Which Society Is More Generous?

European hospitality has always surprised me. This morning I was invited to brunch at a Swiss friend's house, and I woke up early to prepare a dessert to bring. The host even told me specifically what was needed or missing.

Yes, in Switzerland, to be polite you must bring a small gift such as flowers, some food you prepared, or drinks. You simply do not arrive with empty hands. I have embarrassed myself a few times by showing up with nothing.

What surprised me the most was the barbecue, where each guest brings their own meat. Back home in Mauritania, this would be a scandal. In my own family we offered a whole sheep at the very least, and sometimes a full camel, for a single guest. Which, I agree, is a bit extreme. Sorry to all the vegetarians reading this.

I explained these strange Swiss habits to an aunt in Mauritania who has never travelled abroad, and she could not stop laughing. The barbecue example was funny enough, but she laughed even harder when I told her that in Switzerland we have fixed dates for throwing out different kinds of rubbish, and that there is even a calendar for garbage and recycling.

But let's leave Swiss obsessions with garbage aside for now and return to hospitality. I further explained to my aunt that we need to finish our plate and, of course, arrive on time. Yes, Swiss people are not only obsessed with garbage, but also with punctuality.

I found these differences fascinating because everything is upside down in Mauritania. Hospitality there is a real cultural institution, almost a sacred duty. I believe this comes from our nomadic and Arab origins. Every guest must be treated in the best possible way, even if you do not know them.

Let me explain how to be polite as a guest.

Rule 1: Always come late

When you are invited for 7 PM, this means you should not arrive before 8:30, maybe 9, or even later.

Rule 2: Don't bring anything

Bringing something to your host can actually be insulting. The host invited you, which means the host provides everything.

Rule 3: Praise the food, but eat as little as possible

This huge table full of food should remain almost untouched. Never finish your plate. And of course, when the host insists that you eat more, it turns into a small ritual that everyone knows by heart:

"No, thank you." "Eat." "Really, I'm fine." "Eat." "No, honestly, I've had enough." "Eat."

And above all, you can invite yourself to anyone's house. You do not ask. You simply come, and the door will almost always be open. In fact, people often prefer receiving visitors without prior notice because it gives them an excuse for not preparing more.

"Sorry, I didn't have time to prepare a full sheep for you..."

Of course, this has side effects. It becomes almost impossible to plan anything because anyone can come visit you at any time. In such a case, your evening plans are effectively cancelled.

So which culture is more generous? I am trying to answer that question here. Let's take the example of the gift you bring to a Swiss host.

The French anthropologist Marcel Mauss explained in his famous essay The Gift that every gift carries three quiet obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and, above all, the obligation to give something back one day.

A present looks spontaneous and generous, but underneath it quietly opens an account. It ties two people together with a thin thread of debt, and that thread is more or less what we call a relationship. Once you start seeing gifts this way, my two cultures stop contradicting each other.

In Switzerland, the small gift you bring your host works more like a settlement than a real gift. You arrive, you hand it over, you enjoy the evening, and the account that dinner opened is closed before you reach your car. You leave owing nothing, and nothing is owed to you. The relationship is respected, but the books are balanced quickly.

In Mauritania, the opposite is the whole point. The host overwhelms you precisely so that the account stays open. You leave owing something, and the debt is never meant to be cleared because the open debt is the bond itself. We do not settle accounts with the people we love. We keep them open on purpose, for life.

Another anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins, gave these two habits names that I keep coming back to. He called the first balanced reciprocity, a fair, roughly equal exchange that settles on the spot, like the box of chocolates you carry to dinner. He called the second generalized reciprocity, where you give freely, keep no ledger, and trust that over a lifetime it all comes back around. The Swiss way is balanced reciprocity, while Mauritania is generalized reciprocity. And nowhere do you see that more clearly than in our wedding gifts.

The Tagged Veil

When we give a wedding gift in Mauritania, it is usually camels, money, jewellery, perfume, or melhfas, the long, brilliantly coloured cloth our women wrap themselves in. A bride might receive a dozen melhfas from a single friend, cousin, or relative. Now multiply that by everyone who comes: every friend, every cousin, every aunt, every neighbour, each one arriving with their own stack.

