In the last piece I asked which culture is more generous, Switzerland or Mauritania, and answered it the anthropologist's way: with Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, and the quiet debts folded into every gift. This is the harder, stranger half of that story, and the strangest proof I know that a gift is never really free. It begins with a veil that never stops moving.
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 of my aunt back home laughing at the very 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.
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