Women and the Gift Economy

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, 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. Shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible. A gift economy embodies an oriented logic of care while exchange, upon which the market is based, contains a logic of self interest because it requires an equivalent return for what is given, satisfying the need of the ‘giver’ as opposed to those of the ‘receiver.’ Indigenous societies often continue to practice gift giving although they have now been forced into the context of the market. Many other examples of gift giving from mothering to communication and social activism abound in our society although they are unrecognized. Even free housework can be considered an unrecognized gift women are giving to their families and to the capitalist system. Through the commodification of free gift areas—such as water, traditionally grown seeds, medicinal plants—globalization captures the gifts of the many in the Global South, channeling them to the few in the North. Contributors to this volume argue that shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another world possible.