#OWS #BTV #VT – Thomas Meany writes about anthropologist David Graeber’s new book, DEBT: The First 5,000 Years, in this week’s NYT Book Review. Graeber, considered by some to be the “house theorist of Occupy Wall Street,” is gaining traction. From the review…
In 1925 the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss published his classic essay “The Gift,” which argued that contrary to the textbook account of primitive man merrily trading beaver pelts for wampum, no society was ever based on barter. The dominant practice for thousands of years was instead voluntary gift-giving, which created a binding sense of obligation between potentially hostile groups. To give a gift was not an act based on calculation, but on the refusal to calculate. In the societies Mauss studied most closely — the Maori of New Zealand, the Haida of the Pacific Northwest — people rejected the principles of economic self-interest in favor of arrangements where everyone was perpetually indebted to someone else.
“Perpetually indebted to someone else”… this sums up so much of what I love about my community life in Burlington, VT right now. We have a critical mass of people who willingly have jumped into debt with each other… not monetary debt, rather favor debt.
I was raised to value making my contribution to others while taking great pains to avoid accepting the same from others. So were lots of folks here. But that’s a recipe for setting yourself apart, for isolation. As my family has learned to accept favors from those around us, it’s made our contributions to others that much more meaningful and personal.
Now, through Front Porch Forum, MealTrain, our church, school, neighborhood and other means, we ask and offer favors daily from hundreds of friends, neighbors and acquaintances. Each request works against isolation and lays down another thread in the web of community that supports our life. This is a crucial asset… as much as our house, my job, the kids’ college savings.
My brother and his family are planning a holiday visit to see us in Vermont this month. We could all jam into our house, but I know they would sleep better if we had more space for the two families. Hotels are expensive and distant… B&Bs too. So, I put the word out to neighbors and got several offers of empty houses that we could use on our block. These neighbors are traveling out of state and are glad to share their home while they’re away. We’ve done this a dozen times over the past few years… offering or asking for empty-house guest lodging. Make that hundreds of times if we include other favors… meals, rides, tools, advice, kids stuff, labor, baby/pet sitting, on and on.
This is incredibly generous and trusting of all involved… but it’s also keeping each of us “perpetually indebted to our neighbors” in a way that makes our community stronger with each exchange.
Economist Juliet B. Schor writes in her new book, Plentitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, about the decline of social capital in the United States during the past few decades…
Neighborhoods have become much less important as social units, with people much less likely to interact with, or even know, their neighbors… Online community is growing and filling in some of the gap. But it doesn’t replicate all the functions of face-to-face interaction. (Full quote here… see “Economies of Reciprocity.”)
Schor discusses competing theories that may explain this… and looks at people, projects and places pushing back on this troubling trend. A compelling read.
From Sarah Byrnes in YES! Magazine…
If there’s anything I’ve learned while helping to organize Common Security Clubs in communities around the nation, it’s that there is no “one size fits all” club. They are as different as the individuals who comprise them.
But a common thread is that clubs provide a way for people get to know each other. It’s an old-fashioned concept—knowing your community—but it’s badly needed in our time of increasing insecurity and isolation.
“We usually spend about 45 minutes on a ‘check-in’ with each other,” says Paul Miller in Boston, whose club has been meeting for two years. “The focus is simply on hearing each other, and providing support whenever possible. People get to air their concerns and receive affirmation.”
“We’re taking baby steps toward a new type of community,” adds Jared Gardner, a facilitator in Portland, Oregon. “We want people to feel connected and empowered. That’s what the groups are all about.”
In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping those in need. Nowadays, our mutual aid muscles are out of shape and pretty flabby. Clubs help us to start flexing and stretching them again, little by little.
J. David Goodman writes in the New York Times…
Can Americans share? Or, at least, not steal?
That question hung over the rows of identical fire-red bicycles lined up last week for the start of Capital Bikeshare in Washington, the nation’s largest bike-sharing program.
Similar programs also began this year in Denver and Minneapolis, with another to start in Miami this fall. At the same time, start-up companies with names like SnapGoods, Share Some Sugar and NeighborGoods are trying to make money by using social networks to let people borrow or lend their stuff, either free or for a fee.
These companies are looking to join a familiar list — including Netflix, Zipcar and Pandora, the online radio service — built on access to goods and services, rather than ownership.
But the question is whether most consumers would ever accept time share ownership of a bike or a blender. After a bike share program began in Denver, one gubernatorial candidate in Colorado attacked the program as un-American.
But some scholars say that the Internet — by fostering collaboration on a communal, open platform — has changed the way Americans think about sharing and ownership. Collaborative habits online are beginning to find expression in the real world.
“I thought that online was an exception,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, whose coming book, “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” focuses on the explosion of cooperative endeavors, both online and off. “I now am more confident that the phenomenon is not limited to online but is a general phenomenon of human behavior.”
So far, he said, there have been no formal studies into whether the Internet has affected offline cooperation or attitudes about ownership…
This kind of offline sharing happens everyday in via Front Porch Forum in our Vermont service region.