Episode 24 The Gift

A story of a Christmas miracle involving a pink Huffy Sweet Thunder bicycle leads to a discussion of whether Santa Claus is a social fact. According to French anthropologists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, ‘social facts’ are those forces that maintain the integrity of societies – forces that transcend the needs and desires of the individual and require people to support the collective. One of Mauss’s examples in his essay, The Gift, is of the kula of the peoples of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia. The kula is an elaborate ritualised exchange of two types of object: mwali (carved bracelets) and soulava (mother-of-pearl necklaces). The kula produces a set of obligations for the societies in the Trobriand archipelago: the obligation to give these gifts, the obligation to receive them, and the obligation to pass them on to a third party. These are not mechanistic exchanges: the objects themselves become imbued with magical significance, attributes, names, ‘personalities’. Maybe the obligation a father feels when his little girls ask a magical person – Santa – for a magical, but impossible-to-get toy unicorn also counts as a social fact?

For Mauss and Durkheim, the point was to develop a science of the social world which would make it possible to investigate, objectively, those forces that hold societies, collectives and groups together.

I propose a new way of doing social science. Rather than looking at the social facts as they are, I propose that we look to the social world for evidence in everyday conversations, of people’s desires for different types of social world. A social science that looks to ‘real-world’ evidence for ideas about alternative social structures that don’t yet exist? That, to me, would be a gift.