Understanding the Gift Economy, II

When I was preparing to write my piece on the gift economy for the Dictionary of Ethical Politics, I read a few essays by others but quickly abandoned that approach to ensuring that I was fully up-to-speed on the current thinking. As I explained with my customary lack of sensitivity, diplomacy, and fairness:

Unsurprisingly, [the gift economy] is a topic that appeals to well-meaning, good-natured, spiritually curious people. Unfortunately, this results in treatments that are often long on fuzzy-headed feel-good and short on rigor. I’m sure there are some very good essays on the gift economy to be found with a simple Google search; but I really had no stomach for a needle-in-haystack exercise that would subject me to the level of penetrating analysis found in the average Hallmark greeting card.

After I published my synopsis of the gift economy, I received a superb essay from my good friend, Manoj Pavithran, with a very different approach to the subject. Manoj is that rare and spectacular combination of deeply thoughtful and utterly brilliant; and his careful analysis is constructed with the considerable philosophical rigor one might expect from him. It represents a significant contribution to the growing, evolving appreciation of the gift economy.

Manoj is not simply a theorist of the gift economy; he is a practitioner. He lives in Auroville, a community founded, in part, on both collectivist and cooperativist gift economy ideals. He also played a direct and influential role in the gift economization of two significant product initiatives of Upasana Design Studio: the Tsunamika dolls and the Small Steps cloth shopping bags.

With his permission, I offer Manoj’s essay for your consumption and reflection.

Advances in Clinical Chemistry

My second-most-favorite magazine of all time is Clinical Chemistry. Like my first-most-favorite magazine, I pretend to read it for the excellent articles, but mostly only look at the pictures.

If that’s not entirely true, it’s only because the images in Playboy (do they still publish Playboy?) are considerably more interesting than those in Clinical Chemistry, which tend to run toward crazy-shit-complicated graphs and conceptual layouts of brain-melting science. So, alas, I do struggle through the articles — which take me several hours for six to eight hard-won pages — with a Googleload of reference help.

No one will ever adjudge the literary merits of Clinical Chemistry to be on a par with, say, Granta, or the quality and usefulness of the science it contains to rival that of, say, Cooks Illustrated. Still, the rag has its own nerdy charm.

Imagine my delight, then, when Clinical Chemistry finally published something that not only covers my favorite subject in all of science, but that I could read without feeling like a third-grader: a profile of Carl Wittwer.

Accidental Environmentalism

When the Government of Pondicherry takes decisive action in favor of environmental protection, one thing is for certain: there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Here is the astounding-but-true story of the designation of Ousteri Lake, Pondicherry’s largest water body, as an “Important Bird Sanctuary,” thereby providing a significant legal tool to stop the industrial development which is ravaging its watershed.

Diwali Celebrations at Upasana

Diwali, the festival of light, is the biggest holiday of the year in a country that loves its holidays. Technically, it has Hindu roots — marking the homecoming of Ram after kicking some Sri Lankan booty — and is celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains in variations on a theme of the triumph of good over evil. Practically speaking, it is as secularized as Christmas in America — a disappointing trend in both cases (but that’s another story).

It is not only celebrated widely, but poorly as well.

Kuzhali Manickavel Is Just Like You and Me Except that Her Words Have Wings

When reading a wonderfully crafted story, we are sometimes tempted to say that the line between prose and poetry has been blurred. We don’t really mean it, of course. It is simply our hyperbolic way of acknowledging the writer’s stylistic gifts. We cannot read Michael Ondaajte, for example, without marveling at the precision and emotional fullness of his writing; but our brains do not really struggle to ascertain whether we are in the midst of his fiction or his poems. The confidence we bring to the distinction belies its arbitrariness – at least since poetry was liberated from its formal constraints at the opening of the twentieth century – but we are usually confident nonetheless.

This sure ground frequently falls away under the magical pen of Kuzhali Manickavel, whose new work of nearly intertwined short… ummm… pieces, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, has just been published by Blaft Publications in Chennai.

Kuzhali’s stories are like well-remembered dreams. They are frustratingly elliptical and playfully topsy-turvey in their abandonment of mundane reality, yet sufficiently vivid and subtle to provide that delicious moment of doubt about the dreaming/waking, imaginary/reportorial dichotomies which make us feel in control of our lives.

Sunday Picnic under the Banyan Tree

Obama Becomes Elektra

Check-out the awesome new Obama-wear created by Elektra Printz, one of New York’s smartest new fashion designers. Never heard of her? You will.

Yet Another Reason Vancouver Rocks

This afternoon, under cool, grey skies, Yoo-Mi and Ellen rolled out the driveway on bicycle; and I launched a sea kayak from the beach in front of the house. Roughly an hour later, we rendezvoused on the dock at Granville Island, and began combing the aisleways of the Public Market for the makings of dinner.

Not a bad way to “run to the store.”

Socrates, the Pig, and High School Reunions

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863)

My recent post on attending my thirtieth high school reunion may not have produced many public comments, but it has engendered several excellent conversations via private email. Few of my friends have any qualms about condemning my take as too facile, ignoring a vastly complex emotional dimension to the reunion phenomenon. They also criticize my affection for these events as a sign of my tolerance for superficial conversation.

I cannot completely dismiss their critique. It is true that I approach school reunions with an emotional simpicity, low expectations, and good-natured affability. Still, I believe that there is more to my point-of-view than vapidness and lack of critical depth. Either that or, as I have always argued, John Stuart Mill (who presumed to know a thing-or-two about hedonism) was a bit off-the-mark when he slandered the happiness of pigs.

I have taken the liberty of excerpting the most interesting of these discussions, which I think displays the merits of both Socratic misery and porcine pleasure.

High School Reunion

The formally educated world splits into two kinds: those who love school reunions and those who loathe them. The emotional gulf between these points of view cannot be easily bridged or forded. The naysayers deride the pointless nostalgia and the overwrought sentimentality for a time when, in reality, they were crude, zit-faced versions of the far more impressive people they would ultimately grow into. They have “moved on” in life and their few attachments to the past are marginalized to the realm of rarely accessed memory.

I am firmly in the other camp. I think school reunions are wonderful fun.

I find it entertaining and inspiring to see the interesting, valuable lives former friends and acquaintances have made for themselves. While I’m not particularly good about staying in touch with old colleagues, it is nonetheless satisfying to catch-up every once-in-a-while.