Academic literature on the topic 'Counter-Gift'

In this penultimate chapter, the ‘choreomania’ diagnosis all but dissolves. Visiting British and other colonial government anthropologists, moving around the colonial world from Jamaica and Papua New Guinea to New Zealand, read islanders performing ecstatic preparations for the ‘Great Awakening’ or the return of ancestors in rafts as participating in yet another iteration of a primitive type of dancing disease. Yet, as this chapter also shows, the ‘cargo cults’, just like the Hauhau movement, conjugated a complex play of counter-mimicry which reappropriated colonial props, language, and gestur

This chapter explores the social and economic aspects of gift-exchange as a universal phenomenon. Examples drawn from both complex and traditional societies indicate that the personal gift and counter-gift, in which givers and receivers are known to each other and personally communicate with each other, is characterised by a great variety of sentiments and purposes. At one end of the spectrum, economic purposes may be dominant as in some forms of first-gifts which aim to achieve a material gain or to enhance prestige or to bring about material gain in the future. At the other end are those gifts whose purposes are predominantly social and moral in that as ‘total social facts’ they aim to serve friendly relationships, affection, and harmony between known individuals and social groups. Meanwhile, social gifts and actions carrying no explicit or implicit individual right to a return gift or action are forms of ‘creative altruism’.

In this chapter, Jean-Luc Marion uses the “sacrifice of Isaac” as a touchstone for philosophical reflection on the idea of “the gift.” Genesis 22 offers an important insight: if Abraham’s actions on Mount Moriah amount to a “sacrifice,” then sacrifice is neither tantamount to destruction—after all, Isaac was not killed—nor is it a form of economic exchange, as if Abraham owed Isaac to God as “counter-gift” in return for the God’s promise. Rather, the “sacrifice” of Isaac ultimately reveals that Isaac is a gift given by God.

This chapter discusses the work and poetic correspondence (1538–1547) of Michelangelo and Colonna. It shows that both eschew the kind of grace espoused by Castiglione and Pietro Bembo and perfected by Raphael and Ariosto. Instead, Michelangelo and Colonna cultivate an image of the artist as hardworking and intense. Their desire to reveal — rather than conceal — the labour behind their art can be compared in the Pietàs through which the artist and the poet articulate an alternative aesthetics of grace: one that resists humanist connotations, criticises courtly abuses of the term, and promotes a more Christian vision of the artist as the receiver rather than the giver of what is essentially God's gift. Restored here to the domain of religious experience, grace acts as a reminder that art and literature should praise God, not the artist, and in so doing reflects an age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Italy.

Chapter 3 explores Jean Rotrou’s neglected 1634 Hercule mourant, performed during the same season as Corneille’s Médée. In doing so, it conceptualizes the present moment of spectacle—what it means to attend to the theatrical presence of violence—through post-structuralist performance theories of “presence.” Hercule mourant, a Neo-Stoic play exemplary of a Medean tragedy, exposes the conceptual model of endurance as an experience of tragedy. In this performance of Hercules’s death by his wife’s poisoned gift, Hercules’s slow demise is a major portion of the drama’s action. Drawing on the play’s performance archive confirming its incredible spectacularity, this chapter exposes the tension between the invisibility of burning from within and the audience’s poetic apprehension of such violence through stage and rhetorical effects that slow down the moment of crisis to which an audience attends, and whose effects it hopes to feel. Hercule mourant provides a potential counter-example to common notions of catharsis that purge the immoderation of the spectacular, instead belaboring it. It asks audiences to consider endurance as a model of attending to violence.

In various forms of Catholicism sacrifice holds a central position. The centrality of the divine sacrifice literally embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist works in a wider sense as a model for action and thought outside the Church as a place for worship. Sacrifice here places the individual in various positions of moral debt that one can more-or-less willingly work towards suspending. In Damascus, Syria, a popular Catholic ethic of simplicity often collides with clergy who appear to collect money for this-worldly purposes or for the sake of what is perceived as their own benefit. Lamentation over such perceived opulence attests to a tension between grace, gift, and debt. This chapter explores such tension in attending to how moral personhood is fashioned through various engagements with prayer, surrender, and debt. Where David Morgan has argued for a particular Catholic sacrificial economy (2009), wherein individuals are placed in charged relationships, this chapter examines the inherent tension between simplicity and opulence. Catholicism, it argues, may very well work by asserting a particular emphasis on the holy office that appear opulent, which necessitates a counter-movement in the form of purification and work towards greater simplicity.

