The Dangers of Gifts from Antiquity to the Digital Age

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.

Introduction: Unpacking the Dangerous Gift Part 1: Gifts Divine, Demonic, and Devout 1. Demonic Gifts and Counter-gifts in Ancient Zoroastrianism 2. Blessings, Bribes and Bishops: Cyril of Alexandria, the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Making of Orthodoxy 3. ‘The most precious of all gifts’: Sentimentality, Consumption, and The Gift of Death in Warner, Phelps, and Twain 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 5. A Pandora’s Box of National Hostility?: The Széchényis and Aristocratic Donations in Nineteenth Century East-Central Europe 6. The Dangerous Gift of Universal Income: The Problem of Rentier Dependency in Venezuela 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 8. The Dual Dangers of the Gift 9. The Birthday Cake: Commodity, Thing, Object, and Token. Afterword: Gifts, Dangers and Their Performative Context