Mothering, gift and revolution

Honoring Genevieve Vaughan's life's work

AA.VV. AA. VV., Kaarina Kailo, Erella Shadmi

• Editore: VandA edizioni
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9788868994440
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Saggi letterari

Feminist, philosopher, and activist, Genevieve Vaughan has engaged the world's ecological, climate change, justice and democracy-related crises for many decades. Essays and articles in this Festschrift are a gift to her by collaborators and friends as well as by many members of the International Feminists for a Gift Economy. Together, they apply Vaughan's theories of maternal gift economy from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. The global Covid-l9 pandemic of 2020 reveals most clearly the dysfunctions of patriarchal regimes. The writings within show that the seeds of a liveable future for all are within matricultural/matriarchal and other egalitarian societies. Editor: Kaarina Kailo with participation by Erella Shadmi. The contributors are Vandana Shiva, Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Darcia Narvaez, Angela M. Kurth, Mary S. Tarsha, Annine van der Meer, Barbara Alice Mann, Rajani Kanth, Nané Jordan, Mariam Irene Tazi-Preve, Vicky Noble, Susan Petrilli, Patricia Mukhim, Maria Luisa Di Blasi, Alessandra Piccoli & Marco Linardi, Miki Kashtan, Angela Dolmetsch and Kirre Koivunen. This splendid anthology honoring Genevieve Vaughan's life's work could not have come at a more poignant time in human history. The rampant plundering of the world for profit has poisoned the air, the water, and the earth, causing an avalanche of species extinction and disruption of living systems that has led to the present global pandemic. Vaughan's pioneering scholarship, prodigiously refined over half a century, offers a necessary antidote to the pathological imbalance of our time: the cultivation of a maternal philosophy of unconditional generosity giving rise to the Gift Economy. The multi-cultural contributors to this festschrift weave a rich fabric of trans-disciplinary perspectives. We are reminded that the cultivation of a social structure based upon generosity and caring to reverse the parasitic destruction of life is not simply a feminist utopia, it is a matter of the survival of life on this planet, our only home. Joan Marler is the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Archaeomythology. She is the editor of The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) by Marija Gimbutas and From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas (1997). She worked closely with Marija Gimbutas as her personal editor from 1987-1994. This is an extraordinary collection of essays, celebrating the life and work of an extraordinary and brilliant woman, Genevieve Vaughan, on the occasion of her 80th year. Gen has inspired, encouraged, nurtured, and challenged feminisms throughout the world. Her personal Giftedness, theory of the Gift, and insistence on the philosophical linguistic, social and epistemological centrality of Mothering has inspired the contributors to this festschrift. These essays pay tribute to her life and ensure that the movement she has mothered and the sisterhoods she has created, will continue to give birth to radically new ways of thinking for the sake of our endangered world. Mary Condren, Th.D., Director, Woman Spirit Ireland, teaches at the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She is author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland (1989).

Part 1.
The Personal is Political: On Genevieve Vaughan’s Impact

For the Sake of the Other
Genevieve Vaughan and Susan Petrilli in Dialogue

The following is a text written with Genevieve Vaughan between August and November 2019 as a follow up on our conversations begun at her beautiful home on the Lago di Vico, located between Rome and Viterbo in Italy, where we had the pleasure of spending a few days together (21-24 August 2019). The idea of organizing this text was conceived by Susan to celebrate Genevieve on her eightieth birthday, 21st November 2019.

Genevieve Vaughan and Susan Petrilli at Lake Vico, Italy, August 21st, 2019. Photo from Susan Petrilli’s album.

Susan Petrilli (from here on SP): There are so many different trajectories in the work of a lifetime, in particular yours across so many different worlds, that it’s hard to know where to start from. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, it’s the journey that counts, its our journey. My desire is simply to have you speak so that I can listen to you, embraced by the sound and the sense of your words, by the wisdom of your life experiences as only you know how to recount them. Nothing is obvious, nothing can be taken for granted: beyond the said, beyond statements, beyond the done, beyond actions, beyond what appears on a surface level how to capture that which drives it all: the nuances of sense, the implications, the values, ideology, projectuality, desire. Dialoguing is searching for the other, that other we intuit, perceive, love or even fear, but can never capture or pull away from the folds of discourse, once and for all. Where do you come from Gen and where are you headed?

