Gift Giving and the Goddess:
A philosophy for social change
© Genevieve Vaughan, 2004
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The society in which we are living, let's call it 'capitalist patriarchy'
for lack of a better term, creates a perspective, a pair of eyeglasses
given to us in childhood, through which we learn to look at and interpret
the world. These glasses create a selective vision, foregrounding some
kinds of things and backgrounding others. Some kinds of things become
invisible altogether. It is the privilege and the responsibility of all
those who believe in the Godess(es), in magic, and in the immanence of
a better world, to take those glasses off and re focus. There is another
point of view that we already engage in even without knowing it because
we are trained to discount it or to interpret its messages as something
else. That is the point of view of the gift paradigm.
In the early sixties I married an Italian philosophy professor and moved
to Italy from Texas. Because he had studied the philosophy of language
at Oxford my husband was asked to collaborate with a group of Italian
professors who were starting a journal based on applying Marx's analysis
of the commodity and money to language. I went with him to the meetings.
I was in my early twenties at the time and was completely bowled over
by the ideas the group was discussing. I had one of those moments of enlightenment
in which it seems you can understand everything. I also thought: If this
means so much to me, a fairly normal girl from Texas, other people would
probably have a similar reaction. Well, the years passed. The journal
did not happen after all though my husband did write books dealing with
the subject during the several years we were married. His approach was
to look at language as exchange. Somehow that did not totally convince
me. It did not accord with my original vision. Besides I was deep in mothering
our three daughters and I felt that exchange was a very minimal part of
that experience. In fact exchange is giving-in-order-to-receive. You have
to satisfy little childrens' needs unilaterally. They cannot exchange
with you. As they get older you can of course engage in manipulation but
that usually ends up hurting both the children and yourself. I knew that
language was older than exchange, certainly older than exchange for money.
Children also learned language before they learned exchange.
I had read some anthropologists like Malinowsky and Mauss who wrote about
symbolic gift exchanges and competitive potlatch. I began to develop a
theory about language, exchange, and money. It appeared to me that communication
was about satisfying communicative needs, needs to relate to each other
as human beings regarding our experience of the world. I did an analysis
of money as an 'incarnated word' which satisfies the communicative need
everyone has in capitalism to relate to each other, bridging the gap caused
by mutually exclusive private property. I joined the feminist movement
in Italy and in the international consciousness raising group I was part
of, which was made up mostly of women connected to the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the U.N. (which happened to be located near my house),
we talked a lot about women's free labor in the home. I began to see that
women's labor is gift labor and that it is the basis of co-muni-cation
('muni' means 'gifts' in Latin), the giving of free gifts together, which
forms the co-muni-ty. In fact by nurturing our children we form both the
bodies and the minds of the people who make up the community. This material
non-sign communication involving giving and receiving without a pay back,
is what makes us human generation after generation.
Giving has a transitive logic of its own. If A gives to B and B gives
to C then A gives to C. Besides, when you satisfy someone's need you give
value to them, since the implication is that if they were not important
to you, you would not be satisfying the need. The giver has to focus on
the need of the other, so the transaction is other-oriented. Her satisfaction
lies in the fulfillment and well being of the other person. The receiver
must actively use what is given to her or the gift is wasted. Her position
is creative, not passive, as has sometimes been imagined. She can later
take turns, becoming a giver too, giving something to someone else, but
she does not have to give back to the original giver an equivalent of
what she has been given. The motivation of the giving is the satisfaction
of the need not the 'pay back'. Needs evolve and change. After basic needs
are filled new more complex needs develop. Children who first live on
milk later need other kinds of food; they learn to walk and need their
mothers to allow them to be independent, and mothers satisfy that need
also. Giftgiving and receiving create bonds between giver and receiver.
The receiver knows someone else is 'out there' because someone has satisfied
her need. The giver knows the receiver is 'out there' because she has
seen the need, fashioned or procured something to satisfy it, and knows
that she has influenced the well being of the other person. The bonds
are formed without an expectation of reciprocity. It is not the incursion
of a debt that forms the bond, rather the direct satisfaction of the others'
need. This bond-making capacity which is at the basis of co-muni-ty has
often been seen as instinctual. As women have recently insisted however,
nurturing requires a great deal of conscious effort on the part of the
care giver.
Opposed to gift giving is the Way of exchange, where the needs of the
other are satisfied only in order to procure the satisfaction of one's
own needs. Exchange involves an ego oriented logic and requires calculation,
quantification and measurement to ascertain that what is received is equal
to what is given. Exchange is adversarial and competitive because each
person is trying to get as much as possible from the transaction. Our
capitalist economy is based on exchange. The logic of exchange encroachingly
influences all our relationships where gift giving used to be. Money is
used to define the value of people, economists talk of a 'marriage market',
the 'free market of ideas', 'human capital'. Fast food restaurants take
over nurturing and advertising 'educates' our needs - while we pay for
this 'education' as part of the price of the product. Needs exist for
the market only where they are addressed through 'effective demand', the
demand of those people who have the money to pay for the products. Other
needs simply do not 'exist'.
