3.b Case study: Elders’ day, gifts to the community and the concept of respect and compensation

Elders’ day is one of the most ceremonial events in town. There are other events in which ceremony and ritual features predominantly, such as sports day, fire brigade day, and constitution day. All have in common a large redundancy of wrapped commodities, as we have seen above. Elder’s day is constructed around the idea of ‘thanking’ and ‘respecting’ the elders. The day starts with most elders being taken by the local bus to school sports hall, a different school each year so that each gets a turn. On entering the hall, elders are given a new pair of slippers and plastic bags to carry their shoes to a the chairs and cushions. Those in their 80s and 90s and couples who have been together fifty or more years sit in their assigned places, while younger elders sit at the back as observers.

Different coloured ribbons are given at the entrance, with the schedule of the event, and a wrapped gift – a towel, a health booklet. Attendance is noted down carefully. Each elder is photographed individually, and the date of the event is featured predominantly. Elders are helped to their places by the local politicians, elders’ club secretaries and employees of the town office. The elders are clearly at the centre, ‘wrapped’ on each side by the rows of politicians and secretaries. I want to emphasise the character of this centre, as it is here that gifts are given, whereas in other contexts (such as Sports Day and Fire Brigade Day) the recipients are forced to move out of their places and approach the stand where the speech and gifts are given. The event consists of two hours of presentations and speeches, delivered by each of the councillors and the Mayor. The prestations are acquired by the town office in large stores, where staff wrap the gifts in several layers of wrapping. In addition, two layers of noshigami are used. The town office also produces the medals and commemoration diplomas that ritualise the giving with the date, the name of the donor and the reason for the gift. The office also provides furoshiki in the medetai colours of pink and white for the elders to carry the large wrapped gifts home. All these are put in the far right corner of the hall, close to the secretaries of the event, who run up and down to ensure each gift is given to each elder.

Gifts are given according to age. The most expensive gifts, futon mattress, are for the eldest, with a selection of cups and towels of different sizes for the rest. Only one secretary is aware of the content, and it is she who decides on the wrapping styles. The stage where the speeches take place is decorated with a bonsai, a national flag, and the prefectural and the town’s logo. People rise to listen to the national anthem, and sit to prepare for the long speeches. Then gift giving begins. The name, age, and village of origin is announced, and the elder rises up to receive the gift. The Mayor motions to the elder not to rise. Some elders refuse to remain seated, as for them the Mayor is a respected figure. All elders bow deferentially several times, usually lower than the Mayor, who tries to bow even lower to reduce the hierarchical distance that villagers enact with their bowing. It is the elders who are being ‘honoured’, not he. A 94 year old lady sits with her back bent over with arthritis and bone and knee deformation caused by many years of hard work and sitting habits. On hearing her name she rises to honour the Mayor, who is bestowing on her the honour of giving her the gift. The Mayor asks her to sit, he will kneel instead. She refuses, and stands up bowing deeply, which the Mayor also does. The next elder allows the Mayor to come down on his knees to give the gift, and both bow. Elders place their gifts above their heads in humble acceptance, and receive the diploma. The prestige accorded to figures of authority is an important aspect of the elders’ perception of the event and themselves as recipients.

Rank, deference and humility are present in every action of receiving in this context. Three secretaries follow the Mayor, making a chain between them. They hand the gifts and diplomas to the Mayor, to accelerate the presentation process. An employee in charge of the town office magazine takes pictures. Wrapping here expresses care and the ceremonial nature of the event, being perhaps one of only three events in the villagers’ lives in which profuse gifts are given and received. (The other two are wedding gifts and fire brigade prizes). The gifts are wrapped in many layers of paper. Only in this context do elaborate wrapping and hierarchy appear to correspond, as in Hendry’s argument (1993). Gifts also have a different origin and destination than on other occasions. These are ‘national’ prestations, from the nation to the elders, through the Mayor as a state elected head. The giver transcends individuals and the immediate community.[7] In the back room, the employees’ wives and the elders’ in-laws prepare wrapped trays of food, sekigohan, sake and bancha (auspicious rice, rice-made alcohol, locally grown tea), which are distributed by the women and the employees. The Mayor and councillors, as in cases of school mochinage, leave the function.

