Reading Excerpt; "The Gift" by Lewis Hyde (Patreon)

Conversation is a commerce, and when we give speech we become a part of what we speak with.

- Chapter 4; The Bond. 

The Gift by Lewis Hyde is a fruitbasket delivered to your door; full of wonderful and almost prophetic one liners like this, with fascinating meditations on capitalism and commerce, and an 80/20 split of cringeworthy and outdated / fascinating anthropology and ethnographies.

It is also a book that's constantly making the same point in small variations, and yet also wrestling with its own contention. I'll be chewing this for a long time, but this month, I've excerpted a particular strand of thoughts that recur, which all speak to my practice.

If you're down for some theory, get you a copy and read the whole thing. If academic texts and ethnographies make your eyes cross, read just the intro and the conclusion - that's enough to get you pondering.