Jack Kent Cooke Young Scholar Anna Lee talks about gifts in her lifE-the loan of a rare violin and her love of music.

WSJ. The Magazine from the Wall Street Journal 

By: Lewis Hyde | Produced by Jeffrey Podolsky | Photographs by Iain McKell

November 30, 2008

One of the premises of Lewis Hyde’s ‘The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property’ is that gift exchange is the economy of the creative spirit. He discusses the art of gifting and we present seven beneficiaries.

When we were students, young and poor, a friend of mine would give his family books for Christmas. Library books. He would seek out works well matched to his relatives’ interests, check them out, wrap them up and deposit them beneath the tree, leaving his loved ones the single task of returning them to the library once they had been read.

An Indian giver, some would say, and more correctly so than they might think. Years ago when I first set out to write a book about gift-giving and art, I thought it would be useful to figure out how that phrase came into being. The first recorded use turns out to appear in Thomas Hutchinson’s 1765 history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the implication being that something odd had happened when the Puritans first met up with Native generosity. “An Indian gift,” one footnote reads, “is a proverbial expression signifying a present for which an equivalent return is expected.” Over two centuries later we still use the phrase, its sense now broadened to refer to anyone who gives a gift with the clear expectation that the recipient should not keep it.

The experiences that Hutchinson’s forebears were trying to name turn out to demonstrate a simple ethic well known in all traditional gift-exchange societies: The recipient of a gift is more its custodian or steward than its owner. “The gift must always move” is the old wisdom, meaning that what we have received from others must eventually be passed along again, either the actual gift itself or something of similar value and meaning.

In such commerce lie the beginnings of social life. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once noticed a simple ritual performed in restaurants in the south of France. Two diners, strangers to one another, might be seated at the same table, each with a small carafe of wine. As the meal began, each man would pour his wine into the other’s glass. In an economic sense, nothing happens. And yet, simple community has appeared where previously there was none.

Such is the cardinal mark of gift exchanges: They connect us to one another. If someone’s generosity touches you, especially if you feel gratitude, and most especially if you are so moved as to give something in return, then friendship may arise, and family life, and collectivity. To say the same thing from the opposite perspective, one of the great virtues of a market in commodities is that it usually leaves no enduring connection. You can drive from New York to Los Angeles—eating in restaurants, renting hotel rooms, swiping your credit card at the gas pumps—and never have the least bit of intimate contact with anyone. If that were not the case, if in every small-town diner the cook got you talking about your dreams and desires, responded to them with generosity, poured his wine into your glass… You might never make it to the coast.

A cash economy enables mobility and, for better or worse, it makes it easy for us to live with one another without connection. But gifts bespeak relationship. Not just the simple binary relationship of two men in a cafe, either, nor that of friends and lovers: Gifts do not just move, they move outward into some larger circle.

Probably the most famous example of a capacious cycle of gifts comes from the Trobriand Islands where, early in the last century, Bronisław Malinowski witnessed a gift economy of striking breadth and complexity. In a ceremonial commerce known as Kula, the Massim peoples carried two ritual gifts—armshells and necklaces—from island to island in canoe journeys that covered hundreds of miles and took years to complete. Years, that is, to make the full circuit of the archipelago, for eventually each gift given would return to those who gave it away (though they, in turn, would give it yet again, the Massim being another group of early Indian givers).

Gifts that move in a circle differ markedly from simple two-person exchanges. Once the circle appears, no one will necessarily receive a gift from the same person to whom he or she first gave. Something may come back to the donor, to be sure, but there is no way to guarantee that. When you give to someone from whom you do not receive, it is as if the gift disappears around a corner before anything returns. You must give blindly then and, if something does in fact return, you must feel a kind of blind or generalized gratitude.

Giving anonymously is one good way to open the circle outward. It diminishes the chance that recipients might feel embarrassed or subordinated, and it helps a donor stand aside from praise and blame. Gifts that are passed from one generation to the next also open the circle. If your parents once dedicated themselves to your well-being, you may thank them for that, but when it comes to concrete expressions of gratitude, it will be better to direct them toward the young. We cannot teach our teachers; we must teach those who follow after. In a 12-step program, the gift of recovery goes to the newcomer, not back to the old-timer.

Perhaps the most surprising domain for open-ended gift exchange in recent years has been the Internet. There are thousands who have donated time and expertise to write Wikipedia’s millions of encyclopedia entries. Unpaid contributors from around the world have created open source code for the Linux operating system, and maintain it still. Some years ago, more than 85,000 anonymous and untrained volunteers—so-called “clickworkers”—went online to help NASA classify all of the craters on its maps of Mars. In these and countless other cases, the Internet has revealed that an impulse to give without promise of return is as modern as it is aboriginal.

Poets especially have long been familiar with the economy of gift exchange. The Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz once reflected on the Greek concept of storge, the kind of affection that a parent feels for a child or that teachers might feel toward their students. It is also possible, Milosz wrote, “that storge may be applied to the relationship between a poet and generations of readers to come: Underneath the ambition to perfect one’s art without hope of being rewarded by contemporaries lurks a magnanimity of gift-offering to posterity.”

That magnanimity is hardly the exclusive provenance of poets. At his death, Benjamin Franklin left a bequest to the city of Boston, a sum of money that (with interest) served, two centuries after Franklin’s birth, as the foundational endowment of the Franklin Institute of Technology. Nor was this Franklin’s only gift to his country. He was also the co-founder of the still-existing Pennsylvania Hospital, and the force behind Philadelphia’s first library, “the mother of all the North American…libraries,” as he called it. “These libraries,” he once wrote, “have improved the general conversation of the Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries.” And, of course, they have made it possible for poor students, even today, to circulate the gifts of art and learning, independent of the commodity culture that otherwise dominates so much of our lives.

1660 Amati Violin
To: Anna Lee
From: The Stradivari Society

When 13-year-old prodigy Anna Lee heard that her $1 million violin was on its way to her home in Queens, outside Manhattan, she was beside herself with excitement. “I was euphoric,” exclaims the Korean immigrant, who started playing at age 4 and by age 5 was performing a Paganini violin concerto with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. “I was supposed to get it on a Friday, and I finally got it on a Sunday, so for three days I was like, ‘Where is it?’ When I got it, I didn’t even let my dad touch it. My teacher wanted to touch it, too, and I was like, ‘Uhmmm…’ ”

Anna isn’t the only young virtuoso who is thrilled with her musical gift. Thanks to the beneficence of the Stradivari Society, talented musicians across the U.S. have been able to borrow some of the world’s most precious violins to help further their careers. The society enables budding artists like Anna to reach their full potential of expression by arranging for well-off patrons to lend instruments from their personal collections—a philosophy of patronage not unlike the Medicis’.

“It’s a true joy and a true gift,” says Chicago philanthropist Mary Galvin, whose husband, Bob, is an heir to the Motorola fortune. Galvin, who loaned Anna a 1660 Amati from her collection, sits on the boards of the Chicago Symphony and the USO but says it’s the Stradivari Society that “lights me up the most.” Founded by Chicago violin dealer Geoffrey Fushi, the society has some eight patrons and 32 recipients, ranging in age from 12 to their 30s, in possession of 300-year-old Stradivaris, Guarneris and Amatis valued at up to $20 million each. (See accompanying video.) –Kate Auletta

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