[iDC] The Ethics of Participation

[mlahey at artic.edu]

Dear Folks,

Keith: hey, if being hijacked by the anthropological classics provides some
insight, they why they heck not?

But, I feel that some of the extremely technical anthro language in this thread
is obscuring a subliminal conflict in the way we discuss culture and
reciprocity.

Often, when we introduce a social gesture, it is ignored or rejected as opposed
to returned (as we would like).  On the web or in real life, it doesn't matter.
 

Imagine a different world in time not far away: America in the 1960's.  Fool's
Crow, the last of the truly great Native American holy people, who knew a time
before Europeans, who did not read or write.  Fool's crow gave his belongings
away on a constant basis.  When a reporter admired his elaborate, cast silver
and turquoise squash blossom necklace, he took it off and gave it to her.  When
jobless relatives were eating him out of house and home he simply continued to
divide up his things and portion them out according to how many people were
sleeping on his floor at the time.

Some have posited that this strategy aided survival in the time (ice ages) when
the first Native Americans crossed the Bering strait.  They had such small
groups that if someone died, they actually survived *worse* than if that person
survived.  hence, dividing your pie to keep everyone going was the appropriate
way to not die.

some Native Americans used to have a tradition of once a year, giving all of
their belongings away and starting from scratch.  Also, those who killed more
buffalo than they could "process" (meaning, skin, tan hides, dry meat, store
and carry) were punished by having all of their belongings thrown away and
scattered on the prarie.

there are more cultures around the world that exhibit similar behaviors, but on
to the point.  In these cultures, when someone indicated that they liked one of
your posessions, you just gave it to them.  Of course, *RECIPROCITY* dictated
that if they asked you to give it back, you would.  This of course gave rise to
a complicated system of ettiquite in which you did not casually ogle other
people's belongings, or you did not casually invoke friendship or some other
social gesture.

In Kieth Basso's book "Portraits of the Whiteman" his breif (and hilarious)
ethnographic study of Indians imitating annoying white people, one can clearly
see the Indians' contempt for the too-frequent, too-early, too-casual and
too-sloppy social gestures offered by whites.

So what's the conflict that I mentioned before?  Unfortunately, almost
everything published (especially in the anthropological classics) is being told
to you through European-colored glasses.  

Then all of this analysis (which sort of means, putting what actually happened
through the filter of a Westernized mind, and then publishing what's left) gets
sort of mishmashed with what we actually experience, and we've got a fine stew
of big words and concepts with 100-page bibliographies attached, but not
necessarily any more clarity on how culture works or why things happen, and
ESPECIALLY not on our relationship to the whole thing.

In my experience, starting from the epicenters of WASP culture and working
outwards to affected (infected?) regions, non-reciprocity is practiced as a
dominance strategy.  You offer a handshake, and someone denies it.  They see
you as "beneath" them.  You're speaking to someone, and they cut you off and
turn away.  Gestures of contempt.  Of course, there are much more subtle ways
to practice it.  It is most subtle when a large number of reciprocities are
punctuated by a small percentage of non-reciprocities.  The direction of
non-reciprocity determines the direction of dominance.

Dominance is an extremely hot issue in Euro culture.  My theory is that after
feudalism was toppled by a series of revolutions before the nation-state era,
"freed" serfs did not create an entirely different culture to the one they
always knew.  Instead, they simply duplicated it on a smaller basis.  Everyone
was still trying to scramble to the top of the dog pile, to wear red and velvet
and ermine.  In fact, that's what drives our materialistic, heirarchical society
today.  Let's see: having lots and lots of children who can work or be sent to
war for you.  Having a cool iPod that other guys can't afford.  Building
Empires.  Suburbs.  Enclosing the commons.  Yeah, all of those things could
definitely result from the delusionary pursuit of the social position of a
mideval feudal lord.

Also, not returning reciprocity (of attention, approval, anything) is such a
common method for gaining dominance that even on the web, it pushes our
buttons.  Yet there is another side to this game.  When everyone demands
reciprocity (in order that they not end up dominated), reciprocity becomes a
prison, our social life becomes a prison.  We learn to give in order to force
others also to give.  We learn to withhold in order to punish and subdue.

