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Free gifts that must be invented

2017; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 7; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau7.3.001

2575-1433

Giovanni da Col,

Economic Theory and Institutions

Previous articleNext article FreeFree gifts that must be inventedGiovanni da ColGiovanni da ColSOAS, University of London Search for more articles by this author SOAS, University of LondonPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreImagine if someone wanted to write the Anti-Mauss. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari wrote the Anti-Oedipus ([1972] 2004) to criticize the founding myth of psychoanalysis and its reification by capitalism to control desire for utilitarian purposes; whereas Viveiros de Castro proposed the Anti-Narcissus to obviate the tutelary spirit of anthropology eager to find what they have that we have not, that patron figure “a little too obsessed with determining the attributes or criteria that fundamentally distinguish the subject of anthropological discourse from everything it is not” (2014: 43)—the Anti-Mauss would muse on how individuals rather than moral persons conceive ideologies of negative reciprocity and gratuity. Jonathan Parry eloquently showed that the free gift is an invention of modernity, where free individuals endowed “with interests against the world” (1986: 456) are the actors of the transactions. On the contrary, Mauss was rather concerned with moral persons who did not act on their behalf. The gift is never free either but always self-interested and constrained. As remarked recently by James Carrier (in Sanchez et al. 2017: 561), Parry’s merit was to highlight how “ideologies of reciprocity and non-reciprocity” are rather offspring of the emergence of capitalist systems, which hide behind freemarket transactions the notion that a personal gift should be a spontaneous gesture. The Anti-Mauss would then ideally include an archaeology of the emergence of ideologies of unrequited reciprocity, mistrust, parasitism, and even gratuity, and their role in times of economic fears, crisis, and anxieties. How would different societies cope with or experience—if they do—anxieties about parasites and freeriders? How would they conceptualize or personify figures deemed as embodying innate wasting or exploitative natures? To what do we owe the rise of philanthropy, and the notions of gratuity and their theological derivatives, such as the Christian concept of grace (Lat. Charis; cf. Pitt-Rivers [1992] 2011; cf. Shryock and da Col 2017)? How do different ethnographic contexts and idioms of gratuity compare and relate? What is the logic of gratuity in the current climate of economic anxiety and digital “freedom”? The internet provides us with a feast of objects we can use without consuming. Whereas the consumption of food leads to its destruction, the ease of access to knowledge without constraints has led to the conviction that online knowledge should be always free or produced for free consumption (cf. Ricciardi 2014). There are few doubts that the whole discourse of gratuity affecting academic publishing may be an ideological side-effect of the increased corporatization of academia and the obscene profit of commercial publishers, rather than a reality unto itself. I always wondered whether the concept of open access drew its efficacy from a utopian imagination of academic freedom, where “free lunches” and “free beers” exist, and intellectual labour is priceless. In six years of relentless fundraising, I have often been asked by distinguished scholars why a department should contribute to open access by joining the HAU-NET model (similar to the model now adopted by megajournals like the Open Library of Humanities) and paying more than a subscription to a commercial publisher’s journal. Such questions illustrate once again the mystification of the world of publishing for the majority of academics. The notion of a common good and a few well-off institutions paying to liberate knowledge for many is hardly understood.Toward free accessSix years ago, in December 2011, the inaugural issue of a journal was launched. It was called hau because mana was taken, and because we wanted it to be a gift. It was founded with no funds, no institutional help, no office, no editorial or publishing experience, no hope of career or a salary. Hau had only an idea, one carried forward with sheer determination. It attempted to return to what has historically been anthropology’s strongest intellectual suit: its ability to take up the fruits of ethnography and value this fortunate participation in other people’s lives to enrich our sense of what being human ultimately means. It wanted to ask again the big questions that once animated that manifold branch of knowledge called anthropology.Since then, Hau has grown to encompass not only a journal (in five years the most cited anthropology journal in Europe according to Google Scholar, seventeen issues and over eight thousand pages), but also a book publishing project (with thirty-eight old, new, and forthcoming titles in the catalogue), an international network of over forty supporting institutions, and ultimately a movement, a cultural phenomenon in itself, a small revolution within the discipline that has attracted more than fifty thousand followers on social media (the second most popular after the American