Quantifying the Gift
Sacred money, then, will be a medium of giving, a means to imbue the global economy with the spirit of the gift
Charles Eisenstein • Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
But when a gift moves beyond two people, the terms of the engagement change. In our household, we were not indebted to any one individual but to the community we helped build. This gave us the confidence to receive without guilt and to give without a sense of meagerness or competition.
Lola Milholland • Group Living and Other Recipes: A Memoir
Reciprocity was the social currency.
Lynne Twist • The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life
The gift economy is thus the relationship of friends, or family, or different people trying to build an alliance.
Lawrence Lessig • Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It
The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. Anthropological ideas mentioned in the article point towards this as being a way of sustaining life in various communities.
Emergence Magazine • The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Lewis Hyde portrays gift economies in general: “The only essential is this: the gift must always move”—that is, people must keep passing it on. To treat a gift correctly is thus to “allow [ourselves] to become a channel for its current.”34