This chapter examines the eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword fabricated in La Rochelle and given as a gift to Cabindas Mfuka Andris Pukuta following the conflict of 1775. The chapter argues that the object stands for a rich example of the complex interactions between French trades and Cabinda’s local authorities. The chapter explores the work and trajectory of the silversmith, who likely created the sword, and its connections to the shipowner Daniel Garesché and ship captain Jean Amable Lessenne. Like a large cutlass, the sword follows the format of a kimpaba, a Woyo insignia. The chapter explores the uses and meanings of this kimpaba, and its connections to other existing similar West Central African swords. The chapter argues that the sword symbolizes the increasing power acquired by coastal Woyo agents in detriment of the Ngoyo’s ruler whose powers were decreasing with the intensification of the slave trade.

This chapter examines the medieval Greek and Arabic sources for the movement of medical substances between the Byzantine and Islamic worlds in the period from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Although commerce was the most common means employed in the movement of materia medica, and the part played by tribute taking and looting was not negligible, the role of diplomatic gift exchange cannot be ignored. A relatively wide range of drugs were exchanged, ranging from theriac and a stone against dropsy to spices and perfumes. Moreover, this chapter examines the peculiar role of drugs as gifts in diplomatic communication compared to more typical diplomatic gifts such as expensive textiles and luxurious objects. Not suited to acting as objects of display, materia medica seemed to convey a personal message of care, creating mutual ties between the sender and the recipient.

This chapter aims to provide a survey of the recent and emerging conversations between theology (and more specifically moral theology or Christian ethics) and social anthropology (and more specifically the anthropology of morality). These conversations are presented as starting from two sides, as being a matter of theology attending to anthropology, and of anthropology engaging with theology. Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life is taken as providing an indication of the nature and promise of the first conversation for enriching theology’s social intelligence and its self-understanding (illustrated in particular by a discussion the Alder Hey scandal and of reproductive surrogacy), and Robbins’s Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life is taken as indicating the potential for the second, namely that beyond religious life providing material for ethnography, theological ideas and concepts may contribute to anthropological theory, even in relation to such central categories as the gift. The chapter closes with a consideration of some future directions which these conversations may take.

In 1929, J. M. Barrie made a bequest to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children of his most popular creation, ‘Peter Pan’. Chapter 5 explores the dynamic of gift-giving for the benefit of vulnerable children and how this translated into licensing practices. A Peter Pan movie, to be directed by George Cukor and starring Audrey Hepburn, was never made because of the bitter relationship that developed between the licensor, the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and its licensee, the Disney Corporation, which resulted in litigation in the 1960s. By looking at the misfortune of a film that was never made, the chapter shows how licensing intangible properties involved not only a question of contract and property, but also a more complicated question of trust, sociality and the etiquette of managing commercial opportunities. The chapter engages in a deeper consideration of the impact of the Disney Corporation, not just in creating a highly effective managerial infrastructure to exploit the child as a consumer, but also in developing intellectual property strategies to gain a privileged position with consumers, who were now conceived of as being included within the Disney family.

Chapter 9 introduces the Q’eqchi’-Maya institution of replacement (eeqaj), a set of practices and beliefs, which determine when various kinds of entities and agents must be replaced, as well as what kinds of entities and agents may substitute for them, and thereby serve as their replacements. It uses this institution as a means to articulate various modes of temporality that underlie social practices and material processes: temporality as repetition (and interruption); temporality as irreversibility (and reversibility); temporality as reckoning (and regimentation); temporality as roots and fruits; and temporality as cosmology and worldview. In addition, it highlights the important role that thresholds play in mediating such practices and processes.

This chapter reflects on the theological virtue of hope in the Christian community and how it must be distinguished from mere optimism. Rather than seeing hope as a result of faith, the author proposes to consider both hope and faith from within the horizon of love. In paying particular attention to the transformative spirit of hope in the church, the chapter is written in dialogue with David Jasper’s ecclesiological reflections in his Trilogy.

