Chapter 4 consists of an introduction to the discourses and ideologies of patronage and benefaction and to the ways in which they are appropriated throughout the Apocalypse. Across ancient Mediterranean societies, one of the primary functions of the king consisted of distributing benefits to subjects, material and otherwise, in order to establish loyalty amongst subjects as well as power that accrued therefrom, a pattern which is best understood within broader systems of patronage and benefaction. A survey of the general contours of personal, imperial, and divine patronage and benefaction reveal how some of the most basic discursive strategies, attending socio-cultural-economic realities, and underlying ethical frameworks not only appear in Revelation but constitute the primary means of depicting the relationship between God, Lamb, and the followers thereof. In sum, Revelation depicts the Lamb as a royal benefactor who dispenses divine benefits on behalf of God.

Chapter 4 consists of an introduction to the discourses and ideologies of patronage and benefaction and to the ways in which they are appropriated throughout the Apocalypse. Across ancient Mediterranean societies, one of the primary functions of the king consisted of distributing benefits to subjects, material and otherwise, in order to establish loyalty amongst subjects as well as power that accrued therefrom, a pattern which is best understood within broader systems of patronage and benefaction. A survey of the general contours of personal, imperial, and divine patronage and benefaction reveal how some of the most basic discursive strategies, attending socio-cultural-economic realities, and underlying ethical frameworks not only appear in Revelation but constitute the primary means of depicting the relationship between God, Lamb, and the followers thereof. In sum, Revelation depicts the Lamb as a royal benefactor who dispenses divine benefits on behalf of God.

This chapter examines sequences of offers by sellers in gourmet shops, video documented in a dozen cities across Europe, focusing on offers of a taste of cheese. Such offers to taste are shown to occur in two types of sequential contexts. They are made when a customer has expressed interest in a product but displays some hesitation in deciding whether to purchase it or not. Such offers to taste pursue sale of the cheese; they are not simple small gifts. Participants orient to this character of the offers by treating them as providing assistance in decision making. On the other hand, if the offer is made sequentially too late or too early, it is rejected, underlining the pursuit of sale at work in an offer of a taste. A contrasting environment of offers is also examined. In these cases, a plate of small pre-cut pieces of cheese are on the counter for anyone to try. The offers are typically accepted by the customer but without leading to buying. This enriches our understanding of the preference organization of offers and requests, and the relationships between benefactor/beneficiary, further supporting the relationship between the offer and the pursuit of the offerer’s interests.

This chapter analyses emergency calls to see how the incident report of callers is ascribed either the action of making a request to the emergency call centre or the action of providing a service to the call centre. In accordance with Whalen & Zimmerman (1987) and Bergmann (1993), we see that when the caller thanks the call-taker in response to the dispatching of assistance, the caller’s incident report is treated as a request, while the call-taker by thanking the caller ascribes to the caller the action of having provided a service. Adding to their analyses, this chapter shows that action-ascription is subject to local interactional contingencies much more than to interaction-external identities such as the caller’s relation to the incident. We show examples where callers who are directly involved in the incident are treated as providing a service and we show examples of witness-callers who are treated as making a request. For action-ascription, this means that the turn to which an action is ascribed and the turn that ascribes the action need not be adjacent. Further, this chapter shows that in these not-adjacent contexts, the interaction in between may strongly impact upon the eventual action-ascription.

This chapter is the first of two chapters examining the identities created at the Great Panathenaia. It asks what identities were created for Athenian men. For these men, the processes were particularly complex, and they had to take part in a variety of different aspects of the festival. The more often a man participated, the more complex his identities became. A man could also have further identities as a member of specific subgroups of Athenian men: as a member of the cavalry, as benefactor of the city, as a member of a genos, a (Kleisthenic) deme and a (Kleisthenic) tribe. Different aspects of a man’s overall identity would have been salient at different moments in the festival and depended on how exactly any individual man participated. Especially in the games during the classical and Hellenistic periods, the definition of what it meant to be an Athenian male mapped quite closely on to a very political and Aristotelian understanding of citizenship. Consequently, the identities of Athenian men were particularly sensitive to political change in the city, and they quickly reflected developments in other areas of the city’s life.