scholarly journals The Gift of Qurbani Meat: Ethnological Reflections

Illuminatio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-209
Author(s):  
Ugo Vlaisavljević
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Close Relatives ◽  
The Sacrifice

The article considers two customs traditionally followed by Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina during Eid Al-Aḍḥā (‘Festival of Sacrifice’ or Kurban Bayram). These are, first, giving a small amount of money, so-called bayramlık, to children as a reward or gift in return for handing out Qurbani meat to neighbors, and, second, giving the meat to non-Muslims. The topic will be explored in the light of Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay on the gift, since Qurbani appears as a gift that identifies, marks and renews the social bonds not only of close relatives, but also of friends and neighbors. In this context too, we will meet what Jacques Derrida calls the aporia of the gift. The slaughtering of Qurbani animal is a true gift, precisely because it is an impossible gift. It may be considered as a giftless giving: although the sacrifice is unthinkable without the slaughtered animal, it cannot be a gift to God. However, after the human act of sacrifice is performed, it is God Who makes the gift to men - because He commands that the victim’s meat must be shared. It is then to be understood not as a returned gift, but as an act of God’s hospitality, which gives to men the very possibility of gift giving. It is argued that the two Bosnian customs draw their ultimate meaning from the divine hospitality vividly experienced in the ritual of sacrifice.

The (anti-)social gift? Mauss’s paradox and the triad of the gift

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-648
Author(s):  
Seung Cheol Lee
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift

Marcel Mauss’s discussion of the gift relies on a paradox: although gift-giving is the foundational act of building a society, in order for a gift to be circulated, society must be always-already presupposed so that the gift can reach and be recognized by its destination. This article focuses on how this paradox has been addressed in anthropological and philosophical studies of the gift, by reviewing work by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier and Jacques Derrida. By illuminating each position through the lens of the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, I first show how Lévi-Strauss and Godelier, respectively, focus on the symbolic and imaginary economies of the gift and how their perspectives are still bound by Mauss’s paradox in assuming the totality of society as the ultimate basis of gift exchange. I then read Derrida’s critique of Mauss as an attempt to explore the space for the aneconomic that grounds but simultaneously threatens the symbolic and imaginary economies of society. In doing so, I argue that the gift always includes the effaceable negativity and uncertainty that serve as the condition of (im)possibility for the social.

The Price of Friendship

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Maria Salomon Arel
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
The Social ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Networks Of Support

Abstract This article discusses the gift-giving behaviour of English merchants involved in the Russia trade in the Muscovite era. Drawing on a small, but growing body of historical literature relating to the role of gifts in the cultivation of mutually beneficial relations between people across the social spectrum in early modern Europe, it explores the various ways in which the English deployed the practice of giving to their advantage, both in England and in Russia. In particular, as ‘strangers’ in Russia who operated beyond the parameters of traditional kin- and community-based networks of support, English merchants (and other foreigners, such as their Dutch competitors) needed to both ‘befriend’ Russian clients on the ground in every-day trade and nurture relationships in high places to ensure smooth, profitable, and secure business. As the sources reveal, they engaged in a variety of gift-giving behaviours in building relationships with Russians advantageous to their enterprise.

Religious Ethics, Gift Exchange and Capitalism

2003 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCEL HENAFF
Keyword(s):  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Religious Ethics ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
The Gift ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spirit Of Capitalism ◽  
Catholic Ethic

This study intends to reread Max Weber's Protestant Ethic with the following question in mind: where is the Catholic ethic with respect to “the spirit of capitalism”? The few short comments that Weber makes on this topic nevertheless suggest an interesting notion which he had developed in earlier texts, i.e., the “religious ethic of brotherhood”. I intend to show here that this notion could be further illuminated by the findings of the anthropology of gift giving since Marcel Mauss. This would enable us to understand how the problem of grace, so central to the debate between Protestants and Catholics, is linked to the history of the transformations in the gift giving practices; we will also discover that this problem was at the origin of the schism. While such a hypothesis leads to a different reading of Weber, it is confirmed by a work of the historian B. Clavero which brings out the complex links that existed in 16th century Catholic Spain between the order of business and that of charity. Besides the antagonism that has marked the two Christian traditions in the West, what seems to be at issue is the way in which economic practices weight on the social bond. These questions invite us to rethink the connections between them.

scholarly journals Given (No) Time: A Derridean Reading of Denis Villeneuve's Arrival

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-203
Author(s):  
Gina Zavota
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Unique Nature ◽  
Political Works ◽  
Global War ◽  
Nonlinear Fashion

The central character of Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is a linguist tasked with deciphering a logographic alien language in time to avert a seemingly impending global war. I argue that the alien heptapods' logographs exemplify the understanding of language advanced by Jacques Derrida in seminal texts such as Of Grammatology (1976), while also engaging some of the themes concerning time and gift-giving that he develops in later, more explicitly political works. Derrida argues that written signifiers, rather than being a mere vehicle for representing speech, confer their own, supplemental meaning onto communication. Furthermore, he emphasizes that writing is not bound by the same linear temporality as spoken utterances, inasmuch as it is inscribed in a format which allows it to be revisited repeatedly. The significance of this disruption of linear temporality becomes clear in Derrida's later works such as Specters of Marx (1994) and On Cosmopolitanism (2001), where he describes such disruption as a necessary condition for the type of political change he believes is needed in the world. The ability to experience time in a nonlinear fashion allows Banks to prevent the looming war, in an illustration of the connection that Derrida draws between time, violence, and politics. However, it also puts humanity in the heptapods' debt, thus exemplifying the paradox of genuine gift-giving that Derrida claims is impossible. Despite the complex ethical questions it invokes, however, the unique nature of the gift in Arrival signals that this gift might be a genuinely altruistic offering after all.

