The Gift Economy: What Happens When Knowledge Is Meant to Circulate?

 

The Gift Economy: What Happens When Knowledge Is Meant to Circulate?

Lately I have been thinking about something anthropologists call the gift economy.

At first, the phrase sounds simple.

Someone gives something to someone else.

But the more I think about it, the more complicated—and beautiful—it becomes.

A gift isn't always something wrapped in paper.

Sometimes the gift is food.

Sometimes it is a seed.

Sometimes it is labor.

Sometimes it is a story.

Sometimes it is knowing where the water is.

Sometimes it is knowing which plant can heal, which tree should be protected, or when it is time to plant.

And sometimes the gift is knowledge.

That last one has been making me think.

The Gift Is Not Always About Getting Something Back

The anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote about gift exchange almost a hundred years ago. He observed that in many societies, giving isn't simply an isolated act of generosity.

Giving can create a relationship.

There is giving.

There is receiving.

And there is reciprocity.

But reciprocity doesn't always mean:

I give you one thing and you give me an equal thing in return.

It can be much more subtle.

I may give you food today.

Tomorrow you may help me in my garden.

Years later, I may help your child.

The exchange moves through time.

And sometimes it moves through the community rather than between two particular people.

That idea interests me.

Because it suggests that wealth isn't always something that sits still.

Sometimes wealth is something that moves.

I Have Spent Much of My Life Thinking About Agriculture

My relationship to this idea probably goes back to my years working with sustainable agriculture and community gardening.

Agriculture has always seemed to me to be about more than producing food.

A garden is a place where knowledge accumulates.

Someone knows how to prepare the soil.

Someone knows which seeds do well.

Someone knows how to save seeds.

Someone knows when to plant.

Someone knows how to make compost.

Someone knows how to recognize a plant before it flowers.

And someone else is just beginning to learn.

The garden becomes a classroom.

But unlike a classroom where knowledge is handed down from teacher to student and the lesson ends, agricultural knowledge keeps circulating.

The student becomes the teacher.

The teacher becomes the learner.

And the knowledge changes as it moves.

That is one of the things I love about ecological knowledge.

It is alive.

The African Connection

When I think about the gift economy in Africa, I don't want to romanticize it.

Africa is not one culture, and African societies have always had markets, trade, commerce, property, competition, wealth, and inequality.

But anthropologists have documented many different systems of reciprocity and exchange in African societies.

Among the San of southern Africa, for example, anthropologists have studied hxaro, a long-term system of gift exchange in which objects can move between people while helping maintain relationships.

The interesting part isn't simply the object.

It is the relationship created by the exchange.

That makes me wonder whether our modern definition of wealth has become too narrow.

We tend to ask:

How much money do you have?

But another society might ask:

Who can you call when you need help?

Who will share food?

Who will help you plant?

Who will watch your children?

Who knows where the water is?

Who remembers the history?

Who can teach you?

Those relationships can represent a kind of wealth too.

Not financial wealth.

Social wealth.

What If Knowledge Is a Gift?

This is where I find myself wandering into my own world.

For years, I have been interested in the movement of knowledge.

I've become increasingly aware that knowledge can disappear when it isn't documented.

An elder dies.

A farmer dies.

A fisherman dies.

A grandmother dies.

And suddenly a piece of knowledge that existed for generations can disappear with that person.

That makes documenting knowledge important.

But documentation alone isn't enough.

Knowledge has to circulate.

Someone has to read it.

Someone has to teach it.

Someone has to add to it.

Someone has to question it.

Someone has to pass it forward.

This is beginning to look a lot like a gift economy to me.

Wikipedia and the Gift of Knowledge

This is one reason I think about Wikipedia differently now.

When I first became involved with Wikipedia, I thought primarily about editing articles.

Now I increasingly think about knowledge circulation.

Someone discovers something.

They research it.

They find a book.

They find an old newspaper.

They locate a photograph.

They interview someone.

They contribute what they have learned.

Then someone else comes along.

They add another reference.

They correct something.

They translate the article.

They add a photograph.

They connect it to another article.

The knowledge keeps moving.

No one person has to own the whole thing.

This is one of the things that fascinates me about the Wikimedia movement.

A person can contribute a small piece of knowledge and never know how many people will eventually encounter it.

That is a very different relationship to knowledge than:

I know something, therefore I own something.

Instead, it becomes:

I know something, therefore I have something I can contribute.

The Gift of the Photograph

I've also been thinking about photographs this way.

A photograph can begin with one person's camera.

But once it becomes part of Wikimedia Commons, it can travel.

Someone researching a historical community can find it.

A student can use it.

