Books by Ilana F Silber
MAUSS International , 2023
Digital journal MAUSS international No 3
Cover and Table of Contents
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MAUSS International, 2021
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MAUSS International, 2021
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This book explores the social position of virtuoso ascetics in two civilizations - traditional Th... more This book explores the social position of virtuoso ascetics in two civilizations - traditional Theravada Buddhism and medieval Catholicism - in which they achieved a position of considerable prestige and cultural ascendancy. In both settings, it is argued, virtuoso asceticism was able to ...
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Papers delivered at conferences by Ilana F Silber
Conference on The Legacy of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities... more Conference on The Legacy of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, May 8, 2024
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Conference Understanding Voluntary Action: Past, Present and Future, 2020
My talk will discuss the ambiguous position of elite philanthropy in contemporary liberal democra... more My talk will discuss the ambiguous position of elite philanthropy in contemporary liberal democratic context, where it is undergoing extensive expansion on the one hand but also facing mounting criticism and public distrust on the other. I shall aim to provide a “road map” to the recent flood of critiques of mega philanthropy deployed in a range of media and influential publications. In such perspective, contemporary elite philanthropy emerges as an arena besieged by intense dilemmas and contradictions, with challenging implications for the operation of public giving as a vector of action for the common good in our times.
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Papers in Gift Research and Theory by Ilana F Silber
Revue du MAUSS , 2024
Cet article propose de revisiter l'étude de Natalie Z. Davis, Essai sur le don dans la France du ... more Cet article propose de revisiter l'étude de Natalie Z. Davis, Essai sur le don dans la France du XVIème siècle (2000), du point de vue de sa contribution conceptuelle et comparative au domaine de la recherche et de la théorie du don. L'essentiel de la réussite de Davis réside dans sa description complète d'un registre du don spécifique embrassant la diversité des processus de dons qui y coexistent, tout en retraçant la relation complexe et pénétration mutuelle entre ce registre et d’autres domaines de la vie sociale. Elle a ainsi développé des outils d'analyse macro-culturelle qui restent encore aujourd'hui inégalés et insuffisamment appliqués. Au-delà de la France du XVIe siècle, Davis suggère également la nécessité d'une comparaison interculturelle avec les registres du don dans les sociétés non chrétiennes, une position qu'elle a de nouveau exprimée dans un texte plus récent consacré à la charité dans les contextes du Moyen-Orient.
English :Ilana F. Silber, Natalie Z. Davis and the Registers of Giving
Abstract
This article offers to revisit Natalie Z. Davis' study The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (2000) from the point of view of its conceptual and comparative contribution to the field of gift research and theory. Standing at the core of Davis' landmark achievement is her comprehensive account of an entire, historically specific gift register and of the diversity of gift processes coexisting within it—while also tracing the complex and mutually pervasive relation between this gift register and other aspects domains of social life. As such, she is also shown to develop tools of macro-cultural analysis that still remain unparalleled and unsufficiently applied in gift research and theory to this day. Reaching beyond sixteenth-century France, Davis also suggests the need for cross-cultural comparison with gift registers in non-Christian societies, a stance she expressed again in a later text centering on charity in Middle Eastern contexts.
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MAUSS International , 2022
The aim is to compile academic publications across disciplines in the humanities and social scien... more The aim is to compile academic publications across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences since 2000. It is on-going, open and interactive, i.e we hope to keep improving it after its first publication in the present, second issue of MAUSS International, and invite whomever is interested to contribute to make it more fully comprehensive. For now, we are launching a first such listing in English, have already a list in German planned for publication in our next, third issue, and intend to initiate and encourage similar compilations of relevant studies in other languages.
