I admit it: I love Christmas. Despite being a horrible crafter, I make holiday cards for family and friends. (See the feature image for proof.) I also have a stack of books I read during the holidays, including Connie Willis’ story collection A Lot Like Christmas and Christmas with Anne, which contains holiday-themed excerpts from L.M. Montgomery’s work. Many of the stories bear a message we oft hear at this time of year: It is the action of giving that is significant rather than the material gift itself. Giving is about giving yourself and your time. It is about relationship building.
Gifts as nourishing community
This theme of relationships arose in a panel I moderated (on Giving Tuesday as it were) as part of the Café Philo series hosted by Inter Arts Matrix. The subject was gifts, and I was joined for the conversation by Isabella Stefanescu, artist and one of the founders of CAFKA and of Globe Studios, Isabel Cisterna, the artistic director and founder of Neruda Arts and force behind the film celebrating the Waterloo region arts community, Love in the Time of Covid, and Joe Mancini, co-founder of the Working Centre.
I suspected that the panelists would challenge consumerist notions of gifts. They did. But they also challenged gifts as being only about interpersonal exchanges. Stefanescu described gifts as an overflow of generosity. For Cisterna, giving was taking action and responding to needs. Mancini talked about work as a gift, where people used their skills, talents, and time in ways that established and nourished community.
In addition, the panelists stressed that gift-giving requires a supportive context for its potential to be actualized. As Mancini discussed, gifts often emerge from the sharing of work. Someone may not realize that their work is a gift until it becomes meaningful as such in a relationship. Cisterna shared stories about growing up in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship where solidarity was prohibited and giving was deemed as threats to the social order.
Care ethics
Although none of the panelists used the term “care,” it seems to me that gift-giving is a kind of care. I am prepping to teach a course on the ethics of care come January, so it’s been a topic I have been immersed in.
Compare the panelists’ responses with five phases of care and their corresponding moral qualities:
- Caring about (attentiveness)
- Caring for (responsibility)
- Care-giving (competence)
- Care-receiving (responsiveness)
- Caring with (plurality, communication, trust and respect, solidarity)
The first four phases of care were outlined by Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher in 1990, the fifth added in Tronto’s 2013 book Caring Democracy. The panelists touched on many of these aspects of care. Yet for me, it was the fifth phase that stood out. No surprise, as readers of this blog will know that solidarity has been a recurring theme.
Arendt and caring with
Hannah Arendt is often critiqued for ignoring concrete practices of care in her philosophical work, a theme I will return to in other posts. But positively, her thought has been associated with the fifth phase of care, caring with and solidarity. For political theorist Ella Myers, Arendt’s idea of “love for the world” emphasizes that democratic action is about caring for something. This something exists between actors, even if they disagree on exactly what this thing is. We might think, for example, of how concerns around defunding the police, abolishing the police, or reallocating police funding are contested ideas even as each expresses an idea held in common that Canada and the United States need to rethink what safety means in our communities.
I wonder about how to reconcile the critique of Arendt as ignoring concrete practices of care with the potential for her thought to orient us to the worldliness of care and to community. I’m not finished with Myers’ book yet, so perhaps she will have a suggestion!
Caring with caring practices
I wonder if Mancini’s thought of work as gift provides an avenue forward. Arendt deems many caring practices to be non-political, like feeding people, which is part of human life she categorizes as labour. For Arendt, labour is part of the private realm, and what is private is hidden from the public gaze. Among the caring practices that are public, they would not meet Arendt’s definition of politics as speaking and acting with others. Caring practices such as building houses would be among the activities she categorizes as work.
Nevertheless, these caring practices are important parts of nourishing our community, just as collective political action is. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt’s biographer, shares anecdotes which reveal how Arendt was a generous gift-giver in her private life. I wonder how might Arendt’s philosophy change had she theorized caring practices as sustaining more than interpersonal relationships. Such practices are important parts of nourishing our community, just as collective political action is.
Reimagining gifts
A few lingering thoughts about reimagining gifts.
Power and equality
First, I worry about power relationships, and specifically about “saviour mentalities,” where giving becomes a way to reinforce hierarchical paradigms. As philosopher Uma Narayan stresses, discourses of care have been used to justify colonialism. Care must also come with a “flattening out” of hierarchy, as Tronto puts it in Caring Democracy.
Discarding the balance sheet
Second, I find myself defaulting to a transactional view of gifts (e.g., I buy you lunch today, and you pick up the tab next time). I’ve inherited some of this view from my training in Western philosophy, as exchange is fundamental to many Western/Eurocentric ways of thinking about the foundations of society. The idea of exchange is prominent in themes central to Western political philosophy, such as the social contract that citizens make with each other and their government. Not all cultures base their ideas of the gift in theories of exchange. Consider just one example: Sami scholar Rauna Kuokkanen argues that gifts are at the center of Sami philosophy and are not reducible to exchange relationships as gifts often are in Western thought.
I’m unlearning some of my assumptions about gifts. As Stefanescu reminds me, giving is not about keeping track of my tab compared to yours. What an anemic community we would have, if it were.
From us at At Home with Arendt, we wish you a holiday season filled with gifts, but in the more expansive way urged by my conversation partners in the panel–gifts that strengthen relationships, build communities, and nourish our democracies.