Rule Enforcement Without Visible Means: Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown
Author(s): Theodore Caplow
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 89, No. 6 (May, 1984), pp. 1306-1323
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Rule Enforcement without Visible Means:
Christmas Gift Giving in Middletown'
Theodore Caplow
University of Virginia
As part of a much larger study of social change in Middletown
(Muncie, Ind.), a random sample of adult residents was interviewed
early in 1979 about celebrations of the previous Christmas. This
paper describes the unwritten and largely unrecognized rules that
regulate Christmas gift giving and associated rituals in this community
and the effective enforcement of those rules without visible
means. A theoretical explanation is proposed.
The Middletown III study is a systematic replication of the well-known
study of a midwestern industrial city conducted by Robert and Helen
Lynd in the 1920s (Lynd and Lynd [1929] 1959) and partially replicated
by them in the 1930s (Lynd and Lynd [1937] 1963). The fieldwork for
Middletown III was conducted in 1976-79;2 its resultshave been reported
in Middletown Families (Caplow et al. 1982)and in 38 published papers3
by various authors; additional volumes and papers are in preparation.
Nearly all this materialis an assessmentof the social changes that occurred
between the 1920s and the 1970s in this one community, which is, so far,
the only place in the United States that provides such long-term comprehensive
sociological data. The Middletown III research focused on
those aspects of social structuredescribed by the Lynds in orderto utilize
the opportunities for longitudinal comparison their data afforded, but
there was one important exception. The Lynds had given little attention
to the annual cycle of religious-civic-family festivals (therewere only two
inconsequential references to Christmas in Middletown and none at all
to Thanksgiving or Easter), but we found this cycle too important to
ignore. The celebrationof Christmas, the high point of the cycle, mobilizes
1
I am greatly indebted to Cleva Maggio, Carmen Matarazza, Steven Nock, and
Margaret Williamson for able and imaginative assistance with the Christmas survey.
Requests for reprints should be sent to Theodore Caplow, Department of Sociology,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903.
2
Supported by the National Science Foundation grant SOC 75-13580. Investigators
were Theodore Caplow, Howard H. Bahr, and Bruce A. Chadwick.
3A complete list of these publications is available on request from any of the investigators.
(C 1984 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0002-9602/84/8906-0002$01 .50
1306 AJS Volume 89 Number 6
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Middletown
almost the entire population for several weeks, accounts for about 4% of
its total annual expenditures, and takes precedence over ordinary forms
of work and leisure. In order to include this large phenomenon, we interviewed
a random sample of 110 Middletown adults early in 1979 to
discover how they and their families had celebrated Christmas in 1978.
The survey included an inventory of all Christmasgifts given and received
by these respondents. Although the sample included a few very isolated
individuals, all of these had participated in Christmas giving in the previous
year. The total number of gifts inventoried was 4,347, a mean of
39.5 per respondent. The distribution of this sample of gifts by type and
value, by the age and sex of givers and receivers, and by gift-giving
configurationshas been reported elsewhere (Caplow 1982).
The following were among the findings: (1) Four out of five Christmas
gifts went to kin, and four out of five of these to close kin. (2) Fifty-seven
percent of all gifts were a part of a multiple gift, that is, two or more
gifts from the same giver(s) to the same receiver(s), and 59% of all gifts
werejoint, that is, from more than one giver or to morethan one receiver.
(3)The proportionof each class of kin relationshipsmarked by Christmas
gifts and the value of those gifts were roughly proportionateto the closeness
of the kin relationship. (4) Women were much more active as gift
givers than men; they selected most of the gifts given jointly by couples,
gave more gifts singly than men, and did nearly all of the gift wrapping.
(5) Although married women were largely responsible for Christmas gift
giving, they did not favor their own relatives over their husbands'. Gifts
to maternal relatives did not differ significantly in number or value from
gifts to paternal relatives. (6) In gift giving, close affinal relatives were
equated with the linking consanguineous relative. For example, gifts to
daughters-in-lawwere as numerous and valuable as gifts to marriedsons.
(7)The flow of gifts between adults and childrenwas heavily unbalanced.
The respondents, all adult, gave about seven times as many gifts to
children as they received in return. (8) Residential distance, which has a
major effect on most forms of contact between kin, has only a minor
influence on Christmas gift giving.
