Actual and potential gifts

Critique, shadow gift relations and the virtual domain of the ungiven

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2402020
AutoresJ Copeman (0000-0001-6967-0086, University of Edinburgh, autor de correspondencia), D Banerjee (0000-0001-9786-796X, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Año2021
Volumen21
Número1
Páginas28-49
Fecha de publicación2021-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAnthropological Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1463-4996 • E-ISSN: 1741-2641
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1463499619894426
OpenAlexW3001274487
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas32

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

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