Will COVID19 help us transition to a gift economy? w/ Genevieve Vaughan & Susun

May 7th, 2020 @ 9:00PM EASTERN

The gift economy as seen through the eyes of Western anthropologists is well known in academia. It involves rules for reciprocal giving and giving back within communities. However, there is an earlier gift economy that takes place among mothers and children that has to be unilateral because young children cannot give back anything in return for the gifts they receive. My contention is that this unilateral gift economy is the economy of life, and all other economies are derived from it...

The challenge is now to understand this new story about who we are and disentangle ourselves from the mechanism while maintaining ourselves and the other species alive. This requires shifting away from patriarchy and exchange and returning to the maternal model, which we all already have within us.

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Genevieve Vaughan was born in Texas in 1939. She is an independent researcher. After finishing college in Pennsylvania in 1963 she married philosopher and semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi and moved with him to Italy where they had three daughters. The couple participated in the beginnings of the Semiotics movement in Italy as well as in the Italian Left, where Genevieve got her political consciousness raised. Genevieve's first book For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange was published in 1997 by Plain View Press and has since been translated into many languages.

Her most recent book is The Gift in the Heart of Language, the Maternal Source of Meaning (Mimesis International 2015). Another edited book of essays from an international conference held in Rome, Italy in 2015: The Maternal Roots of the Gift Economy is now in press. Her websites are: www.Gift-Economy.com and www.GenevieveVaughan.org

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