Gift Exchange Research Articles

“Giving What They Hold Dear”: Safavid Diplomatic Gifts to Venice

Abstract The exchange of gifts was an important aspect of the relations between the Safavid Empire and the Republic of Venice. Drawing on Venetian archival documents, the article aims to explore the nature and significance of Safavid diplomatic gift-giving to Venice in the first third of the seventeenth century. In particular, it examines the place and importance of precious objects in gift exchanges, looking at specific types of gifts given such as carpets, textiles, and weaponry. The article sheds light on the role religion played in the determination of a Shah’s choice of a gift to the Doge. Furthermore, this article examines how the diplomatic gifts from the Safavid rulers were viewed and conceived in Venice. Using a comparative perspective, the article explores the differences between the Safavid gift-giving strategies towards Venice and Ottomans. It reveals that the Safavids and Venetians had a common understanding of what was worthy of giving.

Counterintuitive utopias

What if the institutions of modern society were not informed by the ideas of Descartes or Adam Smith but by those of Mauss, Viveiros de Castro or their anthropological inspirations? This extrapolation would lead to counterintui-tive utopias, to institutions that are always in the making, but that nevertheless offer alternative ways of dealing with xenophobia, capitalism or the environmental crisis. Xenophobia would be countered by the model of the stranger king, the integration of the stranger as a necessity for a complete society. Capitalism would be restricted to the market and subordinated to the principles of gift exchange. An objectifying notion of nature would be complemented by practices of animism that enable a moral relationship with non-humans. The value of otherness and concepts of per-sonhood unite these three approaches.

Receiving an organ: The ambivalence of the debt and the question of giving back

Taking the Maussian gift paradigm as its theoretical framework ( to give-to receive-to repay), this article adopts an original approach to analysis of the lived experiences of organ recipients on an individual and psychological level. Clinically oriented interviews with 9 transplant patients and semi-structured interviews with a further 13 patients reveal the existence of four forms of mental processing around organ donations and the existence of a debt in three of these forms. These debts are ambivalent and recipients experience them both positively and negatively. Organ donation seems to fit into the gift paradigm in an original way inasmuch as, instead of repaying it directly, recipients settle their debt by giving back to others and by other means, whether to real people or to their fantasy donor. In order to improve the well-being of transplant patients, recommendations are set out for the biomedical agencies: a humanised donor discourse should be developed alongside the traditional mechanistic discourse around the body and long-term, multifaceted psychological support should be made available for transplant patients and their families. The marketing implications of our research are also put forward with a view to turning transplant patients into promoters of organ donation. The results are also transferred to other social marketing contexts. Finally, the gift exchange paradigm is proposed as a means of enriching marketing fundamentals in a society in which consumers are increasingly searching for connections and meaning beyond the goods and services they consume.

Reciprocity with stochastic loss

We introduce stochastic loss into a gift exchange game to study how information on intentions affects reciprocity. In one treatment, the respondent observes the amount received and whether a loss occurred, so both the consequential outcome and the sender’s original intention are known. In the other two treatments, information about whether a loss occurred is hidden, and the respondent is only informed of the amount received (outcome) or the amount initially sent (intention). Using both regression-based approaches and non-parametric tests, we find greater reciprocity in the two treatments that reveal intentions. These differences arise even in a simple one-shot setting without reputational benefits and are economically meaningful; they are similar in magnitude to the difference attributable to a full point reduction in the amount received. Our findings show the impact of the information environment on reciprocity in settings with uncertainty and suggest that transparency is important to reciprocity.

