Legacy of Carol P. Christ: A Gift Economy: Could It Be Better To Give Than To Receive?

This was originally posted on April 15, 2013

In a gift economy inequalities are balanced out by the cultural practice of gift-giving. If you have more, then you give more, if you have little, you still feel it is better to give than to receive.  A person who hoards wealth is not viewed positively.

The worldview of a gift-giving economy is so far from our own that we can barely comprehend it.

In Skoteino, Crete, eighty-seven year old Marika awaits eagerly for the arrival of our group. She does not come empty-handed to join us after we have finished a meal lovingly prepared by Christina.  Marika brings a bottle of raki and urges us all to join her in downing a small glass of her homemade moonshine.  Often she offers us nuts she has cracked or raisins she has prepared as well .  She has almost nothing and lives without many modern conveniences, but she would not consider joining us without bringing a gift.

In Zaros, we arrive at our favorite hotel only to be told that the taverna that serves fresh trout is closed because the owner’s son will be getting married in the evening. When I complain that we have come to eat the special trout, our whole group is invited to the wedding.  Outside the taverna the grandmothers light fires under massive copper pots where they prepare the food. Over 600 people have been invited to the wedding. We are first served macaroni with virgin olive oil and goat cheese, then lamb, then goat, and salad. When the wine runs out, bottles of raki are brought to the tables. We dance all night long in a kind of a frenzy.

On our first Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, someone suggests that we end the tour with a give-away, following a Native American tradition.  Each of us is to find a gift that symbolizes the deeper meaning of the tour, wrap it up, and put it in a bag to be chosen by another pilgrim. The women worry about how much to spend, so we tell them about how much.  Though most of us enjoy receiving gifts, and though some of them are very carefully chosen, many of us find choosing a gift burdensome, and very few of us know the deep joy in giving that Marika feels. 

In a gift-giving society a person does not have to “save for a rainy day” because she knows that when a rainy day comes, someone will take care of her.  Secure in the knowledge that giving-and-receiving is the “grace” of life,  she can fully enjoy giving, even when she has nothing saved up for the future.

I am not like that. As a child I was taught to take care of what I have and to save for the future.  I am not an ungenerous person, but neither am I particularly generous.  For me there is often the calculation of not giving so much as to be taken advantage of.  I also think about not giving so much that I will not be able to take care of myself some day.

In a recent series of blogs, I defined patriarchy as a system of male domination created at the juncture of the control of female sexuality, private property, and war.  If private property is coterminous with patriarchy, we might ask if private property is a necessary foundation of “culture.”

This week I read Diane Wolkstein’s retelling of the story of “The Huluppu-Tree” in her book Inanna.  At the beginning of the story the God An “carried off” the heavens, the God Enlil “carried off” the earth, while the Goddess Erishkegal “was given” the underworld. The most powerful Gods took the heavens and the earth. The God Enki who was given nothing “set sail” for the underworld to claim it. The Goddess Inanna who was given nothing set her mind on fashioning a throne and a bed from the Huluppu tree.   Rather than enjoying the sacred tree she planted in the center of her garden, Inanna could think only of cutting it down to make use its wood.

In her forthcoming book Exploring Earthiness Anne Primavesi writes, “[G]iving life to all organisms, species, and plants, is Earth’s defining characteristic. And Earth is definitely not our property.”  Primavesi reminds us that to give back is the appropriate response to the gift of life.  I learned this in Crete.

Control of  “private” property is the animating force in US politics today.  Many of those who have do not want to give back through paying taxes to support social safety net programs. Nor do they want to pay inheritance taxes that will prevent them from passing their wealth on to their children.

Should any of us think we have right to own and dispose of nature however we choose? Should any of us think we have a “right” to have more than we really need? Do only some children have a right to inherit?

If we cannot learn to give freely of what we have as traditional peoples do, perhaps we can at least begin to understand the injustice inherent in ownership of land, property, and other people’s labor.  Rather than admiring those who accumulate wealth, we might rather admire those who give it away.

Then we might begin to see that taxing those who have in order to take care of those who do not is only one very small step along the road to repairing the world in the wake of patriarchal injustice.

Photo of Marika by Diane Gruppe Marshall

See Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview Is Possible, edited by Genevieve Vaughn.