I should now state directly a limitation that has been implicit for some time, that is, that gift exchange is an economy of small groups. When emotional ties are the glue that holds a community together, its size has an upper limit. The kinship network Carol Stack describes in the Flats numbered about a hundred people. A group formed on ties of affection could, perhaps, be as large as a thousand people, but one thousand must begin to approach the limit. Our feelings close down when the numbers get too big. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other’s eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact. When we speak of communities developed and maintained through an emotional commerce like that of gifts, we are therefore speaking of something of limited size. It remains an unsolved dilemma of the modern world, one to which anarchists have repeatedly addressed themselves, as to how we are to preserve true community in a mass society, one whose dominant value is exchange value and whose morality has been codified into law.
This paragraph, like so many in Hyde’s book, is brimming with possible implications and potential lines of inquiry. As a Christian and churchgoer, though, I’m particularly interested in what implications there might be for that unique community we call the church. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how consonant Hyde’s description of the gift community is with the biblical vision of the church. Take, for instance, Paul’s description of the church in 1 Corinthians 12-14: “Gift exchange” would be exactly the right terminology for how Paul envisions Christians relating to one another within the body of Christ. (Of course, there has been fine work done on Paul’s understanding of gift and related notions of reciprocity.) But, as Hyde suggests here, there seems to be “an upper limit” to such communities, seeing as they’re held together by strong emotional ties. Does this mean that a local church cannot carry out its proper functioning beyond a certain size? Is it any coincidence that mega-churches have popped up in the same (American) soil that’s produced so much emphasis on “exchange value”? Indeed, to come at it from another angle: the New Testament often describes the church in familial language, pointing once more to a community bound by ties of affection. Such relational commerce is impossible to engineer through large-scale, top-down manipulation. But that hasn’t stopped many of us from trying…