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can display social problems; in addition, gift exchange that takes place
can convey tensions and conflicts. One critic observes that Mauss
sometimes asserts that the material gift is embedded and expressive of
social relations, and sometimes denies any real difference between the
disembedded exchange of goods, as in a typical modern economy, and
the embedded exchange of goods in the more traditional economies that
Mauss discusses. 12 This ambivalence about the social and ethical versus
the material value of the gift appears in many chapters or selections on
gifts in medieval Arabic literary culture. The ambivalence about gift
exchange parallels the anxiety about the professional use of panegyric
poetry. 13
The material gift is packaged in refined rhetoric within the story and
in the broader range of notices, stories, and poems relating to the
characters that appear in the story. 14 Long narratives play a relatively
marginal role in medieval Arabic literature. 15 While the individual
stories, notices, and poems relating to a particular person are often short,
the extended family of texts can be quite large. Although long narratives
were relatively marginal in medieval Arabic literature, biography––a
genre that delineated individual and communal identity and that both
documented and shaped conflicts within and between groups––was
absolutely central. 16 Families of texts about a particular person, whether
situated in biographical or other kinds of compilations, can convey the
complexity of characters, character development and the concatenation
12 Scott Cutler Shershow, The Work and the Gift (Chicago, 2005), pp. 96–114.
13 Jocelyn Sharlet, Patronage and Poetry in the Islamic World: Social Mobility
and Status in the Medieval Middle East and Central Asia (London, forthcoming
2010), chapters one and eight.
14 In addition to gift exchange poetry, which became established among tenth
century poets who worked with or near the Khālidī brothers, gift exchange is
featured in a number of chapters of adab compilations (for a summary of their
contents, see Jocelyn Sharlet, “The Thought that Counts: Poetry about Gift
Exchange by Kushājim, al-Ṣanawbarī, and al-Sarī al-Raffāʾ”, Middle Eastern
Literatures, forthcoming 2011, note 6).
15 Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, “Development of Arabic Prose from around A.D.
1000 to 1150 A.D.” in S. Leder et al., eds., Studies in Arabic and Islam (Leuven,
2002), pp. 205–16.
16 Michael Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography: The heirs of the
prophets in the age of al-Maʾmun (Cambridge, 2000).