A Wikipedia editor can place it in an article.

A researcher can discover something through it.

An AI system may eventually encounter the information connected to it.

The photograph has entered a larger information ecosystem.

That makes me think about something I have experienced through Wikimedia:

documentation is a form of giving.

You are saying:

I was here.

I saw this.

This person existed.

This place existed.

This event happened.

Here is something that might help someone else understand it.

The Gift of the Garden

Community gardening gives me another way to understand this.

A garden is one of the places where the gift economy can become visible.

Someone brings seeds.

Someone brings compost.

Someone brings tools.

Someone brings knowledge.

Someone brings labor.

Someone brings water.

Someone simply brings themselves.

And eventually something grows.

The harvest may not belong entirely to the person who planted the seed.

It can become food for many people.

That seems almost obvious when we are talking about vegetables.

But we don't always think about knowledge in the same way.

Why shouldn't knowledge work similarly?

Why shouldn't knowledge be planted?

Why shouldn't knowledge be cultivated?

Why shouldn't knowledge be harvested?

Why shouldn't knowledge be shared?

From Seeds to Information

I keep coming back to seeds.

A seed is tiny.

But it contains possibility.

You put it into the soil.

You give it water.

You give it time.

And eventually something emerges.

Knowledge can work that way too.

Someone gives you an idea.

You think about it.

You read.

You investigate.

You ask questions.

You connect it with something you already know.

Then you pass it to someone else.

That person does something different with it.

The original idea has now traveled.

Perhaps it has even grown.

This is why I sometimes think of knowledge as a kind of intellectual seed bank.

The purpose isn't merely to store knowledge.

It is to keep knowledge available for future cultivation.

The Problem With Everything Having a Price

Perhaps this is also why I sometimes feel uncomfortable with the way modern society talks about value.

We are constantly being asked:

What does it cost?

What can it earn?

What is it worth?

Can it be monetized?

Who owns it?

Who can sell it?

These are legitimate questions.

But they aren't the only questions.

There are other questions.

What does it nourish?

Who does it help?

What relationship does it create?

What does it preserve?

What can be learned from it?

What happens when it is shared?

I don't think everything valuable needs to become a commodity.

Some things are valuable because they help sustain relationships and communities.

The Gift and the Future

The older I get, the more interested I become in what happens to knowledge after we are gone.

That may be one reason I am drawn to oral history.

Someone remembers something that isn't written down.

You listen.

You record.

You document.

Now another generation can encounter that memory.

The person who tells the story may never meet the person who eventually reads it.

But something has crossed the generations.

That is a gift.

And perhaps this is one of the deepest meanings of a knowledge commons.

We inherit things we didn't create.

Then we have an opportunity to add something before passing them along.

I Don't Want to Own Everything I Learn

I've begun to realize that I don't necessarily want knowledge to stop with me.

If I learn something interesting about African agriculture, I want someone else to know it.

If I discover an overlooked Black community, I want the history documented.

If I photograph something important, I want the photograph to have a life beyond my phone.

If I learn something from an elder, I want the knowledge to have somewhere to go.

Maybe that is why I keep coming back to Wikipedia.

It gives me a place where something I have learned can enter a larger stream.

I contribute.

Someone else contributes.

The knowledge moves.

A Different Kind of Wealth

Maybe we need to expand our definition of wealth.

Wealth can be money.

It can be land.

It can be property.

But wealth can also be memory.

Relationships.

Skills.

Seeds.

Stories.

Photographs.

Knowledge.

Trust.

And the ability to help another person.

Perhaps a truly resilient community is not simply one in which individuals have accumulated a great deal.

Perhaps it is one in which people have learned how to circulate what they have.

The farmer shares seed.

The elder shares memory.

The teacher shares knowledge.

The photographer shares an image.

The researcher shares a source.

The Wikipedian shares what she has learned.

Someone else receives it.

And then, if the system works, they add something of their own.

The Gift Keeps Moving

That is what I find most beautiful about the gift economy.

The gift doesn't necessarily end when it leaves your hands.

It may begin there.

A seed leaves my hand and enters the soil.

A story leaves someone's mouth and enters another person's memory.

A photograph leaves my camera and enters the historical record.

A piece of knowledge leaves one mind and enters another.

And perhaps years from now, someone I will never meet will benefit from something I once decided to share.

That makes me wonder whether one of the most important questions we can ask about knowledge is not:

“Who owns it?”

but:

“Where is it going?”

Because knowledge that is locked away may belong to someone.

But knowledge that circulates can become part of a community.

And maybe that is the gift.

Not simply giving something away.

But helping something continue.

That is what I keep wondering about.

— Linda