Gifts, sustainable consumption and giving up green anxieties at Christmas

Abstract

This paper explores the proposition that gifting is a little recognised yet important practice bound up in the quest for sustainable consumption, which has largely been studied with reference to market rather than gift economies. It draws on gift theories in economic anthropology which explain gifts as engendering social relations of reciprocity and beyond, and shaping social life differently to commodities. Understanding how and why commodities become gifts (and vice versa), we contend, provides a new way of understanding some of the complex ways in which social relations are implicated in sustainable consumption. We use a study of Christmas gifting practices within a group of environmental..