Community orchards and Hyde’s theory of the gift

Food scholars and advocates just have long asserted that commodification is one of the fundamental injustices of our dominant, industrial food system, as it stands in direct opposition to the notion of food as a human right. The informal social economy, with its concerns for solidarity, participation, service, and community building, offers examples of what de-commodification—that holy grail of food justice—might look like. This article reports on one particular informal social economy manifestation of decommodification, the community orchard. The author argues that decommodification must be seen not only as the absence of commodity production but as the presence of a different economy and underlying ethos – that of the gift. Lewis Hyde’s theory of the gift provides a lens through which to understand the profound ways that gifting changes community orchardists’ relationships to land, to food, to labour, and to those who co-produce and enjoy the fruit with them. Gift theory also furthers our understanding of food commons (of which the community orchard is but one example) as decommodified spaces. The author suggests that theorizing community orchards through the lens of gift theory provides insight into the values and mindsets that characterize non-commodity-oriented food production, which is a necessary step in the direction of innovation and the development of models that are more ecological, community-oriented, and just.

Gifts in Rites of Passage or gifts as rites of passage? Standing at the threshold between Van Gennep and Marcel Mauss

This article revisits Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites de passage from the point of view of gift theory. Gifts emerge as quasi-omnipresent and in association with all sorts as well as all phases of rites of passage in Van Gennep’s text. However, he never explicitly addresses nor problematizes this pervasive connection between gifts and rites of passage. In contrast with Marcel Mauss’s later Essai sur le don, moreover, Rites de passage tends to relate to gift-exchange in either mere instrumental, economic terms, or as a rather simple and efficient, binding and “unifying” mechanism, while displaying none of Mauss’s complementary attentiveness to the agonistic as well as more complex and contradictory features of gift processes. Yet, precisely the ideas of margin and liminality for which Van Gennep’s became best known, but which did not seep at all into his own treatment of gifts, may be drawn upon to approach gift interactions as ritual processes, perhaps even rites of passage, with liminal phases and anti-structural features of their own kind. Such an angle of analysis happens to converge with current approaches to the gift that have underscored the part it may play in fraught dynamics of mutual definition and recognition in human interactions. It might also suggest new ways of interpreting the deep, recurrent association between gifts and rites of passage, which Rites de passage unwittingly contributed to highlight, but still needs to be further explored and conceptualized.

Fourth Climb

This chapter begins the book’s analysis of gratitude. The fundamental religious attitude as the poem conveys it is life lived as experiencing a gift. Gratitude is the response this experience calls for. However, for gratitude to acquire value, it must be tested in various ways. To fall is to avoid gratitude. Three such avoidances—Satan’s, Adam’s, and Eve’s—are presented. A connection with contemporary gift-theory is also made in this chapter. Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion have claimed that the notion of the gift is paradoxical. Inspired by Mauss, both assert that gifts do not transcend the sphere of exchange. Milton’s Satan enables us to pinpoint their mistake.

Grace in Intra-action: Complementarity and the Noncircular Gift

Commonly, grace is defined as a free gift—in opposition to exchange. Key perspectives in twentieth century Gift theory link this particularly Protestant concept of grace with the individualism and commodification that a fossil fuel addicted capitalism depends on. It also remains unclear how this concept of grace can relate to an intra-actively exchangist world except by interruption or annihilation. This essay argues that while the ideal gift, free of exchange, must be challenged, space for uncapitalized returns and even losses in our gift-investments must be preserved. This particular tide grace as a non-circular gift can resist. Consequently, what are commonly held to be competing and incompatible concepts—unconditional grace and the exchangist, intra-active universe—are actually complementary disruptions of key economic practices contributing to climate change.

Gift theory among groups of users of crack and other drugs

This is an excerpt from a dissertation which sought to investigate the meaning of gift theory among groups of users of crack and of other drugs within the scenarios of use. The study has an ethnographic approach; participants were 13 persons who made use of crack and other drugs in the scenarios of use in the Municipality of Pelotas in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and the observations were made in 2013. The results evidenced that the users are victims of prejudice, but maintain the gift in their relationships and seek to help each other and show solidarity as a group. It was possible to share and demystify a highly specific and invisible way of life of the crack users; however, the changes will only begin to appear when more efficacious means of approach are found, with health policies for promoting closeness and links with this population, providing, above all, embracement of their needs, which at many times appeared to be neglected.

Geven en krijgen rond het tijdschrift De Beweging (1905-1919)

Patterns of Giving and Receiving: the Case of the Cultural Magazine De Beweging (1905-1919)The Dutch poet Albert Verwey was editor of the cultural magazine De Beweging between 1905-1919. This article uses gift theory to investigate the alliances he forged with his publishers, with his readers, and with the writers he worked with, and takes stock of the ways he tried to keep the insolvent magazine financially afloat. Verwey struggled to find a balance between his own agenda and the interests of his associates, and had to tread carefully as he appealed to their clemency and goodwill. Following Aafke Komter, who differentiates between four types of gift relationship, this article demonstrates that Verwey positioned himself predominantly within the modes of what Komter calls community sharing and authority ranking.