Leaning into the Gift Economy

How participating in a gift economy can transform a community

As I wrote about in my post-Black Friday post, my family is embarking upon a No-Buy Year in 2023. The goal of this endeavor is to provide a reset. It will reset our brains to resist the psychological pull of accumulating stuff. It will reset our sense of values and how they relate–or don’t relate–to “things” and accumulation. It will reset our sense of dedication to doing our part to repairing the planet. This No-Buy Year is very much a part of the Cramming for the Apocalypse journey in that it helps to strip down to the foundation to create a distinction between “wants” and “needs.” In the future, our economic system is not going to look the way it does now and survival (and thriving) in an apocalypse is dependent on adaptation to a changing system. 

So as we close out the year, I’ll be dedicating the newsletter to some of the lessons I’m learning as I start this journey and create a plan of action and accountability method for our 2023 No-Buy Year. The gift economy is a beautiful one that I’ve been pondering quite a lot over the course of this journey and is a perfect one to reflect on as we head toward Christmas.

My son writing a card to his cousin for her Christmas gift this year — while not necessarily explicitly a part of the “gift economy,” the act of giving out of love and appreciation definitely helps inspire giving.

I’m a member of my local Buy Nothing Facebook group. I’m sure many of you reading this are a part of you neighborhood group, too. This concept has taken off over the last decade or so to make up over 7,500 Buy Nothing community groups and over 6.5 million community participants around the world, so chances are Buy Nothing isn’t a new concept for you. But to those of you who are unfamiliar, the Buy Nothing project is a hyper-localized forum of gifting administered through private Facebook groups made up of neighbors. You have an appliance you don’t use anymore? Offer it in a post on Buy Nothing and chances are, you’ll find a neighbor who’d love to give it a try. You need a couple extra chairs for a gathering you’re having? Post an ask on Buy Nothing and there’s likely someone willing to lend you a couple seats.

I’ve been a member of my neighborhood Buy Nothing groups since my son was born in 2017. Upon the realization that babies require so much damn shit, it was a welcome discovery so I wasn’t constantly buying the size up of clothes when he’d grow out of it in 20 minutes or I could try out some toys on him that there was no guarantee he’d play with. And as a gift-er, it was a beautiful way to find a home for something that I had been holding onto for sentimental reasons. Somehow giving those precious “things” to a neighbor who would appreciate them felt better than just dumping it in a bag of stuff that I’d hand over to Goodwill. 

My participation in Buy Nothing ebbs and flows, but the constant community as a resource in a pinch or at a time where I didn’t want to add more plastic consumption to the world, it’s always been there. And while the founders Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller–who wrote The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan about the BN Project–describe it as a “movement,” I don’t know if I really thought of my gifting of some fabric I’d never use or books I was never going to read as a part of anything greater than providing something fun to my neighbor. Turns out, though, Buy Nothing falls squarely into a “gift economy” which is an age-old form of community organization that our capitalist-centric minds in America have overlooked from years of indoctrination to economic growth principles where a “good economy” equals continuous growth.

Yet when you look at the etymology of the term “economy,” it comes from the Greek word Oikos or home. “Economy” essentially meant “household management.” The Online Etymology Dictionary noted that in the 1600s and even into the 1780s when the American Founders began laying the groundwork for the new republic, “economy” was essentially synonymous with “frugality.” Somehow that definition has transformed to include wealth accumulation. Today, the Cambridge Dictionary defines “economy” as “the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used.” Ugh. How did we get from this idea of “economy” as home management to building the wealth of an entire freaking nation? My point here isn’t necessarily to answer the question, but rather to turn it on its head and look more at what we can learn from different economies, specifically the gift economy.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer beautifully describes Indigenous perspectives around the “gift economy” that are essential cultural values rooted in the relationship between people and the earth. The idea of reciprocity being at the center of this.

“Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet,” writes Kimmerer about her childhood growing up in upstate New York and experiencing the abundance of wild strawberries that would accumulate near her home. “A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery–as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.” 

This was contrasted against the backdrop of the strawberries grown on farms nearby that kids were hired to pick by local farmers. “It was quite a lesson in economics,” she writes. “We’d have to spend most of our wages if we wanted to ride home with berries in our bike baskets. Of course those berries were ten times bigger than our wild ones, but not nearly so good.” 

Within this “quality” of the gift, there’s a change in the feelings one has about the “thing.” Kimmerer quotes scholar and writer Lewis Hyde on this: “It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.”

She also describes how Hyde’s work “illustrates this dissonance in his exploration of the ‘Indian giver’,” and continues: 

“This expression, used negatively today as a pejorative for someone who gives something and then wants to have it back, actually derives from a fascinating cross-cultural misinterpretation between an Indigenous culture operating in a gift economy and a colonial culture predicated on the concept of private property. When gifts were given to the settlers by the Native inhabitants, the recipients understood that they were valuable and were intended to be retained. Giving them away would have been an affront. But the Indigenous people understood the value of the gift to be based on reciprocity and would be affronted if the gifts did not circulate back to them. Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again.” 

