Gift – The Binding Chaos Lexicon

Goods or services allocated to a person who is not automatically entitled to a share by social norms, or goods or services one is not automatically entitled to by social norms, such as personal or rare property. Gifts are not an entitlement and frequently carry expectations such as eventual reciprocity or future friendship.

Expanded explanation

Entitlement is the boundary the definition draws. What a person is already owed by the norms of their society is a share rather than a gift, and a gift begins where that entitlement ends, either because the recipient has no automatic claim or because the thing itself is not something anyone has a claim to. That is what separates the category from allocation, and it is why gifts carry expectations. Something outside the entitled share arrives with conditions attached, commonly eventual reciprocity or future friendship. Gifts are bonding in Marsh's account, and the bonding is the point rather than a side effect, which is why the gift economy appears in her work as an alternative distribution to trade. Goods are given in the hope that equivalent goods will be returned, without the direct exchange a trade requires, and this eliminates the central hubs that control distribution and block access. The failure cases are instructive and she describes them at length. Someone who gives to a person cast as the negative image may find themselves put to as much inconvenience and expense as they will endure and then slandered, accused of theft, of incompetence or of having somehow benefited, which is what happens when a gift lands where guilt is already being managed. The distinction from charity turns on the same axis as everything else, since a gift that establishes the giver as endo-ideal and the receiver as negative image has become charity whatever it is called.

In Heather Marsh’s words

Marsh draws the line at entitlement, which is what separates a gift from a share and why conditions come attached.

“Gifts are not an entitlement and frequently carry expectations such as eventual reciprocity”
Abstracting Divinity

Examples

Beyond the entitled share: What the norms already owe someone is allocation, and a gift starts where that claim runs out.
The gift economy: Goods given in hope of equivalent return, without direct exchange, removes the hubs that control distribution.
When giving turns to slander: A gift to someone cast as the negative image frequently ends in accusations against the giver, which is guilt management rather than ingratitude.

How others use it

Marcel Mauss's essay on the gift established the field, arguing that gifts are never free and that giving, receiving and reciprocating constitute an obligation system, and Malinowski's kula ring supplied the classic case. Later work by Marshall Sahlins mapped reciprocity from generalized to negative, and Annette Weiner described possessions kept while giving. Lewis Hyde extended the analysis to art and creativity. Marsh's definition agrees with the Maussian tradition that gifts carry obligation and differs in where it draws the line. Mauss contrasts gift with commodity, whereas she contrasts gift with entitled share, which puts the ordinary social allocation of a society on one side and both gifts and trades on the other.