On these occasions wrapping is multiple and layered, reflecting the temporal proximity of the elders to the sources of prestige in town. These gifts are complemented with the flow of prestations women and employees distribute. This second set of prestations, given in the absence of the Mayor, is auspicious food. Elders change their assigned seats and move closer to their friends and fellow villagers. Small groups of women emerge. They gossip and eat. Some of the elders sit silently wrapping their already wrapped gifts and return home, while the rest remain and enjoy the food and talk. The young women are now behind the stage, ready to entertain the elders. Their giving of services is less obvious than the wrapped gifts. They offer a succession of plays and songs from the elders’ youth, with a few dances, comic sketches about the farmers’ youth and romantic songs. Finally, everyone leaves. Back home, elders who have not left their gifts at the genkan open them, others leave them unwrapped for their children and grandchildren.

The contexts for making the town have multiple layers of exchange. As I described, there is an array of prestations given to particular households and individuals on account of their services as mediators. These layers of exchange multiply on the ceremonial occasions I examine, where the relation of periphery between givers and recipients is acknowledged ritually, and where givers and recipients are clearly stated, and clearly separated by rank and hierarchical considerations. Understandings about gifts are predicated on understandings about the relation between the giver and the recipient, and especially on the distance between giver and recipient but also on those who help to create the occasion, who wrap, cook, dance and offer prestations of sake and tea. The first, can be understood in terms of rank and prestige, although these are difficult to assert in conditions where the giver is absent or veiled through intermediaries. I use the ideas of ‘core and periphery’ proposed by Gill (1999) in their model of Japanese workforce. In their model, individuals who are close to the core enjoy the security of their relations with the main institutions (I suspect where gifts have profuse layering), while other workers at the outer rim of peripheral relations can be hired and dismissed at will, giving the centre a flexibility to use and discard workforce depending on changing economic conditions. It would be interesting to know which kinds of exchange happen at the periphery, but I suspect from Moto’s case (Chapter Three) that it involves barter and ritually wrapped commodities that ‘revolve’ among people. One could speculate that arrangements would resemble those where patrons are removed or absent from the symbolic centre. Although it is unusual to use ethnographies in urban industrial contexts for analysing the rural process, I think the model describes a form of oppositional identity that I encountered in Kamikatsu. The flexibility of this model in encompassing relations of inclusion and exclusion within group forces helps to centre the discussion between households and central administrations, in which households found themselves either close to the centre or peripheral and easy to discard. I imagine that given the circumstances of town making in which all members must contribute to the making of the town, the relations between centre and periphery, and the different layers of proximity to these centres or cores, are less clear-cut and more inclusive.

Hiraoka’s first comment embodies the representational interest of the town office. The town is one and its multiplicity and complexity are reduced to the town’s image. The town’s image is made of five different villages, all equal in their importance (from the point of view of the town office). The practices and knowledge of each village, district, and household are examined by the town office. Those practices and knowledge that appeal to the town office as ‘interesting’ or ‘representative’, and therefore fitting into their conception of the ‘town’s image’, are placed in a pool of knowledge and traditions. Any interesting feature a particular Shrine roof, a sumo fight at a festival, a belief in natural phenomena, the beauty of a spot, the convenience of a valley for tourist recreation, ways of making and throwing gifts, household production of fruits and vegetables becomes a feature of the town itself. The rest is rejected, unless someone finds a way to ‘exoticise’ or ‘culturalise’ a particular piece of knowledge, place or activity for the benefit of the town. The town’s serialised knowledge is then presented in brochures, meetings, gatherings, maps, local magazines, as the town’s image. Wrapped gifts are offered on the occasions when the town office must implement these changes and incorporate villagers into the town. Any criticism of this image is perceived as a criticism of the town’s identity. In short, the preoccupation with the town’s image reflects a strong sense of identity crisis.

