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The Gift Economy in Atlantic Canada: Personal Reflections of a Feminist Sociologist
By Linda Christiansen-Ruffman, Saint Mary's University
International Feminist University Network, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Introduction
As a woman sociologist, I knew I had come to a different cultural space when I arrived in Nova Scotia. It was over thirty years ago that I moved from Columbia University's graduate school in New York City to Nova Scotia's capital city of Halifax, the major Canadian city east of Montreal. My early research in Halifax (PhD dissertation on newcomers in Halifax and studies of citizen participation) indicated that it took longer in Halifax than in other places in North America, based on what the scholarly literature was reporting, for a newcomer to be considered to be part of the community. "Newcomers," "birds of passage" (a term coined by an elected member of the governing city council), or "come from aways" (a common Newfoundland phrase) were not welcome by local inhabitants. Newcomers in the early 1970s were frequently asked at public meetings on planning and development issues: "How long have you been here? And were are you from?" Being able to claim birth in Halifax definitely added credibility to what was being said.
I noted that social relations in this region were also different then. Family status had a structural importance in community life not unlike class or caste in other societies around the world. Henry Hicks, the former President of Dalhousie University and politician, is reputed to be able to greet incoming students to the university and be able to place them in a genealogical picture based on their last name and their geographic location. Most Haligonians would ask about a stranger's family (and the stranger's genealogical location within it) as a mechanism for socially locating a stranger in the same way that people now would be more likely to locate a stranger by occupation (with a questions such as "what do you do?"). When I said at a dinner party in 1968 that I did not know the maiden names of my four great grandmothers, the Lieutenant Governor's wife called across the room to her husband at another table, telling him of this startling phenomenon. I had clearly broken the social expectation that everyone is embedded in a genealogical picture of prime social significance both for themselves and for others in the community.
It was thirty years later and only after being introduced to Genevieve Vaughan's concepts of the "gift economy" that I recognised the gift's place in this regional culture. The first part of this paper draws illustrations of gifting relationships in this region from my personal memories and research in the city of Halifax, in the Maritime region (which includes the provinces of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick) and in Atlantic Canada, the larger region which encompasses both the Maritimes and also the province of Newfoundland and Labrador (see map). I then address what first appeared to be a surprising and apparently contradictory idea about the gift which I recently encountered from a woman in a small Nova Scotian fishing community and use sociological analysis of the gift to recognise its very different meanings and its appropriation and transformation by capitalist societies and cultures. No wonder the gift is viewed with suspicion by some people. The paper concludes with a discussion of the feminist significance of the gift as a hopeful alternative paradigm and pathway toward life-affirming social relationships and the non-patriarchal societies of the future.
Illustrations of the gift in Nova Scotia
My most vivid recollection of the gift economy is from the early 1970s after we had moved to a nearby fishing community. One morning we were awakened by a banging on our door. There stood a neighbour, with a piece of freshly caught halibut for us. There was no special "occasion" for this gift. He said very little but that he had more fish than he needed and thought we might like some of it. What an understatement. The fact that he was thinking of us helped us to feel part of the community. The delicious taste of fresh fish still lingers among the multi-layered memories of such neighbourly gifts and gift-giving in that community. As a sociologist who had lived previously only in suburban and urban places, I remember how different it was to live in a place such as this where diverse relational and communal norms rather than individualistic norms prevailed.
Another recent example illustrates that the Nova Scotia gifting tradition continues although, sadly, not as dominantly in the community where we now live. In September 2003 my husband and I were driving home after a long trip. We were on the main highway in a rural area of Nova Scotia after dark when our left front tire went flat and we pulled off to the side of the road. It was a dark moonless night; trucks and cars whizzed by and both of us were still trying to find the jack, the instructions and the flash light when two men came up to us from a side road. A father and an adult son said they had noticed us and thought we might need help. They changed the tire and refused to accept the monetary gift my husband tried to offer "in return."
