scholarly journals The Gift Exchange in the Social Networks of Silicon Valley

2003 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 120-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Ferrary
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift

Rembrandt, Vermeer, and the Gift in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Dutch Art ◽  
Dutch Golden Age ◽  
Symbolic Economy ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Perspective

This book offers a new perspective on the art of the Dutch Golden Age by exploring the interaction between the gift's symbolic economy of reciprocity and obligation and the artistic culture of early modern Holland. Gifts of art were pervasive in seventeenth-century Europe and many Dutch artists, like their counterparts elsewhere, embraced gift giving to cultivate relations with patrons, art lovers, and other members of their social networks. Rembrandt also created distinctive works to function within a context of gift exchange, and both Rembrandt and Vermeer engaged the ethics of the gift to identify their creative labor as motivated by what contemporaries called a love of art

Token Salaries and Social Answers in Work Relations in Africa

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
Massimo Repetti
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
Work Relations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Strength Of Weak Ties ◽  
Popular Economy ◽  
Client Relations ◽  
Analysis Of Social Networks

In Dakar, faced with crisis and uncertainty, social answers begin to appear. Only those having a supportive social network could find a place in the labour's market. The observation of the daily routine of any of Dakarís micro-businesses and its social aspects, reveals the wide area of interference that exists between waged worker and the relation networks with family and relatives, ethnic groups and Muslim brotherhoods. The urban economy is supported by a network of family, alliance, and client relations. The overlap existing between waged and unwaged work can be understood only by looking closely at the network of social ties present outside the production site. Switching from the analysis of urban work relationships in Africa to the analysis of social networks is almost spontaneous, because a system of relational actions and strategies grows around the figure of the worker. The importance of the “strength of weak ties” in procuring employment is as a whole confirmed, but African sociability creates an intense inter-network relational interchange. Dakarís urban space feeds a “popular economy” where social networks and the gift-giving logic co-exist with market economy. This economy utilise different wage embryos or tokens salaries for each of the social players.

Religious Ethics, Gift Exchange and Capitalism

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCEL HENAFF
Keyword(s):  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Religious Ethics ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spirit Of Capitalism ◽  
Catholic Ethic

This study intends to reread Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with the following question in mind: where is the Catholic ethic with respect to “the spirit of capitalism”? The few short comments that Weber makes on this topic nevertheless suggest an interesting notion which he had developed in earlier texts, i.e., the “religious ethic of brotherhood”. I intend to show here that this notion could be further illuminated by the findings of the anthropology of gift giving since Marcel Mauss. This would enable us to understand how the problem of grace, so central to the debate between Protestants and Catholics, is linked to the history of the transformations in the gift giving practices; we will also discover that this problem was at the origin of the schism. While such a hypothesis leads to a different reading of Weber, it is confirmed by a work of the historian B. Clavero which brings out the complex links that existed in 16th century Catholic Spain between the order of business and that of charity. Besides the antagonism that has marked the two Christian traditions in the West, what seems to be at issue is the way in which economic practices weight on the social bond. These questions invite us to rethink the connections between them.

Gift-giving in the great traditions: the case of donations to monasteries in the medieval West

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana F. Silber
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Dynamics ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Religious Orientations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Impact

Focusing upon donations to monasteries in the medieval Western world, this paper expands upon extant discussions of religious gift-giving in the ‘great traditions’ , and of its relation to more archaic forms of gift-exchange, hitherto largely based on non-Western and mostly Asian anthropological material. While displaying many of the social functions familiarly associated with the gift in archaic or primitive societies, donations to monasteries are shown to have also entailed a process of immobilisation of wealth not extant in the gift circuit of ‘simpler’ societies. While donations to monasteries clearly attested to the impact of otber-wordly religious orientations, they also entailed a range of symbolic dynamics very different from, and even incompatible with, those analysed by Jonathan Parry with regard to the other-wordly ‘pure’ gift. The paper then brings into relief the precise constellation of ideological ‘gift-theory’, socio-economic ‘gift-circuit’, and macrosocietal context, which enabled this specific variant of the gift-mechanism to operate as a ‘total’ social phenomenon in the two senses of that term suggested, though not clearly distinguished and equally not developed, in Mauss’ pathbreaking essay on the gift.