In an earlier paper I undertook to account for those features of Middletown's
Christmas gift-giving system that seemed most distinctive: the
heavily unbalanced gift giving from parents to children, which does not
change when the children are grown; the equal treatment of affinal and
consanguinous relatives; and the lack of interest in exact reciprocity in
gift giving between kin. Drawing on the ethnographic literature, I suggested
that ritualized gift giving, in any society, is a method of dealing
with important but insecure relationships, whereby gifts are offered to
persons or collectivities whose goodwill is needed but cannot be taken for
granted; and I showed how this formula seems to explain the features
mentioned above.
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American Journal of Sociology
In this paper, I discuss a quite different problem: How are the rules
that appearto govern Christmasgift giving in Middletown communicated
and enforced? There are no enforcement agents and little indignation
against violators. Nevertheless, the level of participation is very high.
Here are some typical gift-giving rules that are enforced effectively in
Middletown without visible means of enforcement and indeed without
any widespread awareness of their existence:
THE TREE RULE
Married couples with children of any age should put up Christmas trees in
their homes. Unmarried persons with no living children should not put up
Christmas trees. Unmarried parents (widowed, divorced, or adoptive) may
put up trees but are not required to do so.
Conformity with the Tree Rule in our survey sample may be fairly described
as spectacular. Table 1 shows the distribution of Christmas trees
by family situation in our respondents' households. Of the 45 married
respondents with children under 18, only two had no tree. One was a
newly married woman who had spent the entire Christmas season with
her husband's parents in another state. The other was a recent immigrant
from Venezuela who omitted the tree to demonstrate her refusal to be
assimilated: "Wetry to keep our own culture,"she told the interviewer
in explaining why she and herhusband had set up a nativity scene instead.
Of the 36 married respondents with children who were adults, only
three lacked a tree. Two were away from home for the entire Christmas
season; the third, a 69-year-old woman whose husband had been hospitalized
recently, had broken up house-keeping and was living with a
married daughter who had her own tree.
Two of the six married and childless respondents had trees. They were
a 23-year-old man and woman, each recently married, and presumably
planning to have children. The other four married and childless respondents
were much older, and in each case, the wives were beyond childbearing
age. They had no trees.
Of the 13 unmarried parents in the sample (one was raising two adopted
grandchildren, another had an illegitimate child, and the others were
widowed or divorced), eight had trees, five did not.
Of the nine unmarried and childless respondents in the sample, none
had individual trees, although most had put up Christmas decorations,
and one young woman had decorated a potted begonia with Christmas
lights. The two unmarried childless respondents who reported trees at
home were young people still living with their parents; these apparent
exceptions support the rule.
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American Journal of Sociology
Nobody in Middletown seems to be consciously aware of the norm that
requires married couples with children of any age to put up a Christmas
tree, yet the obligation is so compelling that, of the 77 respondents in this
categorywho were at home for Christmas 1978, only one-the Venezuelan
woman previously mentioned-failed to do so. Few of the written laws
that agents of the state attempt to enforce with endless paperwork and
threats of violence are so well obeyed as this unwritten rule that is promulgated
by no identifiable authority and backed by no evident threat.
Indeed, the existence of the rule goes unnoticed. People in Middletown
think that putting up a Christmas tree is an entirely voluntary act. They
know that it has some connection with children, but they do not understand
that married couples with children of any age are effectively required
to have trees and that childless unmarried people are somehow
prevented from having them. Middletown people do not consciously perceive
the Christmastreeas a symbol of the complete nuclearfamily (father,
mother, and one or more children). Those to whom we suggested that
possibility seemed to resent it.
Ethnographershave debated at some length whether the symbolic connections
they detect in tribal cultures need to be verified by the testimony
of participants (Foster and Brandes 1980). In this exceptionally clear
instance, we infer that Middletown people sense the symbolic meaning
of the Christmastree because, otherwise, the consistency of theirbehavior
with respect to it would be inexplicable, but there is direct evidence that
they themselves do not translate the symbol.
THE WRAPPING RULE
Christmas gifts must be wrapped before they are presented.
A subsidiary rule requires that the wrapping be appropriate, that is,
emblematic, and another subsidiary rule says that wrapped gifts are appropriatelydisplayed
as a set but that unwrapped gifts should not be so
displayed. Conformity with these rules is exceedingly high.
An unwrapped object is so clearly excluded as a Christmas gift that
Middletown people who wish to give something at that season without
defining it as a Christmas gift have only to leave the object unwrapped.
