Key concept: materiality practice questions.

Malinowski, who worked in the Trobriand Islands between 1915 and 1918, recorded that the better-known shell necklaces and armshells each carried the names of the men who had held them before, that a holder's standing rose with the reputation of the piece he had received, and that he was expected to hand it on again within a year or two. Considered as objects, these valuables show that

• their worth lay in the quantity of shell and the labour that each piece contained
• their worth lay in the price they could command against yams, tools and pigs
• their worth lay in the named history of previous holders that each piece carried
• their worth lay in the length of time a holder was able to keep them out of circulation

Answer: their worth lay in the named history of previous holders that each piece carried

The value of a kula valuable is inseparable from its biography: who has held it, and what those men were worth. A commodity is the opposite case, because its price does not depend on the identity of anyone who owned it before.

Mauss argued in 1925, drawing on published accounts of Melanesian, Polynesian and Northwest Coast exchange, that gifts carry three linked obligations: to give, to receive and to repay. Which statement follows from that argument?

• A genuine gift is one that is given with no expectation whatsoever of any return
• A gift that cannot be repaid leaves the receiver in a subordinate position
• Objects given away lose every connection to the person who previously held them
• Gift exchange is an inefficient earlier stage on the way to commercial trade

Answer: A gift that cannot be repaid leaves the receiver in a subordinate position

Because repayment is obligatory, an unrepayable gift converts generosity into hierarchy, which is why Mauss treats gift exchange as political rather than sentimental. The idea of the pure, return-free gift is the misconception his essay was written against.

Mintz traced how sugar moved from a rare medicine and display item on wealthy British tables in the seventeenth century to a cheap daily staple in working-class diets by the nineteenth, supplied by Caribbean plantation labour. His study uses sugar to show that

• consumer taste on its own decided which foods came to be eaten in quantity
• the meanings of a substance shift with the system that produces and supplies it
• the meanings attached to material things stay stable once they have been established
• the organisation of plantation labour had little bearing on European patterns of eating

Answer: the meanings of a substance shift with the system that produces and supplies it

Mintz links consumption at one end of a system to production at the other, so the 'meaning' of sugar is not fixed by the substance or by taste alone. This is the argument to reach for when a question pairs materiality with production and consumption.

Nash worked with Bolivian tin miners in the 1970s who left coca leaves, alcohol and cigarettes before a horned figure they called the Tio, seated in the tunnels, while attending Catholic mass at the surface. Miners told her that the mineral belonged to the Tio and that accidents followed neglect of him. Her account treats these offerings as

• a survival from before the conquest that had lost any meaning for the men who performed it
• a private matter of individual belief with no bearing at all on how work underground was organised
• evidence that the miners had not grasped the geological causes of accidents in the shafts
• a way of stating and handling the relations of a workplace that took their labour and their lives

Answer: a way of stating and handling the relations of a workplace that took their labour and their lives

The offerings are an idiom in which ownership of the mineral, the danger of the work and the miners' claim on what they extract are all articulated. Reading them as ignorance of geology mistakes what the practice is about: the miners knew the physical hazards and also knew who was profiting.

Miller spent a year accompanying households on one North London street as they shopped. He found that most purchases were made for other members of the household, that thrift was pursued even where money was not short, and that shoppers explained their choices by what particular relatives liked. His conclusion is that

• everyday shopping is largely provisioning, and expresses and maintains relationships
• shoppers were mainly displaying status to neighbours through the goods they carried home
• the households behaved as economists predict, maximising the value obtained for each pound spent
• consumption in a wealthy society has become detached from the domestic relationships it once served

Answer: everyday shopping is largely provisioning, and expresses and maintains relationships

Miller's argument reverses the usual picture of consumption as individual self-expression: the supermarket trip is work done on behalf of others, and thrift is one of the ways devotion is demonstrated. Status display exists but was not what most of the observed shopping was doing.

Bohannan reported from Tiv country in central Nigeria in the 1950s that exchanges fell into separate ranges: foodstuffs were exchanged against foodstuffs, while brass rods, cattle and cloth circulated among themselves and figured in marriage transfers. Moving an item up from the lower range was a notable achievement, and colonial currency, which bought in all ranges, made such moves ordinary. The material is used to show that

• the Tiv had no means of comparing the value of one good against another before currency arrived
• what may be exchanged for what is socially restricted, and general-purpose money dissolves the restriction
• money was refused by the Tiv because it had come from the colonial administration
• prestige goods are worth more than foodstuffs in every recorded system of exchange

Answer: what may be exchanged for what is socially restricted, and general-purpose money dissolves the restriction

The spheres were not a failure to calculate: keeping ranges apart is what made an upward conversion an achievement. A currency that crosses every boundary removes the achievement along with the boundary.