Bride exchange in the Western Mediterranean, 400-600 C.E.

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This project compares different strategies used by elites to co-opt each other into predictable behaviour at a time when the Roman empire in the West was subjected first to repeated invasion and then to collapse.Two main strategies are central here: diplomatic marriage on the one hand, and the exchange of religious gifts, especially relics, on the other. The former area has remained under-explored despite increasing interest in the history of marriage and the household in recent decades. The latter has received comparatively greater attention, building on important work by Brown and Geary in the 1980s. A recent article by Florin Curta (in Speculum of 2006) offers a summary of this work's use of theories of the gift from Mauss to Bourdieu.We suggest, however, that after Bourdieu anthropologists working on exchange and value have in fact developed a more valuable critical framework for assessing how donors and recipients assigned value and meaning to acts of exchange, a framework neglected by historians 'borrowing' from the earlier anthropological literature. Crucial to this approach is the fact that recognition of an act or a relationship can be asymmetrical: the two parties to an exchange can disagree over the act's importance, or about the follow-on effect that it should have.It is important to notice also that by comparison to raw metal or minted coin, objects of gift exchange have an enhanced capacity to 'carry' narrative. This holds true whether the objects are animate (like the brides involved in kinship diplomacy), inanimate (prestige objects such as jewellery), or ambiguous (saints' relics, which partake of the characteristics of each category). Negotiation of this narrative element is central to the social choreography of exchange.I have placed particular importance on the volatile dynamics of this negotiation of meaning. The first is what I call the 'calculated vulnerability' of the donor in the act of exchange. Because of the volatility of meaning in the exchange act, the donor has to propose a meaning which may or may not be confirmed by the recipient. This in itself is a gesture of vulnerability, even though it has been interpreted by previous writers as a gesture of power (similar to Veblen's 'conspicuous consumption'). The donor is open to material damage, especially in the case of kinship diplomacy, where the bride's role is that of a hostage in the household of a rival lineage. (The early medieval sources are rich with cases of maiming and/or execution of brides whose fathers have fallen out of favour.) But even where the object of exchange is safe from damage, the gift can be refused, or treated in a way that humiliates the donor, after accepting a gift the recipient can refuse a claim of loyalty that was clearly implicit in the exchange.These dynamics of relationship negotiation were volatile in the context of the upheavals of the last century of empire in the West. More was up for grabs in a situation of chaos. But there is also a surprise: developments of the comparatively solid empire of the late third and fourth centuries also played an important role: in particular, the administrative reforms of Diocletian, which had undermined the social fabric of regional elites, and the coinage reforms of Constantine, which made it possible to side-step techniques of social solidarity necessary in the absence of monetary liquidity, and the rise of Christianity.These developments made it easier to withhold symmetrical recognition of social acts. In the context of exchange, this made the vulnerability of the donor more difficult to calculate. The rise of relics as an exchange medium can be understood, by comparison to the older strategy of bride exchange, as an attempt to limit the donor's vulnerability, at the same time enhancing the donor's control over the narrative capacity of the exchange object (through the texts that often accompanied religious gifts).