Join the
Gift Ecology!
Gift Ecology is a fun way to share and experience the cool new social objects we call kulas. Give and receive interesting gifts, host your own mini-blog about the kula's sojourn with you, and meet some interesting people along the way. [Register]
The Internet Meets Real Life
- Kulas are social objects which travel from member to member. Any interesting object can become a kula.
- Members host sojourns with kulas. A sojourn is like a mini-blog of your time with the kula.
- Members can covet kulas. A kula host eventually gives the kula to a coveter.
- Coveters own the kula until they give it away.
- Thus results more fun, less shopping, increased eco-consciousness, and a rockin' post-materialist experience-centric vibe. (And, it's free.)
Why? Over the last century or so, giving was co-opted by manufacturers and retailers as a means of boosting demand for products. Nowadays, many people think of a gift as just something that you buy in a store. We even have shops that purport to sell nothing but gifts, as if a gift were some sort of retail commodity. We founded Gift Ecology as one way to encourage a return to older and more meaningful traditions and patterns of giving. You're sure not getting anything like this at the local mall.
Gift Ecology is a post-material, eco-friendly, and spiritually-enhanced approach to giving and sharing. It adds individual and collective meaning to everyday or extraordinary objects. It opens up all kinds of new ideas and emotions having to do with people and stuff, including sharing, memories, giving, even inconvenience and loss. (This is the real world, after all.) Plus, it's kind of fun to have a rotating art gallery in your house.
Kula? Kula is a ceremonial exchange system practiced in the Massim Archipelago of Papua New Guinea. Participants travel hundreds of miles in canoes to give and receive "non-use" valuables. Carefully prescribed customs and traditions surround the exchange ceremonies which establish strong, life-long relationships between the participants. Gift Ecology is Kula for the modern age. (Read all about it at Wikipedia. Or dig into the primary texts, The Gift, by Marcel Mauss, and Argonauts of the Western Pacific, by Bronislaw Malinowski.)
Cafe culture
We're cultivating a cafe culture. A place that has a different social topology than is usually seen online. A place where, in the real-world, you could go alone, with your book and a notepad, to ponder a bit. You could also visit with a friend, perhaps someone you're meeting for the first time, to have some conversation and cheer, a smile and a hug. A place where you want to bring your friends.
Comments & contributions
Gift Ecology is a "read-write" website. We encourage both banterful comments as well as more thoughtful contributions. The software allows hosts to mark a comment as a contribution, that is, something of lasting value to the dialogue. This allows the regulars to hang out and make wisecracks, while along the way perhaps building something of more permanence.
Sound interesting? Read some posts, subscribe to the RSS feed, check out the blog, and join the conversation by registering. Once you've found your way around, you might want to learn how to get a kula you like, or give away a kula you have. Eventually, you'll probably want to create your own new kulas. It's a trip. A really long-attention span, low-freqency, long-wavelength sorta trip. Some people like it.
