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The Gift of European Thought and the Cost of Living. Vassos Argyrou PDF

147 Pages·2013·0.68 MB·English
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The Gift of European Thought and the Cost of Living THE GIFT OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT AND THE COST OF LIVING h Vassos Argyrou b erghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com Published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2013 Vassos Argyrou All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Argyrou, Vassos. The gift of European thought and the cost of living / Vassos Argyrou. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-017-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-78238-018-4 (institutional ebook) 1. Thought and thinking. 2. Enlightenment. 3. Cost and standard of living—Europe. I. Title. BF441.A644 2013 153.4'2094—dc23 2013004629 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78238-017-7 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-018-4 institutional ebook For Lisa and Nefeli and in memory of Christodoulos Argyrou CONTENTS h Chapter 1. The Circle 1 Chapter 2. The Gift of European Thought 10 The Postcolonial 10 The Take on/of the Gift 25 The Power of Giving 32 Chapter 3. The Economy of Thought 41 The Phenomenon and the Phantom 41 ‘Think for Yourself’ 54 The Socialisation of Thought 62 Chapter 4. Political Economy 79 Re-volution 79 The Hegemonic 91 Identity Politics 99 Chapter 5. The Cost of Living 111 Thinking and Not Thinking 111 The Modern and the Traditional 117 The Cost of Living 125 References 131 Index 134 chapter 1 THE CIRCLE h The Kula is probably the best known and most celebrated anthropological ex- ample of the gift. It is also a graphic (in the double sense of the term) example of a certain circle in which the gift is implicated – a ‘ring’, says Malinowski, that forms a ‘closed circuit’. Yet this is not the only circle here. There is another that is prior to and much more fundamental than any ring of the kind that Malinowski describes. It is the circle of the gift itself – the gift’s own circularity. The Kula is a form of exchange carried out by ‘communities inhabiting a wide ring of islands, which form a closed circuit’ (Malinowski 1922: 81; my emphases). It involves the circulation of necklaces of red shell – souvala – with bracelets of white shell – mwali – which as they are exchanged move around this ring in opposite directions, clockwise and anti-clockwise, respectively. And they move around it constantly, says Malinowski, on account of a certain rule. ‘One trans- action does not fi nish the Kula relationship, the rule being “once in the Kula, always in the Kula” and a partnership between two men is a permanent and lifelong affair’ (my emphasis). Likewise the necklaces and bracelets exchanged ‘may always be found travelling and changing hands, and there is no question of [their] ever settling down, so that the principle “once in the Kula, always in the Kula” applies also to the valuables themselves’ (Malinowski 1922: 81–83). It is as if both the partners engaged in this exchange and the objects with which they engage one another are caught up in the circle, are surrounded by it, and can- not escape. It is as if they are destined to go round and round in circles until the end – the death of one of the partners in these lifelong relationships or the end as social death – the ‘loss of face’, becoming nobody (an oxymoron, no doubt), which, as Mauss says in his own discussion of the gift, is the fate of all those who fail to reciprocate. Such is the rule of the Kula, but for all we know it may be the rule of much more than this native institution. It may even be the rule of life itself. We will

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