which are more valuable than others did not enter into the potlatch system (Godelier 1999).

Marshall Sahlins who wrote Stone Age Economics: Sahlins disagreed with Mauss on several points and contended that “the freedom to gain at others’ expense is not envisioned by the relations and forms of exchange.” Moreover, “The material flow underwrites or initiates social relations…. Persons and groups confront each other not merely as distinct interests but with the possible inclination and certain right to physically prosecute these interests (Sahlins 1972).”

Claude Levi-Strauss: Levi Strauss applauded Marcel Mauss for his efforts and what he uncovered in his book, The Gift, even as he criticized him of not perceiving that it is, “the primary fundamental phenomena (of social life) is exchange itself (Godelier 1999).” He believed that "society is better understood in terms of language than from the standpoint of any other paradigm (Strauss-Levi)." Moreover, he thought that anthropologists and ethnographers, particularly Mauss, were becoming confused by languages of those they ethnographically studied resulting in obscure ideas that didn’t really make sense (Strauss-Levi). He advocated this in an attempt to clear up certain confusions caused by Mauss’ work.

Maurice Godelier who wrote The Enigma of the Gift: Godelier reinforced Weiner’s work and expanded on it by reinforcing the following ideas: "We have thus seen that sacred objects are inalienable and must be kept and not given. Godelier disagreed about the spiritual motivation behind inalienability.

References

*cite journal|last=Appadurai |first=Arjun |year=1986 |title=The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perpective |publisher=Cambridge University Press
*cite book|last=Douglas |first=Mary |year=1979 |title=The World of Goods |publisher=New York, Routledge |isbn=0415130476
*cite journal|last=Erem |first=Susan |year=2007 |title=An Anthropological Approach to Economics
*cite book|author=Theuws,F, van Rhijn, C |year=2001 |title=Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages Maastricht as a center of power in the early Middle Ages |publisher=Brill
*cite book|last=Godelier |first=Maurice |year=1999 |title=The Enigma of the Gift |publisher=Polity Press and the University of Chicago |isbn = 0226300455
*cite book|last=Helms |first=M W |year=2002 |title=Tangible Durability
* Marcel Mauss: "The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies". Originally published as "Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques" in 1925, modern English edition: ISBN 0-393-32043-X. Lewis Hyde calls this "the classic work on gift exchange".
*cite journal|last=Mills |first=B.J |year=2004 |title=The Establishment and Defeat of Hierarchy: Inalienable Possessions and the History of Collective Prestige Structures in the Pueblo Southwest | journal=American Anthropologist |issue=106(2)|pages=238-251
*cite book|last=Sahlins |first=Marshall |year=1972 |title=Stone Age Economics |publisher=Aldine Transaction |isbn=0202010996
*cite journal|last=Spielmann |first=K.A |year=2002 |title=Feasting, Craft Specialization, and the Ritual Mode of Production in Small-Scale Societies | journal=American Anthropologist |issue=104(1)|pages=195-207
*cite book|last=Strauss-Levi |first=Claude |year=1987 |title=Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss |publisher=London, Routeledge and Kegan Paul |isbn=0415151589
*cite book|last=Weiner |first=Annette |year=1992 |title=Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving |publisher=Berkeley, University of California Press |isbn=0520076044
*cite book|author=Wilk, R., Cliggett, L|title=Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology|publisher=Boulder, CO, Westview Press |year=2007 |isbn=0813343658