1st Edition
The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age
Introduction: Unpacking the Dangerous Gift
Tracey A. Sowerby and Alexandra Urakova
Part 1: Gifts Divine, Demonic, and Devout
1. Demonic Gifts and Counter-gifts in Ancient Zoroastrianism
Shervin Farridnejad
2. Blessings, Bribes and Bishops: Cyril of Alexandria, the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Making of Orthodoxy
Volker Menze
3. ‘The most precious of all gifts’: Sentimentality, Consumption, and The Gift of Death in Warner, Phelps, and Twain
Alexandra Urakova
Part 2: 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
Tracey A. Sowerby
5. A Pandora’s Box of National Hostility?: The Széchényis and Aristocratic Donations in Nineteenth Century East-Central Europe
Sándor Hites
6. The Dangerous Gift of Universal Income: The Problem of Rentier Dependency in Venezuela
Aaron Kappeler
Part 3: 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
Ellen Litwicki
8. The Dual Dangers of the Gift
Russell Belk
9. The Birthday Cake: Commodity, Thing, Object, and Token
Robert Appelbaum
Afterword: Gifts, Dangers and Their Performative Context
Ilana F. Silber
Biography
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.
