Open Gift and Social Bond: Mauss and Beyond

The generativity of the gift consists in its own opening to indetermination, to unknown results. In its generative action a gift welcomes the newness that is to come; it is directed toward the future. The gift is not a memento incumbent on a past to compensate. It is a continuing promise addressed to the future. In its entirely free and disinterested nature, the gift creates a possibility for something new to happen. Giving belongs to an immaterial universe parallel to that of the world of order, where everything that happens must have a clear cause and expected result. The order of the gift is what offers human relationships an alternative to the prisons of hierarchies and of violence. A gift is generative because it places the totally free and gratuitous nature of the obvious gesture of exchange (giving time) within dynamics of reciprocity and hierarchical constraint (competition, contest etc.)