Not quite done with The Gift yet, although definitely slowing down. Chapter five of the book deals with the community that is created by gifts and goes into some interesting detail about the scientific community and the implications of gift exchange on the free market. We’ll save the free market piece for the next post. Right now I want to focus on something Hyde says that has applicability in the blogging world.
Hyde takes the view that “gift exchange at the level of the group offers equilibrium and coherence, a kind of anarchist stability…[T]he conversion of gifts to commodities will have the effect of fragmenting the group or even destroying it.”
From here, Hyde details the circulation of ideas as gifts that brings coherence to the scientific community. When those ideas are converted into commodities, when scientists go to work for the private sector, or publish text books, it creates a shunning from the community. There is an implicit understanding that ideas are shared freely, at conferences, through journals and so on. All of this allows science to proceed toward the collective human goal of understanding the universe. And here, Hyde enters some interesting territory about the emergence of a group mind:
…[T]he task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of “group mind” develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person…A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must “fit,” and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.
This is such a concise and elegant description of why blogging matters. I’m discovering the power of this from the follow up for the Giving Conference, which benefited tremendously from Phil’s insistence that bloggers be a key target audience for the invitation. There were bloggers there (myself included) who know little of philanthropy, but whose engagement with the ideas presented at the conference have ensured that the story has continued to be told, refined and developed.
I cannot conceive of ever planning a conference like this again where bloggers were not invited to be the voices of diversity and story that emerge and continue the spirit of the gathering.
Bloggers offer immense gifts of time, reflection, engagement with each other’s ideas. My own thinking gets continually pushed and stretched by reading others and trying to respond to them. This quality of gift exchange provides a beautiful and powerful foundation for the community of people who share ideas freely on a myriad of subject areas. When bloggers form communities, it is around the cohesion of those who contribute to each other’s thinking.
Last year I did a series of Open Space meetings for the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team, an Aboriginal child welfare authority on Vancouver Island. We were discussing the future of child welfare service delivery on the Island. There were three Open Space events that followed presentations by Dr. Martin Brokenleg. In Fort Rupert, near Port Hardy, we met in the big house, which is one of the biggest on the coast. This page of photos documents some of that gathering, including the above wonderful shot of a small group meeting at the base of one of the four huge house poles.
It’s events like this, with the circle of chairs gathered around the fire at the centre of the big house and lots of Elders and children in attendance that I feel like this process has come home.
Utah Phillips, from thetyee.ca
Utah Phillips is back in our neck of the woods:
?If you and I can agree to do our share of the work in this world, if you and I can agree to take only what we need and put back what we can, if you and I can agree to care for the afflicted, if you and I can agree not to hurt anybody, if you and I can agree to in some small way to get the work of the world done without the boss and the state, that’s anarchism.?
I’ve resisted political labels for a long time, but I find Utah’s gentle and insistent anarchism a more and more comfortable fit.
The world I created for myself, and it was deliberate, was a world made out of speakers and listeners. Many times, going to the missions, going to the flop hotels, I’d get a line from some old Wobbly, some old communist, some old socialist, some old person living on short money, a lot of time alcoholic. I’d start asking questions. The first thing I’d ever get was suspicions. Because these old workers, the only question they’d ever been asked was how come you are late or how soon can you get out. I found thoughts and feelings and ideas and experiences that had been locked inside their heads for years. Once I overcame their suspicions, and they realized I was really interested in what they had to tell me, it opened up like a floodgate. So that’s why I created my world, speakers and listeners, because it makes the country that I love so much so rich. The wellspring of my fascination and the endless carnival of America are the voices of people who will share their lives with me.
I’ve written before about the Aboriginal youth I’m lucky to be working with. One of them, Ginger Gosnell, is involved with the Assembly of First Nations and she shares some thoughts on the recent annual general assembly:
That is one of the differences between the current generation and the future generation of leaders. Young people don’t have the mind set that certain personalities will make in the end all the difference to an initiative’s successs…..As Nelson Mandela says, ‘it is what you make out of what you have, not what you are given that seperates one person from the next’….Overall, some things are worth fighting for, others are not. If it further divides the people, than maybe it’s not worth it….and if what you say isn’t registering with other people, than maybe you need to think about what you’re saying and then come back with a better solution or way of communicating.
Gerry made a comment a couple of days ago about sharing books:
If we put our personal libraries into a database that we could share with our network of friends, they could sign up to get the physical book sent. Maybe I should write a blog entry with more detail, but the database would be more like a blogging network where we could annotate and post reviews or which books most profoundly affected us. It would also track where the books travel and get them back to their origin at the end of a sojourn.
I like the idea, especially the boomerang function, where the books come back. But I have to say, I’m far more taken by the unconditional anarchy of BookCrossing! It makes it hard to coordinate something, but Bookcrossing has the gift theory thing DOWN in practice!
And here’s another example, courtesy of my friend Terry McGee in Australia who is an Irish flute maker. He has what he calls a Roving Ambassador flute, which travels the world from one potential customer to the next. It’s a brilliant marketing tool (because he makes great flutes and you have to actually play them to believe how good they are) but beyond that, it shows remarkable trust in both the goodwill of complete strangers and the power of self-organization. Is this a small peek into the merged worlds of commodity and gift?