Actual and potential gifts: Critique, shadow gift relations and the virtual domain of the ungiven

Abstract

What is given may be evaluated in relation to what might have been given but was not. The central thematic of this essay is what we term the shadow gift relation (as distinct from the more standard anthropological gift relation among exchange partner dyads) between the gift that is given and that which remains ungiven—with the latter, both present and not present, coming to haunt and unsettle the former. The potential of the gift is key for it is intimately related to critique: we explore how the relation between the virtual ungiven and what is actually given may come to form the basis of social criticism. This essay, then, defines a kind of ‘keeping while giving’ that is related to but different from that famously elaborated by Annette Weiner, for what is kept back, in the cases we discuss in this essay, are virtual (imagined) forms of gift. Giving is a technology of the imagination because it is a process that precipitates the imagination of a relation between an actual gift and a double that is virtual but nonetheless real because it exists in the form of a manifold of potentials for how the gift could be.

Public police’s philanthropy and Twitter communications in Canada

“…We have argued that the increased use of police social media promoting philanthropic work is political in the sense that it aims to bolster a sense of legitimacy and generate reciprocal relations over the long-term. Likewise, Copeman and Banerjee (2020) contended that the whole point of philanthropy is to create a set of shadow relations that entrain the receiver of the gift to experience an obligation to give back to or to follow the giver of the gift in some way. More research is needed to see if these social media images can recast the police relationship with communities in the future of if they will become the target of critique as calls for disarming, defunding and disbanding police grow louder.…”

“…As Bornstein (2009) noted, the impulse of philanthropy or charity is almost always to boost social or cultural capital. Philanthropy creates a set of shadow relations whereby the receiver of the gift then experiences an obligation or an expectation to give back in some way (Copeman and Banerjee, 2020). It is important to examine whether police social media messaging about philanthropy serves a similar function in the criminal justice sector and to what extent this is similar or different than what occurs in other fields of fundraising and charity.…”

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGE: Interactions, Transactions and Ethics in Asia and Beyond

“…I have in mind here the literature on the ethics of gift exchange that I engaged with in my work on the provision of development aid to African 'friendship' partners, for example when I sought to show that when official Vietnamese accounts represent these initiatives as acts of gift-giving, to be understood as cooperative interactions animated by feelings of selfless warmth, they are being portrayed as something akin to the 'empathetic dialogues' which says are generated out of the giving of 'illiquid' , disinterested gifts between individual partners in exchange. See also Yan 1996;Laidlaw 2000, Venkatesen 2007; but also Copeman and Banerjee 2020. The language of the gift is widely used in official accounts of Vietnam's African aid schemes, and by the former aid workers themselves ).…”

Negative Ethics: Taking the Bad with the Good. An Introduction

“…Annette Weiner (1992), for example, highlights that transactions may be evaluated in terms of what is kept back. This may prompt exchange partners to appraise gifts by imagining the discrepancy between the actual gift and what potentially could have been given, creating competing virtual points of view centred around the different affordances of these hypothetical gifts and the reality of the exchange (Copeman and Banerjee 2021). At broader scales beyond the concrete transactions studied by Munn and other exchange theorists, differences of moral point of view are also built into social reproduction.…”