scholarly journals Movement, space and the logic of the gift: Reflections on Milbank and the African religious archive

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sepetla Molapo

This article reflects on how the contemporary relationship between movement and space can be reversed so that movement regains priority over space in the experience of life. Its key argument is that movement has potential to take priority over space but only via the logic of the gift. The logic of the gift has potential to undermine the privilege colonial modernity accords to space over movement because its conception of exchange challenges exchange as a construct of economic logic central to the experience of modernity. The article focuses on the gift as is found in the work of John Milbank and the African religious archive. It tries to show that along with Milbank’s imagination of the gift, the gift as a construct of the African religious archive stands to contribute in the fight against the continuing alienation brought about by the project of modernity. This is because it imagines the sacred dimension primarily via the terrain of the family.Contribution: This article contributes to a reading of capitalism via the logic of the gift as a construct of the African religious archive and does so by borrowing from the work of theologians. In doing so, it tries to present a different way of thinking about gift giving in relation to the African religious expression, which has until the recent past been dominated by anthropologists.

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisia Snyder

Sarah Scott's eighteenth-century novel Millenium Hall canvasses the role of gift-giving in the dynamics heteronormative-domestic, economic, and spiritual relationships. The pharmakon of the gift plays a central role in Scott's understanding of philanthropy, and the construction of her female-inhabited, female-run utopia. This article's principle occupation is to show that all instances of gift-giving in Millenium Hall create power-imbalances between the superior giver and the inferior receiver; however, Sarah Scott's female utopia constructs the most preferable type of subservience.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zell

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


2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (9) ◽  
pp. 1539-1547 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Tigreros ◽  
Monica A. Mowery ◽  
Sara M. Lewis

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
V. O. Riadinska ◽  
Yu. O. Kostenko

The article analyzes the relationship between the concepts of “gift” and “gift-giving” as categories of modern legislation of Ukraine. It is noted that although the etymological meaning of the words “gift” and “giftgiving” is equal, the legislator uses these concepts as different categories; in various normative acts either gives them different definitions or operates with these two categories as synonyms. Comparing the signs of a gift and a gift-giving, it is determined that a gift can be provided both free of charge and for a fee, but at a price lower than the minimum market price. In the context of gift and gift-giving features, the ratios of “minimum market price” and “symbolic amount” are investigated. It is justified that the minimum market price is less than the market price, but it takes into account the economic costs of production and sale of goods and the minimum profit, while the symbolic price is formed by the prevailing in the society and concerns the free transfer of things. The ratio of “gift” and “gift-giving” categories in the civil and anticorruption legislation is formulated and its features are defined: 1) the concept of “gift-giving” (Civil Code of Ukraine) is narrower than the concept of “gift” (Law of Ukraine “On Prevention of Corruption”); 2) the main feature of giving is that the gift is free of charge, and the “gift” may be given at a price lower than the minimum market price, while the “symbolic fee” is a category that differs from the category of “price lower than the minimum market price”; 3) the decision to accept “gift-giving” depends on the person who is being presented, but the special subject can accept “gift” only if he or she is permitted by the anti-corruption legislation and is obliged to refuse it and implement a set of appropriate measures in case he or she is prohibited or restricted; 4) the categories “gift-giving” and “gift” are not identical, but when a special subject receives “gifts” from close people, they are “gift-giving”. Keywords: gift, gift-giving, anti-corruption legislation, special subject, minimum market price.


Illuminatio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-209
Author(s):  
Ugo Vlaisavljević

The article considers two customs traditionally followed by Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina during Eid Al-Aḍḥā (‘Festival of Sacrifice’ or Kurban Bayram). These are, first, giving a small amount of money, so-called bayramlık, to children as a reward or gift in return for handing out Qurbani meat to neighbors, and, second, giving the meat to non-Muslims. The topic will be explored in the light of Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay on the gift, since Qurbani appears as a gift that identifies, marks and renews the social bonds not only of close relatives, but also of friends and neighbors. In this context too, we will meet what Jacques Derrida calls the aporia of the gift. The slaughtering of Qurbani animal is a true gift, precisely because it is an impossible gift. It may be considered as a giftless giving: although the sacrifice is unthinkable without the slaughtered animal, it cannot be a gift to God. However, after the human act of sacrifice is performed, it is God Who makes the gift to men - because He commands that the victim’s meat must be shared. It is then to be understood not as a returned gift, but as an act of God’s hospitality, which gives to men the very possibility of gift giving. It is argued that the two Bosnian customs draw their ultimate meaning from the divine hospitality vividly experienced in the ritual of sacrifice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 360-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
SoYon Rim ◽  
Kate E. Min ◽  
Peggy J. Liu ◽  
Tanya L. Chartrand ◽  
Yaacov Trope

Gift-giving is a common form of social exchange but little research has examined how different gift types affect the psychological distance between giver and recipient. We examined how two types of gifts influence recipients’ perceived psychological distance to the giver. Specifically, we compared desirable gifts focused on the quality of the gift with feasible gifts focused on the gift’s practicality or ease of use. We found that feasible (vs. desirable) gifts led recipients to feel psychologically closer to givers (Studies 1-4). Further clarifying the process by which receiving a desirable versus feasible gift affects perceived distance, when recipients were told that the giver focused on the gift’s practicality or ease of use (vs. the gift’s overall quality), while holding the specific features of the gifts constant, they felt closer to the gift-giver (Study 5). These results shed light on how different gifts can influence interpersonal relationships.


Author(s):  
Ana Anahory ◽  

In the 80’s, the situation after the reception of kantian philosophy was suddenly shaken by Jean-François Lyotard’s and Jacques Derrida’s approaches to the Critique of Judgement. These were so massively decisive that they reorganized the bounderies of modernity in projecting the Analytique of the sublime as the ground of legitimation of our aesthetical, ethical and political experience. For Lyotard, the sublime subject contained not only the necessary categories to think the avant-garde art but it could also offer kernels of resistance towards the political model of neocontractualism. Derrida changes the topic of negative representation of the impossible into the theorical coordinates of a new way of thinking such different themes as the hospitality, the responsibility, the justice, the decision, the gift or the death. In both authors, Kant becomes too close, so close that he is almost out of focus, especially regarding what can be unthinkable in his work.


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