Albert Einstein. "Imagination is more important than knowledge..." [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

Yo-Yo Ma Travels the 'Silk Road'. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma's new CD -- Silk Road Journeys -- features traditional music from nations along the ancient trade route. He speaks with Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon. May 25, 2002. [NPR News (Audio)] . . . I love these audio news features particularly when they deal with music . . . give it a listen "coding the internal" . . .

. . . resurfaces . . . to link or not . . .

"Gift: Before there is money, many complex societies order their economic lives, to a significant extent, by means of gifts and gift exchange. . . Marcel Mauss initiated the study of gifts and gift economy in his celebrated Essai sur le don. Here he describessocieties where gift giving is a mechanism of exchangethat is at oncematerial and moral and knits the community together in a livingfabric of value. Mauss cites a proverb from New Caledonia:

Our feasts are the movement of a needle which sews together the parts of our reed roofs, making of these a single roof, one word.

Mauss emphasizes that such a "single roof" is continuously woven out of three interrelated obligations: to give, to receive, to repay. Considering these three requirements, we begin to see how the moral life established by such transactions differs from that of a money economy. A gift has both economic and spiritual content, is personal and reciprocal, and depends on a relationship that endures over time. Money is an abstraction that passes one way and impersonally between people whose relationship stops with the transfer of cash. To use Marx's term, a commodity is an alienable object exchanged between two transactions enjoying a state of mutual independence, while a gift is an inalienable object exchanged between two reciprocally dependent transactors. Gift and commodity represent two different notions of value, embodied in two different sets of social relations. the sets ought to be mutually exclusive. In fact, historically and psychologically, they overlap."(Anne Carson. Economy of the Unlost / Reading Simonides of Keos With Paul Celan. 12)

:: comment :: this is the environment i weave into . . . receiving so many gifts with a moral delight to repay . . . i link (point) as gifts . . . an articulate review of the above by Willett.   12:07:25 AM  comment