A review by reads2cope
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer

2.0

I was excited to read this after loving Braiding Sweetgrass, but it was an incredibly disappointing follow-up to such a detailed and loved book. In contrast to the care I felt Sweetgrass was written with, Serviceberries felt like reading a first draft. In one chapter, a paragraph reads, “The economic contest between colonial and Indigenous currencies did not end with the Buffalo.” But Buffalo were not mentioned at all in that chapter, or that I can remember in any earlier chapters. 

The idea of a Gift Economy and living in mindful reciprocity with everyone and everything around us is a strong and much needed replacement for endless consumerism and exploitative capitalism. However, Robin Wall Kimmerer only brushes over people already doing this work through Mutual Aid groups and hardly touches on other anarchist organizations working to share and protect against the current system system. Instead of researching these organizations, Kimmerer instead says she’s not online much and mostly knows about rural areas. She continues to make bold statements like “Capitalism… is not going away anytime soon.” More research and more detailed examples could have better shown how to practice reciprocity today, or explain more thoroughly workings of this system in the past and in nature.

The one example she used too much was a stand with free goods from a local farmer. At the end of a season when all the goods were taken, the stand was still there with a sign reading “Free Farm Stand.” If I was passing by and saw that, I would assume the stand itself was being given away, as apparently someone did because they took it. Instead of accepting this possibly generous - but in my mind acceptable - explanation, the person who took the stand is called a thief and is used as an example of how selfish and greedy people can ruin the gift economy. This destroyed her argument, at least to me, that living in reciprocity requires not only that we don’t take more that we need but also that we work to assume the best in those around us and trust that they also take only what they need, give extra away, and leave what they can.