Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible
is an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change
in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the
planet. Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and
academics, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which
have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of
Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an
approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is
destroying life on the planet. Shifting to a gift paradigm can give us
the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world
possible.
A gift economy embodies an oriented logic of care while
exchange, upon which the market is based, contains a logic of self
interest because it requires an equivalent return for what is given,
satisfying the need of the ‘giver’ as opposed to those of the
‘receiver.’ Indigenous societies often continue to practice gift giving
although they have now been forced into the context of the market. Many
other examples of gift giving from mothering to communication and social
activism abound in our society although they are unrecognized. Even
free housework can be considered an unrecognized gift women are giving
to their families and to the capitalist system. Through the
commodification of free gift areas—such as water, traditionally grown
seeds, medicinal plants—globalization captures the gifts of the many in
the Global South, channeling them to the few in the North. Contributors
to this volume argue that shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the
radically different worldview which will make another world possible.
