Jeff Russell

Thank you - it sounds like it could be an interesting read. Although, initially, there does not seem to be much appreciation that the colonists who adopted wampum for money simply found in wampum a good substitute for the coinage they were accustomed to using (something like prisoners using packs of cigarettes as currency). The role that wampum played in native cultures is unlikely to have much resembled the uses the colonists put it to.

Also, there are a couple of "just so" stories from the world of biology appearing in this summary. ;) For example that you can understand society by centring "genes" as the [presumed] rational actors in your story instead of people. (Dawkins "Selfish Gene" book is actually one of the most religious books I have ever read by someone who is said to abhor religion!) And, the assumption that "co-operation" is sharply constrained in nature. Hmmm... Lynn Margulis had a great deal to say to that!

The most interesting part of this summary is that it barely mentions social relationships - which is the context in which all exchange between humans takes place. What Graeber (influenced by Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, and others) shows is that what we in the west have come to fetishise (the *things* that are traded), most people conceive of "things" in relation to the people from whose hand, or to whose hand, the thing will move. Goods that move from hand to hand, are only a part of a larger language of relationship.

The "distance" in time between the giving of a gift and its reciprocation (which is the "problem" that money is supposed to have solved) is not a problem at all when the two people involved are not strangers and have a long term relationship - long term enough to easily hold any and all of the long time gaps between a gift going one way and a gift going the other in a normal state of trust. The problem only becomes a problem if strangers find themselves needing to trade with each other - and [importantly] needing to remain strangers at the end of the trade. It seems to me that Graeber offers a much more sophisticated and ethnographically nuanced analysis of the many languages of exchange that people have used, and of which money (as we use it) comes down to us as one narrowed and impoverished [and also, incidentally, impoverishING] stream.

Yes... now that I think of it, I must take another look at Graeber's Debt book.

PS - thanks for entertaining this lengthy conversation! :)