Chapter 1 chronicles how the distractibility of a king, the agency of objects, the desires that cloud judgment, and the memories that haunt the present shape events perhaps even more than ideology. Prior to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Duke of Newcastle proposed returning to a Caroline-style theatrical marketplace, but he was outmaneuvered by courtier-playwrights long accustomed to deploying networks of access. Contingency also determined outcomes. The particular circumstances of Charles II’s upbringing certainly benefited William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew, the two successful patentees. Unlike his royal predecessors, the new monarch regarded the commercial theatre as a gift to be bestowed upon persistent clients who would enjoy monopolistic control going forward. No one foresaw, of course, the economic repercussions of that gift, namely, how the transformation of the theatre from a purely commercial to a hybrid enterprise would require substantial support beyond the box office. Additionally, the duopoly so sought by Killigrew and Davenant exerted its own unexpected agencies. As the following chapters explore, its resulting economic and cultural logic galvanized a host of decisions about repertories and performance practices that would prove both innovative and ruinous.

This final substantive chapter looks in detail at the festival of the Kalends of January as an extended case study for the persistence of popular culture in late antiquity. This distinctively late antique festival is examined from a number of angles, looking at its official and informal, public and private dimensions. Next, the longstanding ecclesiastical critique of the festival as ‘pagan’ is discussed. Key themes of the festival are then considered in turn, starting with the role of festive licence, often seen as a central feature of popular culture more broadly. The Kalends masquerades, including dressing up as animals and in the clothes of the opposite sex, are explored. Next the important element of gift exchange is discussed, providing a way in to look at the social and economic dimensions of the festival. In this way this chapter shows the continuing role of the festival in negotiating the unequal yet broadly stable social relations of late antique Provence, despite the hostility of the church.

Chapter 2 examines the economic life of the South Asian hajj, which, drawing on contemporary conceptualizations, it describes as a “bazaar” economy. The chapter suggests that this seaborne economy, whose lynchpin was the seasonal market of the hajj, was an important arena for speculative ventures from the Subcontinent, particularly from the western seaboard of India. At the same time, the chapter underlines how major developments in Indian Ocean bazaar trade during the eighteenth century – the growth of the cash nexus, the deepening of credit networks, and the proliferation of new patterns of consumption and production – invigorated an array of South Asian gift-giving practices during hajj. By examining both merchant inventories and gift registers, the chapter argues that, far from being located outside the realms of commodity exchange, the gift was intricately interwoven into the hajj bazaar economy. From religiously inspired altruism to politically motivated exchange, hajj gifts thus also played a role in invigorating the prestige of emergent royal and other social groups in India as the Mughal empire decentralized. Like the previous chapter, Chapter 2 also explores matters over the long durée. It accordingly shows how colonial expansion ultimately recast the meanings of both the gift and the “bazaar.”

In this chapter, a more sociological and qualitative conceptualization of relationality is provided. As with the Little Prince and the fox, building relationships require recognizing and subsequent care for the other, who becomes a special individual and not just one-of-many. The origins of the relational framework is traced to early writings from the phenomenologists and subsequent work by theorists of the ethical framework of care.

Only a portion of the anthropological literature on philanthropy, charity, and humanitarianism explicitly engages with literature on the anthropology of ethics and morality, yet all of it describes a field of practice defined by a commitment to precisely these terms – the ethical, the moral, and the good. The first section of this essay reviews works that describe the moral and practical content and effects of philanthropic giving, focussing on the diversity of giving practices, logics, and outcomes. The second section describes how anthropologists have thought about humanitarian and philanthropic practices as the grounds upon and through which people cultivate and enact forms of ethical subjectivity. The third and final section considers anthropology’s relationship to ideas of moral clarity and moral judgement as these terms are used by anthropologists writing about, and taking part in, a range of social projects.

This paper examines the relationship between images of women on funerary monuments in Etruria and Anatolia, with particular focus on the so-called “female assembly scenes” on Chiusine cippi of the Late Archaic period. In these reliefs, groups of seated women drape and exchange textiles among each other. Although scholarly opinion differs on the meanings of these scenes, the visual focus on cloth as a component of social or religious ritual is paramount. The importance of the textile within the specific Etruscan context of these scenes is further emphasized when considered alongside contemporaneous reliefs in Anatolia associated with females, most notably those on the Polyxena sarcophagus from a tomb in the northern Troad. Through both visual analysis and attention to broader issues of gendered representation and identity, this chapter examines the importance of cultural context for interpreting female-focused narratives in both ancient Etruria and Anatolia.

I establish conceptual connections between food, the senses, and political life by drawing upon examples of gastropolitical moments which comprise charged meanings that may be unveiled through a closer inspection of the sensible. They reveal different power dynamics of cohesion and tension between varying sets of political actors. The senses aid in exemplifying political relationships and connections, directing us to particular aspects of political form and practice. This chapter therefore serves as a critical instigation of combining analytical approaches from sociology, anthropology, diplomacy, and food and foodways in appraising the importance of culinary–political encounters both within and between nations. Through such interdisciplinary conversations, it adopts a sensory reading and discussion of gastropolitical exchanges. Subsequently, my analysis is geared towards developing a political life of sensation that builds a theoretical and empirical connection between the political and the sensible. Such a sensory perspective explores the sociopolitical metaphors of taste and other accompanying sense experience. These are addressed through my proposed notion of political gustemology which I utilise in this chapter to illustrate the deployment of sensory knowledge and power in both actual sensorial exchanges and metaphorical takes on the sensory.

