GENEVIEVE VAUGHAN

ANOMALY PRESS PO Box 2285 Austin, Texas 78768-2285 USA

www.for-giving.com
www.gift-economy.com

Printed in the United States of America at Morgan Printing in Austin, Texas

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Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Part One Discovering the Gift Paradigm (download PDF)

How I got started	11
The exchange paradigm	16
Subjectivities	20
Patriarchy	22
Hitting	24
Categorizing	25
Other points of view	28

Part Two The Gift in Communication (download PDF)

Exploring gifts and signs	35
The market, the law, the commons	42
Academic disciplines	47
Mothering and the Gifts of Language	48
Aspects of the gift logic	54
Material Communication	57
Exchange relations	58
Psychological origins of exchange and patriarchy	59
Manhood script	61
Language as a gift economy	62
Women and Signs*	72
Gender and economics	72
The Paradigms	74
The "manhood script again"	83
Needs, expressed and unexpressed	85
Co-muni-cation	89
The verbal commons	93
Where do words and money come from?	97
The exchange metaform	101
The gift metaform	104

Part Three Verbal Gift Giving (download PDF)

Tracking gifts and third party relations*	111
More about syntax	114
Conjunctions	118
Articles	120
Translating Language into Numbers: a conjecture	121
Things, words and value	124
Alignment	130

Part Four Epistemology and gender (download PDF)

Definition, classification, the market	137
Definition, naming and exchange	142
Categorization: a mechanism of oppression	148
Value Commons	149
Epistemology and gender: Knowledge as gratitude	151
The denial of gratitude	154
The construction of common ground	156
Masculation and categorization	159
Masculation and exchange	161
Knowledge and gender	162
Reapplying the incarnated definition of exchange	164

Part Five Some Applications (download PDF)

Going beyond the rights discourse	171
Equality and self-interest	173
Summing up	180
Other variations:	180
Essentialism	183
Recognition	184
Circulation of gifts	189
Nurturing: a process or a common quality?	192
Essential Services	200
Uniting the camps	202
Extending the gift	205
The Gift of Oil	208
The pumps that take the place of the heart	210

Part Six Transpositions (download PDF)

Weighing the scales	217
Equivalence	217
The Peacock Weight	219
Perspective and the ego (1 and I)	226
The ego and the psychology of property	228
Form and Matter	234
Standards and definitions	239
Tracking and counting money	242
North-South masculation	247
Coins R US	249
Inner Eye point of view	250
May the scales drop from our eyes!	257
Weighing weighing	260

Part Seven First Essays: (download PDF)

Communication and exchange(Semiotica1980)
I	266
II	273
III	276
IV	279
V	280
VI	285
VII	290
VIII	291
IX	293
Endnotes	298

Saussure And Vygotsky Via Marx(Ars Semeiotica IV: 1. 57-83, 1981)
I	300
II	311
Notes	329

Introduction

T he subject matter of this book - at the intersection between feminism and linguistics, economics, semiotics, and sociology - is a fundamental part of our humanity that we have not seen before, or named as such. Not that people have not studied what they call 'gift exchange', but they have not given it that fundamental interdisciplinary place that should occupy. Indeed many have believed that unilateral gift giving does not exist. I consider it both fundamental and commonplace.

The gift has been obscured for many reasons, which we will be discussing. It is strange that anything this important could have been invisible, but perhaps this also gives a measure of the importance of revealing it, not only for academic investigation but for politics. Why are we motivated to harm and egocentrism and why is our compassion dwindling? The answer may be found in the struggle between the parasite and the host, the exchange paradigm and the gift paradigm.

Another way of saying this is that gift giving has been deprived of its meta level. That is why we do not name this important aspect of life.Unilateral gift giving is not the same as unconditional love or gift giving. There are conditions - such as the identification of a need. The other person should not be hostile - in fact the hostility may mean that there is a need - for independence perhaps? - that is greater, and is not being seen by the prospective giver.

The identification of needs and agency for their satisfaction creates meaning, in language and life.

I started working on the idea of communication as gift giving in the 70's and did not read any of the authors of the Mauss Revue until some time in the late 90's. I first read Lewis Hyde's book The Gift:Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property in 1981, I think. I am saying this to underline that my ideas have grown up independently and from a point of origin mainly outside of academia. I have also tried to practice them in feminist foundation activism for more than 20 years.

Contents

Introduction