CEU Institute for Advanced Study



Dangerous Gifts and Pernicious Transactions from Antiquity to the Digital AgeAbstractsKeynote Russell Belk (School of Business, York University): Little Nothings: Intangible, Ephemeral, Digital GiftsLittle nothings are either words, experiences, and actions that leave no material trace or minor material things that are seen as little more than nothing. Yet rather than gifts that loudly announce their size, extravagance, or cost, it is through little nothings that we may come closest to giving “the perfect gift.” As O’Henry (William Sydney Porter) so vividly demonstrated in “The Gift of the Magi,” it is indeed the thought, sincerity, and sacrifice that counts. Little nothings may also be perfect gifts because they defy the market logic of economists like Gary Becker and Joel Waldfogel (Scroogenomics) who know “the price of everything and value of nothing.” Rather than economic transfers, gifts are better regarded as ceremonial expenditures that help forge, reinforce, and solidify human relationships, yielding social, not economic, capital. The gift economy obeys an anti-market romantic logic. My talk focuses on why this is and how it came to be.Panel 1: Divine Gifts and Religious Offerings: Perfect, Imperfect, Corruptive (Moderator: Nadia Al Bagdadi)Gy?rgy Geréby (Department of Medieval Studies, CEU): “Every Good Endowment and Every Perfect Gift is from Above”: James 1:17 in Patristic ExegesisJames 1:17, which has entered the dismissal part of the Byzantine rite, is translated into English by the King James Version as ?Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.” The Revised Standard Version tries to be more faithful to the Greek (and the Vulgate), which have etymologically related, but otherwise different terms, δοσι? and δωρημα, datum and donum, rendering them as ?Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above.” What is the meaning of the verse employing near synonyms? Should it be considered a simple reduplication, a figure of speech, or do they mean something different?? What is a “good endowment” or a “perfect gift” as opposed to other endowments or imperfect gifts? The talk will address the interpretation of the verse by the patristic, Byzantine and scholastic authors.?Davide Torsello (Business School, CEU): How History Converted Religious Offerings into Bribes: the Japanese CaseThe paper deals with the historical and folklore-related genesis of the concept of "bribing" in Japanese society. Drawing on a number of folklore, anthropological and historical sources, it will elaborate a theory formulated by Japanese scholars that traces the origin of political bribery in XIII-XIV century Japan. Bribery is tackled as a historical derivation of a complex fabric of gift exchange practices that characterized popular Shinto beliefs in Japan. The key finding is that religion and history have, in modern Japan, supported the crystallization of practices that today still belong to a grey area in which?offering and bribing situate.Panel 2: Eucharistic Gifts and the Poison of Life (Moderator: Volker Menze)István Perczel (Department of Medieval Studies, CEU): An Anarchist Ecclesiology? Saint Symeon the New Theologian on the Eucharistic Gifts and Unworthy PriestsSaint Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) is an odd figure in Byzantine spirituality and social history. A high-ranking eunuch in the Byzantine court and, later, an intransigent monk and a mystic, he introduced new theological formulations, authored a large corpus of prose and verse writings, introduced a new kind of spirituality and generated a social reform by denying the exclusive right of the ecclesiastic authorities to declare saints and to designate father confessors. He claimed that only the mystics who have achieved the vision of God are entitled to serve as priests and to hear confessions. He has also introduced a particular interpretation of the Eucharistic communion linked to the contrition of the heart and the subsequent vision of the divine light. The talk will analyse Symeon’s doctrine of the worthy and unworthy Eucharistic communion and priestly service, which, while seemingly introducing an anarchist ecclesiology, had set the standards for mainstream Byzantine theology for a couple of centuries to come.Tudor Sala (Institute for Advanced Study, CEU): When the Gift of Divine Life Kills: The Poisonous Eucharist in the Early ChurchPopular consciousness commonly associates the Christian Eucharist with a pure and perfect gift. A careful look at its long history, however, reveals the existence of a largely forgotten dark chapter centered around the disturbing conviction that the “medicine of immortality” actually poses a serious threat to life and limb. My paper will explore different rationales and practices related to the perceived dangers of holy communion from the earliest Christian communities to the Middle Ages in an attempt to shed light on the religious and social anxieties that shaped this troubling understanding of the consecrated Eucharistic elements. Panel 3: The Dark Side of Modern Gift Economies? (Moderator: Tolga U. Esmer)Alexandra Urakova (Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences): Gifts of Death and Boons of Life: A Gift of Death Motif in American Literature (1850s-1900s)This paper will examine how the gift of death was themathized in several literary works by American authors written in the middle/second half of the 19th Century, from the divine “unspeakable gift” in Susan Warner’s novel The Wide, Wide World to the “valueless” yet uncanny and “creepy” gift in the late fiction of Mark Twain. While showing how the concept becomes secularized as withdrawn from religious context, the paper will also question its relation to the idea of perfect gift and ideology of