Sunday, February 05, 2006

Sentences like these should just be illegal

From this week's reading by some French anthropologist named Pierre Bordieu:

The theoretical construction which retrospectively projects the counter-gift into the project of the gift has the effect of transforming into mechanical sequences of obligatory acts the at once risky and necessary improvisation of the everyday strategies which owe their infinite complexity to the fact that the giver's undeclared calculation must reckon with the receiver's undeclared calculation, and hence satisfy his expectations without appearing to know what they are. In the same operation, it removes the conditions making possible the institutionally organized and guaranteed misrecognition which is the basis of gift exchange and, perhaps, of all the symbolic labor intended to transmute, by the sincere fiction of a disinterested exchange, the inevitable, and inevitably interested, relations imposed by kinship, neighborhood, or work into elective relations of reciprocity: in the work of reproducing established relations--through feasts, ceremonies, exchanges of gifts, visits or courtesies, and above all, marriages--which is no less vital to the existence of the group than the reproduction of the economic bases of its existence, the labor required to conceal the function of the exchanges is as important an element of labor needed to carry out the function.

Dude, buy a period already and stop hurting my brain.

No comments: