Genevieve Vaughan and the Maternal Gift Economy

I have been interested in the gift economy since I was five years old. I encountered Genevieve Vaughan’s name in the 1990s, tangentially, in the context of feminism, and was endlessly inspired by what I had heard about her. It was years later, in 2016, that she wrote to me as a comment on a blog post where I was speaking about experimenting with the gift economy and invited me to join the groups she had created and which opened a new world for me in terms of depth of scholarship and new ways of understanding the gift economy. Linking the gift economy to the reality that we all depend on unilateral giving from mothers and others in our first several years, longer than any other mammal, is what led her to speak of the maternal roots of the gift economy, which is also the title of a book she edited. Her influence is profound within NGL, which we see as a microscopic prototype of a global, maternal gift economy. Elements of her thinking and the resulting frameworks are in three packets: “Restoring Flow Using NVC,” “Practical Aspects of Restoring Flow,” and “Working for Transformation without Recreating the Past.”

NGL Lineage

Nonviolent Global Liberation Community