In this article, Margaret Visser says, Our culture divides the world into the public and the private. The public is for business, impersonality, contracts, cold reason, politics, officialdom, money and legal obligation. The private is everything the public is not — warm emotional involvement with family and friends, love, the unofficial, the uncalculating.
Interesting. I guess I don’t see such a sharp divide; more of a rather blurry spectrum.
We place the giving and receiving of personal gifts in the private sphere. Obligatory giving is for us a contradiction in terms.
Ah, so in Visser’s ontology, obligatory giving
is an oxymoron, but obligatory gifting
is not, because the former is in the private realm, which is nonjudgemental, and the latter is in the public realm, which isn’t. (Approximately.)
I guess she and I come from different cultures. I grew up with the impression that when someone gives you a gift in the private realm, you are obliged to that person for that gift. As such, gift-giving is usually done with an obvious opportunity for reciprocation in mind, so that the recipient will be able to discharge the obligation without trouble, as otherwise, the gift is burdensome on the recipient.
I’m finding it fascinating and useful to see how powerfully the giftonomies we grow up with shape our perceptions of what constitutes generosity and how to handle it, and also to learn how difficult it can be to translate between giftonomies.