18. Disjunctures and Intimacies: New Perspectives in Gift Theory
Convenors:
Nikolai
Ssorin-Chaikov, University of
Cambridge
ns267@cam.ac.uk
Olga Sosnina, Kremlin Museum
sosnina@kremlin.museum.ru
In this workshop, we propose to examine social spaces and ideologies that are culturally produced by those gift-giving practices that until recently have been overlooked in exchange theory. We invite paper contributions that focus on gifts to heads of states, diplomatic gifts, philanthropy, gifts and donations in politics and corporate world. We are particularly interested in gift gestures that cross borders of polities and both connect and divide social locations (such as, for example, gifts across Cold War boundaries or transnational blood donations). By looking at such under-explored contexts for gift-giving, our goal is to critically revisit the concepts of social distance and identity. Maussian gift theory has been one of the key means of ethnographic imagination of bounded community and direct, face-to-face sociality. In this workshop, we shall ask what trans-local interconnections and disjunctures the focus on gifts can reveal, and what modes of relatedness and cultural intimacy gift-giving constitutes in these frameworks. The workshop shall further, on the one hand, the ethnographic understanding of politics of gift-giving gestures how they transcend and constitute cultural differences and work as means of negotiation of identities and subject positions. On the other hand, we shall look at how, in the material form of such gifts, the identity of givers and relationships between givers and receivers is visualised, and how it is re-interpreted along the phases of these items‚ social lives.
Spirited
Gifts: Ceremonial exchanges between Maori and monarchy
Elizabeth
Cory-Pearce, University of London
anp01ekc@gold.ac.uk
Granted
with a fur coat from the tsar’s shoulder
Patimat
Gamzatova, State Institute of Art Studies, Moscow
Making
gifts work - from Indian rural artisans to heads of states
Soumhya
Venkatesan, King’s College, Cambridge
Disappointing
Gifts: Notes on Anglo-Siamese Diplomacy
Andrew
Turton, School of Oriental and African Studies
at1@soas.ac.uk
Small-scale
but Trans-local: Gifts, Commons, Software and Licenses
Christopher
M. Kelty, Rice University
Gifts
and the relational non-relation
Monica
Konrad, University of Cambridge
Voluntarism
and Charity: Gift-giving to Others in the Greek context
Katerina Rozakou, Aegean University
How
to return a gift?: Taonga Maori and cultural property claims in New Zealand
Amiria Henare, University of Cambridge