| Gifting and Community | 2003-05-29 23:31 1 comment |
 by Flemming FunchYesterday I was watching GIFTING IT: A Burning Embrace of Gift Economy, which is a documentary about the gift economy in effect at BurningMan, which I mentioned here. Somebody said: You could almost say that the definition of community is a place where there's gift giving.Right. I agree. It is like in a family. Wouldn't work if we had to account for and pay for each act. My baby daughter would have had no money to pay for her upbringing. Lots of little joyful or necessary acts would just have been so much harder if we had had to go out and get financing for them. Likewise in any community of people who aren't just family. What brought them together might well have been a commercial relationship. But what holds them together, and what makes the community useful is all the extra stuff they do together which they didn't necessarily have to do. Economics is not so much about money as it is about making choices. In gift economies it is all about choices. Communities form when a bunch of people somehow choose to operate together. It is better the more informed their choices are. Taking away the ability to choose, or the ability to choose well, destroys community and is also bad economics. |