Reading “The Gift”

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:

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