Difficult-to-wrap Christmas gifts, like a pony or a piano, are wrapped
symbolically by adding a ribbon or bow or card and are hidden until
presentation. Nowadays, in Middletown, it is not sufficient to wrap a
Christmas gift in ordinary paper. Nearly all gifts are wrapped in special
paper, most emblematically colored red, green, or white with graphic
emblems that include Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, bells, candles,
holly, mistletoe, wreaths, or carolers-a whole lexicon of familiar images.
Christmas packages are decorated furtherwith ribbons, bows, and stick-
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Middletown
ers. Many of these packages are made up in the stores, but a greater
number are wrapped at home. Women wrap far more gifts than men.
Almost half the male respondents had someone else wrap their gifts, and
wives were much more likely to wrap their husbands' gifts than were the
husbands. Of the women in the sample, 57% wrapped all their gifts
without help, compared with 16%of the men.
In nearly every Middletown household, the wrapped presents are displayed
under or around the Christmas tree as a glittering monument to
the family's affluence and mutual affection. Picture taking at Christmas
gatherings is clearly a part of the ritual; photographs were taken at 65%
of the recorded gatherings. In nearly all instances, the pile of wrapped
gifts was photographed; and individual participants were photographed
opening a gift, ideally at the moment of "surprise."Although the pile of
wrapped gifts is almost invariably photographed, a heap of unwrapped
gifts is not a suitable subject for the Christmas photographer.Among the
366 gatherings we recorded, there was a single instance in which a participant,
a small boy, was photographed with all his unwrapped gifts. To
display unwrapped gifts as a set seems to invite the invidious comparison
of gifts-and of the relationships they represent.
THE DECORATION RULE
Any room where Christmas gifts are distributed should be decorated by
affixing Christmas emblems to the walls, the ceiling, or the furniture.
This is done even in nondomestic places, like offices or restaurantdining
rooms, if gifts are to be distributed there. Conformity to this rule was
perfect in our sample of 366 gatherings at which gifts were distributed,
although, once again, the existence of the rule was not recognized by the
people who obeyed it.
The same lack of recognition applies to the interesting subsidiary rule
that a Christmas tree should not be put up in an undecorated place,
although a decorated place need not have a tree. Unmarried, childless
persons normally decorate their homes, although they have no trees, and
decorations without a tree are common in public places, but a Christmas
tree in an undecorated room would be unseemly. The decorations are
often elaborate:
We had lights outside and around the front door. There was a wreath on
the front door and over the fireplace, candles around, the large and the
small Christmas angel, a mistletoe ball, Christmas salt and pepper shakers,
and Christmas plates for cookies, the creche on the television, card holders
for the Christmas cards.
Every room in the house had Christmas decorations. I have outside lights
on the outdoor tree and on the garage door, electric candles in the window,
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AmericanJournal of Sociology
we decorate the outdoor pole lamp. On the mantel in the family room I
have two latch hook stockings for my granddaughters. The mantel is decorated
with angels and Rudolph. I decorate the bulletin board to look like
a package. There is a wreath on the door, and the nativity scene my mother
made. A Holly Hobby ball in the master bath, mistletoe in the entry way,
an artificialtree and lights around the mirrorin the bathroom. My Christmas
angel collection was out.
It goes without saying that Christmas decorations must be temporary,
installed for the season and removed afterward(with the partialexception
of outdoor wreaths, which are sometimes left to wither on the door.) A
room painted in red and green, or with a frieze of plaster wreaths, would
not be decorated within the meaning of the rule.
THE GATHERING RULE
Christmasgifts should be distributedat gatheringswhere every persongives
and receives gifts.
Compliancewith this rule is very high. More than nine-tenths of the 1,378
gifts our respondents received, and of the 2,969 they gave, were distributed
in gatherings, more than three-quartersof which were family gatherings.
Most gifts mailed or shipped by friends and relatives living at a
distance were double wrapped, so that the outer unceremonious wrappings
could be removed and the inner packages could be placed with
other gifts to be opened at a gathering. In the typical family gathering,
a number of related persons assemble by prearrangementat the home of
one of them where a feast is served; the adults engage in conversation;
the childrenplay;someonetakes photographs;gifts are distributed,opened,
and admired;and the company then disperses. The average Middletown
adult fits more than three of these occasions into a 24-hour period beginning
at Christmas Eve, often driving long distances and eating several
large dinners during that time.
THE DINNER RULE
Family gatherings at which gifts are distributed include a "traditional
Christmas dinner."
