1986/01/01 by Adalaide Morris · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Relay #Power (physics) #Art #Physics #Thermodynamics
paper · doi:10.2307/1208493
openalex publication_date 1986/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Three quirks in H.D.'s life have puzzled her readers and resisted the explanatory efforts of her biographers. When judged by contemporary customs, the anomalies in her handling of money, her manipulation of her writing signature, and her management of motherhood appear at best odd, at worst suspicious or even pernicious. Our customs, embedded in a capitalist ethics of having, tending, and augmenting, appear to have little to do with the procedures and beliefs that inform H.D.'s life and work, procedures and beliefs that are, I will argue, much more closely aligned with a different theory of social and spiritual organization. It is not the ethos of an individualistic market economy but the spirit of the gift that gives H.D.'s life and thought its distinctive structure. The gift economy received its classic elaboration in the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who first discerned the extent to which primitive societies are organized by obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate.' For Mauss, the significance of gift exchange is its creation and affirmation of a social link between gift partners, a link that distributes power and generates peace. Mauss's most striking