The importance of the town seems to predominate over the previous institution, the village. A village is said to be ‘integrated’ into the town. This integration is articulated through the idiom of festivals and town making. Each village has its autumn festivals, its practices and folklore described as mura no dento, the ‘tradition of the village’. These co-exist with town events, machi no dento, ‘traditions of the town’, which are made up of new festivals, gatherings, ceremonies, and economic production and the constant invention of tradition.

The richness of traditions in Kamikatsu is both a product of the amalgamation of villages and a recreation of traditions. Town making is a process of constant renegotiation between villagers and the town office in which events, images, economic production and traditions define the town. It is a not a given aspect of villagers’ life, but one which is fragile and constantly discussed. Knight (1995) perceives the context of making the town and town revival as one ‘in which the past is negotiated’ (Knight 1995: 10), and upon which traditional heritage and nostalgic appeal to tourists are enacted. In Kamikatsu this traditional heritage is appropriated in the context of festivals and ceremonies. Village amalgamation, as Knight also describes, did not take place without a certain opposition of localities and districts. The memories of the villagers of Kamikatsu support this picture. Their descriptions of the amalgamation process portray a life-style of arduous work and constant cession of power from village units to individual households and local administrations. In these contexts gifts are the negotiating pieces. Villagers are made to accept gifts in order to introduce them to the common task of making the town. In these contexts the layering of wrapping increases the closer the giver and recipient are to the core centres of power – the administration, the Shrine, tourist resorts. Their participation in these processes is minimal, they are the recipients of numerous donations, and can only approach these centres through gift giving. Wrapping, however, is distinct from the actions of adding layers to this political core. Those at the periphery of town making make use of wrapping, but the layering is mostly absent. A distinction is made between profuse and less profuse layering and between layering and wrapping. While wrapping is important for all actors, wrapping is not always a synonym of layering, but a reification of auspiciousness for those who seek social prestige. Although wrapped gifts are important pieces in the discourses of town making, the tension of achieving a sense of unity is perceived as a kind of paradox, since most villagers perceive themselves as culturally having little in common but fighting hard to make the town into their shared community.
Elderly woman wrapping her wrapped gift with pink furoshiki paper
Plate 13. The Major of Kamikatsu giving a wrapped prestation to an elder to show respect and to ‘wrap’ elders into ‘town-making’

The main aim of this thesis has been to build up a picture of how gifts are produced and exchanged in different social contexts among the villagers of Kamikatsu. I have focussed on practices and discourses concerning wrapping and obligations, and on the commodities that articulate most relations of exchange. I have wanted to contribute to the ethnographic understanding of Japanese society, as well as to the theories of ‘exchange’ and ‘wrapping’. In this conclusion, I do not want to ‘wrap’ the thesis or unwrap the argument. I want to look at some of the issues that I believe are important for the general understanding of Japanese practices of gift exchange.

The link between the two central themes of this thesis, the villagers of Kamikatsu and the analysis of the relations between gifts and obligation, is contained in the ethnographic material itself. The villagers of Kamikatsu appear to exchange gifts in a manner that would be only partially understood when gift giving is looked at as a ‘traditional’ practice that ‘transforms and maintains itself’ through ‘modernity’. I am addressing here what many anthropologists have considered the paradigm of Japanese society, a peculiar blending of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ described for example by Smith (1983) and Befu (1969). It is clear that there are many elements in Japanese society which are embedded in the language, images and textures of what is constructed as tradition. Wrapping and the concept of obligation (giri) are perhaps the most paradigmatic. Modernity is exemplified by the incorporation of new fashions and practices, for instance Valentine gifts which are said to have a ‘modern’ façade but hold traditional principles such as giri. Throughout the thesis, I have wanted to highlight the fact that each practice of gift giving has to be understood within two contexts: that of capitalist production of gifts as well as commodities, and the historical context of making the town. I have emphasised the crucial importance of commodities in the Japanese understanding of gifts and exchange, because I believe the paradigm of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’ society has forced us to dismiss the strong character of capitalist production of gift exchange in Japan. I am aware that gifts are not external to the discourses of tradition and modernity, rather they are embedded in them, but my concern here is that gift exchange might be in danger of being overlooked if our attention centres around the ideological platform of these discourses.

