Part 3: The Dark Side of the Gift Economyħ. The Dangerous Gift of Universal Income: The Problem of Rentier Dependency in Venezuela A Pandora’s Box of National Hostility?: The Széchényis and Aristocratic Donations in Nineteenth Century East-Central EuropeĦ.

The Dangerous Gift as Diplomatic Tool: Relics and Cross-confessional Gift-giving at the Turn of the Seventeenth Centuryĥ. Part 2: The Precarious Politics of the GiftĤ. ‘The most precious of all gifts’: Sentimentality, Consumption, and The Gift of Death in Warner, Phelps, and Twain Blessings, Bribes and Bishops: Cyril of Alexandria, the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Making of Orthodoxyģ. Demonic Gifts and Counter-gifts in Ancient ZoroastrianismĢ. Part 1: Gifts Divine, Demonic, and Devoutġ. Introduction: Unpacking the Dangerous Gift It will primarily appeal to university educators and researchers of political culture, pre-modern religion, social relations, and the relationship between commerce and gifts.

The book will interest a wide range of scholars working in anthropology, history, literary criticism, religious studies, and contemporary digital culture.

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. 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. Globally, the notion of toxic and fateful gifts has haunted mythologies, folklores, and literatures for millennia. 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.ĭangerous, 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. This is the first volume that examines dangerous gift-giving across centuries and disciplines.

A time of gifts