Conflicting messages
At a hostel in New Hampshire, I saw a sign that caught me off guard. It said: “Do the right thing… if you can afford to eat at a restaurant, you can afford to give a few bucks to someone who offers food.” It also suggested paying someone who gives you a ride a dollar or two a mile. I was struck by its insistence that the right thing to do on the receiving end of someone’s generosity is to immediately reciprocate the generosity, specifically through a financial exchange. The sign made explicit that verbal thank-yous insufficiently gratify the gift-giver. Implicit is the notion that thru-hikers often take advantage of the friendly strangers who support them.
The next day, I saw a paper sign hung in the back of a shelter requesting hikers to participate in a study called “Generosity in the Social Context of the Thru-Hiking Community.” The description read in part: “for our purposes, we define interpersonal generosity as any instance of non-transactional, material or immaterial resource-sharing behavior between thru-hikers such as sharing food, important information, hiking gear, or money.” If you received such interpersonal generosity and reciprocated in financial generosity, would this fit the study definition? What if you offered money in return but the giver turned it down? Was the study concerned with the proportion of thru-hikers who immediately returned strangers’ generosity, as the hostel sign seemed to be?
My experience in conversation
The same day, I happened to be on the receiving end of a generous act. Some weekend hikers had tons of leftover food on their last night and waited through a rainstorm in the same shelter as I. A bit miserable, they kept cooking food, as much to pass the time as for sustenance. Though I never indicated interest, they made food for me, which I accepted. It was incredible – ramen with salmon packet. In that social context, offering money made no sense. The gift of food flowed from abundance and was obviously the sort of gift that builds relationships. I responded to it by engaging them in conversation for awhile and playing a few competitive games of Chinese checkers.
My instinct with gifts on the trail is to not give a gift right back to the giver but to thank them profusely. In a game of tag, there is a no tag-backs rule that states you cannot immediately tag the person who just tagged you. Gift-giving feels implicitly to follow the same rule: though generosity should be passed on, it should not be done immediately. In a gift economy, the benefit of the gift circulates back to the giver through a meandering path. In some social contexts, like getting a ride from someone or paying for your share of a food bill, it could be appreciated and appropriate to surreptitiously leave cash or to offer it directly. I tend in these circumstances to favor the surreptitious reciprocity. Then it seems more clear that the money is a gesture of thanks rather than a prideful attempt to rebalance the relational power dynamic.
The previous paragraph leaves unanswered the critical question ‘when is it appropriate to offer money upon receiving a gift?’. Clearly, I had assumed until reading the hostel’s sign that trail gifts are free, and one should reciprocate by passing on the generosity but right back to the giver. My thinking on gift-receiving systematically prioritized the negative consequence of changing a gift into a transaction over the positive consequence of thanking a gift-giver with a token of appreciation. What if I got this wrong? Were I in the gift-giver’s shoes, would I expect (or hope) someone to offer money in return for my gift? Having given to others at times in my pre-hike life, I think not. If II am not in position to offer something, I should not offer it in the first place. Further, I would be slightly irritated if someone offered me money in return for a gift, mostly because of the aforementioned conversion of a gift into a transaction. I will elaborate. Offering money in return for a gift, for one, denies me the psychological reward of being generous. Further, it commodifies the intangible strengthening of human bonds that accompanies gift-giving, turning the preternatural into an ordinary capital transaction. To me, “generosity in the social context of the thru-hiking community” is best a one-way transaction within a particular interaction but part of a web of interconnected mutuality as we all pass gifts on to strangers.
