Everyone thought native Americans were finished long ago and yet modern ethnographers of the Cree nation are now talking about a ‘cultural enhancement’ or an ‘indigenous affluence’ that has actually been funded by the use of the market economy. They speak of a culturally-oriented project of development, one that reflects certain customary Cree ideas of ‘the good life’ by an explicit promotion of Cree ‘culture’, although their classic situation of dependency could still eventually be their downfall. In the meantime, the trappings of dependency could also be an empirical critique of the orthodoxy that money and markets are incompatible with the customs and kinship relations of so-called traditional societies. Indeed, Cree people find two-way radios useful in sustaining customary relations between kinsmen. Colin Scott found that snowmobiles and trucks likewise ‘have increased [the] opportunities for sharing’. Human sharing is only an aspect of a cosmic cycle of exchange—that includes the animals who give themselves to the hunters and receive in turn their ritual rebirth—and snowmobiles have become part of an even larger economy than is dreamed of in the capitalist philosophy: a world system that includes both human beings and nature in social relations of personhood and interdependence. Over the centuries of increasing engagement in commodity production and exchange, Scott writes

The Cree culture has not simply persisted in spite of capitalism or because the people have resisted it. This is not so much a culture of resistance as the resistance of culture. Since Cree act in the world as social-historical beings, with their own cultural consciousness of themselves and of the objects of their existence, their experience of capitalism is mediated by the practice of their own form of life. Culture inhabits action. In the event, the capitalist forces are played out in a different cultural universe.

According to Marx, money destroys the archaic community because money becomes the community. It is as if, Freud complained, a person suddenly got a psyche when he drew his first pay check. In a book called Money and the Morality of Exchange, however, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry collect a number of ethnographic examples to refute the idea. As against the idea that money gives rise to a particular world view—the unsociable, impersonal and contractual one we associate with it—they emphasise ‘how an existing world view gives rise to particular ways of representing money’ (1989:19). Money can very well be the servant of custom not its master. The destructive effects of markets and money on communities presuppose a separate ‘economic’ domain, as Bloch and Parry point out, an amoral sphere of transaction separated from the generosities of kith and kin. Where there is no structural opposition between the relationships of economy and sociability, where material transactions are ordered by social relations rather than vice versa, then the amorality we attribute to money need not result. Where the economy is embedded in society, say Bloch and Parry, ‘monetary relations are rather unlikely to be represented as the antithesis of bonds of kinship and friendship, and there is consequently nothing inappropriate about making gifts of money to cement such bonds’ (1989:19).

It follows that in certain structural conditions, money could actually increase kinship bonds: it could ‘develop’ the so-called traditional societies in the sense that they understand develop-man—as obtaining more and better of what they consider to be good things, such as anthropological reports from the New Guinea Highlands since the 1960s have reported. Benefiting from the market returns to migratory labour, coffee production and other cash-cropping, the great inter-clan ceremonial exchanges have flourished in recent decades as never before. Among the Enga, Chimbu, Hagen, Mendi, and others, the ceremonies have increased in frequency as well as in the magnitude of people engaged and goods transacted in them. Accordingly big-men are more numerous and powerful. Old clan alliances that had lapsed have been revived. Interpersonal kinship networks have been widened and strengthened. Money has been the means, rather than the antithesis, of community. High-value bank notes replace pearl shells as key exchange valuables, gifts of Toyota land cruisers complement the usual pigs, and large quantities of beer function as initiatory presents (adding certain celebratory dimensions to the customary festivities). Captured in reciprocal obligations and bride-wealth payments, ‘the money which circulates in exchanges is generally not “consumed” at all,’ as Andrew Strathern noted of the Hageners, ‘but keeps on circulating, through the momentum of debt and investment’ (1979:546). Rena Lederman reports that among modern Mendi people the exchange obligations between clans and personal kin create ‘a demand for modern currency far greater than the demand generated by existing market outlets’ (1986:332). Hence the Mendi say they have the true exchange economy, by contrast to the mere ‘subsistence economy’ of white men (1986:236).