https://otherworldsarepossible.org/gift-solidarity-economies
Gift & Solidarity Economies – Women
Gifts economies, in which human beings are worth more than the market, are
fundamental to most traditional and indigenous peoples. Here is a case where a
just alternative already exists, and has for thousands of years.
In its purest form, a gift economy is about the collective, allocation based
on need, and abundance. Behind gifting is human relationship, generation of
goodwill, and attention to the nurturance of the whole society and not just
one’s immediate self and family. Maintaining economic and social relations
outside of the market keeps respect, cooperation, and ethics thriving.
One of these gift systems is alive and well in Mali, West Africa. Called
dama, it is a vibrant economy and culture propagated primarily through a
strong, though informal, women’s social network. Gift-giving is not based on
exchange or equivalence between giver and receiver. She who receives a gift
will probably pass it on to someone else. Another person entirely, somewhere
down the line, will give back to the original giver. Dama involves return, but
from within a broadly defined community to which the gift has moved on.
Gift-giving holds the expectation that just as you care for and provide for
others, someone else altogether will care and provide for you or your family.
The circulation of gifts acts as the warp and weft of community, weaving
together multiple layers of loyalty and history. A gift is a string that
creates and strengthens friendships, family, regional community, religious
grouping, and other social networks. At its best, gifting reflects a worldview
that society, indeed the world, is a web of relationships – not just between
individuals, but among elements of an inseparable whole. Irreducible to give
and take, gifting continually reinforces interconnectedness and the collective.
A second purpose of gifting is to sustain and celebrate the values of
humanity – what is known in Mali as maaya, ‘human-ness’ or ‘being human.’
Djingarey Maïga, director of Women and Human Rights, says, “It’s the link with
your neighbors, your parents, your relatives. If you can’t keep that link, you
are not a human being.” A common Malian expression explains maaya: “Life is a
cord. We make the cord between ourselves, and you have to hold on to it. One
should not drop the cord.”
Thirdly, dama is an essential strategy for keeping the community well.
Gifting is a time-honored means of keeping away hunger, prolonged illness, and
early death. Malians’ understanding of community is that it is only as strong
as its parts, only as healthy as its members, so that only by all providing for
each other will all survive and thrive. Wherever your gift ends up will be an
important contribution toward everyone’s welfare.
Lastly, since one can’t simultaneously pass on and hoard (what many of us
call save), giving also keeps inequality relatively flattened. While in the
U.S. there is social reinforcement to accumulate as much as possible, with
wealth and the wealthy often being revered, in Mali the cultural norm is to
give away as much of your accumulation as possible, with generosity and the
generous being most respected. Popular educator Coumba Toure told us, “The only
way you get to be rich is by disassociating yourself from other people. There’s
no way to live in community, have family in the way that we understand family,
and still be rich. There are so many children that you have to pay for
schooling for, so many people that you have to buy medicines for. People really
start worrying about what kind of person you’ve become.”
Beyond Africa, gifting thrives throughout the global North and South –
usually below the radar, unnoticed, non-quantified, and unarticulated. Gifts
are given frequently, spontaneously, and without thought of reciprocity. The
gift advocate Angela Miles told us, “We just don’t have the right glasses on to
see the gifting happening all around us. We see it as exchange manqué or only a
defensive position of those who aren’t capable of exchange.”
Residents of the most acquisitive nation on earth, the U.S., give infinite
forms of services and goods to family, friends, neighbors, and strangers
without calculation of return. We give where there is no emotional tie, no
reciprocity, and often (in the case of a donation to a community organization,
for example) not even a thanks from the ultimate recipient. We push strangers’
cars, give their batteries a jump in a parking lot, and shovel snow from
elderly neighbors’ walks. We donate our very blood to someone whose name we’ll
never know, and leave our organs to be transplanted into an unknown individual.