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Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Economics, History and Political Science, 2021
This article revisits Sahlins's discussion of Mauss's Essay on the Gift, with a focus on its cont... more This article revisits Sahlins's discussion of Mauss's Essay on the Gift, with a focus on its contribution to research on the gift and its broader, social and political implications. Sahlins's reading of the Essay in Stone Age Economics (1972), we submit, richly buttressed Mauss's attention to the gift's "total" significance and its "spiritual" dimensions-even as it developed a new interpretation of the famed Maori notion of hau, or "spirit" of the gift. But it also offered a Hobbesian-inflected, rational and utilitarian rendering of the gift as a form of social contract, which elided the more complex and contradictory facets of gift-exchange that were underscored by Mauss in the Essay on the Gift. No less important, it left the reader wonder how precisely to relate between the gift's spiritual and contractual dimensions. Recent returns by Sahlins to the topic of the gift indicate a persistent interest in the gift's "spirit", while confirming, even enhancing tendencies found in his early writings. Highlighting the anti-Hobbesian and anti-utilitarian effects of one modality of the gift-'the gift from everyone to everyone'-in the sphere of kin-like relatedness in particular, they also pose a contrast to the Essay's more inclusive vision of the gift's extensions to all parts of social life, including the state. Building upon Mauss and Sahlins, we need pursue the relation between the "spirit" of gift relations and their "contractual" implications as not only a normative and political but also empirical question, equally pertinent across past and present settings.
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I. Hentschel ed. I. Hentschel ed. Die Kunst der Gabe / The Art of Gift-Giving: Theatre between Autonomy and Social Practice. Berlin: Transcript Verlag, , 2019
Theatre as a metaphor has been richly applied to theorize many aspects of social life and would a... more Theatre as a metaphor has been richly applied to theorize many aspects of social life and would appear to be eminently applicable to the analysis of gift interactions as well. Yet little attention has been paid to the theatrical dimension of gift-relations in general, and of elite philanthropy as a form of public giving in particular. This paper starts by surveying how theatric concepts and metaphors were richly deployed across various currents of sociological and anthropological theory yet surprisingly stopped short of being applied to the dramatic and performative dimension of gift processes. Second, taking clue from Clifford Geertz's seminal essay on the Balinese cockfight (1972), I suggest elements of a macro-cultural and contextualizing approach to the theatrics of public giving. Building upon aspects of Geertz's argument that have not yet received attention, I offer to revisit not only his famed notion of cockfights as ‘deep play,’ but also what he indicates concerning the public stage that contributes to sustain the latter's enactment as such. Understanding the changing place and expression of elite philanthropy in the public sphere, I submit in the final section, requires attending to its performative dimension as public giving and possible vector of ‘deep play’ traversed by a distinctive spate of internal contradictions and paradoxes. But it also demands positioning this performative dimension in the framework of gift repertoires, themselves shaping as well as shaped by dynamics of power, display and recognition on a public stage now increasingly akin to a shifty, enigmatic constellation of meso-theatres.
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Journal of Classical Sociology, 2018
This article revisits Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites de passage from the point of view of gift theory.... more This article revisits Arnold Van Gennep’s Rites de passage from the point of view of gift theory. Gifts emerge as quasi-omnipresent and in association with all sorts as well as all phases of rites of passage in Van Gennep’s text. However, he never explicitly addresses nor problematizes this pervasive connection between gifts and rites of passage. In contrast with Marcel Mauss’s later Essai sur le don, moreover, Rites de passage tends to relate to gift-exchange in either mere instrumental,
economic terms, or as a rather simple and efficient, binding and “unifying” mechanism, while displaying none of Mauss’s complementary attentiveness to the agonistic as well as more complex and contradictory features of gift processes. Yet, precisely the ideas of margin and liminality for which Van Gennep’s became best known, but which did not seep at all into his own treatment of gifts, may be drawn upon to approach gift interactions as ritual processes, perhaps even rites
of passage, with liminal phases and anti-structural features of their own kind. Such an angle of analysis happens to converge with current approaches to the gift that have underscored the part
it may play in fraught dynamics of mutual definition and recognition in human interactions. It might also suggest new ways of interpreting the deep, recurrent association between gifts and rites of
passage, which Rites de passage unwittingly contributed to highlight, but still needs to be further explored and conceptualized.