The exchange economy requires scarcity in order to function appropriately.
If gift giving were the mode of distribution exchange would become unnecessary.
People would not exchange if their needs were already being satisfied
by giftgiving. We can see the creation of scarcity for example, when overly
abundant products, say peaches, are plowed under in an attempt to keep
the price of the remaining peaches high. Abundance also makes hierarchy
lose its leverage. No one would have to obey or nurture and reward the
'one at the top' if she could get her needs met elsewhere. Scarcity is
being artificially created through arms spending ($18 billion is spent
every week on armaments worldwide while that would feed all the hungry
on earth for a year) and other non nurturing and wasteful expenditures
in order to create and maintain an environment in which exchange and hierarchy
appear to be necessary for survival. There is also a kind of 'scarcity
of meaning'; getting to the top appears to be the way to achieve meaning
in our lives. Not succeeding in this pursuit to be dominant seems to make
our lives meaningless.
I think that if we are to understand what is going on, the basic distinction
that must be made is the distinction between giftgiving on the one hand
and exchange on the other. The perspective of exchange is so powerful
and pervasive that it obscures and cancels gift giving. We do not even
use words that recognize the giftgiving way. For example archaeologists
talk about 'food sharing' practices as important for the beginnings of
pre history, and a recent book (1) mentions 'grooming' as a possible basis
for the development of language. Food sharing can be seen as gift giving
and grooming is a service all mothers perform. By not recognizing giftgiving
as an important independent human way of behaving with its own logic,
the continuity between mothering and other types of activity are lost.
Anthropologists who study giftgiving in so called 'primitive' cultures
talk about 'gift exchange', Their concentration on debt and forced reciprocity
as the basis of human bonds denies the bond making capacity of direct
giving and receiving.
Over the years I developed a theory of language as gift giving in contrast
to my ex husband's theory of language as exchange. While we give to one
another and create community, there are many material things we cannot
give, like mountains or the sun, and many immaterial things, like justice
or partnership that cannot be transferred, or just handed over to another.
Words are the socially invented commonly-held sound-gifts we can give
to each other in the place of other material and immaterial gifts, creating
our bonds as part of the group verbally when we cannot do so materially.
We satisfy each other's communicative needs to be put into a common relation
to the world. The specification of this relation at any moment constitutes
the transmission (giving and receiving) of information. We are related
to each other in community as verbal givers and receivers regarding specific
parts and aspects of the world (even in cases when, as happens in capitalist
exchange, we are no longer giving to each other on a material basis).
Syntax itself can be seen as a transposition of giving from the plane
of interpersonal behavior to the plane of the relation among words. Subject,
predicate and object can be seen as giver, gift or service, and receiver.
A theory of language of this sort restores mothering or nurturing to its
place as the main factor in our becoming human not only as a species but
individually, life by life.
Abstract reasoning has been influenced by exchange. It is not a sui generis
activity but only a complication of giftgiving and language, which has
left aside or cancelled the other oriented content in order to contend
with cause and effect, quantification, self reflecting consciousness and
supposedly value-free (not value- giving) 'activity'. By abstracting from
giftgiving we prepare ourselves for exchange. We eliminate meaningful
human relations and bonding based on giving, and separate reason from
the emotions which respond to needs. Our emotional responses create the
map that tells us where and what gifts to give. Basing reason as we do
on the equations and categories of exchange while discrediting emotions,
we find our lives are no longer 'meaningful'. That is because meaning
- in life as in language - is formed by gift giving communication. We
also forget that the truth is other oriented, that it satisfies the other's
need to know, while lying is constructed according to the model of exchange,
satisfying only the speakers' own need. Our lack of honesty is also a
lack of altruism and gift giving is defeated once more.
Many aspects of our lives are informed by the paradigm of exchange without
our realizing it. For example, justice is constructed upon the exchange
model. We quantify wrong doing and impose a payment. The feeling of guilt
is a kind of personal readiness to pay. We need kindness instead, for-giveness
and a concentration on the needs of all the parties involved. Profit,
in Marx's sense of surplus value, is an unpaid portion of the workers'
labor, which may be considered as a leveraged gift. The system of exchange
depends upon this gift for its motivation and on the many free gifts that
are given to it by women's (and some men's) nurturing work, the sometimes
laborious activity of shopping, of child care and elder care, the 'reproduction'
of the work force. Slavery of one kind or another throughout history has
provided the forced unpaid 'extra' that was necessary for the growth of
'just' and equal exchange. Presently the cheap labor and natural resources
of third world countries provide a flow of gifts to the market economies
of the North.
