Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

The Preoriginal Gift—and Our Response to It

 The Preoriginal Gift—and Our Response to It A N N E P R I M AV E S I Freely you have received, freely give. —matt. 10:8 THE PREORIGINALITY O F GIFT In Sacred Gaia (2000) and again in Gaia’s Gift (2003), I explored the concept of ‘‘gift’’ while taking for granted that it involves more than simply an exchange of goods between two people. It is now time to spell out, as precisely as possible, what this ‘‘more than’’ refers to. Briefly, it presupposes that gift is essentially a community event constituted by diverse inputs over time from the environments—natural, biological, and social —of giver and receiver. Within this extended framework, such events are best understood as instances of symbolic behavior that mediate and disclose more of the basic and evolving relationships between people and their lifeworlds than can be discerned in the immediate context of the gift itself or in its content. Potentially, the framework extends as far as earth’s limits: or, if desired, beyond them to include the birth of our solar system and the life-giving power of the sun. In line with this expanded context the qualifying term ‘‘preoriginal’’ suggests that the origins and source of present gift events be traced back through evolutionary time to a point or place before the emergence of the human species. It is true that, as Levinas points out, such a linear regressive movement would never be able to reach ‘‘the absolutely diachronous pre-original which cannot be recovered by memory and history .’’1 Nevertheless the effort to do so directly acknowledges the 218 兩 e c os p i ri t essential contributions to present gift events made by ‘‘more than’’ those participating in them now. They include antecedent generations of living beings: all those who, by their lives, their labor, their deaths, their vision, and their patient endeavors have made such events presently possible. We can, therefore, respond to their contribution with a gratitude that is itself, as Levinas remarks, grafted onto an antecedent gratitude for finding ourselves able to be thankful.2 At first glance there is nothing new about this expanded perspective. A seminal work on the phenomenon of gift by anthropologist Marcel Mauss unapologetically took societies as its context. Those studied belonged to an era before the institution of traders, of modern forms of contract and sale (Semitic, Hellenistic, and Roman) and before money was minted and inscribed. During that era, gift appeared as a type of behavior that necessarily emerged from the relationships between those who constitute a particular community and between neighboring communities.3 Now, however, modern forms of trading have taken us into a cyberspace of electronic exchange, far beyond not only the realm of market stalls piled with produce but also the environmental limits imposed by geographical borders and the physical reality of minted or printed currencies . As a result, the communal context for our transactions has all but disappeared from view and from our consciousness. Today the dominance of capitalist models of trading supports a now commonly held assumption: that one individual gives to another primarily in the expectation of at least an equivalent return in personal wealth, however defined.4 On closer inspection, however, it is clear that these apparently isolated individuals can only give something to each other because they are in fact embedded in communities with access to, and input from, their own or others’ resource systems. This fact supports my proposal for a context for gift events spatially and temporally extended to correspond to the contemporary concept of the ‘‘more-than-human’’ lifeworld. David Abram coined the phrase ‘‘more-than-human’’ at a time, he says, when we appear to interact almost exclusively with other human and human-made technologies, forgetting that ‘‘we still need that which is other than ourselves and our own creations.’’ For we are human ‘‘only in contact and in conviviality with what is not human.’’5 This describes the lifeworld out of which we a n ne p r im a v es i 兩 219 emerged and within which we live, just as it describes that which preceded and followed from those antecedent societies studied by Mauss. GIFT’S MORE-THAN-HUMAN CONTEXT The origins of the ‘‘more-than-human’’ that is essential for our humanity date back some 3.5 billion years ago. Then, many and varied forms of single-celled...