Genevieve Vaughan (from here on GV): I was born in November 1939 just two and a half months after the start of the 2nd World War. As a child I lived in Corpus Christi Texas in a house overlooking a bay of the Gulf of Mexico on the road leading to the Naval Base. The window of the room where my little brother and I slept opened onto the sea and I was always conscious of its moods and of the wind or breeze that filled our room (we didn’t have air conditioning back then). From our window we could see the sun rise and the moon rise and the paths of their light on the water. When I was about 10 a Native American (Karankawa) grave was discovered in the vacant lot next door and later I realized that our house was probably built on a burial ground of that tribe. In fact, it was a beautiful place on an earth bluff above the bay. In the spring the vacant lot was covered with wild primroses and verbena. It was a place to look out over the water towards the great unknown. I imagine that the people who buried their loved ones there felt that. Somehow as a child I shared their point of view. It gave me a sense of awe and of the seriousness of things. Back then it was said that the Karankawa tribe was extinct but many years later I met a woman who said she was one of their surviving descendants. She was very angry at everything, probably the angriest person I ever met. I could only feel that she had every right to be.

I do not have space here to recount all the experiences that formed my sense that something had to be done to change the harmful society of which I was/am a part. This sense has been with me all my life though I have not always felt it as strongly as I do now. I was born into a life of economic privilege and also had the privilege of having good and loving parents. I was not abused. Early on though I began to realize that other people had a lot more problems than I did. An African American woman I loved, Bessie Thomas, worked for us. She didn’t know her birthday, so she said it was Christmas Day. She had had 20 children but none of them had survived. How this could be possible, I wondered. We went to Mexico – Corpus Christi was just a few hundred miles from the border – and I saw children my age begging there. These and many other experiences showed me that something was terribly wrong. As time went by, I realized it was a systemic problem. It was not my fault or my parents’ fault, but something had to be done about it. Eventually I resolved to use my privilege to try to change the system that had privileged me. In order to do that I had to understand what the system was and what was wrong with it.

I spent four years in an all female preparatory school (Hockaday) and four years in an all female college (Bryn Mawr) just before feminism hit the mainstream in the 60’s. I married philosopher and semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi in 1963 and moved with him to Italy. My mother died of cancer at only 53 years of age the year after that, leaving me to manage my adult life without her presence. I just missed the whole hippie movement of the 60’s in the USA but was witness to the student and workers movements in Italy and the rest of Europe. I still consider myself a kind of hippie wannabe but actually realize I am lucky not to have risked participating in the drug culture of those times with the result that I have never taken any drugs except one cup of peyote tea when I was about 19 and of course the cigarettes, alcohol and caffeine that are so prevalent everywhere (I gave up cigarettes and alcohol with the help of hypnosis in 1985).

My attempt to understand the system took a leap forward when I encountered Marxism at 24 and then studied the first book of Capital for a couple of years. Ferruccio had been asked to be part of an equipe applying Marx’s analysis of the commodity and money to language and I was fascinated by that idea. Eventually though, I realized it could not be the market that was the basis of language, but it could be the gift economy of native peoples. Soon after that my daughters were being born and I was reading Marx and Dr Benjamin Spock on childcare at the same time I realized that the mothering I was doing was gifting, that it was economic in that it satisfied needs and that it was work even if it was free. And my interest in comparing economics to language sparked by the equipe made it easy to take the step of comparing the maternal gift giving economy to language (as opposed to the work in the market that Ferruccio was using in his homology to explain language). I had read Mauss and Malinowsky in college and knew that indigenous people practicing gift economies, not markets, used language as well as anyone else.