This description of the gift economy being rooted in reciprocity runs so counter to the Western, private ownership model of commodities and ownership, that it can be hard to extract yourself from that idea. 

Additionally, because of the relationship that is rooted between the gifter and the receiver, there’s a deeper connection to the thing. There is a sense of love and obligation. Settlers saw it as keeping and treasuring such objects as their own. But from the Indigenous perspective, it’s more representative of the thing as something that’s a part of a community, and with that collective ownership comes responsibility. Kimmerer writes: “In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a ‘bundle of rights,’ whereas in a gift economy property has a ‘bundle of responsibilities’ attached.” 

In reflecting on this and the Buy Nothing project, that relationship being built between people is inherent in the structure of the movement. That’s why these giving communities are structured around geographic boundaries. These are your neighbors. And there’s responsibility to the community that comes with that gift. For example, if my son has grown out of a pair of shoes someone from Buy Nothing gifted us, it’s my responsibility to re-circulate those in the Buy Nothing community and pass it on to the next person versus selling them for consignment or even donating to Goodwill. This is not an explicitly stated rule that I know of, but it’s something that I adhere to because of that sense of responsibility. 

In Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller’s book, they describe a place that inspired this idea of creating a gift economy in the U.S., the community of Samdzong in the Himalayas on the Nepal-Tibet border in which Liesl and her husband have worked for many years. This remote rural village, cut off from many resources, survives and thrives because of a gift economy. 

“The village’s gift economy requires that each household is given the same amount of social capital, or equal ability to regift the items they didn’t need to families that needed them,” they write. “Social capital can be defined as the productive social relationship in any community that make up the true web of mutual bonds.” Everyone has something to offer the community through gifts. They’re not necessarily exchanged in bartering fashion, rather as true one-way gift because there’s an assumption, an expectation even, that someday the receiver will also have a gift for someone in the community. 

“In the village in Nepal, everyone is cared for and valued and plays a vital role,” they write. “No one goes hungry, and everyone monitors one another’s health, as there’s no doctor in town.”

This reminds me a lot about what I wrote last week about anarchy. A gift economy is essentially a community structured on anarchic principles of mutual aid. Everyone has a gift and everyone is a participant in ensuring the community’s health and well-being. In the U.S., this kind of gift economy is most evident in communities that have been left behind and overlooked because of systemic racism. Black and brown communities especially have been left out of the promise of the “American Dream” to build generational wealth and, as a measure to stop that gap, these communities have built deeper networks within and among one another to care and provide for one another through mutual aid. While they might not always be thought of as gift economies, the gift of self, the gift of care, the gift of support are all a part of that.

Now Buy Nothing doesn’t come without challenges. It involves people, doesn’t it? And we’re a complicated bunch. There has been drama in all the groups I’ve been a part of. There’s misinterpretation around the boundaries or rules set and there’s frustration on behalf of people who don’t pick up their items or who aren’t great at communicating. But that’s what you get when you live in community with people, the complications that come with human beings in a relationship with other human beings.

Despite all of this, seeing my local Buy Nothing group within this framework of the gift economy, it’s a beautiful thing. It’s more than just the giving and receiving of stuff. It’s certainly an attempt to reduce the amount of things we buy, thus decreasing our personal carbon footprint, and hopefully making some kind of impact to decrease the amount of plastic and other harmful materials pumped out into the environment. But it goes beyond that, it's restructuring the way we engage with the people around us. It’s removing the individual one-to-one exchange that has been ingrained in our habits of exchanging money for things.

It’s thanks to the Buy Nothing groups that I’ve been a part of that I found the new parents’ group in my old neighborhood right after my son was born which became a gift economy of knowledge and care in and of itself. And from that spawned a babysitting co-op which became a gift economy of time and trust and care for each others’ kids. And through these various gift economies, I see so much promise for what the future can hold if we look beyond stuff and see the communities that are providing us with our needs and even our wants. 

So what does this mean for my No-Buy year? 

Giving is my first step on that journey. We’re going through all the crap that we have and seeing what we can contribute to our gift economy. While I’m a regular BN gifter, I’m taking this to another level and I’ve found that gifting begets more gifting. It’s contagious. I just participated in a clothing exchange with friends a couple weekends ago and immediately upon coming home (with about the same amount of clothes I gifted *facepalm emoji*), I realized there were enough clothes I was ready to part with to fill another IKEA bag. The gifting inspired a deeper decluttering process. 

The other part of this is to have Buy Nothing be the first stop when I believe I want a new thing. In many cases, I’m too impatient or I just want something new or it’s just right there on my computer so why don’t I just go ahead and buy it. So I need to interrupt those thoughts and temptations early on and seek out the BN group first.

What’s abundantly clear, though, is that gifting and participating in the gift economy is going to be central to this endeavor to buy less.

Would love to hear what this brings up for you. Do you participate in your local Buy Nothing group? Why or why not? What other ways do you participate in a gift economy? Comment below with your thoughts!