Description
Feminist, philosopher, and activist, Genevieve Vaughan has engaged the world’s ecological, climate change, justice and democracy-related crises for many decades. Essays and articles in this Festschrift are a gift to her by collaborators and friends as well as by many members of the International Feminists for a Gift Economy. Together, they apply Vaughan’s theories of maternal gift economy from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. The global Covid-l9 pandemic of 2020 reveals most clearly the dysfunctions of patriarchal regimes. The writings within show that the seeds of a liveable future for all are within matricultural/matriarchal and other egalitarian societies. Editor: Kaarina Kailo with participation by Erella Shadmi. The contributors are Vandana Shiva, Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Darcia Narvaez, Angela M. Kurth, Mary S. Tarsha, Annine van der Meer, Barbara Alice Mann, Rajani Kanth, Nané Jordan, Mariam Irene Tazi-Preve, Vicky Noble, Susan Petrilli, Patricia Mukhim, Maria Luisa Di Blasi, Alessandra Piccoli & Marco Linardi, Miki Kashtan, Angela Dolmetsch and Kirre Koivunen. This splendid anthology honoring Genevieve Vaughan’s life’s work could not have come at a more poignant time in human history. The rampant plundering of the world for profit has poisoned the air, the water, and the earth, causing an avalanche of species extinction and disruption of living systems that has led to the present global pandemic. Vaughan’s pioneering scholarship, prodigiously refined over half a century, offers a necessary antidote to the pathological imbalance of our time: the cultivation of a maternal philosophy of unconditional generosity giving rise to the Gift Economy. The multi-cultural contributors to this festschrift weave a rich fabric of trans-disciplinary perspectives. We are reminded that the cultivation of a social structure based upon generosity and caring to reverse the parasitic destruction of life is not simply a feminist utopia, it is a matter of the survival of life on this planet, our only home. Joan Marler is the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute of Archaeomythology. She is the editor of The Civilization of the Goddess (1991) by Marija Gimbutas and From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas (1997). She worked closely with Marija Gimbutas as her personal editor from 1987-1994. This is an extraordinary collection of essays, celebrating the life and work of an extraordinary and brilliant woman, Genevieve Vaughan, on the occasion of her 80th year. Gen has inspired, encouraged, nurtured, and challenged feminisms throughout the world. Her personal Giftedness, theory of the Gift, and insistence on the philosophical linguistic, social and epistemological centrality of Mothering has inspired the contributors to this festschrift. These essays pay tribute to her life and ensure that the movement she has mothered and the sisterhoods she has created, will continue to give birth to radically new ways of thinking for the sake of our endangered world. Mary Condren, Th.D., Director, Woman Spirit Ireland, teaches at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She is author of The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland (1989).