This chapter argues that questions over what kinds of money Americans should use, often assumed to be settled by the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, persisted throughout the twentieth century and in ongoing debates about who should be allowed what kinds of credit. It narrates the cultural forms of this history by combining critical accounts of the key transitions in the credit economy with new readings of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The first section argues that Frank Baum’s 1900 novella is better read through the emergence of retail credit than through the bimetal debates that have dominated its critical reception. The second section reads Victor Fleming’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz through the debates about the ending of the depression and the shape of New Deal credit and argues that the film’s celebration of this credit obscured its political implications. The final section reads Sidney Lumet’s 1975 The Wiz through the crisis in the New Deal, and the subsequent emergence of neoliberal governance, that the New York financial crisis of the mid-1970s signalled.

Hospitality involves the appropriate mutual behavior between host and guest; the Iliad and especially the Odyssey contain significant episodes where this obligation is either fulfilled or abused, sometimes in dramatic ways.

In the first of five opening chapters on participation and divine causation, we look at 'efficient' or 'agent' causation: what it means, from a participatory perspective, for God to be the cause and agent of creation. The chapter situates the idea of participation within the foundational doctrine, common to the Abrahamic faiths, of creation as being ex nihilo. Nothing is coaeval with God; nor did God rely upon anything else for creation: on eternally existent matter, for instance. Creation is not some past event, now over, but should rather be seen as a relation of dependence upon the creator. This is explored in terms of gift and of the relation of the doctrine of creation to the doctrine of God. This leads on to a discussion of theological apologetics.

The Conclusion explores the theme of relation as integral to any participatory vision, on the basis that if all things come forth from God, then they come forth intrinsically related. Relation, and the joys and duties that accompany it, is not some secondary overlay. Here we pick up the theme of 'intra-finite participation' (the participation in, or reception from, one creature in relation to another) explored in the chapter on truth and epistemology. Central test cases here come up in the notion of the common good, and its place in a theological vision of just economics. The chapter, and the book, end where the book began, with the theme of gift: that every good and perfect gift is 'from above, coming down from the Father of lights', as the Letter of James has it.

In the first of five opening chapters on participation and divine causation, we look at 'efficient' or 'agent' causation: what it means, from a participatory perspective, for God to be the cause and agent of creation. The chapter situates the idea of participation within the foundational doctrine, common to the Abrahamic faiths, of creation as being ex nihilo. Nothing is coaeval with God; nor did God rely upon anything else for creation: on eternally existent matter, for instance. Creation is not some past event, now over, but should rather be seen as a relation of dependence upon the creator. This is explored in terms of gift and of the relation of the doctrine of creation to the doctrine of God. This leads on to a discussion of theological apologetics.

This chapter argues that market metafiction has emerged as the vanguard fictional style of the post-financial crisis period. It begins by discussing the work of Tao Lin and Chris Kraus. The remainder of the chapter analyses two recent works of market metafiction that exemplify the paradigm, even as they register and contest differing financial and literary market logics. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), attempts to deal with risk and uncertainty central to derivatives trading provide models for “hedging” between different forms of literary value, so that underperformance in market terms may be offset against critical approbation. In Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), meanwhile, the depredations of what David Harvey calls “the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex” are seen to be of a piece with the global publishing industry’s exploitation of images of African suffering. In his novel, Cole deliberately sidesteps these stereotyped and voyeuristic images, while at the same time acknowledging the privilege that permits him (now a relatively affluent and highly educated New Yorker) to perform precisely such a resistance to market-dictated convention.

This concluding Coda juxtaposes the market logics traced throughout the book with a form of exchange that is often identified as their antithesis: that of the gift. Focusing on Barbara Browning’s 2017 novel The Gift, it shows how this exemplary work of twenty-first-century market metafiction tries to imagine itself into an alternate economy of gift-giving. The Coda explores the tension, however, whereby the publication of this experimental text, with its Occupy Wall Street affiliations, is made possible by the “gifts” of the corporate and financial donors who support its small, nonprofit press. Rather than viewing this situation as a mere contradiction, however, the Coda suggests that it helps us to recognize that the creation of formally ambitious, “autonomous” works of literary art will always be incompatible with the purity of the gift, since such creation demands material and other resources accessible only via some form of financial backing or remuneration. The Coda suggests that a key challenge for cultural practitioners and critics in the twenty-first century is to imagine a less ends-focused, more democratic structure of support for the arts.