دانلود کتاب خطرات هدایای دوران باستان به عصر دیجیتال

In 2013, the aftermath of the G20 summit in St Petersburg threatened to upend, rather than enhance international cooperation due to worries about the gifts delegates had received. Attendees, suspicious of Russians bearing goodie bags and gift baskets, soon alleged that their gifts were bugged and were digital Trojan horses, allowing the Russians to spy on them. The Trojan horse in the Iliad, perhaps one of the most famous gifts in Western cultural history, epitomises the risk that a gift might not quite be what it seems and that the apparently amicable gesture of giving hides a darker, harmful intent. Anxieties that gift exchanges could in-volve danger or damage have pervaded the mythologies, folklore, and literatures of societies across human history in many parts of the globe. Deceptive, dangerous gifts pervaded ancient Greek mythology, from Pandora’s box the Nessus shirt soaked in poisonous blood, with even well-intentioned gifts from the gods frequently proving harmful. Distrust of gifts is embedded in the ambiguity of ‘gift’ in several European languages, while fateful gifts feature in cultural artefacts from societies as diverse as medieval Scandinavia and the Americas. The idea of dangerous, toxic, fateful, harmful gifts perseveres in many different spheres of modern life including politics, diplomatic relations, religious practices, or social interactions, and resonates in literature and film. Concerns over the damage that gifts can do remain sufficiently strong that it has even been suggested that much modern Western law is for-mulated to protect us from gifts.