Partially through having an overconfident idea of their own status
― Stevo, Friday, 8 September 2023 15:41 (eight months ago) link
I need to read Matthew Restall's work on the interaction between Spain and Mesoamerican infrastructure because he talked about that in interviews i heard a couple of months ago. Montezuma etc giving great wealth as gift to show how very wealthy they were and conquistadors seeing it as an act of fealty not something with an expectation of being matched and possibly increased.
& part of the gift giving economy was to escalate the value of the gift given leaving the other party needing to match it or be in debt I think. Think I saw Gaeber hismelf talking about that in a talk from around teh time Debt came out.
― Stevo, Friday, 8 September 2023 23:23 (eight months ago) link
yeah ... that's part of the awkwardness I felt around that term. Like, there are obligations and cultural assumptions around the value of the gift in these cultures, at least that's how I read it. And then you have the term appropriated by Burning Man (and contemporary things like it) where the "gift economy" is just supposed to be about "giving" and not as part of a transaction. So I feel like it is something often misunderstood.
― sarahell, Saturday, 9 September 2023 17:58 (eight months ago) link