At last!

Following on from my last meeting with Geoff, I’ve spent the Christmas break re-examing my stuff; things I do, projects I’ve done, stuff that interest me and even grand ideas for the future (even if they are just ideas) and apart from most of them were all fun and I learnt loads, I do seem to be happy to give them away as it were. That got me thinking about gifts, gift economy and why we give gifts. The library was finally open yesterday so I went and spent a few hours in there researching the gift and managed to track down a few books which might help.

The Gift – Lewis Hyde
– Hyde uses a lot of different area to examine the role gits play on our lives
The Logic of the Gift – Alan D.Schrift
– a collection of essays on gift giving
The Enigma of the Gift – Maurice Godelier
– Godelier looks at gifts by focusing on sacred objects which are never exchanged.
The Gift Relationship – Ann Oakley & John Ashton
– this book compares voluntary blood donation (UK) with blood donation for cash (US) and concludes that voluntary is better. This sorts of confirms my work in giving stuff away so I wanted to read more
The Gift – Marcel Mauss
– this book is referenced by pretty much all of these others so I felt compelled to include it – even if it seems all they do is reject a lot of its content
Social Solidarity and the Gift – Aafke E.Komter
– this book by showing positive and negative examples examines the link between solidarity and gift giving. This book could be the key one for me.