She’d read once, maybe in Graeber, that rather than barter, precapital economies held certain sorts of goods more or less in common; you’d borrow a neighbor’s hammer, perhaps even without asking, and one day they’d come for something worth about a hammer; they wouldn’t, though, take your goat, since goats were a different sort of thing. Barter happened between groups without mutual trust—my village might barter with those dangerous foreigners, say. By offering trade she’d marked herself as a threat, closed herself to hospitality. But if she tried to take back her offer and throw herself on the
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