Gift Commons

Discussion

Gift Commons: The Inalienability of Social and Natural Being

James Quilligan:

"The years 800-200 BCE were a period of enormous transformation across ancient China, India, Persia, Palestine and Greece. As German philosopher Karl Jaspers marveled, the Axial Age was a time of great upheaval in many realms—scientific, intellectual, political, agricultural, cultural, philosophical and spiritual. These revolutionary dynamics also led to the introduction of coinage, widening trade, the increasing authority of the state and the enclosure of common areas, resulting in the removal of people from their lands and means of subsistence. All of this destroyed the social cohesion of earlier gift cultures and the customary practices that were deeply woven into the lives of these people.

Some historians and free market theorists have questioned the importance—and even the existence—of gift economies. It’s true that documentation of gift cultures is tricky since most of them didn’t leave records. After all, the advent of writing was also the advent of post-gift cultures. Still, there is a large body of literature on gift economies in history. Max Weber and others explored the pre-market cultures of India, China and Judaism, many of which were gift-based. Anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss cited dozens of cultures which practiced gift exchange and our understanding of gift-giving in contemporary indigenous cultures is also extensive. Based on the research of evolutionary biologists, geneticists and neurologists, the gift economy appears to be as old as humanity itself. As an expression of spontaneous social organization— whether in fending off the harsh elements and dangerous predators or in providing food and shelter for the family and clan—informal gift commons of subsistence and exchange were clearly practiced long before the development of categorical thinking, formal laws and state institutions. So there is no point in getting lost in the empirical data about the existence of gift cultures. Communities have always been guided by presuppositions and beliefs. Every community sees individual actions within a larger social whole of ideas, norms and practices—whether real or ideal —and it is this shared understanding that allows people to develop their own social realities and thereby create value. The following overview of gift economies should be viewed in this light.

The intent is not to marshal evidence but to get to the essence of the gift economy, both real and ideal.

A gift economy requires at least three people and the gift must circulate among them. A receiver gives a gift to the third party, rather than returning the gift to the original giver. Whatever one is given should not be kept but given away again—or if it is kept or consumed, then something of equal value should be passed on. One can neither own a gift in isolation nor give a gift with the expectation of reciprocal benefit. A different set of dynamics is at work. The recipient of a gift is in an open, attentive relationship with others, which creates a kind of existential emptiness. This involves experiencing a deep identity with the gift itself, and thereby with the donor and the next person to whom the gift will be given.

Mauss believed that when gifts are given away they hold a lingering element of the personality of the giver, which suggests that gift-giving is not an inalienable process. But this cannot be universally true. Sharing needn’t involve personal sentiment or attachment. When we feel what others are feeling, we experience their being. Through empathy and intersubjectivity, one’s own experiences and the experiences of others flow together in the same field without distinction. Since awareness of the self is not experienced as a separation from others, gift exchange does not take place between us as separate selves. Indeed, personal concern with the feelings, wishes and needs of other people arises, not through our individuality as isolated entities, but because each of us is a physically instantiated self in a living body, sharing experiences with (and through) the bodies of others and the environment where we live. This is what makes the social benefit of gift exchange more valuable than its benefit to a single individual. At the same time, the common being of the community, experienced through the exchange of gifts with other embodied individuals, does not distinguish this increase in social benefit from the natural growth of living things. The exchange of gifts is identified both with social and natural growth through fertility, vitality, liveliness, worth, abundance and creative potential for action—all of which enhance a giver’s capacities for production, the significance of the gift through its circulation, and the realization of community goodwill, well-being and social cohesion. This co-mingling of being with growth allows each member of the community to be nourished by a wholeness of spirit and power—of presence and meaning—that is greater than one’s own. It is a form of shared experience that is irreducible to any other kind and irredeemable on any other terms." (kosmosjournal.org | fall.winter 2011 40)