Giving Without Taking

The nature of gifts and a new approach to reciprocity.

It’s a hard time of year to be an anti-capitalist who is slightly obsessed with the concept of the gift. The transformation of generosity under a capitalist economy is enough to make anyone feel gross. Gift giving has such a beautiful and pure root but is transformed into this strange, unrecognizable beast around Christmas as folks feel pressured to near bankruptcy or at least go into significant debt, often buying things for people that they really have no need for or even interest in. Businesses of every shape and size, from side hustle handcrafters to major corporations with sleazeball billionaires, all depend on this behaviour from consumers over the holidays. It feels as though the pressure to find the perfect present for your loved ones is inescapable.

But giving gifts has a much different meaning outside of capitalist culture, one that I am deeply drawn to. I would even go so far as to say that gift giving is in direct opposition to capitalism, and by removing the capitalist influence from the process of sharing gifts, we uncover a way to build new systems of exchange and interaction that can both meet our basic needs and expand beyond those needs.

While I obviously have gift giving on top of mind during the holiday season, I am sharing these thoughts as a response to a recent podcast recorded by a friend, byron murray. byron is a teacher at the local forest school and records a regular pod about connection to place called “to know the land”. Both of my kids have benefited from byron’s mentorship over the years, and his deep love of nature and ecology is truly infectious. byron recorded a podcast last week sharing his thoughts around the concept of the gift.

“In philosophy, a true gift is one that doesn’t involve reciprocity or exchange, and breaks away from the system of mutual accounting that’s created when something is given. A few philosophers have written about this true gift, including wolf tracker Baptiste Morizot. Considering the tracks and sign left behind by animals, it could be that these are examples of true gifts? But what about our responsibility as a culture and as a species to honour the land and our relationships with all beings we share the land with? When and how does reciprocity fit in the context of this gift?”

byron murray, to know the land, episode 258

In all the times that I’ve thought and written about gifts (here, here, here, here, and previous Christmas rant here), I have embarrassingly limited the scope of interaction between humans and have not taken the obvious leap to look at the origin of gift as something that is given to us by the more-than-human world. In his podcast, byron shares his experience of coming across a coyote nest, a true gift from the coyote by Morizot’s definition.

This notion of a true or pure gift reminds me of a sociology professor who admitted to our class that they believed that humans were unable to act without self-interest: that even seemingly selfless acts were motivated by the feel-good emotional response to seeing others benefit from their actions. I remember this idea hitting me hard and spending weeks afterwards thinking of scenarios that might constitute a truly selfless act.

bryon brings this question up as well in his discussion: does the joy of the gift giver in giving the gift negate the purity of the act of giving itself? He doesn’t think so, and neither do I, but the question itself begs a deeper one still for me: if the world around us can offer gifts so pure and real as a byproduct of their simple existence, are humans then also capable of sharing such gifts in a truly selfless way? And then also: what might it look like to be a human in this world and leave ONLY gifts as a byproduct of our existence?

So often when we are young and finding our path, we are asked to consider what our gifts to the world might be. And sadly, when we regard this question, we are asked to frame it within the confines of capitalism: how can we position our gift in a way that then earns us money, prestige, or esteem? How do we “make a living” from that gift that we wish to offer?

And what a horrible way to crush the beauty of a truly selfless act that we might give to the world as a gift.

byron talks about the offering of these gifts as a piece of living reciprocally, what it might mean to be human in the give-and-take relationship within our ecosystem. When I consider what it might mean to leave only gifts as a consequence of our existence, and by that I mean that the only trace we leave behind is something that benefits someone else, as hard as that is to imagine within the current context of my unnatural existence in a capitalist system, I begin to glimpse what true reciprocity might look like. I think of the crows that benefit from the corn harvest. I think of the biodiversity that lives in a kitchen garden. I think about deer and coyotes and humans all sharing trails through the forest. I think about the wild leek patch that we can nurture and propagate for other foragers.

I think about all the ways that we might not just focus on harm reduction but instead give back to the world.

I suppose the expectation for selfless acts isn’t totally appropriate in this dream. After all, it is really a focus on mutual benefit. The coyote that left the nest as a gift for byron also benefited from the rest they received while taking a nap. Likewise, in the examples above, the initial acts aren’t selfless; they are for my own gain as well. Reciprocity, then, turns what we might perceive as selfless gifts into an endless exchange in a complex ecosystem where we are always considering the needs of others while also meeting our own, maybe even unintentionally nurturing the diversity that necessary for life.

Obviously not all gifts need to carry this lack of intention, and I think to consider gifts as only pure if they’re not reciprocal is to be shortsighted. There is immense joy in giving and receiving gifts: a joy as well as a need to share. It connects us. There is beauty in the intention, and I would never wish to deny that experience by suggesting that the gift is lesser because of the desire to share in that joy with others.

But if we could carry that notion of a pure gift being one that is non-reciprocal or without intention into the holiday season and focus less on the monetization and profit motive of gift giving, I think we would all be significantly better off for it.