Margaret Visser has done it again. Author of The Rituals of Dinner , and The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church , she has now added The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude , an anthropological and philosophical study of gratitude, an examination of the gestures and rituals of thanks. Her latest is the book I’ve been hoping to write someday; now that Visser’s done it, why bother?

Visser recognizes that, for all the obsession with gifts and gift-giving since Mauss, nobody has paid much attention to the other end of the exchange, to gratitude and its obligations.  She notes too that Seneca’s de Beneficiis has been, quite astonishingly, all but ignored in contemporary discussions.  Her book ranges widely, covering verbal expressions of thanks, the reciprocities of giving and receiving, the meaning of gratitude and the emotional dimensions of thanks.  The book is cross-cultural, and Visser is as familiar with evolutionary studies of gratitude as she is with Shakespeare and (I was happy to find) Aquinas.

One illustration: Why do we wrap gifts?

In modern Western civilization, she says, we wrap gifts to distinguish them from commodities.  The gift is not part of an economic exchange, and the festive wrapping indicates that the gift is a different sort of thing.  Of course, it’s something of a ruse: The gift is usually bought, and even gift-wrapping may be purchased.  But we still want to mark off the differences between the world of contracts and the world of personal gifts.  Much depends on the wrapping.

But not as much as in Japan: “the entire culture of Japan has been analyzed in terms of wrapping.  Its systems of honorifics in speech has been described as ‘a kind of armour’ for the purposes of protection and distancing; woman are wrapping in several layers of gorgeous silk, then tied with an extravagant cummerbund like ‘human parcels’; houses and gardens are designed with depth and layering in mind.  Even sections of time are ‘wrapped’ in elaborate, formal beginnings and ending.”

Actual gift-wrapping is an art: “wrapping paper for presents given on auspicious occasions is decorated with an emblem called a noshi, a hexagonal tube of paper containing a piece of abalone shell, or a printed picture of this ancient symbol of purity.  The wrappings for gifts of condolence, on the other hand, should be printed with motifs such as lotus flowers.  There are many significant ways of folding the paper, often layer upon layer of it for the addition fo refinement.”  In contrast to Westerners, Japanese are not over-eager to “get to the secret” under the wrapping.  The surface is the meaning: “The ‘outside’ can be as important as - or even more important than - the ‘inside.’”