Friend or foe? Gift-giving as read in Ode 64 "Mugua" 木瓜, "Kongzi shilun" 孔子詩論 and related commentaries

As is the case of many cultures, gift-giving has been a social and political institution in China since antiquity, a subject that has often been studied through retracing historical texts and archaeological finds. Instead of reconstructing socio-anthropological models from episodes of stately presentations and ritualized giving, this paper turns its attention to early Chinese poetry and commentaries that depict gift-giving in pre-imperial China. Through reading Mao Ode 64 "Mugua" 木瓜, one of the oldest Chinese poems thematizing gift-giving, and related commentaries in the recovered bamboo text "Kongzi shilun" 孔子詩論 (c. 300 BCE) purported to be Confucius' explication of the Odes, the two texts are found to inform each other hermeneutically, uncovering different layers of meaning, the most popular of which, according to the commentarial tradition, ascribes the practice of gift-giving to goodwill gestures. But through a "deconstructive" reading of the ode and "Kongzi shilun", gift-giving can be read as a hostile rather than a friendly act, a phenomenon that is supported by minority views and modern socio-anthropological theories of gift-giving.