Anthropological Association). Within the broader field of scholarly research, Hau has made a powerful intervention, offering a new paradigm for academic publishing. In less than six years, we have built a global readership, and we have fostered a generation of new scholarship, creating ideas of world-leading quality. Many people helped. You, reader, helped. Unsung heroes helped.Owing to Hau’s popularity, it has become clear that the large number of submissions and high output could not be matched by the current team. Hau has been much more than a journal: a book series, research events, relentless fundraising to guarantee a future to the project. In the last two years, a number of people involved in fundraising for Hau have been defeated by the lack of a sustainable prospect. For example, since 2016 we have received a paltry $500 in donations (including two contributions of $250 and $100) through our PayPal button on the website, several HAU-NET members have been unable to renew their membership because of library or departmental budget cuts, while others did not fulfill their three years’ commitment. Institutional open access funds covering Author Processing Charges (APCs) are being depleted and their nature is increasingly misunderstood by authors as payment to pay rather than support for covering production costs. Our seed grants ended in 2016. We realized we could no longer continue to operate unless we could hire a team composed entirely of professionals. Even if the current funding could allow open access to the journal and the book series for another one or two years, the difficulties of ensuring long-term sustainability encountered by other open journals and projects (such as Libraria, an initiative prompted by an idea that Alberto Corsín-Jiménez, John Willinsky, and I had in Madrid in October 2014) do not offer much hope at this historical conjuncture. Thus, the main concern for the people involved in the project has been the survival of Hau as an intellectual project. We tried to imagine where the journal’s intellectual project should and could be in the next fifty years and not in the next three. Above all, we wanted to preserve the mission of ethnographic theory. Such concerns have been met by an opportunity offered by the University of Chicago Press (UCP), one of our most prestigious anthropology publishers. Last May, our Advisory Board voted to accept the Press’s offer—and gambit—of an unprecedented “free access” model for Hau. Starting 2018, 20 percent of the journal articles will remain “gold” open access. The rest of the issue will be “green” open access and remain free to download one month after release—according to our records, the most trafficked download period. Libraries will be offered to purchase reasonably priced subscriptions that will support the journal. Unwaged individuals and libraries from the Global South will be offered subsidized or free subscriptions. Needless to say, all eighteen Hau issues will remain fully and perpetually open access on the University of Chicago Press website. Moreover, the Press is giving us the opportunity to switch back to full open access for future issues anytime, should new grants or a sustainable funding model become available. Fundraising efforts toward this goal are still ongoing and led by senior members of the Advisory Board who are seeking an endowment or another form of long-term sustainability while keeping an eye on new ecologies of publishing developed by communities of librarians, possibly the only figures who fully grasp the political economy of publishing. A marvelous piece of news is that Hau Books will remain fully open access for the years to come: a new partnership with Knowledge Unlatched (KU) from 2019 to 2021 will allow us to hire a full-time professional managing editor and staff.UCP has made a firm commitment to the Society of Ethnographic Theory for the next decade, and their infrastructure of journal submission and management (the same enjoyed by Current Anthropology) will relieve us of the burdens of review, production, and distribution. (Hau will have finally acquired a physical embodiment and a printed version!) The partnership with Chicago will reassure a number of junior authors anxious that an independent open access journal will not boost their tenure track dossier, and it will allow the journal’s editors to focus on the circulation of ideas rather than administration, management, and fundraising. It will speed up the review process, which was our main concern when we launched the journal and proved to be the greatest challenge, given the rise in the number of submissions. This is, without a doubt, the answer to many of the problems we’ve been facing for a long time.UCP investment should be seen as testament to Hau’s achievements. Hau is an unprecedented scholarly initiative and as such is being offered an unprecedented opportunity. A university press has decided to invest in us to preserve its mission and nature, even if this is likely to bring losses in the first years, when we may still need support from our network. Let us remember that a university press is a nonprofit institution, a completely different entity from corporate behemoths like Wiley-Blackwell, Elsevier, or Taylor & Francis. Once again, Hau is reinventing anthropological publishing by embracing an unprecedented model offering the best compromise between accessibility, professionalism, and sustainability. This