New piece was posted:
Posted by T. T. in April 2019
Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), a cultural anthropologist,
investigated many undeveloped tribes, and found that there were strict rules of
gift-to-return relationships, and he concluded that there is no such thing as a
free gift.
In modern societies, gift-to-return relationships still
exist in ordinary life. When we try to give a gift to remote future people, we
cannot expect any return from them. Such a gift will be seen as a free gift.
Thus, it seems reasonable that if we ignore giving to remote future people, we
will not be criticized.
However, it is obvious that we have already received great
many gifts from our ancestors, not only from human ancestors but also from a great
many biological species in the history of life. If we consider that the whole
environment including from the past to the future is the counterpart of our
receiving and giving, then to provide a return to be balanced with the received
gift will be regarded as our responsibility.
More than that, if we love future people sincerely, we will
be willing to gift them more than we will have received. Regrettably, we have
already consumed far too much of the natural resources, and seriously damaged
or destroyed whole swathes of nature so that we cannot
recover all that has been lost. Even so, if we can seriously change our
attitude to the needs of future people, dedicating gifts to such future people
in various ways, a strong bond between present and future people could be
established, and its outcome would be tremendous.
Further information
Mauss’es essay about this topic was first published in
French in 1950, and the first English translation, “The Gift”, was published in
1954 by Cohen & West. Its Routledge Classic version, first published in
2002 by Routledge, has a nice cover design imaging a gift.
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