James Laidlaw

A free gift makes no friends

The giving of alms to Shvetambar Jain renouncers is a specific institutionalized elaboration of the idea of a free gift, an idea which all the major world religions have their own ways of instantiating, and which in north Indian languages is expressed by the word dan. This example illustrates the inherently paradoxical nature of the idea of a gift, and why it is a mistake to define the gift as necessarily reciprocal and non-alienated. Like the pure commodity, the pure gift is characterized by the fact that it does not create personal connections and obligations between the parties. This understanding of the gift, which is implicit in Mauss, enables us to resolve the apparent paradox in the ethnography of dan, that although it is a free gift it is often harmful to its recipients.

A life worth leaving: fasting to death as telos of a Jain religious life

This paper describes the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism. It shows how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly celebrated positive aspiration in Jainism. Through comparisons with some other forms of self-killing found in South Asia, it highlights the moral complexities of issues around volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies positions on some universal ethical issues.

The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty?first century

The following discussion developed from a debate held on the motion: ?The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century?, held at the 2012 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester. The debate was organized and edited for publication by Soumhya Venkatesan. A full transcription of the debate is hosted on the JRAI website: http://www.jrai.net; a full podcast of the debate can be heard at the Talking Anthropology website: http://www.talkinganthropology.com/2013/01/18/ta45-gdat1-neoliberalism/#t=2:49:40.219.

The interactional foundations of ethics and the formation and limits of morality systems

Comment on Keane, Webb. 2016. Ethical life: Its natural and social histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Through a glass, darkly

Comment on Ortner, Sherry. 2016. “Dark anthropology and its others: Theory since the eighties.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 47–73.

The Indian Gift: A Critical Debate.

Introduction In 1986 Jonathan Parry’s ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’ claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and cosmological contexts. Thirty years later, this symposium considers the intellectual milieu in which The Indian Gift was written, and interrogates whether or not the work remains relevant to contemporary research and analysis. The symposium opens with a short introduction that provides some background to Parry’s essay and incorporates material from a recent interview with him. This is followed by critical comments on it by five influential thinkers on gift exchange: James Carrier, Chris Gregory, James Laidlaw, Marilyn Strathern and Yunxiang Yan. It ends with a short ‘revisionist’ note by Parry in which he tries to identify some of the limits of the Maussian approach for contemporary anthropology.