Graeber / Wengrow 22: "[A]nthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy."
22-3: "The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronislaw Malinowski's 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the 'kula chain' of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) -- only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. [...] To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure"
"Is this 'trade?' Perhaps, but it would bend to the breaking point our ordinary understandings of what that word means. There is, in fact, a substantial ethnographic literature on how such long-distance exchange operates in societies without markets."
"[W]e often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another"