Author Archives: d.perry
“To be forced into thought is to begin to formulate the event of feeling historical in the present”
-Lauren Berlant
‘Paradoxical’ trait combinations yield particularly low payoffs: individuals with low choosiness but high effort tend to get exploited by their co-players; individuals with high choosiness but low effort waste their time searching for better co-players, which are, however, unlikely to accept them. The positive correlation between choosiness and cooperativeness leads to a positive assortment between cooperative types – an essential feature of all mechanisms that promote cooperation.
Gift
Daniel Everett, a linguist who studied the small Pirahã tribe of hunter-gatherers in Brazil, reported that, while they are aware of food preservation using drying, salting, and so forth, they reserve their use for items bartered outside the tribe. Within the group, when someone has a successful hunt they immediately share the abundance by inviting others to enjoy a feast. Asked about this practice, one hunter laughed and replied, “I store meat in the belly of my brother.”
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Anthropologist David Graeber argued that the great world religious traditions of charity and gift giving emerged almost simultaneously during the “Axial age” (800 to 200 BCE), when coinage was invented and market economies were established on a continental basis. Graeber argues that these charity traditions emerged as a reaction against the nexus formed by coinage, slavery, military violence and the market (a “military-coinage” complex). The new world religions, including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam all sought to preserve “human economies” where money served to cement social relationships rather than purchase things (including people).
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In North America, it is illegal to sell organs, and citizens are enjoined to give the “gift of life” and donate their organs in an organ gift economy. However, this gift economy is a “medical realm rife with potent forms of mystified commodification”.
The poet Erica Hunt describes love as “a close reading” that “help[s] me invent myself more—-in the future.”
Excerpt from “I’m OK, I’m Pig” by Kim Hyesoon (trans. Don Mee Choi), as well as an interview talking about the work:
“I live in a world full of death, I head towards death, what is spoken and I are erased simultaneously by silence, and with death-filled language I try to form images—isn’t this poetry?
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A horde of healthy pigs like young strong men get thrown into the pit. […]
They boil up like a crummy stew
Blood flows out of the grave
On a rainy night fishy-smelling pig ghosts flash flash
Busted intestine tunnel their way up from the grave and soar above the mound
A resurrection! Intestine is alive! Like a snake!
Bloom, Pig!