Bringing Gift Spirit Back:Rethinking the Ideal Foundation and Practice Path of Time Banks
The development of time banks holds positive significance for alleviating the pressures of an aging society.However,in China,time banks have encountered challenges both in terms of ideological misconceptions and practical implementation.Through revisiting Edgar Cahn's works,it is discovered that time banks embody gift spirit,and excavating this spirit can help address these misconceptions and challenges.On the ideological level,issues such as the fairness of time equivalence and the conflict between compensation and voluntarism can be clarified through gift spirit:the fairness of time equivalence derives from the fusion of labor market value and basic human value within a unit of time.The principle of compensation not only recognizes the basic human value and avoids"degrading charity",but also promotes broader altruism through reciprocal obligations.On a practical level,by enrooting emotions and embodiment in social ethics,we can reconstruct the local practical direction of time banks on the basis of gift spirit.Given the affinity between time banks and gift spirit,it is recommended to introduce the gift paradigm into future research.
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