The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age

269 Pages·2022·5.879 MB·English

by  Alexandra Urakova, Tracey A. Sowerby, Tudor Sala

Routledge Studies in Cultural History
THE DANGERS OF GIFTS
FROM ANTIQUITY TO
THE DIGITAL AGE
Edited by
Alexandra Urakova,
Tracey A. Sowerby, and Tudor Sala
The Dangers of Gifts from
Antiquity to the Digital Age
This is the first volume that examines dangerous gift-giving across
centuries and disciplines. Bringing to the fore a 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 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.
Alexandra Urakova is a Kone Foundation fellow at Tampere University
and holds the title of docent in North-American Studies at the University
of Helsinki.
Tracey A. Sowerby is a Research Associate at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford
and the Director of the Europaeum Scholars Programme.
Tudor Sala has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships from the Leibniz
Association/DAAD, the Dahlem Research School/COFUND, the Fritz
Thyssen Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central
European University.
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For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
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The Dangers of Gifts
from Antiquity to the
Digital Age
Edited by Alexandra Urakova,
Tracey A. Sowerby, and
Tudor Sala
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2023 Taylor & Francis
The right of Alexandra Urakova, Tracey A. Sowerby and Tudor
Sala to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-29854-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-29862-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-30240-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003302407
Typeset in Sabon
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
Contents
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction: Unwrapping the Dangerous Gift 1
TRACEY A. SOWERBY AND ALEXANDRA URAKOVA
PART I
Gifts Divine, Demonic, and Devout 25
1 Demonic Gifts and Counter-Gifts in Ancient
Zoroastrianism 27
SHERVIN FARRIDNEJAD
2 Blessings, Bribes, and Bishops: Cyril of Alexandria,
the Council of Ephesus (431), and the Making
of Orthodoxy 48
VOLKER MENZE
3 ‘The most precious of all gifts’: Sentimentality,
Consumption, and the Gift of Death in Warner,
Phelps, and Twain 65
ALEXANDRA URAKOVA
PART II
The Precarious Politics of the Gift 83
4 The Dangerous Gift as Diplomatic Tool: Relics and
Cross-Confessional Gift-Giving at the Turn of the
Seventeenth Century 85
TRACEY A. SOWERBY
vi Contents
5 A Pandora’s Box of National Hostility? The
Széchényis and Aristocratic Donations in
Nineteenth Century East-Central Europe 101
SÁNDOR HITES
6 The Dangerous Gift of Universal Income: The
Problem of Rentier Dependency in Venezuela 125
AARON KAPPELER
PART III
The Dark Side of the Gift Economy 149
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 151
ELLEN LITWICKI
8 The Dual Dangers of the Gift 174
RUSSELL BELK
9 The Birthday Cake: Commodity, Thing, Object, and
Token 190
ROBERT APPELBAUM
Afterword: Gifts, Dangers, and Their Performative
Context 210
ILANA F. SILBER
Contributors 217
Bibliography 221
Index 250
Figures
0.1 White House Dog ‘Pushinka’, Robert Knudsen, White
House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum, Boston 4
0.2 Karl Marx Statue in Trier, Yvain2908, CC0, via
Wikimedia Commons 12
5.1 Statue of István Széchényi by József Engel, Széchényi
István tér, Budapest, photo by Verjava, CC BY-SA
3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via
Wikimedia Commons 111
5.2 Széchenyi fils’s offering, lithography by Vinzenz Katzler
(1860) 113
5.3 The memorial tablet on the Buda side bridgehead of
Chain Bridge. Photo by author 115
Acknowledgments
The idea for this project originated in conversations at the Central
European University’s Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest. The
goal of this institute is to enhance professional networking across
disciplines. This was certainly realised in our case since all three
editors of this volume are alumni of IAS CEU, as are several of the
contributors. We offer our special thanks to CEU and to IAS’s director
Nadia Al-Bagdadi for bringing us together and pointing to the potential
crosscuts between our research inquiries; without her this exciting
collaboration would not have come to pass. We would also like to
acknowledge the kindness and support of Éva Gönczi and Olga Peredi
who worked at the institute at the time of our fellowships. IAS CEU
provided us with a venue to organize and, together with CEU’s Center
for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, it sponsored our multi-disciplinary
conference ‘Dangerous Gifts and Pernicious Transactions from Antiquity
to the Digital Age’ (May 19–20, 2017); we are grateful to everyone who
made the conference happen and participated in it, particularly those
who presented their research or moderated a panel.
Alexandra Urakova would like to thank a number of institutions for
their support while she worked on this project, in particular the Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced
Study, and the Kone Foundation. Tudor Sala would like to thank the
Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum
and the ‘Beyond Canon’ DFG Centre for Advanced Studies at the
University of Regensburg for their support during the time this book
came together.
Any collaboration incurs many debts and this project is no exception.
All of the contributors to the volume are very grateful to the many staff
at the various libraries and archives at which they have worked while
researching and writing their contributions. We are also all grateful to
Max Novick at Routledge for his support and patience, and to
Routledge’s production team for their hard work on the volume. Our
thanks also go to the reviewers of the volume for their useful and
insightful suggestions.
Acknowledgments ix
Ilana Silber reminds us in her afterword that ‘it would be a mistake, a
dangerous one […] to forget the distinctive, and even uniquely creative,
solidary and benevolent energies which gift processes are capable of
conveying’. We can easily relate this to our experience of working on this
volume: we have truly benefitted from the solidarity and benevolent
energies of colleagues and friends both in our individual experiences of
writing our own contributions and in the larger collective endeavour of
editing this volume.