ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which the preference for 'keeping fur in the family' is embedded within members of the Krakowian bourgeoisies short-term and long-term initiatives to reproduce their standing. It focuses upon ideas about grandmothers and granddaughters, arguing for the fundamental importance of exploring pre-mortem inheritance practices as embedded within the conventions of particular relationships. Gratitude is an 'indispensable manifestation of virtue' because it gives rise to a distinctive dynamic between oneself and whoever has evoked such a sentiment. Bearing in mind, too, the depiction of 'gratitude', generational difference is not the adversary of social reproduction, but, in certain ethnographic contexts, that which constitutes it. Profoundly significant for social reproduction is the possibility that a portion of the non-reciprocable debt felt towards older kin might be productively redirected into 'long range cycles of exchange interaction'.
