December: Festivals and the Carnivalesque – Part Two: Why are Festivals Important to Humans? – The Celebration of the Gift

It is time to write about celebration, when one is in mourning! It is time to write about joy, when one is sad! It is indeed time to write about the gift, when one experiences yet another cruel act of being robbed, of a snatching, of felt loss. If in the first part the aim was to understand festivals in light of the carnival or the carnivalesque, in light of Bakhtin’s rendition of it – carnival or the celebration of festivals as the revolt of the common man against the power structures – and we were able to confidently conclude that the carnivalesque was not sufficient to understand the continued powerful presence of festivals, then in this part, we will precisely go beyond the carnivalesque to seek understanding of festivals, by asking a deeper question – why are festivals important to humans?

There were two responses to the first part. The first, argued that festivals ‘express and shape the desires, emotional response and imagination of the participants offering a sense of incorporation shared with others in a wider culture…The aim in most festivals would be celebration and a sense of belonging’. The second response in the form of poetry, celebrating Christmas, as it is indeed an important festival of December. It used the language of ‘coming’ on the one hand and ‘receiving’, ‘welcoming’, recognizing’ on the other hand. It brings to fore the idea of something being ‘given’ which is consequently ‘recognized’ ‘welcomed’ and ‘received’ – what is it that is given and received during a festival? Of course, it is gifts – it is gifts that are both given and received during festivals.

In a recent post – Transforming Gratitude: Lessons from the Act of Writing, I had given three insights from the act of writing that shed light on the deeper mechanisms underlying the language of gratitude. Simply put, if gratitude is offered at the ‘reception of the gift’ then prior to the receiving, for the gift to be truly appreciated and grateful for, the receiver must exercise a ‘posture of enquiry’ and been in an ‘act of questing’ and then the gift is in some sense an answer, a recompense to this quest and enquiry. It is then and only then, when the received gift is in line with the enquiry and quest that gratitude manifests. There was a fascinating response to this post which tied these three insights to bear upon the festival of Christmas. I will quote the response at length as I believe in it lies a deep insight to the question we are addressing here – Why are festivals important to humans?

After giving a list of references and quotes from the Bible about how Christmas is God’s gift to us, Bernard Farr writes, ‘It had not struck me before that in all these cases there is an equation between the gift of Jesus and the gift of eternal life – so that to receive one is to receive the other. So perhaps the point of Christmas is not so much that it celebrates God coming to share in time-limed human life (incarnation) but the opposite. It celebrates our coming to share in the life of God which is eternal.’ He ends by writing, ‘Christmas is only truly Christmas insofar as the Christian community together appropriates the eternal. In this way God is writing in our lives as he gifts himself in his Son.’

The writing on the wall appears to get clearer now! The clear resonance between festivals and gifts or charity! Now, that is commonsensical, you claim! Of course it is, only that we had completely missed it in our first list of what constitutes festivals – celebration, commemoration, cheer and carnivalesque! So now let’s add the fifth to our list – charity as gift! It is not just an interesting idea, but something that is existentially part of festivals, in other words, the giving and receiving of charity or gifts is synonymous with the celebration of festivals. Evidence for this is found in the financial records of both persons and companies during festival times. The question that stares us in our face is – what is the conceptual structure that conjoins charity and celebration, or gifts and festivals? In other words, how is celebration of festivals related to charity or gifting or giving? And it is to this that we must turn.

But before we come to gifting in a festival, we must look at the act of gifting in its own right, as an existential act with its own ontology. So what is gifting and how is it related to the human condition? We are going to progress by looking intently at the everyday act of gifting. There are three insights about gifting that can be easily observed from (a) the act of gifting or the giving of gifts, (b) the gift, or what is given and (c) the receiving of gift.

