(Beginnings and Endings is the first post in this series.)
I started writing this post with the intention of thanking everyone who has helped or offered to help since I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer last month. I am grateful for the many meals, visits, interesting conversations, and helpful hints. But, as we all know, gratitude can be an uncomfortable feeling. How do we show we truly appreciate an offer without sounding a bit desperate? How do we deal with feelings of inadequacy, resentment, fear of being pitied? And how can we ever reciprocate, especially, as in my case, I’m unlikely ever to be in a position in which I can directly repay these gifts in kind? So, in lieu of a ride or a visit or a meal, I offer these anthropological musings with the hope that when your turn comes to be the recipient of help you’ll hold your head a bit higher.
Helping is interactional, transactional, and almost always hierarchical. There is a helper and a helpee, a giver and a receiver, a donor and a person in need of donations. One thing the Christians got right is that “it’s better to give than receive.” As an anthropologist, I don’t mean they got it right on some moral or cosmological level. I mean that it FEELS so much better to be a giver than a receiver. We all know that twang of joy when we come up with just the right gift for someone. And we all know the challenges of being a recipient: that many of the gifts we receive feel redundant, uncomfortably generous, not exactly what we were hoping for, etc.
Stepping a bit further back, don’t we all feel good when we donate to a worthy cause? When we help an old lady cross the street (why is it always a lady and not a gentleman, but that’s a question for another post)? When we give up our seat on the bus to a harried parent or a person with visible disabilities? Of course we do! All of that feels so much better than needing charity, needing help to carry out basic life tasks, needing others to take care of us.
While the recipient of help likely feels grateful (even if they struggle to articulate their appreciation or gratitude), they also know that it sucks to be the one stuck in the position of needing help. The point is that in a helper / helpee relationship it’s clear who is on top and who is on the bottom.
Quick aside: That’s a difference between Medicare (healthcare for all) and Medicaid (a mean’s tested ‘privilege’ given to people in need). The first is a basic right to which everyone is entitled at a common age. There is no giver, no receiver; no helper or helpee. Just all us frail human beings sharing life in our finite, mortal bodies. The second is a gift – assistance to those deemed worthy of health care. It’s the responsibility of the recipient to prove their worthiness (gratitude). And that sucks. Especially when worthiness is a moving target, as indeed it always is.
Is there a way out of this conundrum? Won’t there always be people who are sick and people who are healthy, people who have good luck and those who have rotten luck, people born with greater intelligence or beauty and those born with less? Of course there will be. But, happily, human societies have devised some good solutions.
Solutions begin with recognizing that both material and symbolic exchanges are intrinsic to the social glue that holds families, communities, and societies together. We would be hard-pressed to come up with a social group that does not engage in some sort of exchanges. However, for exchanges to work; that is, for exchanges to really serve as social glue, both givers and receivers need to recognize that they are engaging in a reciprocal relationship. Put differently, social capital lies in the flow of giving and receiving regardless of who gives and who receives.
On the most basic level, giving should entitle one to receiving, albeit at some (possibly unknown) future point or by proxy (that is, to one’s child or grandchild or niece or nephew.) Through giving, one consolidates one’s place in the social fabric, guaranteeing (as much as anything can be guaranteed in life) that there will be a community, a safety net, resources, and a helping hand when times become tough – as they surely will in this impermanent world.
Second, givers need to appreciate that recipients are doing a noble or even sacred job. Recipients allow givers to feel the moral satisfaction and reap the social esteem that comes with helping. Depending upon one’s world view, giving may secure you a place in heaven or a seat on a prestigious board. At the very least, it will provide the kind of good feeling that comes from being appreciated or from doing the “right” thing.
Third, everyone involved needs to acknowledge that life is uncertain, that nothing is permanent, that situations change on a dime. Even paupers occasionally win the lottery. Even mansions burn down. Even dual PhD parents can birth a child with profound cognitive disabilities. Even the most careful pedestrian can be hit by a car. Even vegetarians can get cancer. As the elderly Kurdish Jewish women I spent time with when I was a doctoral student liked to explain: “The world turns. The one who is on the bottom today can be on top tomorrow. And the one who is on top today can be on the bottom tomorrow. A king can lose all his riches. Even the greatest Torah sage can have a stroke and not be able to remember a word of Torah.” Knowing that I am on the cusp of what is casually called “chemo brain”, that last observation really hits home.
To read more about the ideas touched on in this post I highly recommend Marcel Mauss’s classic book The Gift and Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift. For more on my research with elderly Kurdish women see Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem. And for more on Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare policy, and social capital please browse my blog. Special thank-you to my spouse Yishai for articulating the social capital ideas.