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78 Consuming Media

it is a ritual tool, food or sex, these scholars incorporate the objects into a general gift
pattern, although different objects have different importance and symbolic
meaning. 17 The following discussion about books as gifts should therefore not be
seen as automatically applicable as a whole to other material objects.
A few factors that determine what books will be chosen as gifts can be discerned
in the book lovers’ discussion. A fundamental factor was the type of relationship
between the donor and the recipient, whether the relation is close (intimate and
emotional) or distant (formal, yet friendly). One has close relationships with family
and a few friends, and distant with everyone else.
The giving of gifts in Western culture is based on the ideal of unselfishness and
generosity. Unselfishness dictates that the donor does not think of himself but only
the needs and interests of the recipient. The idea that the recipient’s interests and
personality should decide the nature of the gift is reflected in our informants’ first
statement that it is the recipient who chooses what book to give, or as one of them
said, ‘It is not much use giving Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game to an illiterate
golfer.’
However, this kind of answer is almost always followed by ‘but if both of us like
the book, so much the better’. This ambiguity is also reflected in the fact that
although many people emphasize the importance of the recipient of the gift, it is
remarkable that it is negated by another statement. For example, a woman who first
says that the book must ‘of course’ suit the recipient, immediately thereafter says that
she only gives away books that she likes herself. In theory, it seems, the interests and
personality of the recipient should decide, but in reality the donor is more central
than many people would want to admit. The anthropologist Daniel Miller points out
that the relationship to the other is constructed through the objects that a subject is
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thought to desire. In other words, gifts involve a construction of the other based on
the donor’s ideas about who the other is. The gift of a book reveals more about the
donor, or rather the donor’s idea of the recipient, than the donor intends to disclose.
It is this instinctive insight that makes the answers of our informants in the discus-
sion group ambivalent in this respect.
However, the donor’s ideas about the recipient might coincide more or less with
what the recipient would like and in a close relationship the chances of getting it right
are greater. If one knows the other well the choice of present becomes simpler; our
informants said that they just buy something that suits the personality and interests
of the other. But for them the ultimate book gift should both ‘suit’ the recipient and
the donor should already have read and liked it. The recipient is then constructed as
similar to the donor, as a twin in terms of taste.
In a close relationship, the donor is ‘allowed’ to be visible in his or her gift,
contrary to the norm that the gift should reflect the wishes of the recipient. In
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Mauss’s terms one can say that the gift is ‘charged’ with the giver. Although all gifts
are the responsibility of the donor, it seems to be the case to a higher degree and more
consciously in close relationships. This is only ‘permitted’ or desirable in a close rela-
tionship because it is felt to be too personal, intimate and revealing to be shared with