The World around the Mother as a Gift in African Folktales and Fountain of Radical Joy

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse selected African folktales that foreground the role of mothers in the everyday. The purpose is to appreciate the cultural logic of their representation in relation to the other characters. In the folktales, family is defined around the mother. The father is either conspicuously absent or peripheral. The mother’s self-giving and love towards the family are often radical and come with great sacrifice. Although desirable, it is not always a given that the family reciprocates her commitment. I argue that, in these African folktales, motherhood is crafted as a “gift principle” without which the family cannot survive. This representation of motherhood as “care” is archetypical, as seen in the iconography of Mother Mary in Catholicism. Why does culture endow the mother with such a radical attribute of other-centredness? Is this simply symbolic or does it cohere with the lived experiences of mothers? I draw from scholarship on feminist ethics of care and on the gift economy and motherhood. I conclude that mothers function in the folktales as humanising agents responsible for quality life in the community.

Adam J. Davis. The Medieval Economy of Salvation: Charity, Commerce, and the Rise of the Hospital.

Adam J. Davis’s The Medieval Economy of Salvation locates the twelfth- and thirteenth-century hospital movement at a nexus between the medieval transition from gift to commercial profit economy and its concomitant “charitable revolution,” whose spirituality transmuted almsgiving to the poor into “loans to God,” with redemptive reward monetized as interest. This juxtaposition is not newly discovered, nor is the author’s assertion that evidence of such gifts and countergifts between donors and hospitals challenges previous historiographical assumptions that the commercial profit economy had fully replaced the gift economy. In his 1978 classic Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe, Lester Little pointed out that “Largess no more disappeared after 1050 than did plundering. It remained a hallmark of the life led by the European aristocracy, and as a model for the life of successful merchants and professionals. It was to be seen not only in their clothes, their homes, their gifts, and their entertainments, but in their works of charity and support of religious institutions. What remained of the gift-economy behaviour was thus complementary to commerce; it no longer opposed, or restrained, commercial activity” (8). With respect to hospitals in particular, Little wrote: “Consistent with the general scholastic theory on the efficacy of good works, philanthropy thus held one of the keys to the justification of profit-making. The small-scale, local pawnbroker continued to be harassed by officials, but the merchant-bankers were well on their way to assuming their role as patrons of charity. The proliferation of various types of hospital is one of the leading manifestations of the new style of philanthropy” (213).

An Outline of Methodology in Studies on Online Donations

The article proposes methodological guidelines for studies on a new tool in communication and gift-giving: online donations. It looks at donations in the context of gift culture, with particular emphasis on the changes introduced by digitisation. The author argues that online donations are a source of valuable data, which could prove useful for many sciences. As a very specific and relatively new form on the media market, donations are not an easy research material. An outline is provided of the methodology in studies on online donations, including challenges and problems that researchers may encounter. The solutions presented in the article are the result of the author’s three years of work in the field of collecting and analysing online donation data.

Promote Internally or Hire Externally? The Role of Gift Exchange and Performance Measurement Precision

ABSTRACTManagers often face the choice between promoting an internal employee and hiring an external candidate. Using an interactive experiment, we examine the drivers of managers’ promote/hire decisions and internal employees’ behavior before and after those decisions. Consistent with gift exchange theory, we find that employees exert costly effort to increase the chance of being promoted, and they raise their effort level as the promote/hire decision becomes imminent. Managers respond by promoting those who exert high effort, despite employees’ inferior ability compared to external candidates. Results suggest that managers view employees’ past effort as both a gift to reciprocate and a signal of their future effort. Moreover, we find that managers are more likely to promote internally rather than hire externally under a less precise performance measurement system, and this result is driven by managers who observe low employee output. Finally, we find that total effort is significantly higher when managers promote internally versus hire externally.

Wage negotiations and strategic responses to transparency

This paper experimentally investigates how exogenous and endogenous wage transparency affect the interactions between employers and employees in a labor environment characterized by gift exchange. After the first part of the experiment in which wage offers always remain private information, three treatments in the second part either make wages fully transparent or leave the choice to establish (costly) wage transparency either to employees or employers. When full transparency is induced exogenously, the share of equal wage offers increases in the second part. At the same time, employers and employees rarely induce wage transparency themselves. Moreover, in the treatment where employees could enforce transparency, average wage offers and performance are significantly lower than in the other treatments. Results from a control treatment indicate that employees’ requests for wage information are cost-sensitive. If information about co-employees’ wage offers is costless, employees almost always ask for this information, thus achieving nearly full wage transparency. Further analyses reveal that wage offers in the second part seem to be higher under transparency than under non-transparency of wage offers.

