Working Session: Avoiding Giving
Organizer: Elise Berman

We had an excellent discussion of seven very different and unique perspectives on the role of avoiding. The topics ranged from youthful efforts to avoid giving sex, engaging in kula exchanges so as to avoid giving shells to kin, the use of deception and children to avoid giving, Ponzi schemes as examples of extended efforts to avoid giving, social change and the effect it has had on gift economies, nostalgia for the time when colonial powers prohibited large social exchanges, and Seventh Day Adventist claims that they are “born-again” and thus born out of kinship obligations that would require them to give. The papers included ethnographically rich data from Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia. We plan on continuing in some form next year and would welcome additional contributions. Please contact Elise Berman if you are interested in participating.

Elise Berman, Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago, 5730 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago IL 60637 USA; eberman@uchicago.edu