Blog Entry 3

Over the course of this gift-giving and memoria lessons of this course, I have learned about both the history behind gift-giving and memoria. 

Starting with gift-giving, people start with giving gifts, in the hopes of the return of gifts or something such as prayer in return. In class, we talked about how gifts now are given in hopes of reciprocity at a later time. This created the idea that historians call the gift exchange. These gift exchanges can happen in the present day at events such as baby showers, bridal showers, weddings, birthdays, graduations, holidays, and many more. However during the Middle Ages gifts were given to show honor and wealth. Almost to show the social status of someone or a family. Because of this development to show status, the Middle Ages, from 500-1000 became a gift based economy. 

Memoria can be connected to the gifts, because the gifts were given by people to remember the dead during the Middle Ages. People during the Middle Ages were very worried about being forgotten after they died. To combat this, they donated gifts, built monasteries, churches, and tombs, and founded masses and liturgical services. With the gifts being given in order to be remembered, the hope of the giver is to have prayers said in return for them. The prayers given were said to move the dead out of purgatory if they were in it after they died. Gifts were often given to the poor, and the prayers from the poor were worth more than other people.

I know that we talked about it in class, but this really relates well to the movie Coco. While Coco has to do with Day of the Dead, it still has to do with the memory of the dead and the fear of being forgotten. This relates well to what we learned in class about memory in the Middle Ages. Hector, from Coco, was worried about being forgotten and disappearing. He needed his "gift" of a photo on the ofrenda, so he would be remembered and not forgotten.