“We’ve all been given a gift, the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back.”

-Edo, Sacred Economics

Being in the Galapagos was such a gift.

I remember reading a list in the newspaper when I was 14- something like “Top 10 Places to Visit Around the World”, and the Galapagos was on it with descriptions of black rocks and blue-footed boobies and I remember thinking how can I lead a life that takes me to places like that? The Galapagos Islands are a sacred mecca of biodiversity that most people will never have the privilege to see and I feel uncomfortable that I went without having to make any particular effort: I just chose a college and a study abroad program and voilà! my dreams came true. I feel immense gratitude for this. More importantly I feel a sense of obligation. I have an obligation to respond to this gift wisely and with intention in the way I conduct my life.

The sense of obligation is interesting to me because currently I’ve been reading about gift economies in my Economic Anthropology class. There is a concept called hau from the New Zealand Maori that tries to explain the sense of obligation to reciprocate when given a gift. From Wilk and Cligget’s book Economies and Cultures:

Hau is a term for the force of the identity of the owner of an object, which is attached to the object. Thus, upon giving the object away, part of the owner’s hau goes with it. And this is why receiving the gift always carries an obligation to reciprocate, because the hau wants to return to its original owner, though now it may be attached to another’s object.

In class, we’ve been talking about when things are separated from their origin, their story, the people who made it, there is some kind of erasure of the hau that represents the giver and we don’t feel compelled to respond in kind. Continue reading →