Structural and Motivational Approaches to Social Exchange

In our daily life, we constantly encounter situations where we are giving favor and assistance in return for something else received in the past, or in anticipation of receiving something else in the future. This may be as simple as a smile in exchange for a smile, or morning’s greetings for morning’s greetings, or it may be a dinner invitation for a favor done. The notion of exchange, or reciprocity (see below for a conceptual distinction between these two terms), is so pervasive in our everyday life that we generally assume its operation without stopping to think about it. As we assume reciprocal behavior in our own daily life, in ethnographic reports of other peoples, too, anthropologists generally accept the same assumption. When they describe, for example, payment of cattle for a bride in East Africa, offering a gift in India to earn spiritual merit, exchanging favors between compadres in Middle America, giving a ceremonial necklace in return for an arm shell in the Trobriand kula ring, and potlatching each other by Kwakiutl chiefs, ethnographers are assuming the operation of some reciprocal principle. It is, in fact, probably safe to assume that in every society some form of reciprocal principle is operating, and that for every individual some of his behavior is governed by some such principle.