Acceso usuarios
Luigino Bruni
The gift is a very serious matter. So serious that when Christianity has wanted to choose the gift icon has chosen a crucifix. The first murder-fratricide was born from the gift rejected (Cains). We find the gift at the foundation of civilization, at the center of the family and any social contract, at the root of many of the cooperatives and enterprises, in the heart of many ‘vocations’. Being the heart, the center, the root, the gift is silent. We find it in the things of the most ordinary real life. It is easier to find it in our seven hours of ordinary work in the office than in half an hour of overtime that we ‘donate’ to our company; more in the thousand words that we exchange every day that we say in the few to accompany Valentine day’s gifts. The gift protects their free initiative by a natural device that causes it to disappear when we want to isolate appropriate it, if only for ‘donate’. The paper is a discussion, in an historical and anthropological perspective, some of these issues.
