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More from “The Gift”

July 21, 2004 By Uncategorized


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.”

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