Anatolia and Etruria have been separated by scholarship as much as by the Mediterranean itself. Although Anatolian archaeology has rested in the preserve of Near Eastern scholars, with Etruscan studies falling more within the domain of Classical-oriented scholars, neither sits at the center of Near Eastern or Classical Archaeology. Recent theoretical developments that seek to connect communities more effectively have begun to emphasize the links between these cultural groups and thus bring together their respective scholarly disciplines. This contribution examines the history of interest in the relationship between Anatolia and Etruria, and it reassesses our evidence for it within a Mediterranean-wide context. To do this, it considers historical interpretations of these connections and presents a new perspective that balances shared practices with localized differences, which increasingly is preferred to characterize this period of Mediterranean history.

This chapter focuses on the development of Kakabona, a series of peri-urban settlements just outside Honiara, the national capital. Drawing on a series of disputes that came before chiefs and courts during the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to rapid urbanisation, it demonstrates that the juridical construction and regulation of property prompts the delineation of boundaries between people and on the ground, often in palpably exclusionary ways. Thus rather than ‘securing’ people’s rights and reducing conflict, legal recognition has generated increased social fragmentation and stratification. In Kakabona as elsewhere in Solomon Islands, these processes are now strongly tied to the idea of masculine ‘chiefs’; however, they are also informed by culturally specific meanings attached to land. The chapter demonstrates that paying attention to the emotional or affective dimensions of land disputes, in particular the multifaceted danger they pose, casts light on the emergence of land disputes as crucial sites for the performance of idealised models of masculinity. Moreover, these processes simultaneously reproduce peri-urban areas as sites of insecurity and the state as a masculine domain.

This chapter examines a tiny copy of Fleury Richard’s painting Madame de la Vallière Carmalite (1806) made by Napoleon’s stepdaughter-cum-sister-in-law, Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837), from the intertwined perspectives of gift exchange, amateur art practice, and post-revolutionary politics. Mounted on a toothpick case and gifted by Hortense to her brother Eugène after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, when both were exiled from France, this miniature was one of many seemingly inconsequential items Hortense gave to friends and family throughout her life. Following Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and relying on a close reading of Hortense’s correspondence, the chapter first demonstrates that the exchange of such small objects carried a strategic value within the culture of sensibility that permeated elite social networks in early nineteenth-century Europe, one to which amateur artworks were particularly well suited. It then suggests that as self-referential signs, amateur artworks also had the potential to carry complex meanings about their makers. Ultimately, the chapter argues that through its miniaturization, amateur reproduction, and exchange as a sentimental gift, Richard’s picture became a politically shrewd symbol of Hortense’s identity in exile.

Exploring the vast anthropological and archaeological scholarship on money, this chapter lays out an approach to early money. Examining what it is we refer to when we talk about money, and what effect it supposedly has on society, it becomes clear that money can be diverse and does not have a set effect on society. Rather, the significance of money depends on the social and cultural logic in which its use is embedded. Arguing from this perspective, a distinction between primitive and modern forms of money – or equivalents, such as special-purpose and general-purpose money, or indigenous currencies and state money, with coinage representing modern/general-purpose/state-issued money – is rejected as arbitrary and not conducive to a better understanding of early money preceding coinage. Instead, money is conceptualized as being a commodity and a token at the same time. This is then applied to the material that is placed at the centre of this study – the cut and broken precious metal items generally known as hacksilber and hackgold – thereby substantiating an understanding of this material as a form of money, still preceding coinage.

Chapter 2 explores the genealogy and meanings of supi, a polyvalent term for an intimate girlfriend in coastal Ghana. It distinguishes between supi as an intimate same-sex discourse emerging from the bonds between schoolgirls and adult same-sex lovers, and public representations of supi, including derogatory cinematic portrayals of “supi-supi lesbians” bonded to the water spirit Mami Wata. Focusing on the recollections of women of different generations, the chapter examines the notions of gift exchange and the homosocial spaces by which supi practices are informed. In these narratives supi is framed as an introduction to the ways in which same-sex passion can be known, negotiated, and celebrated in disguise. Invoked as a form of knowledge, supi amounts to an intimate sozializing and learning process. Despite the tacit character of the knowledge at stake, it is constitutive of the bonding networks of those articulate same-sex desiring women identifed as “knowing women.”

Informal institutions are the voluntary social arrangements established between households that are used to solve problems that they cannot resolve on their own. Examples from seven ancient and premodern societies are used to illustrate the operation of informal institutions to mobilize labor, establish and maintain interhousehold social networks, obtain spouses, construct intergroup trade networks, and supply emergency support to avoid household failure.