Deianeira sends her husband Herakles a poisoned robe. Eriphyle trades the life of her husband Amphiaraos for a golden necklace. Atreus’s wife Aerope gives away the token of his sovereignty, a lamb with a golden fleece, to his brother Thyestes, who has seduced her. Gifts and exchanges always involve a certain risk in any culture, but in the ancient Greek imagination, women and gifts appear to be a particularly deadly combination. This book explores the role of gender in exchange as represented in ancient Greek culture, including Homeric epic and tragedy, non-literary texts, and iconographic and historical evidence of various kinds. Using extensive insights from anthropological work on marriage, kinship, and exchange, as well as ethnographic parallels from other traditional societies, Deborah Lyons probes the gendered division of labor among both gods and mortals, the role of marriage (and its failure) in transforming women from objects to agents of exchange, the equivocal nature of women as exchange-partners, and the importance of the sister-brother bond in understanding the economic and social place of women in ancient Greece. Her findings not only enlarge our understanding of social attitudes and practices in Greek antiquity but also demonstrate the applicability of ethnographic techniques and anthropological theory to the study of ancient societies.

From Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility to bring security in the Middle East. The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to 'liberate', 'secure' and 'educate' local populations. They staged first 'humanitarian' interventions in history and established hitherto unseen international and local security institutions. Consulting fresh primary sources collected from some thirty archives in the Middle East, Russia, the United States, and Western Europe, Dangerous Gifts revisits the late eighteenth and nineteenth century origins of these imperial security practices. It explicates how it all began. Why did Great Power interventions in the Ottoman Levant tend to result in further turmoil and civil wars? Why has the region been embroiled in a paradox-an ever-increasing demand despite the increasing supply of security-ever since? It embeds this highly pertinent genealogical history into an innovative and captivating narrative around the Eastern Question, emancipating the latter from the monopoly of Great Power politics, and foregrounding the experience of the Levantine actors. It explores the gradual yet still forceful opening up of the latter's economies to global free trade, the asymmetrical implementation of international law in their perspective, and the secondary importance attached to their threat perceptions in a world where political and economic decisions were ultimately made through the filter of global imperial interests.

In this book Valentin Groebner addresses the notions and practices of gift giving in late medieval and early modern Europe between 1400 and 1550. Focusing on the prosperous cities of the Upper Rhine, it explores the uses of gifts in political ritual and the different functions of these donations. Contemporaries spoke of these gifts—sometimes wine, sometimes coins or other precious metals—as liquid; indeed, the same German word was used for giving a present or pouring a fluid. These gifts were integral parts of an economy of information marking complex differences and dependencies in social status and hierarchy. The gifts were meticulously recorded and governed by strict social codes, yet the terminology and traditions of gift exchange in this period betray deep-seated ambivalence and anxieties about the practice. When, asks the author, does the distribution of gifts to public officials shift from an openly noted, routinely accepted practice to something clandestine, suspect, and off the record? Already by the end of the fourteenth century, the public gifts had their darker counterparts. References appear to more dangerous gifts, usually associated with the male body: from the hands of the corrupt scribe, to the skin of the venal judge, to the private parts of the body politic. A new vocabulary appears in law books, oath formulas, and polemical writing to refer to simony and usury, to Judas's reward, and to the sin of sodomy—in short, to underhanded and invisible relationships in which liquid gifts and bodily fluids mingled in unspeakable ways. The metaphors coined in the later Middle Ages and early modern period for designating illegal offerings are still with us, from "greasing hands" to the sexualized imagery of corruption. Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts explores the late medieval archaeologies of these notions and examines uses of political gifts as highly flexible instruments of control, manipulation, and coercion. Groebner sheds new light upon a phenomenon that to this day possesses the capacity to transform social circumstances.

The #1 New York Times bestselling series continues! Snowfall didn't expect to be queen of the IceWings at such a young age, but now that she is, she's going to be the best queen ever. All she has to do is keep her tribe within IceWing territory, where it's safe -- while keeping every other tribe out, where they belong.It's a perfect and simple plan, backed up by all the IceWing magic Snowfall can find. That is, until a storm of unidentified dragons arrives on her shore, looking for asylum.The foreigners are completely strange and, Snowfall is certain, utterly untrustworthy. But as she escorts the miserable new tribes out of her kingdom, Snowfall is forced to reconsider her plan. Maybe she can only keep her tribe safe . . . if she's willing to risk everything.

Gifts are always with us: we use them positively to display affection and show gratitude for favours; we suspect that others give and accept them as douceurs and bribes. The gift also performed these roles in early modern English culture: and assumed a more significant role because networks of informal support and patronage were central to social and political behaviour. Favours, and their proper acknowledgement, were preoccupations of the age of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Hobbes. As in modern society, giving and receiving was complex and full of the potential for social damage. 'Almost nothing', men of the Renaissance learned from that great classical guide to morality, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 'is more disgraceful than the fact that we do not know how either to give or receive benefits'. The Power of Gifts is about those gifts and benefits - what they were, and how they were offered and received in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows that the mode of giving, as well as what was given, was crucial to social bonding and political success. The volume moves from a general consideration of the nature of the gift to an exploration of the politics of giving. In the latter chapters some of the well-known rituals of English court life - the New Year ceremony, royal progresses, diplomatic missions - are viewed through the prism of gift-exchange. Gifts to monarchs or their ministers could focus attention on the donor, those from the crown could offer some assurance of favour. These fundamentals remained the same throughout the century and a half before the Civil War, but the attitude of individual monarchs altered specific behaviour. Elizabeth expected to be wooed with gifts and dispensed benefits largely for service rendered, James I modelled giving as the largesse of the Renaissance prince, Charles I's gift-exchanges focused on the art collecting of his coterie. And always in both politics and the law courts there was the danger that gifts would be corroded, morphing from acceptable behaviour into bribes and corruption. The Power of Gifts explores prescriptive literature, pamphlets, correspondence, legal cases and financial records, to illuminate social attitudes and behaviour through a rich series of examples and case-studies.

Mary Stein took up aikido in her mid-fifties and quickly learned what it really means to face danger—both external and internal. In this powerful collection of short essays, she vividly describes learning an active and spirited defense on the mat, in the process uncovering a lifetime of habitual tensions and emotional reactions, of flight and ineffective fight. Stein’s thoughtful musings make clear how the practice of aikido can show what is really needed, right now. The Gift of Danger is aimed at men and women for whom the question of what is genuine in their lives has taken on fresh urgency. Above all, Stein shows that a sense of danger has extraordinary importance for the martial artist; when danger is present during training, one learns to test limits and respond quickly and accurately. We follow the author as she stands, tentative but determined, on the razor’s edge between knowing and not knowing, judgment and impartiality—the only place where real growth can occur. The Gift of Danger is both a striking story of personal growth and a potent argument for aikido as a model for human behavior. Please visit thegiftofdanger.com for more information on the book and author.

What do Osama bin Laden, Adolph Hitler, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Gene Applewhite, and the slayers of abortion doctors all have in common? All of them based their dangerous and destructive actions, to a large extent, on a message they believed they received from God. The receipt of messages from God is known by many religions as 'spiritual gifts theology.' Expounding on concepts developed in earlier work, author Stan Lindsay analyzes the religious motives behind the dangerous behavior of some individuals and organizations, presents key indicators of psychotic entelechy, and proposes curative methods.