‘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.”

…

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”.

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?

…

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!

Joelle McSweeney stuff on the Necropastoral (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2014/04/what-is-the-necropastoral)

“The pastoral, like the occult, has always been a fraud, a counterfeit, an invention, an anachronism.

…

With my snout up against the fact of the Anthropocene, with my bill snared in fishing line and the blood pooling in my industrially overdeveloped chest and my meager thighs locked and a bolt in my bovine brain, I find myself reeling through an Anthropocenic zone I call the Necropastoral.

…The Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of “nature” which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects. The Necropastoral is a non-rational zone, anachronistic, it often looks backwards and does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect.  It does not subscribe to humanism but is interested in non-human modalities, like those of bugs, viruses, weeds and mold.”