Category Archives: social capital

Occupy Your Neighborhood or Perpetually Indebted to Your Neighbors

#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.