This is a rule that participants in Middletown's Christmas ritual may
disregard if they wish, but it is no less interesting because compliance is
only partial. Presumably,this rule acquired its elective characterbecause
the pattern of multiple gatherings described above requires many gatherings
to be scheduled at odd hours when dinner either would be inappropriateor,
if the dinner rule were inflexible, would requireparticipants
to overeat beyond the normal expectations of the season. However, 65%
of the survey respondents had eaten at least one traditional Christmas
dinner the previous year.
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Middletown
The term "traditional Christmas dinner" was used by respondents
themselves to describe a meal pattern with all or most of the following
elements: (1) turkey or ham, preferably turkey and ham; (2) dressing; (3)
white potatoes, preferably mashed; (4) sweet potatoes in some form; (5)
cranberry sauce or salad; (6) green beans, baked beans, or bean salad;
and (7) pumpkin pie and other pies.
There appearsto be a subsidiaryrulethat traditionalChristmasdinners
served in homes should be prepared exclusively by women. There was
not a single reported instance in this survey of a traditional Christmas
dinner prepared by a man.
THE GIFT SELECTION RULES
A Christmas gift should (a) demonstrate the giver's familiarity with the
receiver's preferences; (b) surprise the receiver, either by expressing more
affection-measured by the aesthetic or practical value of the gift-than
the receiver might reasonably anticipate or more knowledge than the giver
might reasonably be expected to have; (c) be scaled in economic value to
the emotional value of the relationship.
The economic values of any giver's gifts are supposed to be sufficiently
scaled to the emotional values of relationshipsthat, when they are opened
in the bright glare of the family circle, the donor will not appear to have
disregarded either the legitimate inequality of some relationships by, for
example, giving a more valuable gift to a nephew than to a son, or the
legitimate equality of other relationships by, for example, giving conspicuously
unequal gifts to two sons.
Individuals participating in these rituals are not free to improvise their
own scales of emotional value for relationships. The scale they are supposed
to use, together with its permissible variations, is not written down
anywhere but is thoroughly familiar to participants. From analysis of the
gifts given and received by our survey respondents, we infer the following
rules for scaling the emotional value of relationships.
THE SCALING RULES
(a) A spousal relationship should be more valuable than any other for both
husband and wife, but the husband may set a higher value on it than the
wife. (b) A parent-child relationship should be less valuable than a spousal
relationship but more valuable than any other relationship. The parent may
set a higher value on it than the child does. (c) The spouse of a married
close relative should be valued as much as the linking relative. (d) Parents
with several children should value them equally throughout their lives. (e)
Children with both parents still living, and still married to each other, may
value them equally or may value their mothers somewhat more than their
fathers. A married couple with two pairs of living, still-married parents
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American Journal of Sociology
should value each pair equally. Children of any age with divorced, separated,
or remarried parents may value them unequally. (f) Siblings should
be valued equally in childhood but not later. Adult siblings who live close
by and are part of one's active network should be equally valued, along
with their respective spouses, but siblings who live farther away may be
valued unequally. (g) Friends of either sex, aside from sexual partners
treated as quasi-spouses, may be valued as much as siblings but should not
be valued as much as spouses, parents, or children. (h) More distant relatives-like
aunts orcousins-may be valued as much as siblings but should
not be valued as much as spouses, parents, or children.
It is a formidable task to balance these ratios every year and to come up
with a set of Christmas gifts that satisfies them. Small wonder that Middletown
people complain that Christmas shopping is difficult and fatiguing.
But although they complain, they persist in it year after year
without interruption. People who are away from home for Christmas
arrange in advance to have their gifts distributed to the usual receivers
and to open their own gifts ceremoniously. People confined by severe
illnessdelegate othersto do shopping and wrapping. Although ourrandom
sample of Middletown adults included several socially isolated persons,
even the single most isolated respondent happened to have an old friend
with whom he exchanged expensive gifts.
Given the complexity of the rules, errors and failures in gift selection
can be expected to occur, and they frequently do. Indeed, the four or five
shopping days immediately after Christmas are set aside in Middletown
stores for return or exchange of badly selected gifts. A number of respondents
described relatives who make a point of being impossible to
please, like the grandfather in Renata Adler's story:
The grandfather, who pretended not to care about the holiday, every year,
until the precisemoment when the doorto the study, where the piano stood,
was opened and the presents were revealed, became every year, at that
moment, hopeful, eager, even zealous and then dejected utterly. No one
had ever found a present that actually pleased him. "Verynice,"he would
say, in a tight voice, as he unwrapped one thing after another. "Verynice.