Gift-giving in the great traditions: the case of donations to monasteries in the medieval West

1995 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana F. Silber
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Dynamics ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Social Functions ◽  
Religious Orientations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Impact

Focusing upon donations to monasteries in the medieval Western world, this paper expands upon extant discussions of religious gift-giving in the ‘great traditions’ , and of its relation to more archaic forms of gift-exchange, hitherto largely based on non-Western and mostly Asian anthropological material. While displaying many of the social functions familiarly associated with the gift in archaic or primitive societies, donations to monasteries are shown to have also entailed a process of immobilisation of wealth not extant in the gift circuit of ‘simpler’ societies. While donations to monasteries clearly attested to the impact of otber-wordly religious orientations, they also entailed a range of symbolic dynamics very different from, and even incompatible with, those analysed by Jonathan Parry with regard to the other-wordly ‘pure’ gift. The paper then brings into relief the precise constellation of ideological ‘gift-theory’, socio-economic ‘gift-circuit’, and macrosocietal context, which enabled this specific variant of the gift-mechanism to operate as a ‘total’ social phenomenon in the two senses of that term suggested, though not clearly distinguished and equally not developed, in Mauss’ pathbreaking essay on the gift.

Framing Gifts

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-117
Author(s):  
Adam B. Seligman ◽  
Robert P. Weller
Keyword(s):  
Gift Giving ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Vote Buying ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Scientific Arguments

This chapter begins by discussing the long social scientific arguments over the nature of the gift. We proceed to analyze several cases of gift-giving to show how understanding the different ways of counting as the same help clarify both the literature and the social worlds created by giving, receiving, and giving again. We argue that gift-giving is not just crucial to the constitution of society but that the ways this is achieved differ when they are grounded as memory, mimesis, or metaphor. The chapter considers different kinds of gifts, from charity to beggars, to handing down family heirlooms, to a range of Chinese practices from drinking to vote-buying.

The Gift Relationship

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. Ashworth
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Exchange Theory ◽  
Economic Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The Cost

Abstract Derrida (1992 / 1991) made the case (following Mauss, 1990 / 1925) that the ‘pure gift’ is impossible. Because of the element of obligation and reciprocity involved, gift relationships are inevitably reduced to relationships of economic exchange. This position echoes the exchange theory of the social behaviourists, the cost-benefit analyses of evolutionary psychology, and other reductionist conjectures. In this paper, 18 written accounts of gifting are analysed using established phenomenological tools of reflection. It is shown that the dynamics of the gift relationship are complex (for example the statuses of giver and recipient are problematical, as is the expression of gratitude) and, specifically, reciprocation in gifting is not akin to ‘repaying’ the gift, but should rather be seen as a response to the gift as an expression of affective affirmation, rendering this mutual. Gift giving is in the expressive realm rather than the practical (Harré, 1979). This was, intriguingly, known explicitly by Adam Smith (2006 / 1790).

scholarly journals The gift of repentance: a Maussian perspective on twenty years of pentimento in Italy

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID MOSS
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift

The influence of Marcel Mauss' study The Gift has largely been confined to the study of the circulation of goods and the social relations in which their transfer is embedded. One of Mauss' principal aims, however, was to show the political importance of gift-giving in averting the recourse to violence. In this paper, his approach to the offering, receiving and reciprocating of gifts is used to analyse the phenomenon of pentimento – the exchange of confessions for reduced sentences by terrorists and mafiosi which has become a central feature of the effort to combat organised violence in Italy since 1980.

Approaching Diplomatic and Courtly Gift-giving in Europe and Mughal India

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 525-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Siebenhüner
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
The One ◽  
The Given

This article deals with courtly gift-giving practices in Europe and Mughal India from a comparative and interwoven perspective. Given the historiographical lacunae on Mughal gift-giving, the article presents preliminary observations for further research. Unlike most contributions to this volume, this article understands the notion of diversity in terms of an intercultural diversity that came to the fore in courtly contexts and in diplomatic encounters. My arguments are bifold. On the one hand, European and Mughal rulers and their envoys shared a common ground of diplomatic gift-giving practices that were shaped by an understanding of what was worthy of giving and of the symbolic power of the given objects. On the other hand, courtly gift-giving practices were embedded in different social and cultural environments in Europe and India. By looking at the notion of the ‘gift’ and the social organisation of the Mughal elite, it becomes clear that pīshkash was an idiosyncratic concept in South and Central Asian contexts and that offerings of manṣabdārs to the Mughal emperor had a different character than those of European courtiers to their rulers.

Cultural humility: Pilot study testing the social bonds hypothesis in interethnic couples.

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 531-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey E. McElroy-Heltzel ◽  
Don E. Davis ◽  
Cirleen DeBlaere ◽  
Josh N. Hook ◽  
Michael Massengale ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Pilot Study ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
Cultural Humility ◽  
The Social
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