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Michael Satlow ed. The Gift in Antiquity. Studies in the Ancient World: Comparative Histories. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 202-220., 2013
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Sociological Theory, Jan 1, 2009
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Books by Ilana F Silber
http://www.journaldumauss.net/?Le-premier-numero-du-MAUSS-International-est-sorti
https://www.editionsbdl.com/revue/mauss-international/
https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-mauss-international-2021-1.htm
http://www.journaldumauss.net/?Le-premier-numero-du-MAUSS-International-est-sorti
https://www.editionsbdl.com/revue/mauss-international/
https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-mauss-international-2021-1.htm
Papers delivered at conferences by Ilana F Silber
Papers in Gift Research and Theory by Ilana F Silber
English :Ilana F. Silber, Natalie Z. Davis and the Registers of Giving
Abstract
This article offers to revisit Natalie Z. Davis' study The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (2000) from the point of view of its conceptual and comparative contribution to the field of gift research and theory. Standing at the core of Davis' landmark achievement is her comprehensive account of an entire, historically specific gift register and of the diversity of gift processes coexisting within it—while also tracing the complex and mutually pervasive relation between this gift register and other aspects domains of social life. As such, she is also shown to develop tools of macro-cultural analysis that still remain unparalleled and unsufficiently applied in gift research and theory to this day. Reaching beyond sixteenth-century France, Davis also suggests the need for cross-cultural comparison with gift registers in non-Christian societies, a stance she expressed again in a later text centering on charity in Middle Eastern contexts.
economic terms, or as a rather simple and efficient, binding and “unifying” mechanism, while displaying none of Mauss’s complementary attentiveness to the agonistic as well as more complex and contradictory features of gift processes. Yet, precisely the ideas of margin and liminality for which Van Gennep’s became best known, but which did not seep at all into his own treatment of gifts, may be drawn upon to approach gift interactions as ritual processes, perhaps even rites
of passage, with liminal phases and anti-structural features of their own kind. Such an angle of analysis happens to converge with current approaches to the gift that have underscored the part
it may play in fraught dynamics of mutual definition and recognition in human interactions. It might also suggest new ways of interpreting the deep, recurrent association between gifts and rites of
passage, which Rites de passage unwittingly contributed to highlight, but still needs to be further explored and conceptualized.
http://www.journaldumauss.net/?Le-premier-numero-du-MAUSS-International-est-sorti
https://www.editionsbdl.com/revue/mauss-international/
https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-mauss-international-2021-1.htm
http://www.journaldumauss.net/?Le-premier-numero-du-MAUSS-International-est-sorti
https://www.editionsbdl.com/revue/mauss-international/
https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-mauss-international-2021-1.htm
English :Ilana F. Silber, Natalie Z. Davis and the Registers of Giving
Abstract
This article offers to revisit Natalie Z. Davis' study The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (2000) from the point of view of its conceptual and comparative contribution to the field of gift research and theory. Standing at the core of Davis' landmark achievement is her comprehensive account of an entire, historically specific gift register and of the diversity of gift processes coexisting within it—while also tracing the complex and mutually pervasive relation between this gift register and other aspects domains of social life. As such, she is also shown to develop tools of macro-cultural analysis that still remain unparalleled and unsufficiently applied in gift research and theory to this day. Reaching beyond sixteenth-century France, Davis also suggests the need for cross-cultural comparison with gift registers in non-Christian societies, a stance she expressed again in a later text centering on charity in Middle Eastern contexts.
economic terms, or as a rather simple and efficient, binding and “unifying” mechanism, while displaying none of Mauss’s complementary attentiveness to the agonistic as well as more complex and contradictory features of gift processes. Yet, precisely the ideas of margin and liminality for which Van Gennep’s became best known, but which did not seep at all into his own treatment of gifts, may be drawn upon to approach gift interactions as ritual processes, perhaps even rites
of passage, with liminal phases and anti-structural features of their own kind. Such an angle of analysis happens to converge with current approaches to the gift that have underscored the part
it may play in fraught dynamics of mutual definition and recognition in human interactions. It might also suggest new ways of interpreting the deep, recurrent association between gifts and rites of
passage, which Rites de passage unwittingly contributed to highlight, but still needs to be further explored and conceptualized.
Keywords: S.N. Eisenstadt, theory of culture, cultural sociology, comparative historical sociology, Max Weber.