In 2005, people in the U.S. gave more than $260 billion to non-profits and
charities,ii and 61.2 million volunteered, with each person giving a median of
52 hours per year.iii
Here are a few examples of organized U.S.-based giving:
Freecycle is a Web-based gift
network where individuals can post or request free items from others in their
community. Freecycle facilitates sharing and re-use, both by promoting the idea
and then by facilitating the actual act. And it claims to keep 55 tons of stuff
out of the landfill each day. More than 3,000 groups with more than 1.3 members
have self-organized in more than 50 countries, with especially large
concentrations in U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, and Australia.
Our friend Valentine Doyle is a member of the Hartford Freecycle, and we
asked her about interesting items she’s given or gotten there. Here’s what she
wrote us: “The received stuff is mostly pretty boring — tomato stakes and that
kind of thing, plus lots of salmon cat food that somebody else’s cat was
allergic to. The one thing I received that’s odd enough to be on this list is a
big bag of llama poop. And there’s lots more where that came from.
“The given, though, reflects mostly odd things I’ve found. Here are a few:
some Chinese dresses somebody gave me forty years ago when I was thinner, an
exercise machine some previous occupant left in the basement of my house, a
giant 70s-style macramé hanging I found in the street, and a Pooh costume.”
Valentine then wrote that she had to go because she and her four-year-old
neighbor Felipe had a date to bake an Amish friendship cake. Her description is
another indicator of how widespread gifting is in our society: “Have you met
this thing? You get a bag of batter, you stir it every day for ten days and
feed it in the middle. Then on day ten you divide it into three or four more
bags to give away and bake the remainder into a cake.”
A face-to-face version of Freecycle is the Really Really Free Market,
which is also a modern-day equivalent of the Free Box that hippies used to
locate in community spaces. These non-commercial markets take place once a week
or once a month, in a park or a roving location. To them people can bring
things they no longer want and take things they now want. Everything is free:
old mix tapes, furniture, paintings – whatever. No cash is ever accepted, and
bartering rarely is.
Beyond goods, Really Really Free Markets give services like haircutting,
plus food and entertainment. Developing community, keeping items out of the
waste stream, and having fun are all part of it. One market’s websites
describes the operation as similar to a garage sale “but better…. no price
tags!”
The Really Really Free Markets’ philosophy is: “Because there is enough
for everyone. Because sharing is more fulfilling than owning. Because
corporations would rather the landfills overflow than anyone get anything for
free. Because scarcity is a myth constructed to keep us at the mercy of the
economy. Because a sunny day outside is better than anything money could
buy.”
Really Really Free Markets exist throughout the U.S. in such far-flung
places as Greenville, NC; Grand Rapids, MI.; and Reno, NV. We suspect you can
find them in most any large urban area with a concentration of anarchists.
The same trash-or-treasure system exists in low-income neighborhoods the
world over, just not in any articulated or organized way. People just line
their undesired goods up on the sidewalk for a passer-by to whom they may be
highly desired.
Gift of Kindness, a group
actively promoting gifting and compassion in all spheres of life. Among other
ideas, GiftofKindess.com promotes ‘kindness cards’ that one leaves at the scene
after committing a random act of kindness – like paying a toll for the driver
behind you.
Consider this form of giving: the
Red Swing Project anonymously hangs swings in public spaces in cities
throughout the U.S., India, Thailand, South Korea, and Brazil. The point?
Simply to provide an opportunity for joy in the midst of complicated city
living, inviting passersby to – in their words – “let go and be a child for a
moment.”iv Gestures in the same spirit are all around you.
The challenge today is to keep gifting flourishing despite the expansion of
markets, advertising, and cash economies. Gifting is a canary in the proverbial
coal mine, an indicator of how well cultural traditions can hold up under
conditions of globalization. Though obviously forms of giving will always
exist, what is certain is that gift and other non-market economies will remain
strong and viable only if organized movements vigorously promote them.
Once we started exploring, we found the examples were virtually endless. In
baby clothing exchanges in such places as Queens, NY, parents leave too-small
clothing for younger ones and pick up the next size for free. Gifters have
created leave-a-book-take-a-book – or just one or the other – systems in
various subways, like the free box in Logan Square, Chicago.
Categories: Releases
