Trade

Three properties define trade and the third accounts for the first two. Trade occurs between people without social ties or the desire for them, and because no tie exists no connection is established by the exchange and no guilt attaches if the exchange is unbalanced. That is what a transaction is in this framework, an energy exchange establishing no empathic or euphoric conduits and resulting in power for the stronger agent. The absence of guilt is the significant part, since guilt is the debt from an unbalanced interaction and trade is the arrangement in which that debt does not register. Marsh's larger claim about currency follows, since the belief that exchanging currency absolves the payer of all guilt in an unbalanced interaction is exactly this property generalized. The relation to sharing and gifting completes the set. Sharing divides what participants are already entitled to, gifting allocates what they are not, and trade exchanges between parties with no social relationship at all, which is why she says trade does not occur among people with the closest ties. Her practical objection concerns who can participate safely. A trade relationship must occur among equally advantaged partners if one is not to be taken at a disadvantage, and dependencies are abhorrent in a trade relationship, which means the arrangement excludes anyone dependent and disadvantages anyone unequal, and those are most people most of the time.

Economic anthropology after Polanyi distinguishes reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange as three modes of integration, which maps closely onto Marsh's sharing, gifting and trade. Sahlins mapped reciprocity from generalized among kin to negative among strangers, arriving at the same finding that exchange type tracks social distance. Marx's account of commodity exchange concealing social relations covers the guilt point in different vocabulary. Marsh's contribution is to make the absence of guilt the definitional property rather than a consequence, which shows why trade is preferred precisely where a debt would otherwise be incurred.