Here is a brief interlude from “The Gift” to give a real life case of how the gift theory at work.
Susan Kerr convened a session at the Giving Conference in Chicago on July 10 on the book “The Gift.” I attended the session because of a conversation we had during which she pulled out a copy of the book and read some passages about the gift creating bonds and commodities creating boundaries.
I was so taken with the book that Jill Perkins gave me her copy. I took that copy, cracked it open on the el train heading to O’Hare airport on July 12. On the flight home I read most of the first part of the book. I went directly from my home to Cortes Island to spend a week with my family and in-laws, one of whom, Peter Frost, was in the process of writing a chapter for a soon-to-be-published organizational handbook based on his book “Toxic Emotions At Work.” I tell him about “The Gift,” he cracks it open and gets taken with the ideas of gifts as bonding, commodities as bounding. Within a day he includes the line “Compassion is a gift, not a commodity (Hyde 1979)” at the conclusion of the handbook, which gets into the draft and submitted to his editors on July 18.
Within a week of this marvelous conversation, Susan’s gift to me has made it from Chicago to Cortes Island to some editorial office in New York where it becomes a small part of a widely distributed, soon to be published organizational management handbook.
Money hasn’t changed hands. None of us have engaged in any kind of transaction around this idea. As a result, the whole thing flowed quickly and effectively and graciously around North America and we’re all just a little bit closer.
The Homeless World Cup of Soccer is about to start this week. The tournament brings together national teams from around the world composed entirely of homeless soccer players. Alongside the tournament are meeting on strategies to combat homelessness.
At an Aboriginal youth gathering I was at yesterday, this grabbed a little bit of attention. Some ideas got kicked around, including a British Columbia Aboriginal homeless soccer tournament and maybe the entry of a First Nations team in the 2005 Homeless World Cup in New York.
Check the rules section of the website, where you will find how soccer has been modified to fit in a street for this tournament. Has someone nominated this crowd for some kind of Innovative Social Practice award yet?
Chapter three of “The Gift” is called “The Labor of Gratitude.” In it Hyde examines the nature of the transformative gift, the gift that works a transformation in the recipient. These kinds of gifts are very close to my heart, for they include teachings (received from Elders, mentors and other teachers) and, in a purely prosaic context, the kind of information received from people in processes like stakeholder consultations and organizational change initiatives.
Here’s Hyde:
In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to “take,” the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is an act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won’t feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness.
This is wonderful way to capture what happens when Elders pass on teachings. We receive them in a sense as a challenge and an invitation to raise our own standards to the standards outlined in the teaching. We are also invited to find our own way of achieving the similarity that Hyde speaks of. The very best teachers, in my experience, give us something to aspire to and nurture our own discovery of the path to similarity. The labor of gratitude, the work of becoming transformed by the gift of the teaching, is ours alone. And if you have ever been a teacher, you will recognize the gift that a student gives you when she responds to your teaching by intentionally incorporating it into her life.
I think that these kinds of gifts are actually widely available to us. I do a lot of work with groups who are asking other groups for their opinions, input or collaboration. I facilitate consultation processes where stakeholder are asked for their ideas on things like policy development. I work with organizations who are creating processes to work with employees, clients and other stakeholders to effect organizational change. I work with communities that are seeking to involve more citizens in their decision making.
In every case I make a point of informing my clients that the processes we are crafting will work only if people show up and give to us willingly. (The first principles of Open Space Technology is “whoever comes is the right people” acknowledging those who show up to offer and contribute). We have an obligation to treat these people as teachers and to treat their contributions as gifts. Consultation processes fail without this depth of relationship, because if the relationship is commodified, people feel taken advantage of.
Advice given by people who are usually volunteering their time and effort, is an unrepayable gift. The only proper way to honour it is to undertake the labour of gratitude that creates a similarity between consulter and consultee. And if the fruit of that labour is not transformation, then we have approached people dishonestly and bought their trust, which is a betrayal of that trust.
This has huge implications in organizations and communities. Imagine if everyone was engaged in a way that honoured the gifts they have to offer. Imagine if people in power established a reciprocal gifting relationship with citizens, recognizing that people who contribute are doing so out of a place that cannot be quantified, but must instead be honoured with the gifts of support and connection that people in power can offer.
Hyde’s idea of the labour of gratitude gives me some nice language to deepen my own understanding of these processes.
James Wilson returning the first salmon to the sea
In Chapter two of the “The Gift” Hyde writes about how the benefits which arise from a gift must remain gifts in themselves if the gift’s power is to continue. He looks at the increase of gifts in three ways: natural, spiritual and social.
Honouring gifts from the natural world, such as in the First Salmon Ceremony practiced by the coastal First Nations here on the west coast depend our relationship with the natural world, and place us in a position of recipient of natural bounty. To treat this bounty as anything other than a gift endangers its long term sustainability
Gifts of the spirit increase beyond the life of the gift’s embodiment. It is the gift’s life that endures beyond the actual embodiment of the gift; a spirit of generosity.
The social increase of gifts happen when the circulation of gifts creates community out of individual expressions of goodwill. Blogging is a little like this. So is the community that has formed around people who have been given a copy of the “The Gift!”
Here is another interesting quote from “The Gift” which extends the ideas about what happens when gifts move:
Where…the market alone rules and particularly where 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. For where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to participate in those “wider spirits” i just spoke of – unable to enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community out of the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition. Only when the increase of gifts moves with the gift may the accumulated wealth of our spirit continue to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality that is beyond his or her solitary powers.
— pp. 38-9
Sending our own gifts out into a circle and receiving their return from another source is essentially a very good working definition of “community building.”
At the Giving Conference in Chicago, Susan Kerr turned me on to “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” by Lewis Hyde. Despite the fact that it is now out of print, it seems that lots of people at the conference knew this book (Phil Cubeta: “This is one of my favourite books of all time!”) Jill Perkins (no blog yet — wait until she moves to London) gave me her copy, which had been languishing in a box since her undergraduate days, the relic of an arts course that simply got in the way of her opening up a new branch of quantum chromodynamics (but, boy, that’s a whole other story).
At any rate, this is an amazing book, divided into two parts. The first part outlines a theory of gifts and the second part looks at the poetry of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound as an aesthetic of gift.
I’m reading this book fairly closely, and I’ll post chunks from it as we go along. The first chapter, called “Some Food We Could Not Eat” posits the theory that gifts are always used, consumed or eaten and that in this consumption of the gift, the spirit of the thing is what circulates. When gifts are used, they are not used up but they become more abundant. Gifts which are converted to capital die as gifts, and the spirit that has circulated with them dies as well.
But when gifts are continuously in motion, especially within a society that has a gift economy, marvelous things happen:
The gift moves towards the empty place. As it turns in its circle, it turns towards him who has been empty handed the longest and if someone appears whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves towards him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us. Societal nature abhors a vacuum. Counsels Meister Eckhart the mystic: “Let us borrow empty vessels.” The gift finds that man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own.”
More to come.
PS..I meant to also point to the proceedings from Susan’s session at the conference, where the book and I made our formal introduction