By taking off the eyeglasses of exchange we can see Mother Earth not as
the adversary or as raw material for our profit making activities but
as the great gift giver. Each of the four elements has a different gift
quality. Fire can be given to others without losing it, water nurtures
life freely making up most of our body mass, earth gives us ground, space,
and innumerable gifts of plant and animals, while air flows from a high
pressure to a low pressure area, from where there is more to where there
is less. (That's the answer that is blowin' in the wind). Our hearts pump
blood out to satisfy the needs of our cells and then the blood returns
to be re oxygenated. Every ecological niche meets the needs of the animals
and plants that are adapted to it. Light from stars leaps over endless
space to become a gift when our eyes are there to receive it. Mother Earth
herself has taken the light of the sun and used it to create life in innumerable
interactive (intergiving) patterns. In fact giftgiving is Her Way, not
exchange. So how did exchange happen? How did we get so far from the Way
of the Mother?
I believe the answer goes something like this. By naming boys and girls
with different gender terms we have alienated our boy children. We have
taught them they have to be something different from their giftgiving
mothers, even though it is difficult to construct an identity apart from
the giftgiving by which our bodies and minds are formed. Cognitive psychologists
have indicated that we construct our categories using prototypes (2).
I believe that when a boy discovers he is not part of the category of
his giftgiving mother he seizes upon the father as the prototype for the
category 'human' and he uses that prototype for his own development of
a non nurturing, non female, identity, which then appears to be the human
identity. There is a one-to-many relation between a prototype and things
related to it, so there is logically only one prototype per category.
Boys are in the situation of having to compete with the father and with
other males to be the one prototype for 'human', an almost impossible
and contradictory task. The competition to get to the top and remain there
becomes dominance and power-over. Hierarchies are constructed to provide
many levels of categories so that at least some different people get to
have the prototype position. In response to this misconceived, artificial
agenda, females are seen to be those who cannot be prototypes for the
human concept and who do not compete for dominance. In fact they continue
to be socialized to be mothers and to follow a different, more human,
giftgiving agenda. The fact that both men and women can participate in
the work force and do child care shows that these are socially imposed
roles and value systems. They are not biologically pre determined. In
fact many people have both value systems operating internally, with all
the conflict and confusion that 'engenders'.
Anthropologists talk about a cross cultural 'manhood script' and describe
many more or less atrocious puberty rites which ensure the distance of
the boy from the mother and the nurturing way. The stoicism and autonomy
males are required to embrace encourage them to be impervious to their
own and other's needs. Attention to needs is of course necessary for the
giftgiving way to function. Competition and domination are part of the
script and take place in opposition to giftgiving, cooperation, inclusiveness
and the celebration of differences. One place which does not have this
'manhood script' is the island of Tahiti. The language of Tahiti does
not contain gender terms. (3) To me this seems to bear out my idea that
the script is basically written by language itself, causing a problem
of miscategorization. Some other hunter gatherer societies, such as the
African !Kung live in harmony with nature. They recognize nature as nurturing
them, giving them gifts in a 'cosmic economy of sharing'.(4) There the
mothering prototype is recognized or projected into nature, even if the
language does have gender terms and misogyny.
If language is based on gift giving, and if it was language that made
humanity evolve, we can say that it was, at least in part, giftgiving
that made humanity evolve. We are actually giftgivers and receivers, like
nature, but we have misinterpreted the gift of our biological differences
and the corresponding gifts of our gender terms to mean that we have different
basic life scripts. These scripts alienate the members of half of humanity
from the giftgiving norm and make the other half subservient to them.
One long term peaceful solution to the problem would be to eliminate gender
terms as in Tahiti. Another is the restoration of the mothering prototype.
Because we are all children who had to have had mothers or caregivers
who nurtured us we can understand nature as providing for us in a giftgiving
way. We can develop an epistemology in which our response to our experience,
knowledge, can be seen as a kind of gratitude. We have blinded ourselves
to this aspect of our human nature by giving our gifts to the market,
to the exchange paradigm and to the values of the 'manhood script'. The
exchange paradigm competes mercilessly with the gift paradigm. Many of
the great atrocities of history from the slaughter of the witches to the
genocide of the indigenous peoples have been motivated by the need of
the exchange paradigm to eliminate the giftgiving or mothering model as
the prototype for human life on earth. However at this point the exchange
economy is destroying the planet and penalizing huge numbers of humans
through poverty, disease, violence and war. We must become wise enough
to shift paradigms towards the mothering way.