Other influences on me were: protesting the Vietnam war and the US-backed coup in Chile, spending time in the US with my children, returning to Italy, writing my first articles in semiotics, ‘mental problems’, psychoanalysis, my divorce from Rossi-Landi and finally in 1979, the encounter with Italian and international feminism. Feminism confirmed to me that women’s unpaid work in the home was indeed work and that it contributed to the profit of the capitalists by (re)producing the workers. An international feminist consciousness raising group and a free feminist university, the Virginia Woolf Cultural Center in Rome gave me places to learn about feminist thinking and to talk about my ideas.

After my divorce I returned to the US in 1983 and, because no one there understood the theory of the gift economy that I was trying to promote, I started a multicultural all-women operating foundation to practice it. The foundation involved many women in many innovative projects and functioned until 2005. A short description of the work of the foundation can be found on my website gift-economy.com. I finally wrote my first book on the gift economy, For-Giving, a Feminist Criticism of Exchange, which was published in 1997.

I can’t do justice now to all the influences and synchronicities that have made me who I am so I will point anyone who is interested to the book on my life that I am planning to write someday and to a film on my life that was made in 2004. I had the possibility to ‘do something’ and I have more or less done it. Really it has been seeing obvious possibilities and embracing them. I am grateful to have been extremely lucky in many things and that I have often been able to make lemonade out of the lemons in my life sooner or later. I have loved having the idea of the maternal gift economy as my guide all these years and I think that it does take a long time to untangle the many threads that weave our unjust society together with many other strands of good. My attempt to uncover and reinstate the maternal gift economy has made me realize that Western Patriarchal Philosophy is all wrong because it has excluded mothering and gifting. It is clear to me that we have to start over from that maternal base. Even the Western feminism that embraces Western Patriarchal Philosophy problematizes mothering and falls prey to the exclusion of gifting, making it easily assimilable by the patriarchal capitalism that is now committing the crime of matricide against the Earth.

SP: In fact, to pronounce the name “Genevieve Vaughan” is to evoke the “gift economy” and the vital importance of “language” as the place where the gift economy is formulated and transmitted, communicated to others, having of course come from others. What would you say are the characteristic features of your conception of the gift, of gifting? You have also written about the concept of “for-giving”, and thematized homo donans. What is the relation between gifting and language, gifting and communication, gifting and mothering, nurturing as you also say? In short, what would you describe as the main foci in your intellectual work, the main topics and problems that have captured your attention? Is your focus the same today as it was when you first started thinking about these issues?

GV: Maternal gift giving is unilateral because the young child cannot give back an equivalent of what she or he has been given. The mother has to attend to the child to know what she needs and provide the appropriate need-satisfaction. This transmission of goods and services is necessary for survival, so all children who survive receive this model. ‘A’ gives to ‘B’ is a very versatile interaction. Its very simplicity allows it to be varied in many ways. It can be enacted with many different kinds of gifts and services at different levels, with different actors, at different times and with different intentions. The receiver can pass the gift on to another or give something else again. One thing can be given to another thing: the water can be given to the pot and the potatoes given to the water. One thing can be given instead of another or together with another. One person can give and/or another can give, many can give and/or receive. My contention is that without our knowing it, this basic transaction forms a schema that underlies most of what we do including language.