The hospitality that still marks Atlantic Canadian culture is often noted by strangers to the area who are unaccustomed to generosity, especially from those whom they consider to be "less well off" than they are. Newspapers in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland often contain letters of thanks to the community, including from the grieving relatives of those who died in the Swiss Air disaster off Nova Scotia's coast in 199? and from the plane passengers who were guests for days in Newfoundland and Nova Scotian homes and communities when many planes returning from Europe were suddenly grounded in this region on September 11, 2001 after two planes attacked the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Moreover, stories abound in the region of travellers taken in by those living along a highway until a storm subsides and of community cooperation following natural disasters.
Research in 1999 in Nova Scotia's coastal communities also provides evidence of less visible but daily acts of generosity, gifts which are often so taken-for-granted that they are unrecognised and unseen by both the giver and the receiver. These taken-for-granted acts of neighbourliness include drives given to friends and neighbours who are without transportation, food delivered to elderly or shared with those living in poverty and offers of care in times of emergency. In interviews with women whose communities were being devastated by the fishing moratorium, we found that gifts of personal services were not considered as "volunteer work" by those who carry it out. We also found that women in these communities were grieving not only for their own family's misfortune but for what they could no longer do for their neighbours; without money for gas or insurance for their cars, their elderly neighbours and the local children no longer had a way of getting to the doctor, to the store or to local events.
Women's community work in Labrador
In some parts of Atlantic Canada the model of gift giving by the mother is extended to women's caring for the community itself. Like mother's work of giving gifts, however, the contributions are often invisible and unrecognised to outsiders and insiders alike. It becomes taken-for-granted and unspoken, unarticulated and not calculated by social, economic and policy planners. My research in some coastal communities in the mid to late 1970s found that it took a long time to recognise the strength and presence of local women and their extensive community work for the following two reasons.
1. I arrived having internalised the popularist version of women's movement teachings of the day, which drew a deep dichotomous distinction between (backward) "traditional" and "modern" women (among whom I prided myself). This dichotomous interpretation originally led me to consider the women there as "backward" based on what I saw. When I went to a public meeting, for example, I saw women sitting on one side of the room and not saying very much and men on the other side, the centre of the visiting (male) governmental attention; other women were at the back of the room, serving coffee, and the all-male panel of government officials and dignitaries were at the front. It was only after considerable research and analysis that I began to recognise that this "traditional/ modern" dichotomy assuming "progress" was a false one. It had led me to jump to unwarranted interpretations about the stereotypical "traditional women" I first witnessed in Labrador at this meeting, as will become clear below.
2. Community relationships were clouded by a strong patriarchal veneer. Government visitors and academics alike (see Matthews, 197?) described the culture as male dominated, despite evidence to the contrary, which I gradually began to notice.
In fact, I was first introduced to the Matthews bookentitled There's No Better Place Than Here by an irate woman leader in Labrador. She dragged me away from a dinnertable when she heard I was a sociologist; she wanted to show me what she considered to be an outrageous, biased and discriminatory book which was totally wrong about people like her. The book's methodology rationalises the exclusion of women from the study's sample by some methodologically problematic arguments and the claim that women are not leaders in Newfoundland and Labrador; it then goes on conclude, later on, that one of the three communities studied would not have survived without the actions of a particular woman, a description which seemed to indicate women's leadership. In addition to the outrage of this Labradorian woman leader at what she considered blatant sexist discrimination, indications of women's presence included the fact that the executive director of the community organisation was female and the Women's Institute had a position on the community development association's Board. Indeed, at the time, women had more public presence than they did in similar situations in the supposedly more "progressive" Halifax and other urban areas where there were higher levels of misogyny (hatred against women) among women themselves.
When I went back to the site of my research with a specific focus on women, I was told time and time again by women that "without women, there would be no community." Women pointed out how "government or religious men from away" did not understand that women were the ones who made things happen in the community (see Christiansen-Ruffman, 1979; 199?). When I told men about my return to their community for research on women, generally they at first expressed surprise and consternation at the topic (since I was obviously violating the patriarchal veneer), but then, after growing silent for a few moments, they would describe how important their mother was to their family and to the community. They tended not to mention their wives, although it was adult women of all ages whom I saw running the households, including the household business and its accounts, raising money for community work, meeting to discuss community issues and dealing with community crises.
