Institut für Ethnologie
28.10.2025: Vortrag im Ethnologischen Kolloquium von Tim Burger
23. Oktober 2025, von Christina Fastner
Tim Burger (Austrian Academy of Sciences) zum Thema:
Calculating a Free Gift: Perfect Transfers and the Holy Ghost Festival on the Azores
Since Mauss, anthropologists have debated the existence of a ‘free’ or ‘pure’ gift. The predominant reading of Mauss’ essay holds that the conditions for the possibility of free gifts, i.e. given without installing an obligation to return, are almost impossible to conceive, much less to describe ethnographically. Building on forms of exchange among Azorean islanders in the context of the annual Holy Ghost Festival (Festa do Espírito Santo), I argue that my interlocutors shared this sense of unfeasibility yet still attempted to set up certain transfers to proceed without reciprocal counter-gifts. Put differently, islanders calculated gifts of agrarian produce within and beyond a Catholic ritual economy in order to surpass reasonable expectations in terms of economic behavior, material logic and otherworldly reward. Doing so, they not only aligned calculative with devout thought, but also constructed what I call ‘perfect transfers’, a type of material flow that confounds distinctions between disinterested gift and instrumental transaction.
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Das Kolloquium findet immer dienstags im großen Seminarraum des Instituts statt:
Institut für Ethnologie
Seminarraum 222, 2. OG
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Westflügel
20146 Hamburg