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MY PROPOSAL GOT ACCEPTED! I'm presenting "'Giving It On' in Millenium Hall: Rethinking the Gift Economy in Religious Contexts” at the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Williamsburg this March!!! (Uber-appropriate icon...)
okay, so there's this awesome 18th century book (kind of a novel?) called Millenium Hall. It's about these upper-class women who have bad things happen to them, mostly because of Men. they come together and form an all-female community. they also do a lot of charity projects, including housing less well-off single women, and creating a haven for former "circus freaks" to live away from the rest of society if they choose. Millenium Hall has its own little economy: the land provides food, and their charities, as a full system, are self-sustaining.
The novel has been analyzed as a "gift economy". a theorist named Mauss discussed the sociology of gifting. he said that there are three obligations in a gift economy: the obligation to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. we have to give presents at christmas. if someone gives us a present, we have to take it. we have to give a present back. the present that we give back has to be of an equal or greater value, or we lose respect in the gift economy. so people have analyzed the gift economy in the novel: the ladies of the hall give to the people around them, and some scholars have studied how those people give back. one in particular claimed that the poorer single gentlewomen were disempowered by the gift economy because they had no way to give back. the lower class people who receive charity from the ladies of the hall are able to work in some way to benefit the community, but the gentlewomen can't labor, so they can't give back.
my paper is about how this is silly because the gift economy in MH is specifically a Christian one. the Christian conception of a gift economy is not a circle of giving, receiving and giving back. instead, it's straight lines radiating from God outward. God gives more to us than we could ever repay. So instead of giving BACK to him in something of equal or greater value, we are to give ON to others. the gift can be intangible: friendship and prayer can also be gifts. furthermore, we are only required to give according to our means, as in the story of the widow giving two pennies. therefore, since the poor gentlewomen are specifically described as giving friendship to others in the community, they are doing their part in the gift economy.
so i'm arguing that we have to keep the ideology of the culture in mind when we analyze a gift culture: they don't all work the way Mauss indicated, and a Christian gift economy is one example.
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Good luck with your presentation :)
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(i think you'd like millenium hall, but it might be hard getting hold of a copy.)
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