The variation upon this schema that is exchange creates an important exception that by making the gift contingent upon an equal return, gives rise to a logical movement that contradicts the other-orientation of the gift schema itself. Quid pro quo cancels the other-tending trajectory of the maternal gift and turns it back towards the ‘ex giver’, turning her into an exchanger. The purpose of the transaction is the satisfaction of the exchanger’s own need, using the other as means. The motion towards the other is cancelled and contradicted and the equivalence between the two items takes its place. The items or services and the equivalence between them become the focus of attention. Although I am making a point of logic, it is obvious that what we could call the moral tenor of the interaction changes as well. What has happened in philosophy in the societies based on patriarchy and the market, is that the schema of exchange has been made primary and that although it continues to function, the schema of the gift has been backgrounded, forgotten and ignored. One reason for this is that the ones doing the philosophy were all males who did not in their own lives have the adult experience of mothering as part of their daily practice (though all humans experience it in childhood). Another reason is that the interaction of ‘equal’ exchange while on the surface cancelling gift giving, often serves to allocate more to one party or the other beneath the surface. Controlling this ‘more’ – which is actually a free ‘gift’ portion given to one or the other – is the motivation of the market which we call ‘profit making’. It behooves the exchangers not to recognize the gift character of this portion because that would undermine their supposed right to appropriate it. This hidden gift is also contained in the surplus labor/surplus value that is transferred free to the capitalist from the worker and accumulates to form capital.

Genevieve at her Lake Vico home in Italy, 2019. Photo from Susan Petrilli’s album.

One of the places where the unilateral gift schema has been excluded from consideration is the study of language and communication. ‘Exchange’ is the commonplace term we use when speaking of conversation, of exchanges of ideas and opinions, communicative exchanges, exchanges of words, of love and of glances. My contention is that we need to restore the centrality and primacy of the unilateral gift logic to our thinking about these issues, about communication itself and about the structure of language. It is not primarily by quid pro quo interactions or by positing equivalences: ‘X is Y’ that we communicate but by giving and receiving: X gives (a) to Y.

By recapturing the maternal gift as part of our cultural makeup and heritage we can revise our thinking on many issues including, significantly, the question of who we are as a species. I believe that we are a highly maternal species Homo donans et recipiens (not just Homo Sapiens). If we recognize the importance of the unilateral gift in communication and language, which are so important for our species self-concept, we can begin to act in accordance and let go of that artificial and mistaken self-constructed species being, homo economicus who is now destroying Mother Earth.

I must tell you that I have the shocking idea that the logic of commodity exchange infused with patriarchal motivations actually constitutes a kind of mental mechanism that alienates us from our maternal species-being and incites us to appropriate others’ gifts wherever we find them. The philosophy of the maternal gift economy contrasted with the ideology and experience of the market economy allows us to recognize this mechanism, distance ourselves from it and reclaim our original gift-based identities. I believe the consciousness of the maternal gift economy can finally allow us to recognize the presence of the mechanism in society at large and dismantle it while emphasizing the true gift aspects of culture and nature.

For various reasons we usually don’t abstract from maternal gifting, perhaps because in contrast with the hardnosed market mindset it is infused with emotions or seems too simplistic or oppressive and in the present capitalistic society it is made to seem inferior and menial (or alternatively it is made saintly). When we do abstract commonalities from the various kinds and instances of gifting, we find the transitive patterns in language and life that I believe are the patterns of meaning.

We might even say that language itself is the product of the gift schema abstraction at several levels (though we don’t see it because in the beginning in childhood giving-receiving is an experience of the integrated mind-body and as adults we can’t find the thread of the first abstraction). (I contrast this with Sohn-Rethel’s concept of the exchange abstraction, which I will discuss a bit more below).

This approach is of course different from the approach to mothering that feminists describe as essentialism, which sees nurturing as a burden imposed by society on females by considering us genetically disposed towards caring work, while other actors are liberated from that heavy task. I turn this approach upside down. I see the patriarchal market context as ephemeral that is, impermanent and the reason why mothering is now difficult for homo donans. The species is maternal but patriarchy and the market push most men and many women into an anti-maternal, anti-nurturing stance and way of life, depleting the availability of goods, isolating individu...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Presentation
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1.: The Personal is Political: On Genevieve Vaughan’s Impact
• Part 2.: Indigenous Background to the Gift Economy
• Part 3.: Historical Views on the Gift Economy
• Part 4.: Mothering and the Gift
• Part 5.: Women’s Body, Divinity and the Gift
• Part 6.: From Theory to Practice
• Biographies