is the optimum route if we want the journal to thrive and the mission of ethnographic theory to continue.The decision to move toward this model was shaped by detailed consultations with the Advisory Board and many colleagues, authors, and readers. The free access option, the reach of Chicago journals, and the nonprofit nature of UCP provide our greatest chance to preserve the intellectual vitality of Hau. This is a vital moment for Hau. The next four years will mark a new phase of the endeavor, one that will see it become the professional, sustainable, and collaborative movement that we have, for a long time, dreamed it could be.Our eighteenth issueOur rich Christmas issue opens with the inauguration of a new section, “Shortcuts,” edited by our new associate editor, Claudio Sopranzetti, and yours truly, stimulated by the virulent debate around Marshall Sahlins’ self-declared rant on Facebook last summer, titled “Where have all the cultures gone?” which lamented that contemporary anthropological training and works may be turning their backs on the discipline’s roots, ditching its commitment to the comparative study of the human condition. The shortcut collection, inspired by Italo Calvino and entitled “Why we read the classics?”, includes contributions from anthropologists of different scholarly traditions and backgrounds, including Fred Myers, Anastasia Piliavsky, John L. Jackson Jr., Yarimar Bonilla, Adia Benton, and Paul Stoller. With the publication of this debate and the voicing of heterogeneous views on the function and status of anthropological “classic monographs”—and what constitutes the canon of anthropology or whether there should be a canon at all—we want to offer a precious pedagogical tool for introductory anthropology courses. We will hopefully dispel any doubt as to the Hau project’s relation with our colonial past. Ethnographic theory is not a hopeless romantic and exotic pursuit, oblivious to the archaeology of power and the scholastic foundation of our disciplinary corpus. It remains concerned with rigor; it is historically grounded and oriented to avoid any “reinvention of the wheel” and suspicious of the obliteration of the intellectual genealogy of anthropological knowledge to pursue trends and relentlessly search for new “conceptual repertoires.” Our “Debates” section, spearheaded by Joe Anderson, confronts the dramatic 2017 Las Vegas shooting and attempts a public intervention by interpreting the phenomenon of gun culture in the United States. It does so by deploying an anthropological lens which magnifies the roles of subjectivity, ethics, the problem of evil, and the very framing of reality underpinning the possession of guns, highlighting how gun culture may be related to a cosmological caesura and worldview which divides the world into “good” and “bad” guys. The article by Anderson is followed by comments from a number of eminent writers with expertise on violence, war, and the role of guns in contemporary society: Deborah Durham, Niklas Hultin, Hugh Gusterson, and Charles F. Springwood. For the fifth time, we are delighted to host the transcript of the annual Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, in this instance by Purnima Mankekar and Akhil Gupta and exploring the rise of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry in India, and the precarity surrounding affective labor performed at distance. In this timely lecture, which Hau is very honored to host, the authors ask: “What does it mean to perform affective labor for customers one has never seen and is unlikely to ever meet, including troubleshooting for them, attending to their needs, answering their questions, and putting up with their frustration?” Alf Hornborg completes this section with his 2017 Stirling Lecture (University of Kent), a nuanced reflection on how ideas of “belief ” applied to the categories of “economy” and “technology” are conducive to a specific modality of exploitation that can be understood as a modern form of magic. Our “Research Articles” section begins with John Borneman and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi’s exploration of the conundrums affecting the translation of the German concept of Stimmung and its employment in the 2016 German regional electoral campaign and debate on migrants and refugees who entered Germany the previous year. The article is followed by critical comments by Heinz Bude, Heath Cabot, and Chris Hann, with a response by the authors. Mareike Winchell provides a reflection on the meaning of the reworking of the concept of patronage and obligation (with a nuanced reflection of its relation to Mauss’ idea of render and reciprocity) in the transition from an agrarian to a gold extraction economy in rural Bolivia. David Valentine propounds a return to a humanistic anthropology with an exploration of “humanness” viewed from nonterrestrial sites (Mars and a space settlement called Island Three) and the role of gravity as a definitional property of the species. Alexandre Surallés offers a profound reflection of legal ontology by looking at how the notion of “spirituality” is employed in international law to qualify the relationship between humans and nonhumans among indigenous peoples, focusing on the case of the Candoshi of Peruvian Amazonia. In our last article, Frederick Klaits furthers the study of anthropology of events by focusing on the Pentecostal believers in Buffalo’s African American churches and their prophetic attention oriented to “catch the word” of God and generate a divine contract, one that—contrary to the social contract—will not be broken.In line with Hau’s interest in approaching “economic anthropology” through the transcendental conditions and possibility of its imagination as a distinctive field, we are hosting a groundbreaking collection on The real economy, edited by Federico Neiburg and Jane Guyer. In an increased virtualization of the financial world (think Bitcoin), the contributors to this section—from South America to South Africa (James and Bolt), China (Hortiz) to European and US business schools (Muniesa)—explore how the interest in a “real economy” has moved beyond the technical economic domain into new vernacular modes in the public arena. The comprehensive introduction by guest editors showcase the rise of new categories of custodians judging what constitutes “real” economic knowledge and practice. This large collection will be published in two parts of equal length.Our “Forum” section hosts a special Christmas gift to the readers of Hau, a hands-on guide written by the editor of one of our most prestigious disciplinary book series.We are honored to host Priya Nelson, the editor of anthropology and history at the University of Chicago Press, who agreed to share with our readers her secrets for composing a monograph. Curiously, where Lévi-Strauss often employed musical metaphors to explain anthropology, Nelson opens the gates of her private theater of memory—one made of house building, carpentry, and unusual handywoman skills—to guide us through the art of monograph building.This issue’s symposium, edited by our associate editor Rena Lederman, is a ‘state of the art’ discussion of the anthropological category of magic revolving around Graham Jones’ book Magic’s reason: An anthropology of analogy. Jones’ monumental contribution focuses on the ways that entertainment magic has shaped the category of “native magic” and is commented on by some of the most distinguished experts on the subject, including Mark Mosko, Tanya Luhrmann, Margaret Wiener, and Martin Zillinger.Our “Unedited” section is yet another Christmas gift, this one from Daniel Miller, a long essay (or short book) summarizing his interest in Christmas. Can we produce an anthropological theory of Christmas? What does Christmas tell us about family and kinship, globalization, mass consumption, and materialism?Our translation section, edited and prefaced by Mario Schmidt, revolves around the translated summary of a lecture given by Marcel Mauss at the Société d’histoires du droit on May 10, 1928, on the ambiguities and commonalities surrounding the notion of “wager” and “wedding,” and their connotations of risk, uncertainty, informal pledges, and normative constraints affecting this family of terms. Once again, Schmidt shows that the specter of the free gift—not a certainty but a gamble—inhabits Mauss’ writings. A magical Christmas issue could only be concluded with a classic reprint on magic, Stanley Tambiah’s “Form and meaning of magical acts.”Season’s greetings and warmest thanks to all who have made this issue possible: the editorial team, editors, reviewers, authors, copyeditors, typesetters, press staff, board members, sponsors, and everyone who keeps pushing this project further and believes in its intellectual drive and its capacity to renew itself, year after year.ReferencesDeleuze Giles, and Félix Guattari. (1972) 2004. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Continuum.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarParry, Jonathan. 1986. “The gift, the Indian gift and the ‘Indian gift.’” Man (N.S.) 21 (3): 453–73.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarPitt-Rivers, Julian. (1992) 2011. “The place of grace in anthropology.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1 (1): 423–50.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarRicciardi, Alessia. 2014. “Specters of Saint Francis: Agamben’s The highest poverty and the state of digital culture.” California Italian Studies 5 (1).First citation in articleGoogle ScholarSanchez, Andrew, Carrier, James G., Christopher Gregory, James Laidlaw, Marilyn Strathern, Yunxiang Yan, and Jonathan Parry. 2017. “‘The Indian gift’: A critical debate.” History and Anthropology 28 (5): 553–83.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarShryock, Andrew, and Giovanni da Col. 2017. “A perfect host: Julian Pitt-Rivers and the anthropology of grace.” In From hospitality to grace: A Julian Pitt-Rivers omnibus, edited by Andrew Shryock and Giovanni da Col, xiii–xxxix. Chicago: Hau Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarViveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal metaphysics. Translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGiovanni da Col is a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, where he is also the Director of Publications of the Centre for Ethnographic Theory, which he cofounded. He lectures in the anthropology of thought at Cambridge and is currently a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.Giovanni da Col Centre for Ethnographic Theory SOAS, University of LondonThornaugh StreetRussell SquareLondon WC1H OXGUK[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 7, Number 3Winter 2017 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.3.001 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.