Now I'll just put that away."The year his sons gave him an electric razor,
he said, "Verynice. Of course I'll never use it. I'm too old to change the
way I shave." When they asked him at least to try it, he said "No, I'm
sorry. It's very nice. No I'll just put that away."[Adler 1978, pp. 136-37]
The standard disappointing gift is an article of clothing in the wrong
size. Womenare particularlyresentful of oversized items that seem to say
the giver perceives them as "fat."Childrenareoften insulted by inattentive
relatives who gve them toys that are too "young."The spouse's or lover's
gift that is disliked by the receiver is a sign of alienation. Two of the five
couples in our sample for whom such gifts were reported at Christmas
1978 had separated by the time of the interview several weeks later.
The rigor of the Selection Rules is softened by several devices-joint
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Middletown
gifts from and to married couples, from children to parents, and from
two or three siblings to another are common. Such arrangements make
it difficult to determine whether the comparative value of relationships
has been correctly translated into gifts, and that is the more or less conscious
intention. Two families in our sample drew lots for their gifts.
That practice is nearly standardat nonfamilial Christmasgatherings, like
ward parties for hospitalized children, where presents are distributed
without any attempt to particularize relationships.
FITNESS RULES
Rules about the fitness of gifts (e.g., women should not give cut flowers
to men) are too numerous to specify, but one deserves passing attention.
Money is an appropriate gift from senior to junior kin, but an inappropriate
gift from junior to senior kin, regardless of the relative affluence
of the parties. This is another rule which appears to be unknown to the
people who obey it. Of 144 gifts of money given by persons in our sample
to those in other generations, 94%went to junior kin, and of the 73 money
gifts respondents received from persons in other generations, 93% were
from seniorkin. A gift certificatemay be given to a parent or grandparent
to whom an outright gift of money would be improper, but we did not
record a single instance of a gift certificate having been given to a child
or a grandchild, no substitution being called for.
THE RECIPROCITY RULE
Participants in this gift system should give (individually or jointly) at least
one Christmas gift every year to their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters; to
the current spouses of these persons; and to their own spouses.
By the operation of this rule, participants expect to receive at least one
gift in return from each of these persons excepting infants. Conformity
runs about 90%for each relationship separately and for the aggregate of
all such relationships. Gifts to grandparents and grandchildren seem to
be equally obligatory if these live in the.same community or nearby, but
not at greater distances (see Caplow 1982, table 6). Christmas gifts to
siblings are not required. Only about one-third of the 274 sibling relationships
reported by the sample were marked by Christmas gifts. The
proportion was no higher for siblings living close than for those farther
away. However, gifts to siblings do call for a return gift; this obligation
is seldom scanted. Gift giving to siblings' children, and parents' siblings
and their respective spouses, appears to be entirely elective; fewer than
half of these are reciprocated. We have no way of knowing whether such
gifts may be reciprocated at another Christmas, but there were no references
to deferred reciprocation in the interviews.
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American Journal of Sociology
The Reciprocity Rule does not require reciprocated gifts to be of equal
value. Parents expect to give more valuable and more numerous gifts to
their minor children and to their adult children living at home than they
receive in return. This imbalance is central to the entire ritual. The
iconography of Middletown's secular Christmas emphasizes unreciprocated
giving to children by the emblematic figure of Santa Claus, and
the theme of unreciprocated giving provides one of the few connections
between the secular and religious iconography of the festival-the Three
Wise Men coming from a distant land to bring unreciprocated gifts to a
child.
Equivalence of value tends to be disregarded in gift giving between
husbands and wives and between parents and their adult children. Husbands
often give more valuable gifts to wives than they receive from
them. The gifts of parents to adult children are approximately balanced
in the aggregate-about the same number of substantial gifts are given
in each direction-but there is no insistence on equivalence in particular
cases, and when we examine such relationships one by one, we discover
many unbalanced exchanges, which seem to be taken for granted.
Only in the relationship between siblings and sibling couples do we
findany active concern that the gifts exchanged be of approximatelyequal
value, and even there it is more important to give gifts of approximately
equal value to several siblings than to exchange gifts of equal value with
each of them.
