Nature Of Gift Research Articles

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Dangerous Giving in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Understanding Gift: From Mauss to Derrida

This paper probes into the practice of gift-giving and tries to find out the true character of gift. The paper begins with the common perception about gifts and proceeds to present an insightful analysis of Marcel Mauss’ understanding of gift. It then delves into Jacques Derrida’s take on the subject. The paper brings out the moments of convergences and divergences in thoughts of Mauss and Derrida before drawing up some conclusions about the nature of gift and its differences with other forms of exchange.

Missional Gift-Giving: A Practical Theology Investigation into what Happens when Churches Give Away “Free” Gifts for the Sake of Mission

A small qualitative case study is presented to investigate what happens when churches give away so-called “free” gifts in missional interventions in their communities. Descriptive text data from the churches is analysed and reflected upon in relation to the theological nature of gift which is problematized between the pure gift and gift exchange, a dilemma illustrated by the data itself. This tension is resolved using the work of Gregory Walter who defines promise theologically as “extended and doubled gift”. Such promise offers a new understanding of time and space in which the impurity of human gift exchange can find a place if it moves to incarnational relationship building from simple transaction within the promise. Practical outcomes of the study are offered in relation to the question of money and gift alongside the importance of growing community through empowerment within a consumerist culture.

Pol De Mont and Friends: A Curator, Donations, and Gift Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Antwerp

From 1904 to 1919, Pol De Mont (1857–1931) was curator-in-chief of Antwerp’s Fine Arts museum, one of Belgium’s oldest and most important municipal galleries. One of his tasks consisted of expanding the collection. Local private collectors had already been involved with the museum. In fact, a local tradition of gift-giving dated back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. De Mont acknowledged the potential of private donations and established himself as one of the leaders of Antwerp’s municipal gift culture. At the same time, he respected the viewpoints of donors, some of whom who had been active in the field of fine arts longer than him. In order to direct patrons towards the museum, he created enduring bonds with donors, combining expertise with a personal approach.This article discusses how De Mont’s curatorial practice interacted with the agency of donors and vice versa. He combined research, connoisseurship, and art market insight to establish his authority. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how De Mont persuaded patrons to donate. His analysis of the obligatory nature of gifts was crucial, inherent to the social dimension of what he perceived as a historic gift culture. In this process, De Mont’s personality and creativity also played a role insofar as he was highly persuasive and used language and metaphors to stress the validity of patronage; and he expressed genuine friendship and respect towards patrons and placed his expertise in their service.

Saving and Current Account in the Context of Shari‘ah Contract

Islamic banking is a new phenomenon that has taken many observers by surprise. There are three types of account which are commonly known in the Islamic Banks. These are: Current Account, Saving Account and Investment account. Moreover, this paper proposed to analysis the Savings and Current Account Deposit in the context of Shari‘ah contract. The Shari‘ah principles applicable to saving account are Al-Wadi‘ah, Mudarabah and Al-Qard Hassan. However, AlQard is commonly offered by Islamic banks in the Middle East. The Shari‘ah compliant of current account based on the Al-Wadi‘ah Yad Dhamanah (safe custody) principle which refers to a contract between the owner of funds (account holder) and the bank for safe keeping purposes. This paper claims that deposits from savers are an important source of financial strength for the Islamic banks. They use it to increase their capacity for financing operations and thereby increase profit for the shareholders. In addition, it argued that gifts in wadi‘ah and qard hassan allowed because the excess or expected return is not contractual in nature and the bank is under no obligation to provide a return and return is purely in the nature of gift, whereby, gifts by definition do not constitute ribā.

“And row my blossoms o’er!” Gift-Giving and Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Vocation

Emily Dickinson loved gifts. Many of her early poems were gifts themselves, accompanied gifts, or spoke in the voice of gifts. Finding the voice of the gift was an essential dimension of her development as a poet, and many of her early lyrics show her transforming material gifts into more immediately apprehensible imaginative inventions. She came of age as a poet at a time when the nature of gifts was being widely discussed, and when giving a gift of poetry was, for a brief time, a veritable fad. Her gift poems can be seen as a contribution to the public discourses about what was important in a gift, and what kind of human contact a gift offering might promise. In this current of popular gift discourse, from gift books and flower lexicons, to revivalist discussions of the Atonement, Dickinson forged her poetry and her understanding of the communicative power of the poem. Rising to her imaginative invitation promised a more intense intimacy than any commodity gift could convey. Through her poetic gifts, she debated what kind of human relation was defined by the giving of a gift and what kind of circuit of understanding a poetic gift could create.

Magic of the gift in the workplace: Reply to Dodlova and Yudkevich

The article is a reply to M. Dodlova and M. Yudkevich. In their recent paper they undertake an attempt to use the notion of gift in the analysis of principal–agent relationship and to generalize the idea of gift in order to obtain a theory of gift exchange in the workplace. However, the analysis suggested lacks conceptual clarity and rests upon false presuppositions regarding the nature of gift. As a result, authors draw erroneous conclusions and fall victims of the magic of the gift. This short reply points to these deficiencies and suggests some ideas for alternative approaches to the analysis of certain phenomena observed in the workplace.

Gifts, Drug Samples, and other Items Given to Medical Specialists by Pharmaceutical Companies

Aim To ascertain the quantity and nature of gifts and items provided by the pharmaceutical industry in Australia to medical specialists and to consider whether these are appropriate in terms of justifiable ethical standards, empirical research and views expressed in the literature.

"Her Gift Was Compelled": Gender and the Failure of the "Gift" in Cecilia

Throughout the first half of Frances Burney's Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782), the heroine engages in what she believes are disinterested acts of generosity. Orphaned, single, and heiress to a large estate, Cecilia adopts a sense of fiscal and moral agency as she awaits her twenty-first birthday. Although legally under the authority of three guardians, she considers her money hers to spend and regards herself as "an agent of Charity, and already in idea anticipated the rewards of a good and faithful delegate."1 Cecilia's scheme for happiness through philanthropy arises from her almost immediate dissatisfaction with her life in London and in the Harrel household. Unable to find, in the world of fashion, the human intimacy that she had cherished when in the care of an "aged and maternal counsellor" (6), she commits herself to acts of charity, convinced that they promise social and moral authority. As Kristina Straub points out, Cecilia views giving as a way to "enable herself to act and initiate rather than being acted upon";2 she truly believes she will succeed in making [End Page 107] "worthy use of the affluence, freedom and power" she possesses (55). At the same time, Cecilia considers her fortune "a debt contracted with the poor, and her independence, as a tie upon her liberality to pay it with interest" (55; emphasis added); or, as Catherine Gallagher states, she believes that "she owes whatever she owns."3 The novel, however, works to undermine her belief in unalloyed generosity; she is both impractical and mistaken in her assumptions about self and socioeconomic obligation. Confusing benevolence with "DUTY," combined with her "fervent desire to ACT RIGHT" (55), Cecilia formulates a plan to give, and to give generously—a plan that, from its inception, never enacts the disinterestedness she covets. Rather, this plan entangles her in an ethical dilemma of financial obligation, threatening both her fortune and identity. Cecilia's intended acts of generosity are revealed to be instances of coercion as she quickly finds herself giving her money to the most unlikely recipients, such as her guardian Harrel, and the most unworthy of causes. In actuality, her acts of gift giving and charity are compelled acts in response to a paternal debt—a debt that, by its very nature, can never be repaid and always is experienced as an imposition. * * * The intersections among gift economy, paternal authority, and patriarchal structures inform Cecilia's understanding of the "gift" and its social implications. The problems within the novel provoked by an economy of gift exchange have both historical and theoretical dimensions, and, in this article, I examine how the dilemmas that confound Cecilia locate Burney's novel within eighteenth-century debates about women's roles in philanthropic giving and expose the problems posed by the mutual implications of gifts and obligation. The gift—particularly the heroine's "gift" to the Harrels, her acts of "charity," and the love exchange between Cecilia and Mortimer—sutures over her complicity in a patrilineal and repressive economic system. The novel's representation of the complexities of gift exchange exposes the "impossibility" of the gift and presents interested and exploitative exchange as disinterested generosity and voluntary charity. My reading of Cecilia, in this respect, draws on debates about the nature of gift [End Page 108] exchange to contest arguments that the heroine acts in accordance with eighteenth-century conceptions of social responsibility. Critics such as Terry Castle and Gallagher read Cecilia's capitulation to a patriarchal economy as informed, socially aware, and voluntary.4 Similarly, Catherine Keohane argues that Cecilia's giving empowers the heroine, suggesting that the novel offers the possibility of female agency through charitable participation in the public sphere. Keohane states that the novel's focus on charitable giving signifies Cecilia's "authority to distribute money while single" and her "belief that she has a right to choose what to...