First, the act of giving as an act of experiencing loss! The commodification of gifts and its regulation has in some sense made a mockery of gifting. In other words we have domesticated gifting. We can manage getting all our loved ones a gift if we plan well and save enough to give, and avoid experiencing loss. We have anesthetised giving. But that is precisely what giving of gift is not meant to do. The gifting is meant to leave a hole in the wallet. The giver is meant to experience loss because she has given. She is meant to experience suffering as she has paid to bring forth joy to the other in the very act of giving. The larger the gift, the smaller becomes the giver, more oblivious, and the act of giving diminishes the giver, in every respect. When the giving is truly completed, there is no trace of the giver, become invisible or disappeared, because she has given all. In this sense, the giver is hidden behind the gift, so that the giver disappears even as the gift is presented. Marion has a few interesting lines on the masking of the giving and the giver: ‘In donation, in fact, the giving (Geben) gives to presence the gift (Gabe), so completely and radically that this gift alone occupies presence and, in appearing, necessarily masks its own donation; or, more properly speaking, the gift (Gabe, beings) has no need of illegitimately obfuscating the giving (Geben, being), since it is the right of the giving itself, on the contrary, not to be able to give the gift, to offer it, to deliver it, to put it to the fore, but by concealing itself behind it, because giving can never appear as something given since it exhausts and accomplishes itself in allowing to appear – it does not occupy the opening, because it opens it.’ Simply put there is a loss of the giver in giving. But what exactly is the loss? What exactly is hidden or concealed?

For this we have to go behind Marion to Heidegger. The loss is of the infinite possibilities the gift had before being given which by the act of giving has now been limited to a bounded actuality, a historicality, if one must insist. The gift had the potential of being utilized in infinite ways to accomplish infinite purposes respectively, but the very actual act of giving to a particular, limits it to that receiver and eliminates all other possibilities hence the experience of loss. Take the example of a donor who wishes to sponsor the education of an underprivileged child. As long as she has got those pounds, dollars or rupees in her wallet, she can do whatever she wants with it. She can sponsor any child in the world. But once she decides and gives the money to that agency for that child, she is unable to use her funds for any other child. The loss is not of the money, because she did want to give it, but it is of the infinite other potentialities that the money unspent could accomplish before it was given which in the act of giving have been now lost, lost for ever. This understanding of life as potentiality with infinite possibilities which experiences loss in being actualized is a basic condition of being human. Death is the loss of possibilities and we mourn it every day in the very act of living, even as the actuality of our lived life murders a million unlived lives. In this sense, living itself is dying, dying of the infinite other possibilities that failed to be actualised in the very actualizing of our daily life. If this be the case then becoming human and mere living is to nurture a loss. This sense of loss is what we are doomed to live with and every hunt for a gift is a way of overcoming this loss. When one does not receive gifts, then one steals, one even snatches. This sets up the rationale for the reception of gift. But before that a few brief thoughts about the gift.

Secondly, gift as a presentation of a new world of possibilities. Both Heidegger and picking up from him, Jean-Luc Marion, talk a great deal about the ontological significance of the gift. Going back to Marion’s above quote, ‘In donation, in fact, the giving (Geben) gives to presence the gift (Gabe), so completely and radically that this gift alone occupies presence…’. In other words for Marion everything that has presence, or is present, is able to be present, or come into existence, has only been made possible as a gift. But what is it that has become present and has presence? Wrathall brings in the idea of a ‘sense of place’. So what exactly is a gift? It is a new place, a new possibility, a new potential that has the power to be actualized. In some sense, within the wrappings are hidden a world of possibilities. Wrathall asks, ‘But how can anything really come to matter in this thick sense in a world that is moving swiftly toward abolishing all sense of place?’ and answers his own question by saying, ‘This sort of mattering or importance is not something we can bestow upon things by a free act of will. The only way to get it would be as a gift–a gift of place or a gift of a thing of intrinsic worth.’ The only thing that contains new possibilities, a new place, is the gift, something that is unavailable to the receiver prior to the reception of the gift. For Wrathall, the power of the gift lies precisely in bestowing importance or mattering, bringing about a new sense of place. However, while the gift brings in new possibilities, the gift equally brings with it its own place and limitation. Thus even in the reception of a gift, new losses are felt and new longings born. Thus the gift is a double-edged sword – at one end it slices in new possibilities, and at the other end, these very possibilities that have the potential for actuality, bring with it its own limitation in their actualizing, thus births longings for future gifts.

