gift economies

In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications, all of which Hyde brought vividly into view.

Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous 1923 book on gift-exchange, Hyde took the idea much further, showing how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships. As Hyde shows, gift economies of reciprocity are particularly important to artists and creative communities in their functioning as commons. In their artistry, musicians and performers must learn to see their creative talents as gifts, something they must share without expectation or guarantee of return, but invariably important benefits materialize – inspiration, creative mastery, a sense of belonging – that manifests as if by grace. 

These ideas had obvious value when I began exploring the commons in the late 1990s. Hyde cites many examples in all sorts of unexpected realms of how gift exchange animates a gentle reciprocity and mutual benefits – blood banks and organ donation systems, Indigenous culture and countless artistic contexts. The generativity of gift-exchange has an almost mysterious aura and spiritual dimensions, as ratified numerous fairy tales affirm. 

After being so influenced by The Gift in my younger day, I recently asked Hyde to join me for a conversation on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #70). I wanted to see how his and my perspectives of gift economies and commons may have evolved over the years, and what topics may be in his field of vision today. (One is AI.)

We also spoke about his classic 2010 book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership, which explores how creativity and culture have always functioned as commons. The US Founding Fathers recognized the importance of freely available knowledge and creative works in the late 1700s, for example. Hyde spent an entire chapter in the book describing how Benjamin Franklin – otherwise celebrated as a commercially minded individualist and entrepreneur -- is more accurately called a “founding pirate” for insisting that the free flow of ideas and inventions should override expansive patents and copyrights.