The vicissitudes of The Gift

Resonance of Solidarity: Meanings of a Local Concept in Anti-austerity Greece

“…This rethinking includes the re-conceptualization of economic activity, in line with the Maussian approach, in order to understand markets (such as the makeshift markets my informants organize) as social events (Sigaud 2002). The fact that anti-middleman cooperatives do not defy the state but, instead, suggest positive engagements with it, also confirms their desire to embrace cooperativism.…”

“…The way The Gift brings forward the prestation totale, a new sense of total social fact than that of Durkheim, is explained by Jane Guyer in the same series of essays-the gift is "total" in the sense of assembling a multiplicity of evocations and powers, differently configured, bounded and realized in different contexts over time and space (Guyer 2014, 11). This "pursuit of the whole," present in theorists that understand the potential for historical research that The Gift brings about (Sigaud 2002), is an asset in our research of the ensemble of social relations present in the accelerated historical temporality of the Greek crisis.…”

Which community for cooperatives?

“…These can include politicized pockets of protected wage labor and diversified community claims. Viewing economies as holistic systems where market and mutuality principles interact, in a Maussian sense, transcends dichotomies inspired by bourgeois separations between mutuality and market, the gift and commodities (Sigaud 2002;Hart 2007). Embracing only one aspect of this dialectic pitches "market" against "mutuality" -thus often associating cooperatives only with the realm of the latter and not the former.…”

Money is always personal and impersonal

“…He also took Malinowski to task for reproducing the bourgeois opposition between commercial self-interest and the free gift, a dichotomy that many Anglophone anthropologists have subsequently attributed to Mauss himself (cf. Sigaud 2002).…”