I had these in mind because from a sociological perspective they come connected with various possibilities for individual and class agency.

Upon further thought, the question of the giving, is one of two parts: the proffer and the acceptance. The account the amulet raises the further question of the “appplication” or making use of the gifted object, that is making it into a different object determined by differenct circumstances of use and exchange. Same material support; different object.

There are three moments in the transaction: giving, receiving, using what has been received. In many a composition classroom, I think the commodity culture of capitalism would stress the surplus value of “using what has been given”. A counter hegemonic practice in the practice of composition might stress the modes of receiving. Knowing how to receive is a skill - a sort of cultural savoir faire. Setting up or negotiating conditions of reception is often part of giving. “Close your eyes while I tell you a story” [or its equivalent for the hearing impaired]. I’m not arguing for more discussion of “attention as scarce”. If anything the attentive are emmulated and the very experience of time can be shifted in ways very challenging to the dominant modes of production and consumption (and accumulation of capital). Doing leisure with leisure … you get the picture, I’m sure.

I am reminded of the ceremonies of belief offered by story telling as examined by J. Edward Chamberlain in _If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground_.

However, I’m also trying to do that without discursively constructing all aspects of economy as necessarily commodified — which I think your second point about gifts tends towards. Some in composition do want to see all transactions as necessarily commodified, certainly, and I’ll agree that Mauss makes important points about the ways in which gifts extend or reinforce the bounds of community. But I can’t accept that there are no transactions where the profit motive is absent. Contemporary mainstream economic discourse fosters a cultural discourse where we want to see everything as commodified or commodifiable, a mistaken impulse to attach a price tag to everything, and I think there are many cases of actions (like the woman who crafts the Amulet of Yendor for her significant other) where I would argue that altruism is, indeed, present. I get the impression, that you’re more inclined to see the intrinsic hedonic rewards she takes from doing so as somehow commodifiable, and if so, I think that’s likely a space where we’ll have to disagree.

My larger point here is that if we can see economies as spaces comprising diverse varieties of transactions (market, feudal, independent, slave, gift, etc.) rather than being constrained to the commodified exchange of abstract value characteristic of the market transaction, we can also see in those diverse forms of economic transaction the spaces for productive economic change. Seeing capitalism as incoherent, heterogeneous, and self-contradictory offers far more opportunity than the orthodox Marxist view of capitalism as monolithic and the subsequent (and necessarily impossible) need to overturn it in its totality. The first perspective offers the possibility (and perhaps the responsibility) for action; the second dismisses the possibility (and hence the responsibility) for action.

Might be a way of considering the relations between writers, compositions and their in-out classroom relations.

The link between gift economies and altruism is questionable. Gifts create obligations. Gifts can inaugurate and maintain relations of reciprocity. They can also be accompanied by social obligations of recirculation: the receiver is expected to become giver.