4.Conclusions

My aim in this chapter has been to make explicit the extent to which the process of living together and the process of giving gifts are inextricably related and constitute the main conditions for defining the relations among households and the classification of gifts. I have shown how the villagers’ dealings with gifts within their immediate groupings is a carefully measured statement of the interference, coercion, and power that individuals manage to convey or to execute upon others. Looking at the classification of gifts, my ethnography shows how villagers have ways of negotiating such coercion and power by re-classifying each prestation, and thus manipulating the actual and symbolic value of gifts. The villagers’ capacity to organize the production of ritual prestations is contrasted with their attitude to give and coerce others to accept prestations and fight for them. In the following chapters I attempt to analyse the structural relation between prestations, that is the generic links between those prestations that have a character of contingency in their production, distribution and consumption.

It is important to highlight that villagers’ ideas about their life in common and about their relations to other groups and to institutions, are permeated by a kind of non-discursive attitude, in which things are discussed, not through elaborate verbal manifestations, but through manifestations of pragmatism, value, symbolism and aesthetic reifications experienced through gift giving. This was my experience in the field. During my period in Kamikatsu, villagers very rarely exchanged other things than gifts verbally or even semiotically. The town was made out of constant meetings and gatherings, tedious, rhetoric, sometimes irrelevant to other matters, where what mattered was not what was being said but what prestations were offered and by whom, how to evaluate them, and whether to accept them or not. Villagers appeared to spend most of their time worrying about the gifts they should give and return, or about the prestations they should make and give, whether to wrap them and how to convince others to accept them. Hendry describes how words ‘envelope’ meetings among people as a form of wrapping (1993: 53). She points to the idea that direct and indirect communication is what wraps human relations. She extends the metaphor of wrapping to explain the nature of communication itself. People do not always talk. They communicate feelings and sanctions to others through indirect communication, one of which is ‘wrapping’. By wrapping she means the enveloping of words and actions with polite words or body movements. However, gift exchange constitutes a basis of reference for which wrapping is meaningful, and without which wrapping can not be fully understood. Thus, it is alongside descriptions of exchange that wrapping emerges in this thesis. This thesis is based on the understanding that it is necessary to acknowledge the radical transformations and uncertainty of social outcomes in the life of the villagers of Kamikatsu. Examples of the fragility of villagers’ adaptations to the fast and changeable demands of Japanese society can be observed throughout the pages that follow. The case of mochi shows how similar ways of giving can be used to define different aspects of community making and how power is negotiated. The political implications for mochi are very important for understanding the making of a neighbourhood. The very subject of this thesis, the villagers’ understanding of gifts and wrapping, illustrates in many ways the complexities of their constant reformulation of their identity and community and how these affect their use and understanding of gifts. An important issue has emerged when looking at gift exchange: the character of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness that forces people to make prestations. It is because patrons want to ward off inauspiciousness and attract auspiciousness that they engage in these complex episodes of making and throwing prestations. Chapter Four examines the cultural construction of auspiciousness and inauspiciousness that is central to gift giving.