The Debt Balance:Sour ce of Relational Risks
Oneimportant effect of the gift is that it serves to recognize the value of the
recipient as aperson.But gift giving is at the same time a very risky activity,
precisely because identity is so crucially involved. One potential risk is
that the recipient does not share the feelings we want to express in our
gift. Our well-intentioned gift may cause disappointment, disapproval,
irritation, or embarrassment in the recipient.With our gift we may have
forced ourselves too much upon the recipient. We sometimes project
our own feelings onto the other person: a gift out of compassion toward
another person may, in the end, reflect our own self-pity; a great love for
us supposedly felt by another person may be reduced to our own feelings
of love for him or her. We may misjudge the taste or the needs of the
recipient, or the nature of our relationship to the other person, causing
him or her to reject the gift. This is an extremely painful event, as the
rejection of the gift may not only reflect that we had a wrong image of
the recipient but also, and more seriously, imply a rejection of our own
personal identity and being by the recipient.
Gifts reflect, confirm, disturb, or injure identities. The motives used in
this interactional process range fromlove and sympathy, to insecurity and
anxiety, to power and prestige, to self-interest and overt hostility. Gifts
may be conciliatory as well as estranging and distancing; they may be
saving as well as sacrificing lives. This enormous psychological potential
of the gift has been largely ignored so far. In order to prevent gifts from
becoming perverted, it is extremely important to keep the subtle balance
between giver and recipient intact. Giver and recipient find themselves
involved in a debt balancewith respect tooneanother. This balance should
neither be in complete equilibrium nor disintegrate into disequilibrium.
Giver and receiver should be in an alternatively asymmetrical position on
this balance, each party properly reciprocating the gift received, thereby
preserving the equilibrium. The extent of asymmetry can only be held in
control by the specific type of feelings usually evoked by a gift: gratitude.
Not being able to feel proper gratitude, exaggerating or underplaying
one’s own gratitude, not acknowledging gratitude in the recipient, underor
overestimating his or her gratitude: all of these imperfections can
severely disturb the debt balance and generate great relational risks.
Three insights can be derived fromthe current chapter that are important
in view of the theoretical model that is developed in the course of this
book and specified inChapter 9.Afirst building stone for our argument is
the reciprocity principle for which empirical support has been presented
in this chapter. The reciprocity of giving and receiving is a crucial element
in our model of solidarity. A second aspect concerns the insight that gifts
reflect identities. Gift exchange is based on the mutual recognition by
givers and recipients of each others’ identity.Without that recognition it
would be impossible to render meaning to gifts themselves; for gifts reveal
both the identity of the giver and his perception of the recipient’s identity.
Finally, the commonly accepted idea that gifts have merely positive consequences
for social relationships is disproved in this chapter. Negative
aspects and consequences are also connected to solidarity, in the sense
that some people are excluded from the community whereas others are
included, although sometimes at the cost of their own autonomy.