Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“And in reference to the sparagmos in which the originary sacred object is divided up among the participants, its division into roughly equivalent portions may be considered as the prototype of all kinds of material exchange, establishing (as was never the case in the pecking-order hierarchies of animal groups) an overall sense of “equal division” in which individual portions can be compared to each other. The defining characteristic of the gift, however, is that it takes place outside the ritual context; its function is to tie people together through the “profane” time of everyday life. The anticipated but delayed response to a gift or invitation illuminates the time in between. The failure of one party to reciprocate in timely fashion to a gift presents the danger of a potential rupture of relations. None of this is a mystery to us, for whatever the vast differences between modern and tribal societies, our gifting practices remain mutually comprehensible. The gift raises a question of general interest to GA: how does one use the event-based model of the originary hypothesis to describe the genesis of an institution that specifically, one might even say, “deliberately,” exceeds the temporality of an event? Or to put this more sharply: what in the originary event can serve as the model of a connection established between events not identical but felt as reciprocal with each other?”

— Eric Gans, On the Gift · Saturday, January 14th, 2012 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment