Communication through shared experience: gifts that overcome distance

ENUsing the research tools of phenomenological anthropology, semiotics, and everyday practices, this article presents an analytical look at a special group of gifts found in today's everyday practices that share a common context: gifts or goods sent or otherwise delivered by friends and family living abroad. Different meanings, and identifiable and changing relationships are explored in the analysis of various non-structured interviews about personal gift-giving experiences among residents of the United States, South Korea, France and their relatives in Lithuania. The study reveals how gifts both reflect and affect people's interpersonal relationships, how these experiences are enacted, remembered, and take on meaning. These individual traditions of gift-giving testify to deeper layers of a worldview that determines old and new identities, shared sensations, tastes, and feelings, even mark relationship as generosity (or the lack of it). Moreover, through the gift, as a non-verbal form of communication, people can express and understand multiple layers of meaning - without words or reflections, but through experiential knowledge, known in phenomenology as lived experience. [From the publication]

• Sociologija / Sociology
• Komunikacija / Communication