Now we get into the juicy stuff, as if the book hasn’t been juicy so far.
Chapter four of “The Gift” is called simply “The Bond” and it is this chapter that took Susan Kerr’s interest by storm at the Giving Conference. The essential point of this chapter is that gifts create bonds and commodities create boundaries.
It is characteristic of market exchange that commodities move between two independent spheres. We might best picture the difference between gifts and commodities in this regard by imagining two territories separated by a boundary. A gift, when it moves across this boundary, either stops being a gift or abolishes the boundary. A commodity can cross the line without any change in its nature; moreover, its exchange will often establish a boundary where none previously existed…Logos-trade draws the boundary, eros-trade erases it.
— pp. 60-61
There are all kinds of places we can go from this statement. One major thought that triggered for me was around the nature of markets. Our traditional sense of markets are changing largely because of the world wide web, but have we got to the place where markets are actually places where people create bonds? Seems to me that modern branding, and even the “markets-as-conversations” theory of Cluetrain operate within a transactional type of commodity exchange. Having said that, they do recognize that people do not form bonds with companies (or countries or other brands) but rather that bonds are formed between people. What is missing is companies (and their people) figuring out how to actually use the power of corporations to become givers. Corporate philanthropy is a step in this direction, but can it be taken down to the individual level? What is a corporation took a portion of its philanthropic budget and gave it to individuals within the company to pursue their personal giving plans in their communities, encouraging individual staff members to bond through sharing their gifts of time and money? Can we enable that for our staff? For our citizens? There must be some companies that do this. Are there countries that support their citizens’ engagement with their gifts?
Markets come up for me because I think of them as simply places (real or imagined) where people connect. What people choose to do there is up to them. People can connect in a gift relationship or they can connect to give something value and thus exchange it in a transactional deal. I think the kind of connection we forge here on the web is bulging forward a breach or a blurring in this traditional dichotomy. Even the revolutionaries are getting in on the act (thanks Tutor!).
Hyde goes on to talk about the social implications of these two kinds of relationships, giving and transactional:
Because of the bonding power of gifts and the detached nature of commodity exchange, gifts have become associated with community and with being obliged to others, while commodities are associated with alienation and freedom. The bonds established by a gift can maintain old identity and limit our freedom of motion…It seems a misnomer that we have called those nations known for their commodities “the free world.” The phrase doesn’t seem to refer to political freedoms ; it indicates that the dominant forms of exchange in these lands does not bind the individual in any way – to his family, to his community, to his state. And though the modern state is too large a group to take its structure from bonds of affection, still, the ideology of the socialist nations begins with a call for community.
Yes, I am advocating more bondage and less freedom in this sense. And it starts with more political freedom, leading individuals to be free to create their bonds and connections to communities that operate far from the madding trap of commodification.
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I have an approximately $300 credit with WestJet for sale. It’s good until the end of April, and fully transferable. If you are interested, drop me a line (chris AT chriscorrigan.com) and I’ll make the arrangements to transfer it to you.
Just to plug WestJet for a moment: I made this booking back in the spring for a conference in Edmonton which I had to cancel at the last moment. WestJet’s transfer policy is this: your credit is good for a year. Transfer it to anyone you like, just call us and let us know. The whole procedure takes less than two minutes.
Is there any reason it has to be more complicated than that?
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Following on from the last posting on the labour of gratitude, I’d like to take a slight deviation back to the introduction of “The Gift” where Lewis Hyde is writing about how we receive the fruits of artistic gifts:
The spirit of the artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to proffer our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation…When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.”
This was foremost in my mind when I attended Jon’s session at the Giving Conference on art and mental models. The idea is that we are all gifted with resources to create and receive artistic expressions. When art really affects us (moves us, pun intended) it activates these resources. It makes us want to create, to engage in a form of the labour of gratitude that leads to further creative activity.
We don’t need to be great composers to understand Mozart’s harmony, and the more we listen to it, the more we recognize it and the deeper we respond. We may yet evolve into composers, but I think the real value of a creative response to a creative expression is that it triggers something of a poetic impulse in us to respond creatively to the world around us. Thus the gift of art is the unlocking of the key resource for democracies and thriving societies: creative citizenship.
You don’t need to make poems or create music or draw figures to put this creative impulse to use. Creative entrepreneurship, citizenship and responses to societal problems all become arenas for the expression of this impulse. Through those arenas, we share our gifts with others and perpetuate the cycle. We become artists engaged in the collaborative creation of the world we want.
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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.
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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?