The Life of the Gift

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to acknowledge the ongoing generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [1924], trans. W.D. Halls (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1990). 2 Jacques Derrida, Given Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Alphonso Lingis refers to Nietzsche's directive that ‘whenever you do a good deed, you should take a stick and thrash any bystander to muddle his [sic] memory. Then you should take that stick and thrash your own head, to muddle your own memory’. Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 3 Rosalyn Diprose Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002); Nigel Clark ‘Disaster and Generosity’, The Geographical Journal, 171:4 (2005), pp.384-386. 4 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity’, p.7. 5 Myra J. Hird, ‘The Corporeal Generosity of Maternity’, Body and Society, 13:1 (2007), pp.1-20. 6 Genevieve Vaughan, ‘Othering, Co-muni-cation, and the Gifts of Language’ in The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, eds. E. Wyschogrod; J.J. Goux, and E. Boynton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp.91-116. 7 The only feature of this relationship that, to a limited extent, rescues women within the economic discourse of exchange is what Donna Haraway discusses as the value placed upon ‘reproductive investment’, that is our investment in offspring. Donna Haraway, Modest witness@second millennium. FemaleMan ©_ meets _OncoMouse TM (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p.204. 8 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: Penguin Books, 1976). 9 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p.25. 10 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p.653. 11 ‘IVF Babies “More Likely” to Have Mixed-up Genes’, Telegraph, 2 November (2004), p.1. 12 See Myra J. Hird, ‘Chimerism, Mosaicism and the Cultural Construction of Kinship’, Sexualities, 7:2 (2004), pp.217-232. 13 S. Hosein, ‘Testing: Pregnancy and the Immune System’, Treatment Update 57, 7:3 (1995), pp.1-2. 14 This means that the immune systems of HIV-positive pregnant women are further compromised. 15 K. Moore and T. Persaud, Before We Are Born: Essentials of Embryology and Birth Defects (Philadelphia, PA: W. B. Saunders Company, 1998). 16 Canadian Parents URL: < www.canadianparents. ca/CPO/Pregnancy/PregnancyTerms.html> [accessed 11/04/2005]. 17 I refer to both ‘parents’ and mothers while acknowledging that the breast feeder did not necessarily conceive, gestate or birth the infant or child (see Giles 2004; Shaw 2004). 18 J. Newman, ‘How Breast Milk Protects Newborns’, URL: < www.Pregnancy.org/article.php?side = 2326> [accessed 11/04/2005]. 19 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p.9; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Duke University Press, 2008). 20 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity’, p.7. 21 Nigel Clark, ‘Disaster and Generosity’, p.7, 8. 22 Myra J. Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Press, 2009). 23 See Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1981). Note that bacteria are not actually species (they are defined rather in terms of ‘kinds’) because their reproductive abilities exceed the traditional species definition as individuals who are able to produce viable offspring through reproduction. 24 Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.167. 25 Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-technology, and the Mutations of Desire (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2004), p.40. 26 Phil Dunham explains that most of the dust we encounter (especially in our homes) is actually us. This dust consists of miniscule fragments of dead skin that has peeled from our bodies. The outermost layers of the skin on our body is in the process of becoming dust. Rather than epitomize a boundary between non-matter (culture) and matter (nature), self and other, familiar and foreign, dust ‘…resists the modernist ennui, the weariness of classification, the strain of keeping things fixed… Dust is no respecter of boundaries, whether real or imagined’. Phil Dunham ‘Dust’, eds. S. Harrison, S. Pile and N. Thrift, Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion Books), p.99. 27 A. Tauber, ‘Postmodernism and Immune Selfhood’, Science in Context, 8:4 (1995), p.601.