Charles, the Prince of Wales at the Court of Philip IV of Spain: the «Incognito» Trip and the Problem of Exchanging Gifts

The article studies the tradition of exchanging gifts during diplomatic negotiations for marriage using a historical reconstruction of the trip of the English Prince Charles Stuart to Madrid in 1623 to negotiate his marriage with the Spanish Infanta Maria as a crucial case. The heir to the English throne personally arrived in Madrid «incognito» to speed up the negotiations. These circumstances created problems for the Spanish side because the reception ceremony was not developed for such a case. Besides, the «incognito» trip complicated the question of exchanging gifts. Later, such trips of monarchs would become a common practice. However, this case was one of the first precedents which forced the existing ceremonial procedure of gift exchange to undergo modifications. The article focuses on functions of exchanging gifts during marriage negotiations and studies the effects of an «incognito» trip on the course of the negotiations.The research is based on the letters of king James and his son Charles and eyewitness reports from the English and Spanish sides. The article claims that Prince Charles’ trip «incognito» changed the traditional procedure of exchanging gifts: the exchange happened before the prince’s departure and was initiated by the Spanish side. Nevertheless, this ritual has not lost its symbolism and significance in the rhetoric of negotiations. Gifts were used as a means of communication, an indicator of the influence of states and the way of their self-presentation.

The Horse in the Wedding Ceremony of the Khakass (Late 19<sup>th</sup> – Mid 20<sup>th</sup> Century)

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to present the characteristics of the horse as a key object in the wedding tradition of Khakass.The chronological framework of the work covers the late 19th – mid 20th centuries. The choice of such time limits is determined by the state of the source base on the research topic. The principle when any cultural phenomenon is considered in development and taking into account a specific situation, the principle of historicism, is leading in the study. The research methodology is based on historical and ethnographic methods: remnants (relic) and semantic analysis.Results. In the traditional Khakass culture, the horse and its image play an important role. This animal was extremely in demand due to its utilitarian and sacred significance. In practical terms, it was perceived as the main means of transport and an affordable source of meat. In religious and mythological terms, it acted as a symbolic projection – a “replacement” of the human soul, which had a close connection with the world of ancestors and deities. The image of the horse was steadily associated with the idea of vitality and fertility, being endowed with apotropaic properties. All this naturally contributed to its inclusion in the wedding ceremony.One of the main components of the marriage ritual was the mutual gift exchange. The horse was one of the key objects of it. This animal was an indispensable element of the kalym and all the gifts replacing it, as well as the bride's dowry and the groom's share. At the same time, the gift horse was a kind of pledge and a symbol of the conclusion of an unwritten marriage contract. The possession of a horse and the presence of expensive decorative elements in its ammunition not only emphasized its aesthetic preferences, but also served as a marker of the social status and prestige of the horse owner. This norm was observed in the wedding procession.Conclusion. The role of the horse in the ritual and socionormative practice associated with marriage is one of the components of the multifaceted image of this animal in the Khakass culture. Such a wide functionality of the horse people’s lives obviously may indicate the nomadic roots of the phenomenon of horse veneration.

Saul Bellow in Utah: “Leaving the Yellow House”

ABSTRACT Saul Bellow wrote “Leaving the Yellow House” with a setting in Utah although it is based on his sojourn in Nevada in 1955 and 1956. The location at Sego Desert Lake is historically significant in relation to the theme, which concerns economic networks of exchange, notably gift exchange (potlatch). Central to the narrative is the treatment of native Americans, past and present, and the gifts they gave to the early Mormon settlers, which rebounded upon them. The protagonist, a self-styled pioneer who relies on gifts that come back to haunt her, is a woman and one of the few in Bellow’s fiction to turn her back on money and status and negotiate an identity outside intellectual and material frames.

Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions

Abstract People engage in transactions because they expect to bring about certain futures. This suggests replacing Marcel Mauss's three obligations of gift exchange—giving, taking, and returning—with the notion of expectations. From this perspective, three contingencies constitute gift exchange: gifts create futures that remain indeterminate; they presuppose a social whole whose boundaries are unclear; and they visibly constitute opaque persons. Reconsidering gift exchange in these terms provides a set of analytical terms, like strong and weak expectations, moral horizons of value systems, and the opacity of personhood, that can be applied to sharing and commodity trade as well. This constitutes a dynamic and expansive theory for the analysis and comparison of case studies that understands society as a shared project of expecting the future.

Buzo Or Recycler: Waste Collecting as Gift Exchange in the Context of a New Waste Regime

Abstract The Dominican Republic (DR) experienced an economic boom related to tourism development over the last 30 years. Subsequently, consumption has increased, accompanied by an exponential growth in inorganic waste. Without adequate solid waste management, an environmental crisis has developed. Plastic waste litters roadsides, streets, streams, and beaches, threatening the very industry that enabled it. Informal waste collectors are on the front line of addressing, if not alleviating, the crisis but are regarded as marginal and inconsequential. A new waste regime is inevitable and imminent. Waste collectors are justifiably concerned that new systems may threaten their livelihoods. As such, they leverage their work, vis-à-vis a gift economy, to place themselves as essential to addressing the environmental crisis.

Lumpen utopia: money, livestreaming, and labor in emerging media worlds

ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hengdian – China’s largest film and television studio—this article engages with recent scholarship regarding converging media and payment platforms. Thousands of unemployed people travel to Hengdian to find work as background actors in the production of historical dramas. But low wages lead many to seek monetized gifts by livestreaming as broke hengpiao, or Hengdian drifters, who encourage their audience to send them gifts and move to Hengdian to work in an alternative to waged-labor. Hengpiao construct alternative experiences of work through the animation of generic historical and livestreaming characters in exchange for payment. This alternative arises from performances, payments for activity, and gift exchanges that create contrasting chronotopes of labor, or mediated conceptions of time, space, and personhood entailed by payments for work. I describe the way these experiences are constructed and monetized in relation to revenue generation schemes that fuel the expansion of the platform economy. I argue that producing experiences of place, personhood, and class plays an important role in both creating payments that generate revenue for livestreaming platforms and forming the subjectivities of those who produce the platform economy.

Wage claim detracts reciprocity in labor relations: experimental study of gift exchange games

Wage claim detracts reciprocity in labor relations: experimental study of gift exchange games

The Flowing of the Sacred Space: How Reciprocal Exchanges with Deities Are Affected by Urbanization

Although there is a consensus on religious revival in China, it must be noted that popular religion and institutional religions such as Buddhism and Daoism adopt different strategies to survive the state’s regulations. Many temples that used to facilitate the worship of local deities have to establish some form of intangible cultural heritage or emphasize the deity’s history and folklore to de-religionize. During this process, a temple may earn its lawful place to survive, but risks its communality in the village. Based on studies of rural and urban temples in Henan and Shandong provinces, in this paper, I attempt to understand people’s religiosity and how they conduct the human–deity exchange under social transformation. Popular religion is characterized by the pursuit of efficacy and its embeddedness in rural life. The traditional binary exchange with deities could be used to maintain a relationship with deities as well as offer urgent solutions, while three-party chains of exchange not only constitute a religious gift economy but also offer a religious agent to seek answers. I argue that temples are marginalized and excluded from village life, so people need to find new means by which to continue their religious practices beyond what the state sponsors, and this has led to the flowing of sacred places.

