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J Scott Hill

Marcel Mauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Marcel_Mauss

gift mauss gebusi

shared by J Scott Hill on 30 Jan 13 - Cached
  • n his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never "free". Rather, human history is full of examples that gifts give rise to reciprocal exchange. The famous question that drove his inquiry into the anthropology of the gift was: "What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?" (1990:3). The answer is simple: the gift is a "total prestation", imbued with "spiritual mechanisms", engaging the honour of both giver and receiver (the term "total prestation" or "total social fact" (fait social total) was coined by his student Maurice Leenhardt after Durkheim's social fact).
  • The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: "the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them" (1990:31). Because of this bond between giver and gift, the act of giving creates a social bond with an obligation to reciprocate on part of the recipient. To not reciprocate means to lose honour and status, but the spiritual implications can be even worse: in Polynesia, failure to reciprocate means to lose mana, one's spiritual source of authority and wealth.
  • In a gift economy, however, the objects that are given are inalienated from the givers; they are "loaned rather than sold and ceded". It is the fact that the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate. Because gifts are inalienable they must be returned; the act of giving creates a gift-debt that has to be repaid
Michael Daly

Perspectives on Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado - 2 views

www.jstor.org/...320007

Violence Yanomami measles Chagnon

shared by Michael Daly on 07 Feb 13 - No Cached
J Scott Hill liked it
  • Michael Daly on 07 Feb 13
     
    "This would be unfortunate, for the book offers a controversial account of the impact of Western research on an indigenous population that should urge us to think hard about our work. Even before its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became a Janusfaced text that in calling attention to methodological and ethical shortcomings of scientific research in the Amazon also brought attention to faults in its own production. This should not obscure its contribution or make us forget that the central issue in this drama, after all, should be the Yanomami" "At the books heart is a twostranded argument concerning the work among the Yanomami by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James Neel. One strand follows their involvement in a complex set of medical practices centering on the collection of blood samples and a measles vaccination campaign. The other traces Chagnons spectacular career as the creator of the Yanomami as anthropologys wellknown fierce people. While Tierneys focus is on individuals, his book locates them in two relevant contexts: the cold war and the Vietnam War, during which currents of evolutionary genetics, sociobiology, and cultural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a positive role in human evolution found broad support, and the Venezuelan petrostate culture of clientelism, which fostered a network of corrupt politicians and businessmen with interests in the Yanomami and their territory for reasons of profit and power. His discussion argues that the work of Chagnon, Neel, and other scientists brought the Yanomami neither empowerment nor wellbeing but fragmentation and destruction" "The first strand of the book, which occupies less than onetenth of Tierneys text but has received the most public attention, argues that Neel and Chagnon collected blood samples for the Atomic Energy Commission to compare mutation rates in populations contaminated by radiation with those in one uncontaminated by it and at the same time carried out
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