The Question of the Gift
The Question of the Gift is the first collection of new interdisciplinary essays on the gift. Bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, including anthropology, literary criticism, economics, philosophy and classics, it provides new paradigms and poses new questions concerning the theory and practice of gift exchange.
In a culture awash with the rhetoric of self-interest, understanding the gift is more important than ever. Thus this collection raises essential questions for social life:
How do non-commercial exchanges form and solidify communities?
How do humans and objects interact outside of consumerism?
What are the relationships between gifts and commodities?
To what degree are artworks gifts?
Is a truly free gift possible, or even desirable?
In addressing these questions, contributors not only challenge the conventions of their fields, but also combine ideas and methods from both the social sciences and humanities to forge innovative ways of confronting this universal phenomenon.
Mark Osteen is Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at Loyola College, Baltimore. He is the author of American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillos Dialogue with Culture (2000) and The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (1995); the editor of the Viking Critical Edition of Don DeLillos White Noise (1998) and co-editor, with Martha Woodmansee, of The New Economic Criticism (Routledge, 1999).
Routledge Studies in Anthropology
1 Student Mobility and Narrative in Europe
The new strangers
Elizabeth Murphy-Lejeune
2 The Question of the Gift
Essays across disciplines
Edited by Mark Osteen
The Question of the Gift
Essays across disciplines
Edited by Mark Osteen
First published 2002
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Transferred to Digital Printing 2006
2002 Selection and editorial material, Mark Osteen; individual chapters, the contributors
Typeset in Baskerville by Taylor & Francis Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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ISBN 0415282772
Contents
MARK OSTEEN
PART I
Redefining reciprocity
JAMES LAIDLAW
YUNXIANG YAN
LEE ANNE FENNELL
PART II
Kinship, generosity and gratitude: ethical foundations
CHARLES H. HINNANT
MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFF
EUN KYUNG MIN
PART III
The gift and artistic commerce
JACQUI SADASHIGE
NICOLETTA PIREDDU
ANTHONY FOTHERGILL
STEPHEN COLLIS
PART IV
Posing new questions
MARK OSTEEN
ANTONIO CALLARI
JACK AMARIGLIO
ANDREW COWELL
Jack Amariglio is a professor of economics at Merrimack College. He was the founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Rethinking Marxism, and is the co-editor (with Stephen Cullenberg and David Ruccio) of Postmodernism, Economics, and Knowledge (Routledge, 2001), and the co-author (with David Ruccio) of The Postmodern Moment in Economics (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).
Antonio Callari teaches economics at Franklin and Marshall College and serves on the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism. He has edited Marxism in the Postmodern Age (Guilford, 1995; with S. Cullenberg and C. Biewener), and Postmodern Materialism (Wesleyan University Press, 1996; with D. Ruccio), and is now working on a book of essays, How Economics Was Invented (Ashgate, forthcoming).
Stephen Collis is an assistant professor of American literature at Simon Fraser University. He is currently working on a manuscript on poet Robert Duncan, The Poetics of Derivation, and has published his own poetry widely in Canada and the United States.
Andrew Cowell teaches French and Italian at the University of Colorado. He specializes in the Middle Ages, but also has a broader interest in economic theory and economic anthropology. His book At Play in the Tavern: Signs, Coins and Bodies in the Middle Ages was published by University of Michigan Press in 1999. Recent publications include articles in Cultural Studies and Poetics Today. His current book project is entitled The Gift, Performance and Alterity: Reciprocity with the Past.
Lee Anne Fennell is an assistant professor at the University of Texas Law School. Her teaching and research interests include property, distributive justice, local government law, and law and literature.
Anthony Fothergill teaches English literature at the University of Exeter, UK, having previously taught at Heidelberg University and Kenyon College. He has written extensively on Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf and other modernist writers, and on German critical theory, as well as publishing editions of Oscar Wildes and Conrads works. His current project is a book, Joseph Conrad and Germany: The Politics of Cultural Reception.
Charles H. Hinnant is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of books on Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift and, most recently, Anne Finch. He is currently at work on a book-length study of the relevance of Marcel Mausss The Gift to an understanding of the Bible.
James Laidlaw is a Fellow of Kings College and a university lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His publications include The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (Clarendon Press, 1994; with Caroline Humphrey), Riches and Renunciation (Clarendon Press, 1995), and The Essential Edmund Leach (Yale University Press, 2000; with Stephen Hugh-Jones).
Eun Kyung Min is an assistant professor of English at Seoul National University in Korea. She studied philosophy at the Graduate Faculty, New School for Social Research, and completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Princeton in 1998. She is currently working on the intersections of contemporary virtue ethics and eighteenth-century moral philosophy, and her next major research project is on the literary uses of China in eighteenth-century England and France.
Mark Osteen is Professor of English at Loyola College, Baltimore, and has published widely on film and on twentieth-century literature and economics. He is the author of The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (Syracuse, 1995) and American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillos Dialogue with Culture (University of Pennsylvania, 2000), as well as editor of the Viking Critical Library edition of DeLillos
