Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:
And here we might step back a moment and consider that something of great weight may be going on here, with this matter of the morality of ordinary life, and with the word ‘grace’ in particular. For a word that is traditionally applied to the lord seems equally and perhaps more applicable to the peasant, one who is decorous, courtly even. Where does being civilized really reside? Where is ‘civilization’ to be found? The anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers was deeply interested in the concept of what he called grace in what he termed traditional societies. The subject of Pitt-Rivers’ anthropology was the peasants of twentieth-century Adalucian Spain, not its aristocrats. As he puts it, ‘grace is inspired by the notion of something over and above what is due, economically, legally, or morally; it is neither foreseeable, predictable by reasoning, nor subject to guarantee.’ It is the gift freely given, a sort of cousin to ‘honour’. As such it infuses peasants’ social relations. Rather than being based on the expectation of reciprocity, it is instead rooted in sacrifice, which is at the root of grace. What is involved is ‘an expression of friendship, respect, appreciation, love, which comes from the heart, not from a sense of obligation; as such, it is a vehicle of grace, and it can be returned, as it must be, only in the form of grace.’ What nullifies grace is the parasite, the witch, the sycophant, the usurer, the graceless ones of the world, big and small.
… We need to be aware that peasant societies are societies of the gift, not the commodity, like our societies. What is given should be given freely; that which is given without expectation of return feeds the giver again and again.