Gift Exchange and Justice in Families.

This article discusses the distinction between gift and market exchange which illuminates some basic and often unarticulated attitudes toward justice in family life. In "Justice, Gender, and the Family," Susan M. Okin has written an incisive critique of contemporary U.S. theories of distributive justice. She exposes the false gender neutrality of theorists who have discussed justice among human beings while ignoring the very different roles and expectations of women and men and who have assumed without acknowledgment the work of childbearing and child rearing performed by women. In "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property," Lewis Hyde highlights the distinction between gift and market exchange. In both gift and market systems people exchange goods and services, but both objects and persons are viewed quite differently in the two systems. In a market exchange, someone offers a commodity for sale at a price, and someone else buys it. The terms are explicit by itself, the exchange creates no personal commitment or connection between the buyer and the seller. The ideals of gift exchange exemplified by the kula and other historical gift systems are equally found in contemporary Western etiquette surrounding the giving of presents.