Unlike the highly privatised household in which I grew up, specific parts of the home in these northern communities were considered public. Women's kitchens effectively served as public community spaces, open to all who came through the unlocked door to sit for a while, perhaps to get warm or chat or rest or hear the news or have a cup of tea from the pot which always seemed to be cooking on the stove. I was never completely comfortable with the non-proprietary cultural practice of not even knocking on the door or otherwise announcing my entrance. Having experienced the biting cold northern wind, I could understand this cultural practice as a community gift, one that encouraged sociability, or, perhaps more accurately, supported social relationships by taking community relationships for granted. Women were the providers and managers of these public spaces.
"Business As Usual?" An alternative meaning of the gift and its implications
in Nova Scotia
In 2003, I was sitting around a table with seven women in a small coastal community in rural Nova Scotia, discussing current issues and problems. One woman asked how she could feed her husband the food he now needs for health reasons. Earlier in the week his doctor had given her a list of healthy food, but none of it is available at the local food bank. Amidst discussions of life's problems in the community - inadequate money for food, lack of housing for single women, problems of employment and the recent death of a parent whom one of the women had cared for "non-stop" for fifteen years, - one women, whom I shall call Mary, made a surprising statement. She passionately introduced the idea of the gift into the conversation as one of her major problems of the times. I was astounded. I had been thinking about how so many items discussed in the conversation were accomplished by gifting relationships - women caring, creating support and training opportunities for others, caring for parents, providing the infrastructure for the food bank, the transportation to look for a place to live.... But Mary was the only one to use the word "gift" - and she hated it. She said it was ruining her life. She spoke with such vehemence in describing how her sister in law would spend $300 to $500 per child on gifts for the children at Christmas. Gifts like that were impossible for her, totally out of her reach. The gift was destroying her relationships with her family, making them impossible.
This discussion shows several features of the gift in contemporary Nova Scotian society. Sociologically, it indicates how many community relationships are based on "free gifts" or "giving gifts" which were invisible and often even are unrecognised as gifts by people in the community - both those giving gifts and receiving gifts. Indeed, gift-giving and generosity toward one another might well be a large part of what it means to be "a community." Gift-giving relationships and community relationships seem to be inextricably associated. Perhaps because of their taken-for-granted nature in some settings, people seem to be more likely to describe them in the abstract or once these relationships have been lost rather than describing them in their daily lives.
Secondly, the vehemence and intensity of Mary's concern with the "problem" of the "gift" is associated with a societal and cultural shift in its social meaning. The gift is increasingly becoming commoditized and appropriated to signify some of the worst features of capitalist relationships. Increasingly the gift feeds into and reinforces a market-oriented materialist society. The gift as material commodity is reinforced by advertising, stores and an increasingly consumer-oriented culture. The dominance of this commoditized gift in Mary's mind is not surprising given the dominance of the gift as commodity motif in advertising and in stores throughout Atlantic Canada; in December 2003, before the Christmas sales were complete, local chains of "drug stores" were full of gifts for Valentines Day, 2004.
Thirdly, the explicit use of the word gift is associated in the public mind with the idea of "exchanging gifts" or gift exchange, with the very explicit notion that the exchange should reflect social relationships. The translation of gifts to monetary value along with the idea of equality begins a process of reciprocal inflation among friends and relatives. Gifts become symbolic signifiers of social relationships, with a tendency among friends and siblings toward equal exchange. This idea of equality of exchange may either reinforce equality in social relationships or shatter the relationships themselves when reciprocation is impossible; when one party is not able to participate in "equal exchange," a "charity model" is seen to become operative. This whole process establishes and reinforces ideas of hierarchy and social class when gift relationships are seen to fail.
The unexpected diatribe from Mary is an indicator of what we might call "false manifest equivalence." The word "gift" is the same but takes on two very different meanings because of appropriation of the gift by capitalist and patriarchal cultures. New characteristics are ascribed to public meanings of the term, often fueled by the market and advertising, and by dichotomous "readings" and evaluations by the public of what is being said. In the case of Mary, for example, the "value" of the gift is no longer measured by its thoughtfulness or the time involved in creating it; the only way of measuring a gift has become its monetary value on the market, which trivialises and "makes fun of" quaint or "cheap" or non-monetary gifts. Even more importantly, the notion of "gift exchange" has come to mean the equivalency of market value. This cultural appropriation of the concept of what constitutes a gift illuminates a common way in which the powerful are able to shift the social agenda in significant and subtle ways which are difficult to counteract, even when this social process is recognised.
