The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude

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More About This Book

Overview

Known as an ‘anthropologist of everyday life,’ Margaret Visser has, in five award-winning books, uncovered and illuminated the intriguing and unexpected meanings of everyday objects and habits. Now she turns her keen eye to another custom so frequently encountered that it often escapes notice: saying ‘Thank you.’ What do we really mean by these two simple words?

This fascinating inquiry into all aspects of gratitude ranges from the unusual determination with which parents teach their children to thank, to the difference between speaking the words and feeling them, to the ways different cultures handle the complex matters of giving, receiving, and returning favors and presents. Visser illuminates the fundamental opposition in our own culture between gift-giving and commodity exchange, and the similarities between gratitude and its opposite, vengefulness. The Gift of Thanks considers cultural history, including the modern battle of social scientists to pin down the notion of thankfulness and account for it, and the newly awakened scientific interest in the biological and evolutionary roots of emotions.

With her engaging combination of curiosity and erudition, Visser once again reveals the extraordinary in the everyday.

Editorial Reviews

Dwight Garner
The not-very-promising title of Ms. Visser's new book, The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude, and the fact that it is being issued in November, will make some readers think it's another snoozy, belt-loosening tour of America's Thanksgiving traditions, from the Pilgrims to whether it's the L-tryptophan in turkey that makes you want to crawl under the table and take a nap on the carpet after eating. It's not that at all. Instead The Gift of Thanks is a scholarly, many-angled examination of what gratitude is and how it functions in our lives. Gratitude is a moral emotion of sorts, Ms. Visser writes, one that is more complicated and more vital than we think.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Like a modern Ruth Benedict immersed in classical literature, Visser (Much Depends on Dinner) examines what it really means, in the course of human interaction, to be thankful. Her kindly book turns on itself in an exhaustive but continually engrossing fashion. Beginning with the assumption that “[g]ratitude must be freely given; otherwise, it might be a polite show, but it is not gratitude,” Visser asks many questions of cultures East and West and provides a plethora of answers. The obscured and deeper meaning of giving thanks is probed through such divergent cultural markers as the work of Georg Simmel and Dickens; the Bible and Proust; Japanese sumimasen, which is both a thanking and an apologizing, and C.C. Baxter in Bill Wilder's The Apartment; Plato's Laws and Seneca's massive treatise on gift giving and the slipperiness of saying “you're welcome” in today's U.K. What is tipping all about? What is the etymological relationship between “votive,” “vow,” “favors,” “grace” and “gratitude”? What might the gestures of courtesy—the curtsy for example—be? Overall, this is a delightful and graceful gift of a book, for which any fortunate recipient will be thankful. (Nov. 19)
More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
Following the trend of her previous, successful titles (e.g., The Rituals of Dinner; The Geometry of Love), Visser again gracefully applies her wide-ranging learning in the service of fundamental humanistic themes. She examines the meaning of gratitude, using linguistic, sociological, religious, and other rubrics to consider such matters as why we wrap gifts, what we owe to our parents, and why Japanese speakers say "I'm sorry" when English speakers would say "Thank you." Visser is one of a small number of writers able to both use and transcend conventional academic scholarship to offer readers a truly liberal education. This work may be compared to Leon R. Kass's The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature in the authors' belief that everyday rituals reveal profound insights into human life. VERDICT Readers content to skim the surface will glean pieces of information; those able to invest more time and thoughtfulness will be rewarded with deeper insights and will appreciate the book's extensive bibliography. This will also appeal to those who seek greater cross-cultural understanding.—Lisa Richmond, Wheaton Coll. Lib., IL
Kirkus Reviews
An anthropological and philosophical account of how and why we give thanks-or, at times, resist doing so. Former classics professor Visser (The Geometry of Love, 2000, etc.), a deliberate writer whose lovely books are few and far between, ponders why it is that we are moved to say "please" and "thank you." Are we hard-wired to do so? Perhaps, for, as Visser writers, "in states of aphasia, or in people suffering from Alzheimer's disease, these little phrases often survive the shipwreck of all other memories." The author's investigations take readers around the world, perhaps most fascinatingly to Japan, where the need to thank prolifically and to extremes of self-effacing near-groveling is a deeply ingrained thing, an expression of a view that we're all in this together, the living and the dead alike, and that we all owe everyone else on the planet thanks for allowing us to survive. The Japanese way of giving thanks involves phrases whose literal meanings acknowledge one's inferiority: "This is poison to my soul," "This doesn't really taste very good, but please eat it," "I feel shame." The network of obligation a Japanese thanks implicates is profoundly different from the way an American might feel, and indeed Americans are widely perceived as a people who apologize without really meaning it. "Bilingual Hindi-English speakers in India thank more often in English than they do in Hindi," Visser writes, continuing her planetary researches before settling down to examine our own culture more completely. She looks at the expressions of thanks in Dickens's Great Expectations, the custom of tipping (which is abound up with hidden traps of social rank and equality), the perils of gift-giving, theeven greater perils of stinginess and other such diverse matters of nature and nurture, all delivered in elegant, clear prose. A book to be thankful for-sympathetic to human foible, deeply learned and a pleasure to read.
The Barnes & Noble Review

"Naked are the Graces," goes the Roman proverb, and that's how the Romans thought giving (sex especially) was meant to be: guileless, free, and very bare. The deeper lesson of the Graces, though, may be the circle in which they danced-the way giving kept them close. The customs of gratitude choreograph our lives together, argues Margaret Visser in The Gift of Thanks, and the ways they unite us are nearly as varied as the clothing we have worn (or removed) in the world's long history of gifts.

For Visser, the quickest way to the heart of thanks is through its etymology. The merci of French is a cousin to merchant and commerce; lift up appreciation and find the Latin pretium, or price, underneath. Price and gratitude are linked in how they commend the giver through the value of the gift. Take, for instance, certain Inuit tribes that expected hunters to give away a big catch. Here the luck of the one is the luck of the many; no one is thanked. But those who give to such a group cinch their belonging to it, and therein lies a circle of gratitude, for next time it will be their turn to receive. That is the kind of cycle that Visser finds across continents and centuries.

Money outmoded elaborate gratitude in most modern business, but in earlier times a gift was often like a sale, and shirking gratitude was closer to theft. (Perhaps the Graces are naked, wrote Erasmus, because the ungrateful have stripped them bare.) Ancient Persians put their ingrates on trial as criminal types, fearing that since they lacked a sense of duty and shame, they might next betray their gods, city, or family. After all, aren't ungrateful children what started that landslide of savagery in King Lear? The stakes are clearest when gratitude is denied. Thanks means nothing to a sales clerk unless you forget to say it.

Visser's title invokes at least two distinguished commentaries on gifting -- Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1923) and Lewis Hyde's The Gift (1985) -- but her overlap with these books, as with the many writings she plunders, is more appreciative than indebted. Like the models of her study, Visser has given plenty back. --Jeremy Axelrod

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780151013319
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Publication date: 11/19/2009
  • Pages: 458
  • Sales rank: 1,232,415
  • Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

MARGARET VISSER is an award-winning author and essayist. Much Depends on Dinner was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times. The Rituals of Dinner won the IACP Literary Food Writing Award and the Jane Grigson Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book, The Geometry of Love was a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize. Margaret Visser taught classics at York University for 18 years and now devotes her time to research and writing. She lives in Toronto, Paris, and the south of France. Visit her online at www.margaretvisser.com

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