A free gift makes no friends

The giving of alms to Shvetambar Jain renouncers is a specific institutiona lized elaboration of the idea of a free gift, an idea which all the major w orld religions have their own ways of instantiating, and which in north Ind ian languages is expressed by the word dan. This example illustrates the in herently paradoxical nature of the idea of a gift, and why it is a mistake to define the gift as necessarily reciprocal and non-alienated. Like the pu re commodity, the pure gift is characterized by the fact that it does not c reate personal connections and obligations between the parties. This unders tanding of the gift, which is implicit in Mauss, enables us to resolve the apparent paradox in the ethnography of dan, that although it is a free gift it is often harmful to its recipients.