@book{hyde1999gift,
title={The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property},
author={Hyde, L.},
isbn={9780099273226},
series={A Vintage original},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=GPrwAAAAMAAJ},
year={1999},
publisher={Vintage}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
The way we treat a thing can sometimes change its nature. It may be possible to destroy a work of art by converting it into a pure commodity.
Every modern artist who has chosen to labor with a gift must sooner or later wonder how he or she is to survive in a society dominated by market exchange. Where commerce is exclusively a traffic in merchandise, the gifted cannot enter into the give-and-take that ensures the livelihood of their spirit.
A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.
Gift economies tend to be marked by three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate. Gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended families, small villages, close-knit communities, brotherhoods and, of course, of tribes.
Indian giver: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. If it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead. It is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party.
A man who owns a thing is naturally expected to share it, to distribute it, to be its trustee and dispenser.
Where someone manages to commercialize a tribe’s gift relationships the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed.
Widening the study of ecology to include man means to look at ourselves as a part of nature again, not its lord. What nature gives to us is influenced by what we give to nature. The circle of gifts enters the cycles of nature and, in so doing, manages not to interrupt them and not to put man on the outside.
The forest’s abundance is in fact a consequence of man’s treating its wealth as a gift. Fertility is a gift from God, and in order for it to continue, its first fruits are returned to him as a return gift. The first salmon ceremony establishes a gift relationship with nature, a formal give-and-take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase.
Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Under the assumptions of exchange trade, property is plagued by entropy and wealth can become scarce even as it increases. A commodity is truly “used up” when it is sold because nothing about the exchange assures its return. Because the sale removes it from the circle, it wastes it, no matter the price.
If it brings the group together, the gift increases in worth immediately upon its first circulation, and then, like a faithful lover, continues to grow through constancy.
The increase is the real gift in those cases in which the gift-object is sacrificed, for the increase continues despite (even because of) that loss; it is the constant in the cycle, because it is not consumed in use.
In gift exchange it, the increase, stays in motion and follows the object, while in commodity exchange it stays behind as profit.
Where the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of gift exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling.
A gift, when it moves across the boundary, either stops being a gift or else abolishes the boundary. A commodity can cross the line without any change in its nature; moreover, its exchange will often establish a boundary where none previously existed (as, for example, in the sale of a necessity to a friend). A commodity can cross the line without any change in its nature; moreover, its exchange will often establish a boundary where none previously existed (as, for example, in the sale of a necessity to a friend).
“The Yakut refused to believe,” writes an anthropologist, “that somewhere in the world people could die of hunger, when it was so easy to go and share a neighbor’s meal.”
If we take the synthetic power of gifts, which establish and maintain the bonds of affection between friends, lovers, and comrades, and if we add to these a circulation wider than a binary give-and-take, we shall soon derive society, or at least those societies— family, guild, fraternity, sorority, band, community— that cohere through faithfulness and gratitude. Gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability.
Cash is a medium of foreign exchange, as it were, because unlike a gift (and unlike status) it does not lose its value when it moves beyond the boundary of the community.
Ideas do not circulate freely when they are treated as commodities. In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.
When emotional ties are the glue that holds a community together, its size has an upper limit. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other’s eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact.
The anarchist begins with the assumption of man’s good nature, contending that law itself is a “cause” of crime. There are many connections between anarchist theory and gift exchange as an economy— both assume that man is generous, or at least cooperative, “in nature”; both shun centralized power; both are best fitted to small groups and loose federations; both rely on contracts of the heart over codified contract, and so on.
Identity is neither “yours” nor “mine,” but comes of a communion with the world. “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Identity is specific, sexed, time-bound, mortal. It is transitory, drawn together and then dispersed. The self is more enduring, standing apart from “the pulling and hauling.”
Some knowledge cannot survive abstraction, and to preserve this knowledge we must have art.
Ford tested three different devices that would tend to prevent the rupturing of the tank. One would have cost 1, another around 5, and the third, $ 11. In the end, however, Ford decided that benefits did not justify costs, and no safety feature was added to the vehicle. Between 1971, when the Pinto was introduced, and 1977, when the magazine Mother Jones printed Dowie’s analysis of the case, at least five hundred people burned to death in Pinto crashes. In order to apply a cost-benefit analysis to a situation in which the core equation is “cost of safety parts versus cost of lives lost,” one must first put a price on life. As the costs so clearly exceed the benefits, the decision was made not to spend money on the safety feature.
Gifts have become associated with community and with being obliged to others, while commodities are associated with alienation and freedom. We have called those nations known for their commodities “the free world.” The phrase doesn’t seem to refer to political freedoms; it indicates that the dominant form of exchange in these lands does not bind the individual in any way— to his family, to his community, or to the state.
More highlights:
https://archive.org/download/elopio-kindle-highlights/the_gift.html