pure or disinterested giving in the consumer society. Sandor Hites (Institute for Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences): Nationalism as Gift Economy: Unintended Consequences in 19th century Hungarian Aristocratic DonationsEarly 19th century Hungarian nation-building was fostered by several aristocratic donations, raising institutions or establishing prizes. Focusing on the most iconic ones, e.g. count Ferenc Széchényi presenting his collections for the purpose of a National Library in 1802 and his son István offering his yearly income for establishing a Hungarian Academy in 1825, I approach these acts as elements of a peculiar gift economy in which donators function as gift-givers, the abstract entity of the Nation (as represented by the King or the feudal Diet) as recipient, and the ensuing celebration of the donators provides counter-gift in the enduring form of national cult. Examining the reciprocal dynamic between these elements as a symbolic economy underlining modern cultural and political nationalism, the paper highlights cases when their equilibrium is destabilized, i.e. when donators come to question the ways their donations are being utilized. My key example is Széchenyi Jr., who from the early 1840s followed with increasing anxiety how the institutionalized cultivation of the Magyar language that his gift had enabled was leading to the estrangement of non-Magyar communities living in the Kingdom of Hungary.Ellen Litwicki (Department of History, State University of New York at Fredonia): Pernicious Transactions in the Workplace: the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving.In November 1912, an odd but memorable new word entered the New York lexicon when some one thousand women launched the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, or SPUG. SPUG was the product of women from opposite ends of the social scale: women who worked in New York’s shops and factories and socially elite, civic- and reform-minded women in the Woman’s Department of the National Civic Federation. The Society’s founding goal was to eradicate the custom that pressured retail clerks and factory hands to contribute to Christmas gifts for their supervisors. In seeking to address a specific workplace inequity, SPUG contributed to Progressive conversations about the substance and goals of workplace reforms, as well as the best way to effect cross-class cooperation. Perhaps as importantly, the organization tapped into dissatisfaction with the commercialization of Christmas and briefly took a leading role in the debate over Christmas giving, before its message was undercut by ridicule and ultimately co-opted into an advertising gimmick. Panel 4: The Politics of Gift Exchange: Legitimacy, Status, and Subversion (Moderator: Jan Hennings)Erica Benner (Institute for Advanced Study, CEU): Machiavelli's Prince: A Gift to the Prince or a Gift to the People? manual for citizens?Niccolò Machiavelli dedicated the book we now know as The Prince to a young member of Florence’s princely Medici family. The author humbly offers to share his hard-earned political wisdom with his noble dedicatee, and proceeds to show how ‘new’ princes can increase their power over restive subjects. But there’s a puzzle at the heart of the book, for its warmest passages stress the difficulties and dire long-term consequences that follow when princes try to suppress popular freedoms. This puzzle helps explain why many of the Prince’s early readers suspected that the book was a Trojan Horse: a gift that princes would accept in hopes that it might help them, but whose deeper purpose was to help peoples defend or recover their freedom from princely encroachments. Neguin Yavari (Institute for Advanced Study, CEU): Ominous Gifts and a Job Interview in Umayyad DamascusOne day in 715, the Umayyad Sulayman b. ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 715-17), sitting with his courtiers, took stock of his kingdom, and surmised that there was nothing that remained to be had, and that, in fact, the grandeur of his realm compared with that of Solomon, the son of David. His courtiers were quick to point out that he lacked a good vizier. Tasked with rectifying the fault, the courtiers settled upon a candidate from the city of Balkh, whose ancestors had served Ardashir I (r. ca. 227-43), founder of the Sasanid (224-650) dynasty. The prospective vizier was summoned to Damascus for an audience with the Umayyad king. The outcome of the job interview was settled in an exchange of one-upmanship involving curious gifts bearing multivalent allusions, the focus of this brief presentation. Tracey Sowerby (Institute for Advanced Study, CEU): Relics and Other Religious Items as Dangerous Diplomatic Gifts at the Turn of the Seventeenth CenturyIn January 1604 Anthony Standen, an English ambassador, returned from a mission to Italy carrying a gift from Pope Clement VIII to the English queen Anne of Denmark. Rumours about this gift and what it meant rapidly spread across European courts. Could the wife of a Protestant monarch accept a gift of religious artefacts from the Pope, especially when the church over which her husband was head rejected both the supremacy of the Pope and the sanctity of the items in question? Contextualising this cross-confessional diplomatic gift, this paper explores why the gift bundle that Clement sent was considered so pernicious. It also examines what such instances can reveal about the dangers of cross-confessional gifting and attempts to define the parameters of political relations between two polities that were opposed religiously. Relics were relatively ‘safe’ gifts between co-religionists, but in this case they became sites of religio-political point-scoring. ................
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