Abstract:
This article reflects on how the contemporary relationship between movement and space can
be reversed so that movement regains priority over space in the experience of life. Its key
argument is that movement has potential to take priority over space but only via the logic of
the gift. The logic of the gift has potential to undermine the privilege colonial modernity
accords to space over movement because its conception of exchange challenges exchange as a
construct of economic logic central to the experience of modernity. The article focuses on the
gift as is found in the work of John Milbank and the African religious archive. It tries to show
that along with Milbank’s imagination of the gift, the gift as a construct of the African religious
archive stands to contribute in the fight against the continuing alienation brought about by the
project of modernity. This is because it imagines the sacred dimension primarily via the terrain
of the family.
CONTRIBUTION : This article contributes to a reading of capitalism via the logic of the gift as a
construct of the African religious archive and does so by borrowing from the work of
theologians. In doing so, it tries to present a different way of thinking about gift giving in
relation to the African religious expression, which has until the recent past been dominated by
anthropologists.