Empirically, the gift giving between adults and children in our sample
was highly unbalanced, in both quantity and value. Respondents gave
946 gifts to persons under 18 and received 145 in return;89 of these were
of substantial value and six of the return gifts were. In about one-third
of these relationships, no gift was returnedto the adult either by the child
or in the child's name. In most of the remaining relationships, the child
returned a single gift of token or modest value.
There is little reciprocity in the gift giving between non-kin. A large
number of the gifts in this category are addressed to persons who provide
minor services; reciprocation in those cases would be bizarre. Gifts from
employers to employees, from grateful patients to physicians, and from
pupils to teachers do not call for reciprocation. The Christmas gifts exchanged
en masse at club meetings and office parties are reciprocal to
the extent that each participant gives and receives some small gift, but
there is no direct exchange between giver and receiver.
DISCUSSION
Since the problem is to account for the uniformitiesof gift-giving behavior
revealed by the data, speaking of rules begs the question to some extent.
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Middletown
Although we infer from the uniformitiesobserved in Middletown's Christmas
gift giving that, somewhere in the culture, there must be statements
to which the observed behavior is a response, the crucial point is that we
cannot find those statements in any explicit form. Indeed, they are not
recognized by participants in the system. In effect, the rules of the game
are unfamiliar to the players, even though they can be observed to play
meticulously by the rules. Instructions for Christmas gift giving are not
found in administrative regulations or popular maxims or books of etiquette;
they are not promulgated. Neither do they seem to be enforced
by what Durkheim called "thepublic conscience"(Durkheim [1895] 1964,
pp. 2-3). People who scanted their Christmas obligations would not be
disapproved of by the public conscience in Middletown because Christmas
gift giving is visualized there as both a private and a voluntary activity.
We never heard anyone make an even indirect reference to community
opinion in connection with Christmas gift giving. As far as we can tell,
there are no customary forms of moral disapproval reserved for persons
who neglect their Christmas duties (which are not, of course, considered
to be duties). The moral drift goes the other way. Among Middletown's
Protestant fundamentalists there are still vestiges of the violent Puritan
objection to the celebration of Christmas as a "wanton Bacchanalian
feast"(Barnett 1954, pp. 1-23), which is commonly expressed in sermons
about the "degradation"and "commercialization"of the festival.
Since the rules of Christmas gift giving have no explicit form or institutional
backing or moral support, they seem to escape the dichotomous
classification of "summary rules" and "rules of practice" proposed by
TABLE 2
GIFT GIVING IN MIDDLETOWN BY RELATIONSHIP AND RESIDENTIAL
DISTANCE, CHRISTMAS, 1978
RELATIONSHIPS MARKED BY GIFTS (%)
RELATIONSHIP Within 50 Miles Beyond 50 Miles
Fathers ............. ....... 100 (29) 85 (26)
Mothers .................... 98 (41) 90 (29)
Children ........... ........ 96 (191) 95 (61)
Childrens' spouses ........... 92 (52) 94 (38)
Grandparents ............... 96 (25) 50 (26)
Grandchildren ....... ....... 90 (95) 77 (63)
Siblings .................... 32 (122) 35 (152)
Siblings' spouses .......... .. 24 (84) 24 (113)
Siblings' children ............ 19 (254) 15 (384)
Parents' siblings ....... ...... 15 (86) 10 (200)
NOTE.-Numbers in parentheses are N's
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American Journal of Sociology
Rawls (1967)and elaboratedsubsequentlyby Giddens(1976)and Mulligan
and Lederman (1977). They cannot be summary rules because they are
not formulated on the basis of past decisions, and they cannot be rules
of practice because they do not refer exclusively to a closed situation
created by the rules themselves. It is tempting to abandon the concept of
rulesaltogether,but if we do that, how arewe to explain the extraordinary
uniformity of behavior demonstrated, for example, in tables 1 and 2?