As Hendry (1999) has said of other areas of Japan, the villagers of Kamikatsu seem to be regularly engaged in the ‘throwing’ of prestations: all through fieldwork I was struck by the facility with which villagers gave things away, literally threw away auspicious prestations. Both constructions, throwing and auspiciousness, intersect in a series of discourses about the morality of obtaining prestations. Prestations are obtained in ways that force the producer(s) of these prestations, neighbours, kin, spouses, to renounce throwing them. Givers extract the work and prestations from individuals who produce them. These prestations tend to be treated as good and natural and they are shared as a way of compensating for the ways prestations were acquired for exchange and prestige. Other prestations follow in which recipients thank donors. In giving and in receiving givers and recipients are not always related vertically. Recipients might have contributed in producing and returning prestations. By throwing gifts away villagers emphasise the character of their participation and their belonging to the celebration of auspicious consumption. They define the moral economy of accumulation and thus the degree of boundedness between households. The processes of throwing away defines to a large extent the political division of groups of people; how the welfare of the community is negotiated and organised, and by whom. The experience of gift exchange is not linear though some prestations take place in the course of life-cycle events. Gift giving is mostly an experience about the centrality and the peripherality of producers, givers and organisers of prestations. Thus, most relations of gift exchange are not necessarily predicated upon the differences in rank between the giver and recipient, but also between the periphery and centrality of producers, the presence and absence of givers and the level of competition expressed between recipients of gifts. When giving wrapped gifts, givers coerce the recipient to accept a commodity and therefore to accept certain obligations to return it. The magic of their gift exchange lies not so much in coercing the recipient to accept a gift but in wrapping the gift, in adding value to the commodity and gift. Politeness and rank are important when giving and receiving a gift, but gift giving targets the reproduction of intimate relations between givers and recipients.

Villagers’ identity is thus predicated on the assumption that belonging to their group(s) is intimate and reproduces some of the conditions of ‘help’ and mutuality expressed within the main residential group, and conditions of mutuality between spouses (rather than between senior heads, ritual specialists and dependant members). Individuals in their groups behave properly according to villagers’ formulations of giving ‘thanks’, fulfilling obligations to return gifts and participating in the welfare of their families and the group. Villagers’ concepts of group draw on two key understandings. First, villagers stress obligations to and feelings about others as constitutive of their belonging and moral behaviour. Gifts are thought to make possible the definition of such obligations, to make them tangible and valuable. Secondly, villagers make a conceptual integration of the individual, the group, and their bodies, as layering or wrapping actions. These two understandings make up villagers’ concept of the group and the personalised self in the group. Moreover, gift giving works to attract and coerce people into nets of activities and ritual practices, to use their capacity to produce and obtain gifts, and by return gifts to coerce them to return to their positions of centrality and periphery. This is not restricted to villagers and it is visible in many aspects of social organisation in Japanese groups. These shifts between gaining centrality and being removed to a peripheral position through gifts were interpreted by those who made me the recipient of their gifts as part of a larger process of the definition of each individual’s place in a group. What I, and other villagers, experienced as a successful integration into the town, and a gradual dislocation of such privilege, was articulated through a set of prestations, the categorisation of which ‘shifted’ ambiguously from ‘thanks’ to ‘apology’.

