Practice question · Multiple choice
In the kula, valuables circulate permanently and no one accumulates them. What is being produced if not wealth?
Hints
- Ask what a man loses by keeping a famous armband, and what he gains by passing it on.
- The objects are useless. What does moving them accomplish?
Show the answer
B. Relationships and reputation, not property
Why
Keeping the armband stops the name attached to it, and giving it on is what buys renown, the value is in the transaction rather than the object. Mauss built the theory of the gift on exactly this: a present that must be reciprocated is not a transfer of goods but the creation of a bond.
Practise Economic Anthropology and Reciprocity
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Economic Anthropology and Reciprocity
- Ethnographic evidence shows that most pre-modern economies were organized around barter between strangers.
- Kula valuables circulate for years and are never kept, while ordinary trade rides along the same routes. Why…
- Mauss published _Essai sur le don_, the essay that founded gift theory, in which year? Set the slider.
- Which features are true of kula valuables?
- Order Mauss’s cycle as one gift moves between two lineages.
- Match each of Sahlins’s reciprocity grades to its example.
- Sort each flow of goods by Polanyi’s mode of integration.