The Gift of Life and the Common Good: The Need for a Communal Approach to Organ Procurement

The Need for a Communal Approach to Organ Procurement Its critics to contrary, of metaphor is not to be blamed for indebtedness and guilt that organ recipients often experience. It is certainly misused, however, both by post-transplant caregivers, who exploit it to manipulate recipients' behavior, and by organ procurement system, which has failed to understand that decision to give gift of life must be approached communally. The metaphor of of has shaped most public discussions of organ in United States. Indeed, until very recently, overwhelming majority of appeals to recruit organ donors been framed in terms of this metaphor, and there is evidence that metaphor is persuasive. According to some surveys, a majority of Americans say they would be willing to donate their organs after death.[1] Nevertheless, number of organs actually donated is considerably smaller than would be expected given number of people theoretically committed to donating. Various explanations been offered for this discrepancy. A recent study in these pages has concluded that one problem is that metaphor of gift of life has simply not proven entirely effective in overcoming resistance to donate.[2] According to Laura Siminoff and Kata Chillag, recent studies have shown that major limitation to procuring organs is families' unwillingness to do so when asked in actual donor situations--in fact, less than half donate when asked. Thus while metaphor may aided public awareness of need for organ donation, it has not proven effective in procuring organs for transplantation (p. 35). Further, Siminoff and Chillag argue, not only is gift of life metaphor ineffective in organ recruitment, but it has unexpected and detrimental effects on donor families, as well as on recipients and their caregivers (p. 40). The gift of life metaphor is itself one of major problems with organ system: it has not overcome donor families' reluctance to give, and it generates problems for those who receive. The clear implication is that metaphor ought to be abandoned. In our view, we need not abandon metaphor, indeed we ought not, but certainly if we are to continue to work creatively and constructively with metaphor of gift of life, we must take seriously important criticisms that Siminoff and Chillag directed at it. Problems with the Gift of Life According to Siminoff and Chillag, in order to understand how metaphor functions, we must set out some of basic structure of any social institution premised on voluntary and altruistic gifts. The classic work on gift exchange theory is Marcel Mauss's The Girl: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, and Siminoff and Chillag draw upon that work to help identify some of problems of organizing organ procurement system around image of gift of life. One serious problem is connected with nature of debt. Mauss, for example, noted that gift giving typically creates relationships in which there is both debt and expectation that debt will be repaid. Indeed, gift giving is a socially useful institution precisely because it creates a network of obligations within a communal context in which group's welfare is partly dependent upon mutual cooperation. Of course, if within a system of gift relationships debt created by a gift is not acknowledged or if debt is not repaid, then system inevitably breaks down, with significant consequences for both individual and group. And this points to two related problems with organ donor system. Given way organ procurement system conceptualizes transaction, donor gives organ to recipient. At least for cadaveric donation, it is obviously impossible for recipient to discharge his or her debt, because nature of gift is such that gift giver is inevitably dead. …

The role of housing inheritance in selected owner occupied societies (Britain, New Zealand, Canada)

Abstract The paper examines the debate regarding housing inheritance and its impact upon wealth transfers within selected owner occupier societies (Britain, New Zealand and Canada). The examination of current research data show how tenure changes and house price movements in the 1970s and 1980s have resulted in greater accumulation of wealth within owner occupied housing. This increase in wealth raises the question of the disbursement of such wealth on death through bequeathing, and the impact this has upon the recipients social position and lifestyle. Here, the data from the selected societies show that most transfers are within the immediate family and occur in mid‐life when the recipients are already established in their own housing, thus minimising the impact on their lives and social positions. The second part of the paper presents data on the nature of gifts and inheritances within Canada drawn from the 1986 Housing Expenditure Survey. These data show that the amounts of money transferred vary by age, gender, family composition, income, occupation and tenure. In addition, regional differences across Canada were found. The paper argues for the need for further more qualitative based research to assess the full impact that such transfers play upon family relationships, social class position and lifestyles.

Circumcision Feasts among the Negev Bedouins

Social scientists often consider feasts to be reflections of social structure. They assume that people living in community, sharing a common culture and participating in the same political framework, will also celebrate the same feasts. This may be superficially true. But a closer look at such feasts shows that the manner of their celebration varies a great deal between sectors of the community. Different positions in the social structure are reflected in the details of ritual, in the composition of the participants, in the nature of gifts, and in other aspects of the feasts. These distinctions are very evident in the circumcision feasts of the Negev Bedouin.