This is the first volume that examines dangerous gift-giving across centuries and disciplines. Bringing to the fore the subject that features as an aside in gift studies, it offers new insights into the ambivalent and troubled history of gift-giving.
Dangerous, violent, and self-destructive gift-giving remains an alluring challenge for scholars almost a hundred years after Marcel Mauss’s landmark work on the gift. Globally, the notion of toxic and fateful gifts has haunted mythologies, folklores, and literatures for millennia. This book problematizes what stands behind the notion of the 'dangerous gift' and demonstrates how this operational term may help us to better understand the role and place of gift-giving from antiquity to the present through a series of case studies ranging from ancient Zoroastrianism to modern digital dating. The book develops a complex historical, cross-cultural, and multi-disciplinary approach to gift-giving that invites comparisons between various facets of this phenomenon through time and across societies.
The book will interest a wide range of scholars working in anthropology, history, literary criticism, religious studies, and contemporary digital culture. It will primarily appeal to university educators and researchers of political culture, pre-modern religion, social relations, and the relationship between commerce and gifts.
Author(s): Alexandra Urakova, Tracey A. Sowerby, Tudor Sala
Series: Routledge Studies in Cultural History
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 268
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unwrapping the Dangerous Gift
Gifts: War by Other Means?
Approaching the Dangers of the Gift
Identifying the Loci of Danger
Notes
Part I: Gifts Divine, Demonic, and Devout
1. Demonic Gifts and Counter-Gifts in Ancient Zoroastrianism
Introduction
Sacrifice and Ritual as Gift and Gift Exchange
Gifts and Bad Gifts: Rituals, Sacrifice, and Asking for a Favour
Inefficient Rituals and the Zurwānite Myth
Ahreman's Kiss as a Reward for the 'Primordial Whore'
'You are humans! Sacrifice to the demons!'
Kərəsāspa's Fall and the Dangers of Idol-Worship
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Gift Terminology in Ancient Zoroastrian Texts
Appendix 2: Text and Translation of Key Passages
Notes
2. Blessings, Bribes, and Bishops: Cyril of Alexandria, the Council of Ephesus (431), and the Making of Orthodoxy
Introduction: Gifts, Bribes, and Blessings in the Later Roman Empire
Cyril's Gifts: 'Blessings' and Gold
Cyril's 'Blessings': Their Timing and Incentives
Cyril's Gifts: Blessings and Payments = Bribes
Conclusion: Bribes, Orthodoxy, and Sainthood
Notes
3. 'The most precious of all gifts': Sentimentality, Consumption, and the Gift of Death in Warner, Phelps, and Twain
Introduction: 'donner la mort' and the American Context
'Just accept the gift'
God's Keepsakes
'Absolutely free gift'!
Conclusion: 'Dangerous' or 'Safe'?
Notes
Part II: The Precarious Politics of the Gift
4. The Dangerous Gift as Diplomatic Tool: Relics and Cross-Confessional Gift-Giving at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century
Introduction
The Papal-Anglo Gifts in Context
The Meaning of the Exchange
Dangerous Gifts and Diplomatic Strategies
Conclusion
Notes
5. A Pandora's Box of National Hostility? The Széchényis and Aristocratic Donations in Nineteenth Century East-Central Europe
Introduction
From Feudal Social Obligation to Sacrifice for the Nation
Gift-Patriotism: Its Socio-Theological Context
Receiving, Cultus, Counter-gifts
Patriotic Donations, Patriotic Investments
The Donor as Antichrist: On Disequilibrium in Patriotic Gift-Economies
From Sacrifice to Self-Damage: The Destructive Force of Gift-Patriotism
Notes
6. The Dangerous Gift of Universal Income: The Problem of Rentier Dependency in Venezuela
Introduction
The Gift of Development
Nature's 'Free Gift'
The Gift of Oil and the Magical State
From Boom to Bust--Import Substitution to Import Subsidization
Social Missions versus Basic Income
The Socialization of the Market
From Social Missions to Socialist Basic Income
The Morality of Labour and Global Exchange
Conclusion
Notes
Part III: The Dark Side of the Gift Economy
7. Taking Aim at 'Exchange Gifts' and the 'Christmas Tax': Dangerous Gifts in the Progressive Era and the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving
Introduction
Origins
Attacking Pernicious Transactions in the Workplace
SPUG and the Meaning of Christmas
Reaction
SPUG's Impact
Conclusion
Notes
8. The Dual Dangers of the Gift
Introduction
Dating
Alternatives to Dating
Hookups and Dating Apps
Gifts for Sex
Discussion and Conclusion
Notes
9. The Birthday Cake: Commodity, Thing, Object, and Token
Introduction
Commodities, Things, Objects, and Tokens
The Birthday Cake in History
Symbolic Exchange
Candles
The Birthday Party
Notes
Afterword: Gifts, Dangers, and their Performative Context
Notes
Contributors
Bibliography
Index
