ABSTRACT
Ethnography can show clearly how patterns of frequency in social activities separate high-and low-status activities in tribal society and confer high and low value upon the objects used. Above all, tribal examples give clear demonstrations of how luxuries tend to be used as weapons of exclusion. At this stage everything in the argument seems to support the economists’ puritanical bias in favor of necessities and against luxuries. Some moral reinstatement of non-necessities must await a later stage in the argument.
