22 | The Giving Divide
constituted according to Islamic law (vakıfs), whose format is standard enough
to consider them the closest that fourteenth-century Anatolia has to offer to
archival documents. In addition, I used a variety of other sources that include
chronicles as well as the travelogue of Ibn Battutah, who left a rich but strongly
opinionated description of the regions he visited in the fourteenth century, from
Morocco and Anatolia to China and from Mali to the Swahili Coast to Indonesia.
To reconstruct the experience or texture of daily life in late medieval Ana-
tolia, I scanned these sources for passages that depict the ways in which people
interact with food, covering everything from the work of peasants in fields of
barley to the fasting regimen of dervishes, to the symbolic association between
rice and luxury. In this chapter, I concentrate on the scenes that depict food giv-
ing because they offer insight into how late medieval Anatolians defined both
their own social identity and the social identity of other people.
For other, better-studied time periods, an extensive scholarship exists on the
social meaning and function of gifts, which is largely the work of anthropologists
and the historians who have borrowed from their approach. The core concern
of this scholarship is reciprocation, or what the giving party expects back from
the receiving party. The literature shows that, especially in premodern states, the
most common expectation is for other gifts of the same nature. In other words,
a gift is followed by a second round of gift giving in which the giver becomes the
recipient, then a third in which the roles are inversed again, then a fourth, and
so on. This ultimately creates “giving circles,” whose direct effect is to strengthen
social relations.
An expectation of reciprocity is indeed apparent in most of the gift-giving
scenes I survey here, but only a small proportion of these follow a one-to-one
pattern of equals exchanging gifts back and forth. Most of the time, rather, the
giver and the recipient carry very different social identities. Although the gifts
I discuss here do have the effect of strengthening the social order, they do so by
incarnating and reinforcing specific relations of social inequality. Rather than
the act of giving itself, it is those relations of social inequality that constitute my
central concern, because they allow us to circumscribe the identity of various
groups in society. In exploring the subject, this chapter will concentrate first on
the giving activities of rulers and urban folk and then turn its attention to the
various identities that derived from religious professions.
Food Gifts among Rulers and City Dwellers
Some scenes of food giving will come as no surprise to those familiar with late
medieval and early modern Middle Eastern history, as they present a handful of
rulers and grandees who distribute meals in person. Witness, for example, the
deeds of Ottoman sultan Murad II (r. 1421–1444, 1446–1451) after the construc-
tion of a bridge that revitalized a region in Thrace: