Beyond the given and the all-giving: extraneous speculations on women and the gift

Authors

• Morny Joy University of Calgary

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67247

Keywords:

Women, Gender, Methodology, Pluralism, Religious, Hermeneutics, Gifts, Postcolonialism, Anthropology, Sacrifice, Feminist theory, Rites and ceremonies, Colonization

Abstract

There needs to be a recognition that the phenomenon of the gift and the fascination it exerts for contemporary thinkers is a measure of dissatisfaction with prevailing norms. As a test case, the phenomenon of the gift needs to be perceived as an instance of heterogeneity in a culture that, despite its convoluted escape mechanisms, cannot honestly confront its repressive controlling impulses. The gift is thus a symptom par excellence of Western tendencies to distort for its own purposes (whether benign, malevolent or simply ignorant) whatever is viewed as alien, exotic or excluded. This has largely been (non-Western) cultures, women and those of other racial, class or ethnic varieties. Such behaviour is evident not just in anthropology and literature, but in philosophy, and especially in religious studies where the prevailing norm has been the cliché of the neutral male scholar. Insofar as this propensity is unacknowledged, the gift will remain an enigma to a society such as ours that refuses to admit not just its blind-spots (whether cultural, racial or sexual), but the mechanisms that continue to produce them. It will thus compensate by demonizing or idealizing uncritically, the other as bearer of those repressions that make its continued flourishing possible. These examples of selective reading of questionable data and utopian improvisations highlight a common predicament as the Eurocentric mindset is confronted by otherness — be it its former colonized peoples or its own internalized forms of exclusion.