<P> When the exchange is immediate, as in barter, it does not create a social relationship . When the exchange is delayed, it creates both a relationship as well as an obligation for a return (i.e. debt). Hence, some forms of reciprocity can establish hierarchy if the debt is not repaid . The failure to make a return may end a relationship between equals . Reciprocal exchanges can also have a political effect through the creation of multiple obligations and the establishment of leadership, as in the gift exchanges (Moka) between Big Men in Melanesia . Some forms of reciprocity are thus closely related to redistribution, where goods and services are collected by a central figure for eventual distribution to followers . </P> <P> Marshall Sahlins, a well - known American cultural anthropologist, identified three main types of reciprocity (generalized, balanced and negative) in the book Stone Age Economics (1972). Reciprocity was also the general principal used by Claude Lévi - Strauss to explain the Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), in one of the most influential works on kinship theory in the post-war period . </P> <P> Annette Weiner argued that the "norm of reciprocity" is deeply implicated in the development of Western economic theory . Both John Locke and Adam Smith used the idea of reciprocity to justify a free market without state intervention . Reciprocity was used, on the one hand, to legitimize the idea of a self - regulating market; and to argue how individual vice was transformed into social good on the other . Western economic theorists starting with the eighteenth century Scots economists Sir James Steuart and Smith differentiated pre-modern natural (or self - subsistent) economies from civilized economies marked by a division of labour that necessitated exchange . Like early sociologist Émile Durkheim, they viewed natural economies as characterized by mechanical solidarity (like so many peas in a pod) whereas the civilized division of labour made producers mutually dependent upon one another resulting in organic solidarity . These oppositions solidified by the late nineteenth century in the evolutionary idea of primitive communism marked by mechanical solidarity as the antithesis and alter ego of Western "Homo economicus". It is this armchair anthropology opposition that originally informed modern anthropological debate when Malinowski sought to overturn the opposition and argue that archaic societies are equally regulated by the norm of reciprocity and maximizing behaviour . </P> <P> The concept was key to the debate between early anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss on the meaning of "Kula exchange" in the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea during the First World War . Malinowski used Kula exchange to demonstrate the apparently random gift - giving was in fact a key political process by which non-state political leadership spanning a vast archipelago was established . Gift - giving, he argued, was not altruistic (as it supposedly is in our society) but politically motivated for individual gain . Marcel Mauss theorized the impetus for a return as "the spirit of the gift," an idea that has provoked a long debate in economic anthropology on what motivated the reciprocal exchange . Claude Lévi - Strauss, drawing on Mauss, argued there were three spheres of exchange governed by reciprocity: language (exchange of words), kinship (exchange of women), and economics (exchange of things). He thus claimed all human relationships are based on the norm of reciprocity . This claim has been disputed by anthropologists Jonathan Parry, Annette Weiner, and David Graeber amongst others . </P>

Generalized reciprocity is the dominant form of exchange in