Giving as a total social phenomenon: Towards a human geography of reciprocity

Abstract

This paper explores how small group sharing practices contribute to wider community hierarchies. Using a combination of qualitative, quantitative and network data, the paper shows how small group reciprocal practices overlap to generate key nodes within community scale networks, creating hierarchies and information inequalities in each site. Thus, the paper aims to draw closer conceptual linkages between close knit, "bonding" relationships, livelihoods and community hierarchy by emphasising how reciprocal risk mitigation practices function as an intermediary process between climate-dependent livelihoods and power relations within community-scale networks. By applying this broader, mixed methods interpretation of gift giving and reciprocity to an area usually interpreted with a single scalar and methodological approach, the paper makes a case for greater focus on the structural dimensions of giving and reciprocity in geography. K E Y W O R D SCambodia, inequality, reciprocity, social networks 1 | INTRODUCTION Giving, as Marcel Mauss famously explained, is a process full of meaning. Though a gift may appear to be generously offered, it is never discrete or disinterested. Rather, the "formal pretence and social deception" (Mauss, 1967, p. 2) of generosity disguises a key role in social construction: givers and receivers are linked to each other in durable relationships, expectations are generated, and reciprocity is born. Giving and receiving are therefore acts with great social significanceeach containing "all the threads of which the social fabric is composed" (Mauss, 1967, p. 2)yet each is also linked to its environment. The meaning of an exchange depends upon the circumstances, from wealth to the weather, in which it takes place. It is a "total social phenomenon" (Mauss, 1967, p. 2) in which context, meaning and power interplay.Yet despite this, the wider resonance of reciprocal practice has fragmented in contemporary geography. Conceptions of reciprocal behaviour remain narrowly defined and centred upon a simplistic conception of reciprocity as the exchange of equally valued goods between peers. In addition, its analysis has been impeded by metaphorical, often hierarchical, conceptions of power which have tended to be fixed at the community scale (Mistry et al., 2014) and rooted in long-standing and widespread conceptions of the village as the primary unit of analysis (Kemp, 1991).Aiming towards a closer, more holistic focus on reciprocity, this paper explores sharing within the context of close knit ties or "bonds of affection," using self-defined networks of close friends and associates to understand how these intimate relationships contribute to community-scale power structures. As it will show, loans in this contextgiven in times of need without formal conditions attachedtake on many of the social characteristics of a gift, cementing close ties and strengthening social relations in a manner rarely focused upon in the economically dominated literature (e.g.