The Gift Illusion

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
Ilya T. Kasavin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Distributed Knowledge ◽  
Evaluation Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Scientific Infrastructure ◽  
Distributed Knowledge Systems

The epitome of modern scientific infrastructure and distributed knowledge systems is scientific social networks (NSS). Their number, as well as the number of their users, is constantly growing and reaches millions. They are in demand, and, therefore, perform significant social functions. It is still unclear what their own nature is, what their functions are and how they perform and, finally, what are the consequences of their integration with the social institute of science. Along with the obvious advantages, the NSS creates clear cultural dissonances and challenges that change the usual ways of communication. There is already enough evidence that the NSS not only bring about positive change, but also face rejection. Science policy, the scientist's moral code, the scientific citation and evaluation systems are all affected by the activities of the NSS and become an important subject matter of science and technology studies (STS). This text is a response to the article “Social Networks for Researchers on the Internet: A New Sociality?” by S.V. Shibarshina.

Women's Worth and Wedding Gift Exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907–89

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara M. Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Gift Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Pastoral Economy

Wedding gift exchange from the turn of the century to the present has served as a medium through which women in the Maradi valley of Niger could assert their worth, create social ties and respond to a shifting political economy. Rather than exploring the implications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘dowry’ in isolation, this paper sees wedding prestations as an ongoing and evolving dialogue in which women's roles and worth are contested, the nature of wealth is redefined and the terms of marriage are negotiated. The crisis in domestic labor which arose with the decline of slavery in the early decades of the century gave rise to informal unions through which the labor of junior women could be controlled. Women responded to these informal marriages by staging highly visible ceremonies which established the worth and standing of the bride. With the growth of an increasingly urban-centered commercial and bureaucratic economy, women have been drawn into a desperate ‘search for money’ to continue to meet their obligations in the gift economy. While the outward form of wedding gift exchange appears unchanged, the importance of cash to the acquisition of goods, services, and productive resources has radically altered both the content and the significance of gift exchange. Gifts no longer embody wealth in people derived from ability within an agro-pastoral economy. Instead they reveal the giver's access to the resources of the state and the market. Women's eroding position within the economy since 1950 has drawn them further and further into gift exchange, both in order to build a safety net in the form of exchange value stored in a woman's dowry and to secure the social ties which can ensure their continued access to increasingly contested resources.

The (anti-)social gift? Mauss’s paradox and the triad of the gift

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-648
Author(s):  
Seung Cheol Lee
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift

Marcel Mauss’s discussion of the gift relies on a paradox: although gift-giving is the foundational act of building a society, in order for a gift to be circulated, society must be always-already presupposed so that the gift can reach and be recognized by its destination. This article focuses on how this paradox has been addressed in anthropological and philosophical studies of the gift, by reviewing work by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier and Jacques Derrida. By illuminating each position through the lens of the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, I first show how Lévi-Strauss and Godelier, respectively, focus on the symbolic and imaginary economies of the gift and how their perspectives are still bound by Mauss’s paradox in assuming the totality of society as the ultimate basis of gift exchange. I then read Derrida’s critique of Mauss as an attempt to explore the space for the aneconomic that grounds but simultaneously threatens the symbolic and imaginary economies of society. In doing so, I argue that the gift always includes the effaceable negativity and uncertainty that serve as the condition of (im)possibility for the social.

The value, costs, and meaning of transnational migration in rural Oaxaca, Mexico

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey H. Cohen ◽  
Bernardo Rios ◽  
Lise Byars
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Southern Mexico ◽  
Shared Identity ◽  
The Social

Rural Oaxacan migrants are defined as quintessential transnational movers, people who access rich social networks as they move between rural hometowns in southern Mexico and the urban centers of southern California.  The social and cultural ties that characterize Oaxacan movers are critical to successful migrations, lead to jobs and create a sense of belonging and shared identity.  Nevertheless, migration has socio-cultural, economic and psychological costs.  To move the discussion away from a framework that emphasizes the positive transnational qualities of movement we focus on the costs of migration for Oaxacans from the state’s central valleys and Sierra regions.   

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