ABSTRACT
This chapter offers some theoretical underpinnings for understanding the issues of how exchange and reciprocity play out in intimate and anonymous orders through an extended discussion of Carol Stack's classic ethnography of poor, urban, African-American families in the late 1960s, All Our Kin. Non-monetary exchange happens within the face-to-face world of small communities, and various forms of non-monetary exchange, reciprocity, and gift giving are important parts of the anonymous Great Society as well. Biologists who investigate reciprocity in animals distinguish between two forms of apparently altruistic behavior: kin selection and reciprocity. Hayek is most known for his development of the concept of spontaneous order in which many human practices and institutions evolved as the result of human action, but not intentional human design. Stack argues that swapping had both an economic and sociological function. The economic function is clear enough, in that it became a way to reallocate resources to those who needed them most at any particular time.