The enterprise of ‘making the town’ has had a key impact on the way households are able to relate to others and imagine themselves as a community, and to objectify their identity. The enterprise provides them with new occasions for exchange, ones that link the central administrations with each household on an individual basis rather than a communal or village basis; the villagers are said to be equal members of the town, with strong emphasis on democratisation of participation. The transformations, both politically and socially, have not affected the villagers’ perception of gifts as crucial in defining relations of power. Cheal (1988) has underlined how among people in Winnipeg the practical assistance of gifts is a solution to the contradictions in the rationalisation of exchange. He puts forward a functional approach in which the conditions for the rationalisation are largely related to the many irregularities of raising support in collectivities that are fragmented or ‘weakly articulated’. My analysis stresses the fragility of the villages and households, and how they have been fragmented through the process of town making. I wish to underline that transformations of relations of power in gift exchange are not always expressed in the language of wrapping, and sometimes have no representation of their own: it is in the management of the production of gifts, rather than their presentation, that relations of power lie. Whether local administrations will manage to abolish certain practices for the benefit of making an egalitarian community would be the topic of further research. For the present, the town of Kamikatsu lives in a constant and dramatically changing society, where much effort and inventiveness are put into finding ways to ‘move forward’. Inventiveness and resourcefulness are two features that define making their town into the success story that it is. However, there were many occasions in the process of making the town where this enterprise engulfed many villagers in arduous tasks. These are situations difficult to resolve without dispute, ostracism, and indifference. In daily life villagers tend to move within multiple relations and boundaries which are not fixed, such as the neighbourhood, the village, and the town, in constant renegotiations and adaptation to national needs. Villagers appear to have sacrificed many personal and household needs and relations to the political and social endeavours to move out of their villages and into the town and prefecture.

In Chapters Three and Six I have described how the villagers’ use of wrapping fulfils a basic need of presentation of commodities and a presentation of a rationalisation of commodities as redundant. I do not wish to reduce my analysis to this sole consideration. Villagers of Kamikatsu tend to present their world as an expression of their identity which revolves around considerations of rank, politeness, and hierarchy. In their exchanges they take up semiotic expressions to indicate the position of humility and respect. These expressions are also specific to the moment of giving, the very moment in which wrapped gifts exchange hands. Visualisation of rank through semiotic gestures is always present. The opposite is also true; some exchanges are not predicated on the recipient being humble and ‘down’, and the donor respected and ‘up’. The donor and the recipient may place themselves ‘close’ to each other even when semiotically they show respect. They exhibit this closeness in different ways, usually articulated through the notion of ‘entering the house’ and sharing auspicious prestations. If we focus on the moment of exchange it is easy to dismiss the people who also participate in producing and the different context of participation and consumption. The extent to which wrapping reflects the locus of power relations manifested in the exchange of gifts is hard to establish. The villagers’ use of wrapping for gifts, as well as politeness, are crucial in the theory of wrapping. However, it is difficult to assert that increased layering of wrapping reflects an increase in the distance between giver and recipient as a reification of power and rank. The wrapping does not reflect the existing relation, because most of the existing relations are usually mystified in the process from production to consumption. Wrapping reflects models of communication, but exsiting relations of power are not always replicated by models of wrapping. Wrapping reflects certain relations of pragmatic power, in which layering of wrapping might be enhanced or disregarded depending on individuals’ positions within a group. Wrapping has lost some of the power of representation that it may have had because gift exchange is not part of a traditional economy. Rather gift giving is based on the necessity to construct and deconstruct the boundedness and limits of groups of people. This does not deny the importance that wrapping has in capitalist exchange as it provides the means to mystify the appropriation of commodities and work from people in groups. I assume that this power of representation might be more heightened the closer one is to ‘core’ centres of power, however such closeness is rare in social life. Japanese feel very distant from those who organise their groups and politics. In daily life, wrapping is always mediated by cultural understandings about objects and gifts. Most of the objects and gifts that are wrapped in daily life are deeply affected by considerations of the commoditization and economic value of such objects and gifts.

