Who or what do we care about in the 21st century?

The article explores the importance of Richard Titmuss's 1970 book, The Gift Relationship. It analyses the substance of the gift relationship, and its steady erosion through the embrace of neoliberalism globally, by seeing how the 'gift of life' has become a 'theft of life' through the work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It sets out the importance of redistribution and recognition to the study of sociology, outlines the lacuna in Honneth and Fraser, and argues that the preciousness of the gift relationship can only be kept alive by scrupulous attention to social structures that nurture this; and by rejecting the death-fetish that is implicitly and explicitly present in scholarship that explores death as resistance (Mbembe). The article calls for an end to the romance with death, and for the work of mourning to be undertaken, without which there can be no going forward into the futures we wish to create.