Decent work in traditional tourism destinations: Tourism Agenda 2030 perspective article

ObjetivoAnalizando las tendencias y deficiencias del debate actual sobre la promoción del trabajo digno en la hostelería y el turismo, este estudio responde a los recientes llamamientos para avanzar en la mejora del bienestar de los empleados, proponiendo elementos de una estrategia basada en la productividad e inserta en una dinámica circular que vincule la productividad, la calidad del servicio, la rentabilidad y la calidad del empleo para mejorar el bienestar de los empleados del turismo con vistas a alcanzar el Objetivo de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) 8 sobre trabajo digno.Diseño/metodología/enfoqueBasándose en recientes trabajos empíricos sobre la teoría del intercambio de regalos, este artículo de perspectiva presenta un posible escenario que debería estimular el debate entre los estudiosos y los responsables políticos locales sobre cómo se puede lograr el trabajo digno y la calidad de vida en los destinos turísticos tradicionales. Esto llenaría un vacío en el debate actual, que se centra en formas alternativas de turismo cuantitativamente marginales, para superar los problemas inherentes al turismo basado en el crecimiento.ResultadosEsta contribución propone una estrategia de desarrollo basada en la productividad y respaldada por una política de regulación de incentivos dirigida a los empresarios que prestan servicios turísticos en destinos turísticos de masas, promoviendo la calidad del empleo para aumentar la productividad y mejorar la calidad del servicio y, en última instancia, la rentabilidad.Originalidad/valorEste breve artículo propone una nueva perspectiva sobre la promoción del trabajo digno en los destinos turísticos tradicionales basada en la teoría del intercambio de regalos y analiza el alcance de la investigación esencial para apoyar un desarrollo basado en el escenario descrito por un modelo circular.

Changing pattern of Marriage and Social Exchange in Post Covid Society: An Overview of Rawat-Rajput Community

This paper is an attempt to address the Post Covid scenario that led to changes and significant alterations in social dynamics in Marriages of Rawat-Rajput community of Magra belt region in Rajasthan. With the basic explanation of Rawat-Rajput Community and Magra Belt region of Rajasthan, this paper would primary focus on the vital transformations being observed, during and post Covid era, in rituals, cultures and social events which got transformed, or limited, from celebration to just ceremonies. It will try to explain how Covid situation actually affected the Gift Exchange ceremonies and the ‘Status Symbol’ or the ‘Show Off culture’ amidst the people of this region. After the Covid era, how the social obligations got filtered and renovated in this relatively short span of time period of two years. The most pertinent aspect of the paper will be on the fundamental behavioural and outlook change that took place in people’s mind-set towards these ceremonies.

Trading zones and boundary objects: To the typology

Based on the concept of boundary objects and gift exchange, the article proposes a classification of trading zones. Boundary objects are material or abstract objects that are used by various social groups. Following from their joint use, it is possible to build a common field of understanding. The exchange of gifts, such as knowledge, skills, various competencies, and material and technical resources, starts the process of forming trading zones, i. e. spaces of coordination of activities and beliefs of various social groups. Based on the analysis of the concepts of boundary objects and the exchange of gifts, three types of trading zones can be distinguished. In the first type, the exchange takes place within the scientific community boundary objects function as objects of science, and participants in the trading zone have a similar institutional status. In the second, the exchange of gifts takes place between scientists and non-scientists who aspire to become scientists. Scientists have institutional advantages here, since they can bring their scientific knowledge as a gift, while non-scientists are only able to accept this gift. In response, they can share solely the cultural elements of scientific knowledge. However, partly these elements are already built in the knowledge of scientists. The third type again implies the interaction of scientists and non-scientists, but here both have a similar institutional status. The main task of trading zones of this type is the formation of associations and alliances between social actors of various types to meet joint interests. In this case, boundary objects are used on equal terms both as scientific and sociocultural entities.