Primitive commodity money, like the magical words of 
non-literate society, can be a storehouse of power, and has 
often become the occasion of feverish economic activity. The 
natives of the South Seas, when they are so engaged, seek no 
economic advantage. Furious application to production may be 
followed by deliberate destruction of the products in order to 
achieve moral prestige. Even in these “potlatch” cultures, 
however, the effect of the currencies was to expedite and to 
accelerate human energies in a way that had become universal 
in the ancient world with the technology of the phonetic 
alphabet. Money, like writing, has the power to specialize and to 
rechannel human energies and to separate functions, just as it 
translates and reduces one kind of work to another. Even in the 
electronic age it has lost none of this power.

     Potlatch is very widespread, especially where there  is