Gift Exchange

Gift Exchange
Author: Grégoire Mallard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2019-03-14
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108489699

Examines gift exchanges as a foundational notion both in anthropology and in debates about international economic governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Gifts and Commodities

Gifts and Commodities
Author: James G. Carrier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2005-07-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134816650

Three hundred years ago people made most of what they used, or got it in trade from their neighbours. Now, no one seems to make anything, and we buy what we need from shops. Gifts and Commodities describes the cultural and historical process of these changes and looks at the rise of consumer society in Britain and the United States. It investigates the ways that people think about and relate to objects in twentieth-century culture, at how those relationships have developed, and the social meanings they have for relations with others. Using aspects of anthropology and sociology to describe the importance of shopping and gift-giving in our lives and in western economies, Gifts and Commodities: * traces the development of shopping and retailing practices, and the emergence of modern notions of objects and the self * brings together a wealth of information on the history of the retail trade * examines the reality of the distinctions we draw between the impersonal economic sphere and personal social sphere * offers a fully interdisciplinary study of the links we forge between ourselves, our social groups and the commodities we buy and give.

Chaucer's Gifts

Chaucer's Gifts
Author: Robert Epstein
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1786831708

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated literary work of medieval England, portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer’s world or in his poem. Chaucer’s Gifts reveals the gift economy at work in the tales. Applying important recent advances in anthropological gift theory, it illuminates and explains this network of exchanges and obligations. Chaucer’s Gifts argues that the world of the Canterbury Tales harbours deep commitments to reciprocity and obligation which are at odds with a purely commercial culture, and demonstrates how the market and commercial relations are not natural, eternal, or inevitable – an essential lesson if we are to understand Chaucer’s world or our own.

The Gift

The Gift
Author: Marcel Mauss
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2002-09-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136896848

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Gifts and Exchanges

Gifts and Exchanges
Author: Catherine Denning
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1999
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780789006783

This important book explores the many questions challenging librarians who work with gifts and exchanges (G&E) as part of their daily responsibilities. Too often, because of shrinking library budgets, library gifts are considered burdensome and unprofitable drains on both financial and personnel resources. However, Gifts and Exchanges: Problems, Frustrations, . . . and Triumphs gives you solutions that will allow you to embrace your library's gifts as rewards. In this book, you will discover the latest ways of disposing unwanted materials, planning and holding book sales and auctions, and operating a full-time bookstore with Friends of the Library. Gifts and Exchanges covers the many questions that are currently challenging librarians who work with gifts and exchanges--the problems, such as limited space and an understaffed team, frustrations, and triumphs that make up your daily routine in book donations. The many chapters in Gifts and Exchanges will assist you in solving your worst gift and exchange nightmares as you explore research and solutions on: the importance of a gift policy and its interpretation a template for drafting a gift policy G&E procedures in libraries not affiliated with the Association for Research Libraries answers to todays G&E problems disposing and profiting from unwanted gifts encouraging the gifts you want Gifts and Exchanges is a valuable reference that will help you swim through your department's sea of gifts and exchanges. As a library profesional, you will benefit from this book's current and well-researched answers to the problems that flood your G&E department.

Last Best Gifts

Last Best Gifts
Author: Kieran Healy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2010-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226322386

More than any other altruistic gesture, blood and organ donation exemplifies the true spirit of self-sacrifice. Donors literally give of themselves for no reward so that the life of an individual—often anonymous—may be spared. But as the demand for blood and organs has grown, the value of a system that depends solely on gifts has been called into question, and the possibility has surfaced that donors might be supplemented or replaced by paid suppliers. Last Best Gifts offers a fresh perspective on this ethical dilemma by examining the social organization of blood and organ donation in Europe and the United States. Gifts of blood and organs are not given everywhere in the same way or to the same extent—contrasts that allow Kieran Healy to uncover the pivotal role that institutions play in fashioning the contexts for donations. Procurement organizations, he shows, sustain altruism by providing opportunities to give and by producing public accounts of what giving means. In the end, Healy suggests, successful systems rest on the fairness of the exchange, rather than the purity of a donor’s altruism or the size of a financial incentive.

Zamumo's Gifts

Zamumo's Gifts
Author: Joseph M. Hall, Jr.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2012-05-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812202147

In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws. Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.

Dangerous Gifts

Dangerous Gifts
Author: Deborah Lyons
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2012-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292742762

Deianeira sends her husband Herakles a poisoned robe. Eriphyle trades the life of her husband Amphiaraos for a golden necklace. Atreus’s wife Aerope gives away the token of his sovereignty, a lamb with a golden fleece, to his brother Thyestes, who has seduced her. Gifts and exchanges always involve a certain risk in any culture, but in the ancient Greek imagination, women and gifts appear to be a particularly deadly combination. This book explores the role of gender in exchange as represented in ancient Greek culture, including Homeric epic and tragedy, non-literary texts, and iconographic and historical evidence of various kinds. Using extensive insights from anthropological work on marriage, kinship, and exchange, as well as ethnographic parallels from other traditional societies, Deborah Lyons probes the gendered division of labor among both gods and mortals, the role of marriage (and its failure) in transforming women from objects to agents of exchange, the equivocal nature of women as exchange-partners, and the importance of the sister-brother bond in understanding the economic and social place of women in ancient Greece. Her findings not only enlarge our understanding of social attitudes and practices in Greek antiquity but also demonstrate the applicability of ethnographic techniques and anthropological theory to the study of ancient societies.

The Gift Relationship

The Gift Relationship
Author: Titmuss, Richard
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2019-09-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1447349601

Richard Titmuss (1907-1973) was a pioneer in the field of social administration (now social policy). In this reissued classic, listed by the New York Times as one of the 10 most important books of the year when it was first published in 1970, he compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient. Titmuss’s argument about how altruism binds societies together has proved a powerful tool in the analysis of welfare provision. His analysis is even more topical now in an age of ever changing health care policy and at a time when health and welfare systems are under sustained attack from many quarters.