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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …