The gift : imagination and the erotic life of property by Hyde Lewis 1945-

Author:Hyde, Lewis, 1945- [Hyde, Lewis, 1945-]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural studies, Theory of art, Gifts, Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.), Economic anthropology, Art and society
Publisher: London : Vintage
Published: 1999-06-20T19:00:00+00:00

larger self; they are its necessary embodiment, a language without which it would have no life at all.

In first introducing these two Greek terms, I said that it is bios-Wit —individual and embodied—that dies, while zo'e-Yite is the unbroken thread, the spirit that survives the destruction of its vessels. But here we must add that zo'e-Mie, may be lost as well when there is wholesale destruction of its vehicles. The spirit of a community or collective can be wiped out, tradition can be destroyed. We tend to think of genocide as the physical destruction of a race or group, but the term may be aptly expanded to include the obliteration of the genius of a group, the killing of its creative spirit through the destruction, debasement, or silencing of its art (I am thinking, for example, of Milan Kundera's analysis of the "organized forgetting" which has been imposed upon the nations of Eastern Europe). Those parts of our being that extend beyond the individual ego cannot survive unless they can be constantly articulated. And there are individuals—all of us, I would say, but men and women of spiritual and artistic temperament in particular—who cannot survive, either, unless the symbols of zoe-life circulate among us as a commonwealth.

To offer a single example that strikes both the collective and individual levels of this issue, in her autobiography the writer and actress Maya Angelou recalls her graduation from an all-black junior high school. The assembled students and teachers had fallen silent, momentarily shamed by a casually racist speech given by a white administrator, when one of Angelou's classmates began to sing a song they all knew as "the Negro national anthem," its words written by a black man, its music by a black woman. "Oh, Black known and unknown poets," Angelou writes, "how often have your auctioned pains sustained us . . . ? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (including preachers, musicians and blues singers)." The elders who passed the Sacred Pipe of the Sioux to Black Elk warned him that "if the people have no center they will perish." Just as a circulation of ceremonial gifts among tribal peoples preserves the vitality of the tribe, so the art of any peoples, if it is a true emantion of their spirit, will stand surety for the lives of the citizenry.

In the last chapter I spoke of ancient usury as the conversion of unreckoned gift-increase into reckoned market interest. We are now in a position to connect this idea to two others. First, if we

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