Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Jeremy Gould
In the current moment, where the collapse of the ecological infrastructure which has made capitalism so profitable seems imminent, many anxious voices long for ’other possible worlds’ founded on gifting rather than extraction, worlds where the compassionate co-production of value might supplant exploitative relations between capital and labor in the organization of provisioning and reproduction.
Marcel Mauss (1954) seemed to have had faith in this possibility and proposed that we moderns take a lesson from ‘archaïc’ societies in the formulation of social welfare policies. I propose to engage critically with this thought experiment via the examination of a modern culture of gifting on the fringes of the industrial revolution in rural Maine in the middle of the 19th century. Examining the practices and relationships invested in the collaborative production of what are variously termed ‘album,’ ‘signature,’ or ‘friendship’ quilts reveals a culture of compassionate co-production which, I argue, is best understood by abandoning a dyadic notion of gifting, i.e., one based on a transaction between a donor, on the one hand, and a recipient, on the other. It may be more fruitful to conceive of gifting as a collective enterprise, where compassionate co-production feeds horizontal relationality, rather than the delayed reciprocities between discrete providers and recipients.
Jeremy Gould is a professor emeritus of development studies, currently affiliated with Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. His earlier work has focused on sundry manifestations of power in postcolonial Africa. The current paper represents preliminary results from a new project on ’Circles and cycles of rural women’s lives in 19th century Maine.’