Paper short abstract:

Gifting and giving are ethical acts that variably index and reproduce the moralities of class and gender respectability, individuality and sociality, and which are also framed within the shifting hegemonies of forgetting, foregrounding and/or misrecognising commodification.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore gifting and giving praxes of a cohort of low socio-economic females resident near Wellington, New Zealand's capital city. As ethical acts, gifting and giving variably reproduce the moralities of class and gender respectability, individuality and sociality, and are, in part, also variably framed within the shifting hegemonies of forgetting, foregrounding and/or misrecognising the commodification of labour, goods and exchange.

Numerous scholars have followed Mauss' (1950) seminal lead in noting that gifting (and by extension, giving and all transaction forms) are deeply implicated in the politics and economics of social life. Indeed both gifting and giving typically involve economic and other 'costs' to givers, and material, social, and other 'benefits' to recipients. Within the research cohort gifting is typically associated with celebrations of momentous occasions such as birthdays, manifests in charitable acts or donations, or is enacted in spontaneous moments of 'treating' in which commodity origins are either hidden, obscured or unmarked. Yet other similarly altruistic and empathetic acts - such as domestic provisioning (e.g. providing food for dependents and intimates) - are framed within the moral ordinariness of banal giving in which commodity modalities are visible, marked and sometimes foregrounded.

I argue that indexing gifting and giving within the shifting hegemonies of forgetting, foregrounding and/or misrecognising commodity modalities does the assessment work (Tsing 2013) of normalising the exploitative and stratifying aspects of capitalism as underpinning (albeit differently) and 'necessary' to the moral reproduction of class, gender, individuality and sociality.