Substituting another word like "custom"or "norm"would merely introduce
additional complications. What are we to make of unrecognized
customs and amoral norms? As Collins remarked,
Why do people repay a gift? Self-interest is not a sufficient explanation, as
an exchange is rewarding only to the extent that individuals already know
there will be reciprocity. Hence theorists have felt it necessary to fall back
on such claims as "what is customary becomes obligatory"(Blau 1964), or
to invokean alleged"normof reciprocity"(Gouldner1960;see alsoHeath
1976). Both formulations beg the explanatory question: in both cases, the
customariness of the behavior is just what remains to be explained, and to
call this customariness a "norm"is merely to describe it. [1981, p. 1006]
Both functionalist and social exchange theories provide convincing accounts
of this gift-giving system (or any other) taken as a whole. Functionalism,
with its realist conception of society, looks to the contribution
that a given system of activity makes to the maintenance of some larger
and more durable system: the institution, the culture, the society. Exchange
theory, implicitly nominalist, looks to identities in human nature
to account for observed uniformities in social behavior. Some recent investigators,
notably in ethnomethodology, have modified this view without
attenuating its nominalism by asserting that exchange transactions
seldom involve rationalcalculations of self-interestbut aretypically based
on tacit understandings rooted in previous experience (see Cicourel 1973;
Deutscher 1973; Cancian 1975).
Ekeh (1974)distinguishes between "collectivisticorientations"in social
exchangetheory,exemplifiedby Durkheim, Mauss, and particularlyLeviStrauss,
and "individualisticorientations,"whose principal spokesmen he
identifies as Homans and Blau, although very similar positions were
articulatedmuch earlier by Frazer (1919) and by the forgotten American
sociologistAlbert Chavannes, who was rediscoveredby Knox (1963).The
collectivistic orientations emphasize systems of exchange and their contributionsto
social solidarity.The individualistic orientationsproposethat
the self-interest of individual participants provides sufficient explanation
for particular transactions and ipso facto accounts for any similarities
displayed by a plurality of transactions. But the two approaches, when
applied to particular cases, are not as contradictoryas their protagonists
claim, since the collectivists cannot demonstrate that individual trans-
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Middletown
actions do not satisfy the self-interest of participants in an exchange
system, while the individualists have never, to my knowledge, attempted
to show that the repetition of similar transactions does not contribute to
social solidarity.Indeed, it is very easy to cross from one side of this street
to the other when working with empirical material. An earlier report of
this study proposed a functional explanation of Christmas gift giving in
Middletown as serving to reinforce group solidarity (Caplow and Williamson
1980), and another report of the same study suggests that individuals
are persuaded by self-interest to concentrate their gift giving on
persons whose goodwill is wanted but cannot be taken for granted (Caplow
1982)-an individualistic account with no reference to group
solidarity.
But while it may be possible, if not prudent, to use opposing theories
of social exchange to illuminate different facets of the same data, it must
be admitted, nevertheless, that neither theory directly explains cultural
uniformities in gift giving. In the collectivist perspective, any type of
exchange transaction, whether it is cross-cousin marriagein New Guinea
or Christmasgiving in Middletown, binds the entire community together.
But what invisible hand accomplishes this result? It cannot be the community
as a whole, because that is incapable of such concerted action,
or any of its components, since none of those takes particular cognizance
of the uniformities we are trying to explain.
The individualistic account is incomplete in a different way. Rational
self-interest may explain why Middletown people give their affinal relatives
so many Christmas gifts, but the explanation is plausible only because
of other uniformities in the relationshipsof Middletown people with
their affines. If the uniformity of gift-giving behavioris attributedto these
other uniformities, these will then, in turn, call for explanation, and we
will not have made much progress with the problem. At some point in
the sequence, we must face the fact that Christmas gift giving in Middletown
is a customary pattern of ritual behavior. "The customariness of
thebehavior"to quoteCollinsagain, "isjust what remainsto be explained."
Recent work by ethnographershas carriedthe analysis of gift exchange
in simple societies beyond the classic formulation of Marcel Mauss ([1925]
1967).Schieffelin (1980), summarizingthe researchof otherethnographers
working in New Guinea (Wagner1969;Kapferer1976;Rubel and Rosman
1978;Ernst 1978)together with his own, concludes that "allthese studies
contain the idea that exchange, as a system of meanings, is involved in
the shaping or construction of particular cultural realities. They do this
by focusing on the act of prestation as a rhetorical gesture of social communication,
stressing the symbolism of the objects exchanged, and viewing
transactionsas expressivestatementsor movementsin the management
of meaning" (p. 503).
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American Journal of Sociology
Gift exchange, in effect, is a language that employs objects instead of
words as its lexical elements. In this perspective, every culture (theremay
be exotic exceptions, but I am unaware of them) has a language of prestation
to express important interpersonal relationships on special occasions,
just as it has a verbal language to create and manage meaning for
other purposes. The language of prestation, like the verbal language,
begins to be learned in early childhood and is used with increasing assurance
as the individual matures and acquires social understanding.