Finally, the reception of gifts as an overcoming of death! Gifts are wrapped, hidden, and there is the sense of it not being there are all for the receiver prior to the giving. Hence at the opportune time, the gift is revealed and handed over and in some cultures even asked to be unwrapped. There is an anticipation, an eagerness, even as one fumbles with the wrappings, an urgency to get beneath the covers, to hold the gift, to stand in the presence of a new naked revelation, a new actuality is born in the life of the receiver. In some cultures both the wrapping and unwrapping of gifts are rituals of equal significance. It is this reception of a gift that undoubtedly causes the joy and the celebration. The festival lies precisely in this reception of gifts. On one hand festivals are mere occasions, often excuses, to exercise this act of giving and receiving to generate celebration and joy. But before we get to festivals, let us continue to explore the ontological significance of receiving. I heard a man once claim that when he saw Bill Gates having a meal with Melinda three tables across in a Seattle restaurant, he told the waiter to pass this message to Bill that he will pick up their tab. Even as he watched the waiter lean to pass on the message and point to the benefactor of their meal, this man swore that he caught a primordial glee, joy, in Bill’s face, one that comes in receiving a gift. His point being, even the world’s richest man is joyful in getting a freebie or a gift. Why are humans besoughted with receiving gifts? Receiving has value when what is received fulfils a lack, even if it be an artificially constructed lack. But it is the condition of lack that gives currency to the reception of gifts. The fact that we come into this world crying, howling for our mother’s milk is evidence enough for the birth of the fundamental condition of lack in being human. Today’s liberalism blinds us to our existential condition of lack. But what exactly is this lack? If we dovetail this lack to what the gift signifies and what giving accomplishes, then in light of what we have said above, we can say that this lack is the lack of possibilities and potentialities. In this sense, the existential condition of being human is that of exhaustion, the actuality of being exhausts itself of all power to be. Therefore, one is constantly in need of gifts from the other. Be it food, shelter, love, material or non-material, it does not matter, but humans constantly need to be gifted so that they can have life and overcome the death that is already in operation which constantly creates the existential lack.

There are different possibilities for how these meditations can be taken forward and different conclusions arrived at. But the journey we must actualize is our quest to understand festivals and answer the question we began with – why are festivals important to humans? I am sure the reader can already begin to see, in light of the above discussion, the shape of the answer. If receiving is central to being human to overcome an existential lack, then the giving that results in receiving is surely the cause of celebration. However, we have already seen the condition of lack is a perennial human condition, and if that be so, then what are festivals? Here I claim that festivals remember, commemorate and celebrate an original event of giving, a phenomenal giving that has left its imprint in collective human memory. In other words, festivals are celebrations of cosmic ‘givings’. Within the Christian tradition, Christmas celebrates God’s giving of his son, Jesus and Easter celebrates Christ’s giving of his self. In Hindu tradition Diwali celebrates the returning or giving of Ram to the capital city, Ayodhya. Be it Hanukah or Dusshera, the originary event that is commemorated is one of giving – of new life, hence celebration of birth dates, of victory in war, of salvation to people, or whatever else form the gifting might take shape.

However, following Farr, I would like to end by arguing that the power of festivals lies not merely in the commemoration and remembrance of an old event, however cosmic, but of its significance in fulfilling present day lack. Festival is the occasion for receiving. But can one receive except what one is given! So festivals provide the occasion to give and to receive, to overcome the existential human condition of lack, to open new possibilities and potentials, to offer the presence of new places. The power of the gift lies in it being less deserved, more of a surprise, a bringing about of possibilities completely unforeseen. It is indeed loving without a reason, a giving without rationale, and a silent suffering in the presence of the other’s discovery of a new world. What better words than that of Caputo to end with – ‘But then again, must love be deserved – or is love a gift? If love must be deserved or earned, then it is something we owe to the one who earned it, and then it is more like wages for labor than a gift we give without condition. Is love given unconditionally or do you have to meet certain conditions in order to earn it? Does love always have to have be reasonable, to have a logos, why, a reason – or is love without why?’

But has the gift got anything to do with the carnivalesque? How is the carnivality of festivals related to the giving of gifts? I would like to argue that the fire that fuels the festivality of giving is none other than the carnivality of the carnivalesque. But for that we have to consider the question – How can we make the most of festivals? – to which we will turn in the last part.