sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

When my prof suggested I read Marcel Mauss's book The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, I'll admit that I was less than thrilled, for several reasons.

First, I'm sick of reading theory translated from French... it tends to be exhausting, circuitous, and self-involved, and I've simply read too much of it lately.

Second, Mauss's work falls squarely in between the work of Durkheim (his uncle) and Levi-Strauss, who were the core subjects of the worst class I took as an undergrad... and the class which led me to abandon my second degree in Comparative Religion.

However, at least after reading the first half of The Gift, I've been pleasantly surprised... to the point that I'm considering revisiting Durkheim and Levi-Strauss. Perhaps I blamed them for the failure of the aforementioned class, when I should have placed more of the blame on the terrible professor.

Regardless, I'm also delighted that the book is very readable and will probably turn out to be quite helpful for my project. When my prof first suggested it, I remember thinking "Seriously? You want me to read more French anthropology? Can't I just google 'potlatch' and call it a day?" Well, as it happens, this book is all about the potlatch concept, which makes it the perfect starting point for my term paper.

On that note, here's where I'm going with my paper at this point...
I'm writing about the Open Source movement as a gift economy and as a postmodern reaction to specific failures of capitalism in the new global and digital economy. Mauss turns out to be foundational to this discussion, although I'm not quite ready to articulate why just yet... I'm still reading. This topic came up in class in a discussion of Baudrillard's notion of equivalence (in Towards a Political Economy of the Sign), but I honestly didn't read that article closely enough to comment on it yet.

That's all I've really got so far (pathetically simple, I know), because I just started thinking about this a few days ago, but I'm quite excited... I feel like this is a great path for me to be starting down this semester, as it will position me very well to write my thesis about similar topics, which should help me bridge several of my interests and keep me enthused for the next 13 months. Which I was really worried about.