These "natal"languages are seldom completely forgotten, although new
languages may be learned by translation and practice. The problem of
accounting for the enforcement of gift-giving rules without visible means
is simplified if we take them to be linguistic rules, or at least as similar
to them, because linguistic rules, for the most part, are enforced among
native speakers of a language without visible means and without being
recognized explicitly. It may be objected that school teachers do make
linguistic rules explicit and then enforcethem by reward and punishment,
but that is a rather special case of learning a new language or relearning
a natal language in more elegant form. The acquisition of language does
not depend on schooling, and the grammaticalrulesthat aremade explicit
in school are only a small fraction of the rules that native speakers obey
without being aware of their existence. The process whereby grammatical
rules acquire consensual support is partly instinctual, partly cultural, and
partly social. The tendency to follow linguistic rules without explicit
awareness appears to be innate in the construction of new verbal combinations:
young children acquire the language of the people who raise
them along with other elements of the ambient culture; and linguistic
rules are self-enforcing insofar as the effective transmission of messages
rewards both senders and receivers.
Visualizing Christmas gift giving as a language-or, more precisely, as
a dialect or code (Douglas 1972, 1979)-helps to explain, among other
matters, the insistence on wrapping and other signs to identify the objects
designated for lexical use and the preference for the simultaneous exchange
of gifts at family gatherings rather than in private.
In most cases such a gathering is composed of a parent-child unit
containing one or two parents and one or more children together with
other persons who are tied to that unit by shared membership in another
parent-child unit, such as children'schildren, children'sspouses, parents'
siblings, or parents'parents. Although there is room at a family gathering
for a friend or distant relative who otherwise might be solitary at Christmas,
there is no convenient way of including any large number of persons
to whom no gift messages are owed.
Under the Scaling Rules, gift messages are due from every person in
a parent-child relationship to every other. The individual message says
"I value you according to the degree of our relationship"and anticipates
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Middletown
the response "I value you in the same way."But the compound message
that emerges from the unwrapping of gifts in the presence of the whole
gathering allows more subtle meanings to be conveyed. It permits the
husband to say to the wife "I value you more than my parents" or the
mother to say to the daughter-in-law "I value you as much as my son so
long as you are married to him" or the brother to say to the brother "I
value you more than our absent brothers, but less than our parents and
much less than my children." These statements, taken together, would
define and sustain a social structure, if only because, by their gift messages,
both parties to each dyadic relationship confirmthat they have the
same understanding of the relationship and the bystanders, who are interested
parties, endorse that understanding by tacit approval. The compound
messages would have a powerful influence even if they were
idiosyncratic and each parent-child unit had its own method of scaling
relationships. In fact, there are some observable differences in scaling
from one Middletown family to another and from one subcultural group
to another, but the similarities are much more striking than the differences.
We attribute this commonality to the shared dialect of Christmas
gift giving, hyperdeveloped in Middletown and elsewhere in the United
States in response to commercial promotion, stresses in the family institution,
and constant reiteration by the mass media. Once the dialect is
reasonably well known, these factors continue to enlarge its vocabulary
and its domain.
Another circumstance facilitating the standardization of the dialect is
that nearly every individual in this population belongs to more than one
parent-child unit for Christmas gift-giving purposes. Because these units
are linked and cross-linked to other units in a network that ultimately
includes the larger part of the community, they would probably tend to
develop a common set of understandings about appropriate kinship behavior,
even without the reinforcement provided by domestic rituals.
The most powerful reinforcement remains to be mentioned. In the
dialect of Christmas gift giving, the absence of a gift is also a lexical sign,
signifying either the absence of a close relationship, as in the Christmas
contact of cousins, or the desire to terminate a close relationship, as when
a husband gives no gift to his wife. People who have once learned the
dialect cannot choose to forget it, nor can they pretend to ignore messages
they understand. Thus, without any complicated normative machinery,
Middletown people find themselves compelled to give Christmas gifts to
their close relatives, lest they inadvertently send them messages of hostility.
In this community, where most people depend on their relatives for
emotional and social support, the consequences of accidentally sending
them a hostile message are too serious to contemplate, and few are willing
to run the risk.
In sum, we discover that the participants in this gift-giving system are
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American Journal of Sociology
themselves the agents who enforce its complex rules, although they do
so unknowingly and without conscious referenceto a system. The dialect,
once learned, imposes itself by linguistic necessity, and the enforcement
of its rules is the more effective for being unplanned.
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