Solidarity and the Gift
Not satisfied with a society fashioned by uncoordinated individual
efforts, one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments is
to translate egocentric community concerns into collective values.
The desire for amodus vivendi fair to everyone may be
regarded as an evolutionary outgrowth of the need to get along
and cooperate, adding an ever-greater insight into the actions
that contribute to or interfere with this objective.
(Frans deWaal 1996: 207)
The classical sociological question about the bases of social order is of
great current interest. In our times there is a concern about the fate
of solidarity and social ties similar to that at the end of the nineteenth
century. In both eras significant social transformations were presumably
affecting the “cement of society.” In the preceding chapters we returned
to the works of the classical anthropologists and sociologists, as well as to
more modern theories. Once again the classics proved invaluable to our
understanding of the complexity of the current “problem of order.”
It is remarkable that so few attempts have been made to bridge anthropological
and sociological theories on social ties and solidarity. In
the same period that Durkheim described the transformation from mechanical
to organic solidarity, anthropologists conducted detailed field
studies about the origin of human societies in diverging cultures: from
NorthAmerican Indian tribes to theMaori tribes inNew Zealand and the
inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands. Whereas the sociologists emphasized
the shared values and norms and the new forms of mutual dependency
that the modernizing society brought about, the anthropologists
conceived of solidarity as the consequence of patterns of reciprocity between
individuals, arising from the exchange of gifts and services.
In this chapter we investigate what the conditions are under which
contemporary solidarity comes into being and has positive or negative
consequences. In addition, an attempt is made to understand and explain
the essence of the transformation solidarity has gone through. But first,
we look back upon the preceding chapters, in order to see where their
main conclusions have brought us.