The emphasis on wrapping as a meaningful action upon things is perhaps the most powerful and transformative action on objects as well as people, as Hendry (1993, 1999) has shown in discussing language in Japan, and Raheja (1994) on songs in Indian. The features of Japanese wrapping as symbolic, aesthetic and ritualistic, makes it different from wrapping in other industrialised societies. However it is certainly true that Japanese rules about wrapping are shared to a certain extent by most European capitalist societies. At birthdays, for instance, gifts are not always unwrapped in front of the donor; they may be left on a table in the lobby; wrapping cloths like furoshiki are still functional in Catalonia. Wrapping paper is a preoccupation in capitalist exchange, although usually veiled in western capitalist societies. Wrapping gifts is personal, obligatory and commercial. I am not denying that the cultural construction of wrapping in Japan has significance for structural combinations of symbolic elements that came about in pre-modern Japan, or rather in the romantic reconstruction of pre-modern Japan, that people in the Meiji period invented. Indeed, wrapping is made of noshi, elements of symbolic nature which define the symbolic consumption of the gift. However, noshi is used in many original ways. Far from following convention, villagers make adaptations to their needs to deal with commodities and relations of power in industrialised societies. Their wrapping looks unprofessional and incorrect, but these are small but important cultural innovations. According to those who look at wrapping in its traditional and ritual meaning gifts can only be consumed, in symbolic terms, if they are free of pollution.

In Chapter 4, I emphasised the necessity of contextualising the symbolic importance of pollution. I stressed that the villagers make a distinction between normative and ritual knowledge with their daily needs of wrapping. The concern with pollution occurs only in certain conditions and stages in life, it is by no means the main concern in relations of gift exchange. As Raheja argues for North India, despite the great emphasis that most societies place on pollution, relations of gift exchange are more concerned with notions of fortune and misfortune, auspiciousness and inauspiciousness. It is in the prestations’ capacities to shape relations of continuous prosperity and protect the household and its members that actions of exchange gain most of their meaning. It is the appropriation of products which are mostly thrown away, and not only the particular moment of the presentation of a gift, that dictates what is the meaning of wrapping and the character of obligations. However, it is this appropriation, like the objects’ market origin which is removed from sight or enhanced in the moment of shopping and the moment of giving. As anthropologists, we stress the performance of givers and receivers, their gestures of lowering and raising a gift, as reflections of relations of power at the moment of exchange. The show of humility and politeness when giving is necessary to most villagers, as they indicate how individuals respond to something they view as inherent to all social relations, the inequality of status and respect of status. However, as villagers are aware, such performance is embodied in their persons and communication. It is mostly intended to convey an impression to others and influence others. However, the value of gifts, their pragmatism, usefulness, market value, ability to create obligations, their emotional value, is a final statement, one against which most villagers match the performance of an individual. As important as politeness, wrapping, and considerations of rank, is the capacity of an individual or household to acquire gifts and put them into circulation. Thus the power of any individual to affect others’ actions depends not only on her/his communication skills, knowledge of wrapping, and place in the hierarchy, but also and more crucially on her or his capacity to appropriate the production of gifts, either by being in control of production, extracting it from others, organising others to obtain gifts, or inducing the acquisition of more goods through the creation of debt and obligation.

By concentrating on the relation between those who appropriate objects and persons as gifts, and those who might not be visible at the moment of the presentation but who were crucial in the production, I have wanted to demonstrate a point for future cross-cultural comparison. I do not want to suggest that we should privilege the sphere of production as the analytical core of our interpretations, in favour of other spheres such as exchange and consumption (Campbell 1997: 7). As Carrier notes: ‘circulation pervades production in a way that production does not pervade circulation [of gifts]’ (Carrier 1995: vii). However, our emphasis for circulation and the moment of exchange should not take for granted the importance of production, either.