I have attended weddings in my own family where I saw the garden outside filled with camels. When I walked into the bride's room, the gifts had simply taken over. Hundreds of bottles of perfume, thousands of veils, presents piled from floor to ceiling until there was barely space left to step inside. You stand in the doorway and cannot quite believe that a single marriage produced all of it. And this is completely normal.

The problem is that nobody actually needs five hundred melhfas, let alone a whole room full of them. Some are not your colour, others are not your taste. So what happens to them? You do not throw them away, and you do not wear them either. You put them away in a closet that I call the gift warehouse. Because when your own turn comes, when the next cousin gets married six months later, you open that drawer, take out a melhfa, and send it straight back out into the world.

This system extends far beyond weddings. Gifts are exchanged for births, promotions, travel, religious celebrations, and countless other occasions. Imagine the number of melhfas circulating through the country at any given moment. Between all these families and friends, I am fairly sure the melhfa moves faster than any stock on Wall Street.

For years I have wanted to sew a tiny GPS tracker into a single melhfa and release it into the system, the way scientists tag a migratory bird, just to see where it goes. How many weddings would it attend? How many drawers would it sleep in, and for how long, before being passed along again? I never did it, for obvious reasons, but I would bet everything I own on the result. In a country where everyone knows everyone, that veil comes home. Sooner or later it completes the loop and lands back on me, perhaps at my own wedding, hidden somewhere inside another stack of ten.

And that silly fantasy is, by accident, the whole theory. Mauss wrote that in a gift economy the object never completely becomes yours. It stays in motion. It carries an obligation to move on. My melhfa works less like something I own and more like a currency, and like all currency it is built to circulate rather than to be hoarded. Nobody is offended when a gift is re-gifted because everyone is running the exact same drawer. We are all just temporary keepers of the same travelling cloth.

So when I think back to my aunt laughing at the idea of bringing food to a meal someone else has prepared, I understand now what she was really laughing at. Not the Swiss themselves, but the strangeness of closing an account you could have left open.

The Swiss bring a small gift so that nobody owes anybody anything. We bring nothing and overwhelm each other instead, precisely so that everyone keeps owing everyone else, forever. One culture works to protect you from debt, while the other turns that same debt into the very thing that holds people together. The travelling veil, passed from drawer to drawer across a whole country, is simply that thread made visible.

It is a beautiful system, and for most of our history it worked. Mauss explained why gifts create social bonds, and Sahlins went a step further. He argued that generalized reciprocity, the kind where nobody keeps score and debts remain open indefinitely, works best in small communities. It works when everyone knows everyone else, when today's gift can be repaid years later because the relationship never disappears.

And for most of our history, that was exactly our world. We lived in small nomadic groups and villages. The circle was limited. The people you helped were the same people who would one day help your children. An obligation could remain open for years because nobody was going anywhere.

Then we moved to the city. The community didn't just grow, it exploded. A few hundred familiar faces became thousands of people. But the culture didn't change with the address, and we kept giving as if the world were still small and closed.

Except now the circle is no longer just your tribe. It is your tribe, plus your colleagues, plus your neighbours, plus distant relatives, plus everyone you vaguely know from school, work, or the city. Every wedding, every birth, every promotion, every funeral creates another obligation. You keep paying into a pool that has quietly grown too large to ever pay you back. So we became, as a good friend of mine once described us, a society of unsettled accounts.

A whole country giving to others, living for others, and maintaining rules that made perfect sense in the desert but are much harder to sustain in a modern city. Many families end up borrowing money to finance weddings, gifts, ceremonies, and obligations. They spend years funding everyone's honour but their own comfort.

The travelling veil still circulates. The accounts are still open. The logic of generalized reciprocity is still alive. The question is whether a system designed for a village can survive a city.

So, which society is more generous? The two are not more or less generous than each other. They are generous about completely different things.

Switzerland is generous with your freedom. It hands you a gift, asks for nothing in return, and lets you leave light and unburdened. Mauritania is generous with itself. It gives until it hurts, and quietly ties you to everyone you know. One culture sets you free, the other refuses to let you go. Which of those counts as the bigger heart, I honestly cannot decide, and most days I am not sure I want to.

That is the harder, stranger half of the story, and it deserves its own piece. I'll tell it next time.