"The Work and the Gift" considers how working and giving are taken for opposites and revealed as each other's ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves, for instance, to work for a wage and a living, dooming ourselves forever to the curse of daily toil; and yet we imagine the magnum opus or the oeuvre as a labor of love. We ask ourselves to give with no thought of return; yet we still tell ourselves to give only to the deserving and only where our giving will do some good. Ranging from Marx and Derrida to Friedrich Hayek and Alvin Toffler, Scott Cutler Shershow here explores the predictions of...
"The Work and the Gift" considers how working and giving are taken for opposites and revealed as each other's ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves, for in...
Scott Cutler Shershow Christopher Schaberg Ian Bogost
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Bread is an object that is always in process of becoming something else: flower to grain, grain to dough, dough to loaf, loaf to crumb. Bread is also often a figure or vehicle of social cohesion: from the homely image of "breaking bread together" to the mysteries of the Eucharist. But bread also commonly figures in social conflict - sometimes literally, in the "bread riots" that punctuate European history, and sometimes figuratively, in the ways bread operates as ethnic,...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.