We have to even *invent* things to elevate, in order to have things to negate
about others.  I would take personal hygiene as one example.  I can't count the
times when I've heard people groan about "smelly" "oily-haired" "oily-skinned"
or "hairy" Indians, or Italians, or Blacks.  Why is it that having manicured
nails lacquered with toxic polish, straightening or removing one's body hair,
and chemically deodorizing oneself, is such a desirable activity?  Because it
allows us to look askance at those who have not mastered this technique.  

One could view the entire category of technique as susceptible to similar use. 
it has played a huge role in the history of racism.  Can't yodel?  Weeeell,
we're into yodel here, so you can just mosey on.  

If we ever want to solve these problems, we would have to thoroughly, deeply,
radically think up an entirely new social structure from scratch.  To be
successful, it would probably have to be "crazy" by current norms.   Ready set
go?  Sigh.

Malian.



Quoting "keith at thememorybank.co.uk" <keith at thememorybank.co.uk>:

> Michel,
> 
> Thanks for this. (Thanks too to Brian for his intriguing post). I think,
> from what have been able to say briefly here, that there would be
> substantial agreement between us on several matters. These would include
> the importance of considering reciprocity as part of a set of what Polanyi
> called principles of integration. I am currently editing a book of a
> workshop on Polanyi, the crisis of neoliberalism and economic
> anthropology,.  Market and Society: The Great Transformation today. The
> issues you raise here engage the participants alos. Jean-Michel Servet
> makes a powerful case for updating reciprocity, redistribution and market
> in ways that evoke your comments about revenue-sharing.
> 
> I have a particular beef about the idea of a gift economy which is a
> travesty of Marcel Mauss's intention when writing the 'essai sur le don'.
> His aim there was to expose the contrast between self-interested commerce
> and the free gift as bourgeois ideology, insisting rather that the archaic
> gift and modern markets, like economic institutions everywhere, combine
> individual freedom and social obligation, self-interest and concern for
> others in what is in effect the universal human condition. He also
> preferred to deal with the social facts as given rather than with
> analytical abstractions.
> 
> I would not wish to hijack Trebor's stimulating post into a discussion of
> the anthropological classics. And I am grateful to you and Brian for
> reminding me of more recent writers. But it does raise the question of
> whether the ethics of participation can be usefully discussed independently
> of social context or without explicit reference to some of the main
> categories that have usefully organize thinking about the topic.
> 
> Keith
> 
> 
> From: Michel Bauwens michelsub2004 at gmail.com
> Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 08:01:00 +0700
> 
> Keith,
> 
> I completely agree with this. In my own work, and following the relational
> grammar of Alan Page Fiske, I distinguish between the reciprocity-based gift
> economy (Equality Matching), the tributary economies based on hierarchy
> (Authority Ranking), Market Pricing exchange, and finally, non-reciprocal
> Communal Shareholding, of which contemporaty peer production is an
> expression.
> 
> Viewing peer production as such is much more productive than what is in my
> opinion the misguided equation of it with the gift economy. There is no
> direct reciprocity in Linux or Wikipedia, only an indirect exchange of
> different value streams (use value, expression, reputation, sharing
> pleasure, etc...)
> 
> But that doesn't mean that it has to be monopolistic or totalitarian either,
> rather, the 3 other modes will co-exist. However, it can be argued that
> non-reciprocal sharing is in many senses ethically superior. Instead of tit
> for tat neutral exchange of the market, and the obligation-creating gift,
> both of which involve direct calculations of mutual benefit, there is the
> natural tendency to share, and an open return on that sharing, where
> calculation of direct benefit is secondary. Instead of the win-loose context
> of tributary economies, or the win-win (theoretically neutral) context of
> market exchange, you have a context, where the very act of giving/sharing,
> implies already the return, where the needs of the individual and the
> community are not seen as different or opposed, but as co-existing in the
> same act.
> 
> The call for revenue-sharing, as mechanism for reciprocity, can therefore be
> misguided. Better solution is to keep the non-reciprocal logicl of peer
> production, and to reserve the revenue-sharing aspects for the derivate
> scarce services, and to use part of that revenue, to create an ecology of
> support for the non-reciprocal sharing, as is done by the free software
> community.
> 
> Michel
> 
> 
> 
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