Last update: doc. Veronika Čapská, Ph.D. (06.02.2024)
The course will analyse modes of gift exchange in pre-modern Europe. It seeks to de-romanticise our contemporary idealised understanding of gift-giving as a purely altruistic practice. Thus, it will make use of concepts from social and cultural anthropology and show how gift exchange functioned in societies in which individuals were more vulnerable and more dependent on each other than today. It will draw studentsʼattention to the so-called ego-documents as useful sources for tracing economic behaviour, including the practices and ideas of gift exchange. We will ask, for example, how people communicated through gifts in the past, what steps they took to forge fair exchange deals and cultivate more balanced relationships. We will explore what people donated most, and in what ways their life stages and religious affiliations shaped their perceptions and practices of giving. We will also look at past representations of greed and generosity (as concepts connected with gift exchange). This course is also an invitation to learn more about underestimated gift-exchange related phenomena, such as as bribery or hospitality.
Literature
Zoltán Biedermann – Anne Gerritsen – Giorgio Riello (edd.), Global Gifts. The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia, Cambridge 2018.
Natalie Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France, Madison 2000.
Engin Isin – Ebru Üstündağ, Wills, Deeds, Acts: Womenʼs Civic Gift Giving in Ottoman Istanbul, Gender, Place and Culture 15, 2008, 519–532.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift, London 1990.
Joshua Teplitsky, A “Prince of the Land of Israel” in Prague: Jewish Philathropy, Patronage, and Power in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, Jewish History 29, 2015, 245–271.
Irma Thoen, Strategic Affection? Gift Exchange of Seventeenth-Century Holland, Amsterdam 2006, 9–44.
