During Fall 2025, students in Dr. Mark Auslander’s “Global Studies and Cross Cultural Analysis” (Anth 205), at the University of Southern California’s Capital Campus (Washington DC) pursued research projects on objects of exchange (primarily international exchange) that have come to rest in the nation’s capital. As a class, we have been especially interested in how social and cultural relations are produced through the exchange of material objects (or in some instances, the exchange of non-human animals) that bind together distant persons and communities, in some cases in relations of general equality and in other instances in hierarchical relations of domination or subordination. Many, although not all of the exchange media in question came to DC because its status as the seat of national government, and are tokens of international diplomatic relations between the United States and foreign governments (or in some cases, international communities that acted outside of the rubric of nation-state systems per se.). We have been interested in the dynamics of full gifts, in which ownership was permanently transferred, in loans, and in commodities, as well as exchanges that are difficult to characterize as one thing or the other.
Our point of departure is Marcel Mauss’ foundational work of anthropology, The Gift (1923-25), in which he famously argues that social relations between similar or dissimilar social groups are built up through exchange processes. In small scale, pre-capitalist societies the gift process functions as a “total social fact” that infuses all significant aspects of the social universe. Gifts are characterized, across the great range of human cultures, by three core requirements: the obligation to give, the obligation to acknowledge the gift, and the obligation to reciprocate (nearly always, to reciprocate with an object that is different from the original gift, but usually of roughly the same value as the original gift). Gifts can bind together persons and collectivities in egalitarian ways, or in ways that are ranked or socially stratified. As the Inuit proverb has it, “As whips make dogs, gifts make slaves.” Gifts are complex bridges between donors and recipients, embodying the spirit of their origin points and the destination points, and signifying the often fraught relationships between gift-givers and gift-receivers. We have been fascinated by the extent to which in modern, capitalist social worlds, including internationally, gifts continue to create, maintain, or transform human social relationships, especially across great distance and over extended periods of time. How do objects, in motion and in rest, help to shape people’s memories of the past and their visions of the future?
Working in small research groups, the students faced challenges during the semester. The longest Federal Shutdown in US history meant that access to key Federal institutions, including the Smithsonian museums, the National Archives and the Library of Congress we limited or restricted. We also operated during a period of the federalization of law enforcement in the District of Columbia, as basic questions about law, community, and the shape of democracy itself were being actively contested and debated.
The projects also reflect the students’ deep interest in issues of power, inequality, poverty and social struggle, which characterized all the classes they took at the Capital Campus (with Drs. Lessersohn, Jacobs, Dinneny, and Chastain, as well as Dr. Auslander) . During the semester we engaged directly with people and communities in precarious situations, including incarceration, post-incarceration, housing insecurity, and food insecurity. Throughout, we gave serious attention to artistic and cultural creativity under extremely difficult circumstances.
The students, pursuing their first semester as University of Southern California students in Washington D.C. before relocating to Los Angeles, thus had a front row seat to history in the making. These projects reflect their experiences here in DC during a pivotal four months in the nation’s history.
Student group research projects include:
–The international loans of giant pandas from the People’s Republic of China to the National Zoo from 1972 onward
-Gift objects within the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate
Conception
–The loan during the Kennedy Administration of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris France to the National Gallery of Art
–The proposed gift of a 747 Jumbo Jet from Quatar to the White House
–The Resolute desk (given by Queen Victoria) in 1879
–The canoe given to the Smithsonian Institution by Queen Kapi’olani of Hawaii
–The Netherlands Carillon in Arlington Virginia, given by the people of the Netherlands to the people of the United States
–The International Friendship Doll exchange between Japan and the United States (1926-1927)
–The Trojan archaeological artifacts given by Heinrich Schlieman’s widow to the Smithsonian Institution
–The gift of Cherry Blossom Trees from Japan and the City of Tokyo to Washington DC
–Gifts between the Japanese Shogunate and the crew of Commodore Matthew Perry’s Black Ships in the 1850s
Please share your questions, your reflections on these research projects, and suggestions for further research with Prof. Mark Auslander at markauslander at icloud.com
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Mark Auslander 