Practice question · Multiple choice
Kula valuables circulate for years and are never kept, while ordinary trade rides along the same routes. Why treat the two as different economies rather than one?
Hints
- Ask when each transaction is finished.
- What does a kula partner come away with that a trader does not?
Show the answer
B. Because the kula's return is a relationship, not a good
Why
A gimwali exchange is settled on the spot; a kula gift leaves a debt that keeps the partners bound. The obligation, not the object, is what actually circulates.
Practise Economic Anthropology and Reciprocity
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More questions on Economic Anthropology and Reciprocity
- Ethnographic evidence shows that most pre-modern economies were organized around barter between strangers.
- 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.
- In the kula, valuables circulate permanently and no one accumulates them. What is being produced if not…