Avoiding Sharing How People Help Each Other Get out of Giving

Anthropologists frequently treat giving and sharing as primordial prosocial acts-the building blocks of society. Avoiding sharing appears as negative and antisocial. But in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, avoiding sharing is just as social and as important to relationships as sharing. First, any act of sharing involves avoiding sharing. Second, successfully avoiding sharing is a collaborative process in which interlocutors construct one another as people who do not need to share. These avoiding-sharing interactions are ubiquitous but often invisible. Social life thus takes places through silence as well as speech, inaction as well as action. Avoiding sharing is as central to economic and social life as sharing itself.