What are we doing when we give gifts?
ABCPoised as we are at the brink of our great annual festival of shopping, wrapping, giving and exchanging, we can sometimes forget just how ethically complicated the act of “gift-giving” is. In fact, those who recoil at the idea of receiving the “charity” of others, as well as those who are suspicious of the clandestine giving of gifts and doing of favours —suggesting a corrupt quid pro quo — are more attuned to this ethical complexity than those who take an unseemly delight in the prospect of “out-gifting” another. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “He is a good man, who can receive a gift well”. Guest: Kim Huynh teaches in the School of Politics and International Relations and is Deputy Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University.
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