For comparative purposes, I have looked at the concern with auspiciousness and inauspiciousness when giving gifts. I have used ‘obligations’ to refer to relations created by the production of relations of exchange, rather than as the quantification of the amount of debt and gratitude in the exchange of gifts, encompassing different categorisations of such relations as giri, orei to kimochi, free gift and service. I have been explicit about the fact that the moment of exchange affects our perceptions of wrapping and its use. I have established a dialogue between my interpretations of the nature of gifts and how they are produced and exchanged, and the lives and voices of the villagers. With the debate of gift-commodity and the necessary inclusion of wrapping for anthropology, I have tried to address the need to revise the tools, language, and paradigms used in our task. I have tried to keep in mind the necessity for reflexivity in enthographic description, ethical relations in the field, as well as the dangers of intellectual fashions. The ideas and meanings that we as anthropologists try to grasp about the different societies and people are both strongly embodied in practices and deeply rooted in conventions. It is not only in the liminal place that the anthropologist achieves during fieldwork that these conventions and concepts are challenged. The narrative process through which we represent this whole process is capable of revising and improving our perspectives and ways of thinking. One of my premises has been the double idea that I should reflect on this constant challenge and that it should make a contribution both to studies of Japanese society and to anthropology. I have based my work on the axioms that ‘societies’ are not homogeneous and that within them there is always a strong sense of fragility and contradiction; identities of people and groups are neither clear-cut nor bound to single representations of sociability.

I started this thesis by saying that Japanese gift exchange is often described as a ‘particular’ type of gift economy. My ethnography shows that Japanese gift exchange is not a gift economy or a hybrid between gift economy and capitalist exchange. Japanese gift exchange is a capitalist gift exchange. This may seem an oversimplification of the differences and similitudes with other capitalist and traditional societies. I have demonstrated, however, how obligation and wrapping, the two main pieces of articulation of gifts, are essential for giving meaning to social relations. The Japanese case of gifts is a good example of the relations between gifts and commodities in capitalist societies, how commodities and relations are appropriated and veiled.

The way villagers of Kamikatsu exchange gifts and use wrapping is a process of embedding capitalist gift exchange into discourses of tradition. The Japanese case shows how gifts are necessary in a capitalist society to define the identity of changing relations and overwhelming transformations. Wrapping and obligation have been used to present capitalist gift exchange as a recognisable discourse of tradition and modernity. Villagers do not use wrapping as a given tradition but there are many instances when wrapping and obligation reflect ‘creative responses’ to new situations and relations, such as ‘making the town’.

Wrapping, and obligation do not have much power in the formation of groups but they are key pieces of discourse about the self and relations. I have in particular analysed the contention that the wrapping of gifts is a metaphor for the market and the alienation in the core ties of work and home. Obligations are defined in relation to how people perceive alienation at work and at home. Obligatory giving is made to visualise the existence of a sphere of alienation within work relations and household relations. By means of wrapping, people aim to mystify and thus transcend this alienation, creating a sphere for human relations. This sphere is not ‘outside’ work and ‘outside’ home, but a sphere of alienation is found inside each of them. The closer that individuals are to these inside centres of alienation, through gifts of obligation, the more these gifts are wrapped. In the other spheres and distant from the main ‘core’ of a group or place, gifts do not require so much wrapping. In this thesis I have looked at different types of giving, and different notions of reciprocity. I have shown how new and traditional types of gift giving, such as Valentine gifts are not mere ‘adoptions’ from Western societies. They have a development of their own and tell us about how men and women negotiate their social positions. Many aspects of gift exchange have gender as an underlying preoccupation.

Throughout this conclusion I have demonstrated that the Kamikatsu villagers locate in their sense of obligation the link between the identity of a group and community, as a relation acquired with others through gifts. One of my aims should now be clear: to convey a sense of how wrapped gifts are vehicles through which the aspect of ‘obligation’ becomes a form of consumption. The importance of wrapping in coercing the recipient to accept a prestation, blurring the nature of the object given as a gift, is crucial. The meaning of wrapping and unwrapping objects we define as gifts depends on our capacity to transcend the moment of the exchange and integrate the history of the things, the process of production, appropriation of objects, persons and relations, that make exchange possible. I hope this thesis does not merely reflect the lives of people such as Oue, Hiraoka, Atsuko, Abe, the group of elders, employees and children with whom I established relations and by whom was wrapped. But it is their personalities and their gifts that have given shape to this thesis.
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