Ethnologia Europaea

Gifts are deeply seated in the organisation of social life and how we make sense of the world; we all give and receive gifts, and tend to think of the rituals of exchange as rather pleasing. However, gifts can also create ambiguity and tension, especially around expectations for reciprocity. When gifts are given without a clear indication of their expectations, recipients may feel uncertain about how to respond. The timeline of reciprocation can also blur; a gift might not be reciprocated immediately or in kind, complicating the relationship and fuelling anxiety regarding the roles of the giver and receiver. Hence, gifts cannot be adequately understood without acknowledging their dark side, as for instance the troublesome feelings that arise from social indebtedness (Marcoux 2009), and from reciprocity holes during the exchange, since delay, failure and dislocation are as common as the neat linearity and inevitability conceptualised by Mauss.

This article addresses the embodiment and temporality of gifts through the question of an absent presence. By acknowledging the presence of the other in one's corporeal system, it is possible to rethink the gift/present as an enduring entanglement, ontologically and empirically different from the model of debt and exchange. My research engages with a radical displacement of conventional theory by exploring gifts in an intracorporeal rather than extracorporeal location, specifically thinking of the interweaving of bodily material at the cellular level. The arenas of organ transplantation, pregnancy and stem cell therapy show that to give or receive a gift need not imply a certain distance, but rather an entanglement. In the mode of intracorporeality, the enduring spectral presence of the donor in the gift may even position the recipient as the gift's hostage, but what matters is the hospitality of embracing the hauntological sense of otherness within.

This article examines the contested and ambivalent givenness of waste using the animated film Toy Story 4 as a case study. Inspired by the idea of Christmas box becoming a gift instead of its content, Toy Story 4 provides us with insights into the nature and social function of waste. The article discusses the story of Forky – a disposed spork “rescued” from the bin and crafted as a handmade toy by a child – in the context of contemporary reflections on waste, gift and property. I also read this story together with two nineteenth-century novels – Uncle Tom's Cabin and Frankenstein. While demonstrating how the animated film valorises empathetic bonding, purposeful existence, and cuteness stemming from the long-standing sentimental tradition, this comparative reading also accentuates the unruly potential and vibrant energy of the non-human agency. This article argues that Forky resists, even if temporarily, the attempts of humans to appropriate, anthropomorphise, and sentimentalise the non-human.

Could piles of radioactive soil bags be regarded as a “gift” to future generations? Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Japan between 2018 and 2019 in a region that is haunted by remnants of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, I explore how the radiant promise of nuclear energy turned into a catastrophe. In following the contaminated soil bags that contain unfiltered isotopes and have unimaginably long lifespans, I consider the notions of “ecological inheritance” and “accursed share” to reflect on the arbitrary nature of the bags in the way that they oscillate between gifts and curses. In so doing, I propose the semi-permanent characteristics of nuclear matters shape and reshape temporal and spatial horizons regarding the futurity of the disaster.

This article frames domestic things that are kept but not used as dormant, drawing from research in people's homes in the UK to argue that such objects are still animated through prior, potential and material lives. Focusing specifically on gifted objects people keep, I bring together literatures on everyday material culture and on the relational dimensions of gifts to centre the underexplored phase of dormancy in the lives of gifts. Taking the perspective of the recipients of gifts, I expand the “obligations” the gift presents to include the obligation to keep and to care for gifts (even when unwanted). Keeping gifts dormant is a short-term and long-term strategy to manage the mismatch between the relations, materialities and moralities of the gift. Through an adapted follow-the-thing approach, I argue that imagination is key to how gifts are (re)animated; I follow how people imagine themselves and others through the gift, which is animated by remembered pasts and possible futures.

This article introduces the concept of parasitic ethnography to explore how gifts can be abandoned or out of time, unsettling classical theories of reciprocity. Drawing on the case of a forgotten Soviet library in Sillamäe, Estonia, and a series of artistic interventions, it examines how belated gifts – objects that linger in storage, fall out of circulation, or survive beyond their original contexts – continue to shape social life. Rather than producing neat cycles of exchange, these gifts generate ambiguity, excess, and unresolved obligations, forcing us to confront the dark side of giving. By engaging with such residues through exhibitions and experimental collaborations, parasitic ethnography treats fieldwork as an act of intrusion and reactivation, where researchers and hosts enter unstable relations of dependence, exploitation, and creativity. This approach expands gift theory beyond Maussian reciprocity and repositions ethnography as a generative but disruptive practice, showing how forgotten cultural artefacts can become catalysts for new meanings, relations, and futures.

The gift is, first, an event. Social theories of the gift have often attempted to reduce the gift to a social institution: exchange, reciprocity. But then the gift becomes simply a delayed and misrecognised form of social exchange, to use Pierre Bourdieu's own terminology (1977). How can we think about the gift as a concept before its reduction to reciprocity? For Jacques Derrida, a gift cannot be reciprocated because a return always implies its opposite: interest, benefit, utility, accountancy, commodification. The time elapsed between gift and return (that strange concept: counter-gift) is a time that counts, transforming gift into debt, giver and receiver into subjects of an objectified exchange, and the gift into an object of exchange. The gift must be given without expectation to be returned, without intentionality; in fact, it should be forgotten in the very event of giving, because any memory or trace of the gift could turn it into debt. Jacques Derrida was not saying that pure gifts don't happen, that they are false consciousness, but that they must be forgotten as gifts. That is what he calls the aporia or impasse of the gift. The gift is not the thing given, but the event of giving; an event that gives itself and that must be forgotten as such. “The gift, like the event, as event, must remain unforeseeable … It must let itself be structured by the aleatory; it must appear chancy or in any case lived as such” (Derrida 1992: 122).