As a youth, Andy’s inconsiderate curiosity can’t be bothered to contemplate the consequences of his investigations. To remedy such recklessness, Berry argues that we should pursue knowledge within limits and apply it within healthy forms. Academics who are enculturated in a publish-or-perish environment, however, tend to form similarly driven, ambitious students who aspire to be global leaders heroically solving big problems. Yet universities should also honor humble vocations that help steward the health of local places. Such stewardship can be an act of gratitude for the good gift of life. This grateful stewardship runs counter to the denial of limits embedded in much of our contemporary culture, which believes in scientific progress and unending technological improvement. The arrogance and ingratitude that cause these various denials of limits are exacerbated by the specialized, fragmented organization of knowledge in higher education. Such isolation allows academics to be unmindful of and ungrateful for their places, the sources of their life and health. Members of universities can foster proper gratitude and an acceptance of our limited, embedded place in creation by observing the Sabbath, acknowledging our ignorance, and maintaining a local, contextual scope in learning.

This introductory chapter traces the origins and resilience of the idea of India as the world’s largest democracy. Democracy was neither a gift of the Western world nor uniquely suited to Indian conditions. India was in fact a laboratory featuring a first-ever experiment in creating national unity, economic growth, religious toleration, and social equality out of a vast and polychromatic reality, a social order whose inherited power relations, rooted in the hereditary Hindu caste status, language hierarchies, and accumulated wealth, were to be transformed by the constitutionally guaranteed counter-power of public debate, multiparty competition, and periodic elections. Efforts to build an Indian democracy are said to have done more than transform the lives of its people. India fundamentally altered the nature of representative democracy itself. India’s democratic credentials, however, face new scrutiny as a result of the executive excesses of a populist demagogue as governing institutions crumble. The chapter argues that India’s democratic decline actually goes back further. It looks at the destructive effects of the long-standing neglect of the social foundations of India’s democracy and considers the possible mutation of democracy into a strange new kind of government called despotism.

The fall of the Mycenaean world marks a deep historical break. Mycenaean society was characterized by a redistributive economy, indicated by accurate book-keeping in its centres. According to Finley, in the following Dark Ages, Greek society was largely determined by reciprocity, thus differing not only from the preceding Mycenaean age but also—fundamentally—from the advanced civilizations of the Near East. Reciprocity can still be found in Herodotus, who records traces of consolidation of social relationships through the exchange of gifts. The friendship between Polykrates of Samos and Pharaoh Amasis, for example, was strengthened by means of gifts and counter-gifts; the alliance between Kroisos and the Spartans came about through the gift of a krater as a reciprocal present for gold. Given the absence of great centres of redistribution for the collection and reallocation of land, labour, and products, Greek society and its economy should be regarded as developing along completely different lines to those of the Near Eastern civilizations. Any attempt at commenting on trade in Archaic Greece seems a risky undertaking in that the results depend wholly on the approach applied and the questions asked. Written sources are rare and difficult to interpret. Archaeological sources, for their part, while extensive and varied, are no easier to explain. Do we have to assume that every sherd of pottery, every ivory fragment, and every oriental seal arrived at its place of discovery through trade—indeed, what precisely do we mean by ‘trade’? My feeling is that it is impossible to find a definition of the term that is both general and really useful; nonetheless, the review of a few attempts aiming at such a definition will serve to indicate at least some possible direction. Polanyi has rightly observed that trade can signify not only the two-way movement of commodities through a market—that is, via supply-and-demand price mechanisms and involving the use of money—but also peaceful, usually two-way movements of objects over a considerable distance directed at acquiring items which are not available on the spot. He uses the word ‘trade’ for every form of exchange, however, making it necessary for us further to determine and define its meaning in each case. Polanyi’s remarks are of great assistance if one is seeking to grasp the variety of exchanges, but not if one wishes to differentiate pre-market-economy trade from other forms of exchange.