Research in coastal Nova Scotian communities found that women's sense of themselves, of their communities and of their social relations were being shattered by a set of processes related to the fishing moratorium initiated by what was called an "environmental crisis of overfishing." Government restructuring, the corporatization of fisheries, a shift away from rural-friendly and people-friendly policies, what was reported as a deliberate divide and conquer governmental strategies and a shift of all policies and culture toward individualism and economic fundamentalism were the set of neo-liberal policies which responded to this crisis. Government of Canada officials brag about the "success" of the fisheries, now more lucrative than ever before in terms of the value now being extracted from previously underutilised species. These neo-liberal solutions and the policy of switching the fisheries to "underutilised species" will in all likelihood exacerbate the environmental crisis in the long run - as well as undermine the social infrastructure which has sustained these maritime communities and their gift-giving traditions over the centuries.
The erosion of this social infrastructure is both a direct result of economically-oriented government policies aimed at restructuring, corporatising and professionalising the fisheries and invisible to government because it is not captured on the standard economic measures used by policy makers and policy planners. It shows up, instead, down the road in cycles of poverty, despair and growing dysfunctionality of both individuals and communities and the shift to the individualistic, greed-based economic where everything of value can be measured in monetary terms and even social transactions are reduced to calculations of self-promotion.
This individual and local level dynamics is related to what has been happening at the global level in the last few decades. The neo-liberal agenda and its individualistic market-oriented ideology along with restructuring of Nova Scotia's rural infrastructure has been undermining the cultural, economic and community basis of the gift economy. The ideology of support to those in need characteristic of the welfare state with its social safety net has given rise to an ideology of individualism and greed. Rural communities are under threat as hierarchies are introduced. Globally both within and between societies, we see the reintroduction of a commoditized gift economy which parallels the growing gap between the rich and the poor both within and between societies and communities around the world.
Conclusion
As in all non-dichotomous interpretations, both discouraging and promising elements are apparent from this analysis. Mary's negative attitudes toward the gift is a sign of the dubious impact of globalisation on human lives and communities. The vast research on the negative impact of structural adjustment programs on women in the economic south tells a similar story. The current cultural values of economic fundamentalism harm features of life that cannot be reduced to monetary value or the exchange mentality. Mary's attitude toward the gift is one of many signs that Atlantic Canadian life and culture is being adversely affected by neo-liberal policies. The increasing presence of individualism, greed and a commodification of culture and history makes it harder and harder to practice a gift economy in this region - or even to describe it.
Underlying this neo-liberalist agenda are patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism. As values of patriarchy and colonialism (with their dichotomous, hierarchical and dominating assumptions over life - by violence and other means) continue to combine with capitalism (with its exploitative and monetarist assumptions), we can see how easy it is to produce instrumental individualism with its machiavellian assumption that the end justifies the means. If we look around us, we can see the emergence of a logical result - the buying of people and body parts; new forms of slavery emerge in a variety of hierarchical forms - from sports figures to trafficked women. The end, the value, in this case, is money and wealth. Women, children, men the environment are only there to be exploited in this neo-liberal equation. It - and the life it shapes - are based on false economic assumptions.
The good news is that almost everyone still knows that the above view of life is partial and exclusionary while it pretends to be complete and open to all. Almost everyone can still imagine another possible world based on life-giving, gifting values and practices - a world which they still experience but which is shaped by different assumptions. The fact that it has been existing and that we do not have to start from scratch, from nothingness, is also appealing. Its traces are there in mothering behaviours and community practices, especially in what are now considered marginalised parts of the world. In articulating cooperative, communities, in valuing multi-centredness and diverse equalities, global feminisms also contain such hope and vision.
We can all start by asking these question: "What do I value most in this world?" and "What does it 'cost'?" And then ask ourselves? "What in the world costs the most?" and "What value would I put on this most costly item?" When we share the answers to these questions with each other, we will begin to understand different forms of wealth and of gifting relationships which recognise our common humanity and begin moving toward another possible world.
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