Top Highlights

• **Marshall Sahlins** begins a comment on modern scarcity with the paradoxical contention that __hunters and gatherers ‘have affluent economies, their absolute poverty notwithstanding.’__ He writes: **Modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity.**
• __Consider the old ethics-class dilemma in which you are in a lifeboat with your spouse and child and grandmother and you must choose who is to be thrown overboard to keep the craft afloat__ – it’s a dilemma because you are forced to evaluate in a context, the family, which we are normally unwilling to stand apart from and reckon as we would reckon...
• there is a force seeking to keep the gift in motion.
• If you have not yourself been a part of such an exchange, you will easily turn up a story like these by asking around, for such spontaneous exchanges of ‘useless’ gifts are fairly common, though hardly ever developed to the depth and elegance that Malinowski found among the Massim.
• Partners in barter talk and talk until they strike a balance, but the gift is given in silence.