We are at a critical time. Like a psychotic, society 'acts out', representing
its psychosis externally at another level in its institutions, in its
hierarchies and its wars, in individual and collective acts of competitive
violence to achieve the dominant position. As I write these words my country
and yours are acting out their manhood script to destroy the male prototype
of another society by dumping millions of tons of phallic bombs and missiles
upon 'his' territory and 'his' people, to get rid of him. In the longer
term, first world businesses maraud third world countries in the name
of 'free trade'. Scarcity is created where abundance should be causing
starvation and disease for many while the few at the top accumulate the
capital that allows them to leverage power over the many. In this scenario
giftgiving appears unrealistic, an impossible dream. However, psychoses
can be healed. The half of humanity which has not been given the manhood
script can begin to validate the giftgiving values it already has and
promote them both personally and politically. The half of humanity that
does have that script can begin to question it instead of embracing it
or acting it out.
We can all look at the problems of society as needs that are waiting to
be satisfied. Solutions to our society's problems, to its psychotic displays,
its cruel and murderous behavior patterns, are the greatest gifts that
anyone can give. They are gifts to the children of the future, and to
Mother Earth herself who does not want to see her precious creations destroyed.
They also provide the healing gift of self respect as we act in accordance
with a human race in harmony with the giftgiving universe. I believe that
well thought out social and political activism is one way to begin to
give these gifts. Another is the creation of alternative models. Another
is communication at a 'meta' level about the sick society and the gift
economy. At the same time we have to avoid the obstacles that have impeded
the shifting of the paradigm until now. For example charity, while it
involves giftgiving, is only functional on an individual basis and does
not address the systemic status quo. We need to concentrate on changing
the psychotic institutions not only on saving their individual victims.
By changing the institutions and shifting the paradigm we can spare everyone.
I believe that the popularity of both Princess Diana and Mother Teresa
is due to our longing for a female giftgiving prototype. Both of these
women were caught within patriarchal institutions however, and were not
so much addressing changing the system itself as they were involved in
practicing individual charity. I believe systemic change is the key because
it is the system that is causing the problems. Concentrating on individual
charity usually makes us forget the need for systemic change and does
not challenge the status quo.
Another paradox involves the prototype position itself. If the social
prototype is as I believe, a projection of an instrument of our concept
forming process, concentrating on its dominance and singularity creates
an exclusionary mentality as happens with monotheism. The singular dominant
prototype of the giftgiver is a contradiction in terms. The giftgiver
always includes the other. Moreover, as Patricia Mognahan says, goddess
spirituality is never monotheistic. On the other hand Chrisitianity can
be seen as proposing a giftgiving male prototype (perhaps the idea of
the Trinity attempts to get beyond the paradox by re introducing plurality
into the prototype, uniting the many in the One). Monotheism and patriarchal
hierarchies conceal the giftgiving that women have been doing daily throughout
history. The validation of sacrifice makes us not see that the context
of scarcity in which sacrifice is necessary, is created by the exchange
system.
Those of us who honor the ancient ways and love Mother Earth, approaching
her with wonder, can participate in the varieties of life beyond monotheism,
loving the whole in her parts. When we create a society in which giftgiving
has become the human norm, our spirituality will be liberated and we will
recognize the goddess in each other and the earth. Though some of us may
feel that we are already experiencing this phenomenon, we have to remember
the dire situation society is in and try to turn our giftgiving towards
the big picture. Protesting against patriarchy is a spiritual necessity.
We must mother society, mother the future, mother our Mother the Earth
and our human mothers as well as our children. As we call upon the ancient
goddesses of our own and other cultures we empower ourselves with their
gifts and we are also respecting the need of the people of the past not
to have lived in vain, to have a progeny that survives on this magical
planet, which must not be destroyed. When we look at our planet from space
we see that here we are living in comparative Eden. The sun shines on
other planets and on the moon yet they are desolate. The earth has created
all this abundance of life, using the energy of the sun. She is the creative
receiver-and-giver. We must honor her processes. When we have restored
the giftgiving way we will all be able co muni cate with the spirits of
nature who have no gender script. Presently our exchange system must be
toxic to them so they keep away from us. Our psychic abilities cannot
develop because the contents of our minds have been made manipulative
by our economics. Perhaps if we create a gift based society we will be
able to form a community with the spirits of the dead as well, a practical
heaven on earth.
1 Dunbar, Robin1996/1998. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language.
Cambridge Mass. Harvard University Press.
2 Lev Vigotsky,1962, Thought and Language . Cambridge. The M.I.T.
Press.
George Lakoff, 1987,Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
3 David G. Gilmore, 1990. Manhood in the Making. New Haven & London,
Yale University Press.
4 Nurit Bird-David,1992 'Beyond "The Original Affluent Society" in 'Limited
Wants, Unlimited Means' ed. John Gowdy, Island Press, Washington,
D.C.1998.
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