Women and the Gift Economy

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Ebook in EPUB format. Available for immediate download after we receive your order

DRM:
Watermark

Publication Year:
2007

ISBN-13: 9781926708461

Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible is an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the planet. Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and academics from around the world, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet. Contributors to this volume argue that shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible.<p class="copy"><em><span class="highlight">Women and the Gift Economy:</span> A Radically Different Worldview is Possible</em>&#10; is an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change&#10; in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the &#10;planet. Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and &#10;academics, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which &#10;have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of&#10; Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an &#10;approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is &#10;destroying life on the planet. Shifting to a gift paradigm can give us &#10;the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world&#10; possible.</p>&#10;<p class="copy">A gift economy embodies an oriented logic of care while &#10;exchange, upon which the market is based, contains a logic of self &#10;interest because it requires an equivalent return for what is given, &#10;satisfying the need of the &#8216;giver&#8217; as opposed to those of the &#10;&#8216;receiver.&#8217; Indigenous societies often continue to practice gift giving &#10;although they have now been forced into the context of the market. Many &#10;other examples of gift giving from mothering to communication and social&#10; activism abound in our society although they are unrecognized. Even &#10;free housework can be considered an unrecognized gift women are giving &#10;to their families and to the capitalist system. Through the &#10;commodification of free gift areas&#8212;such as water, traditionally grown &#10;seeds, medicinal plants&#8212;globalization captures the gifts of the many in &#10;the Global South, channeling them to the few in the North. Contributors &#10;to this volume argue that shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the &#10;radically different worldview which will make another world possible.</p>