Dear Professor Kennedy, Yes, I think you're right that any human relation involves dickering. And I am certainly willing to join in most criticisms of Polanyi (though not all of them). It's a good point that calculation and balancing and questioning is involved at all levels, which is I think another difference between humans and our less close cousins (great apes do a lot of dickering). Who's in, who's out? Let's talk about it. How much fealty is a lord owed? Let's talk about it. Talk, talk. Fiske allows for this in his amazing table on pp. 42-49 of the book (rather similar to another amazing production by Irene van Staveren in her The Values of Economics) by speaking of "some of the features that the cultural implementation rules must specify" (p. 46) in the form of questions: "In what doman may authority [ranking] be exercised?" But I wouldn't want your point to obscure a felt difference between the most sacred of relations (in/out; this mother's daughter or not; Clan of the Cave Bear or not) and the most profane ("WalMart has this cheaper"). Trade is normally felt by humans to be less sacred than the three other relations. Now that is something that economics has skirted since Smith, and including Smith. Down through Keynes the sacred got some acknowledgement, if only of a sneer. (Marshall, who did not sneer, was after all a failed priest, so to speak: he went up to Cambridge intending a clerical career, and as Keynes points out lost his faith when many other English intellectuals did, in the 1860s; yet there is a whiff of incense, as it were, in some of Marshall's writings (I mean Industry and Trade, not his memorandum on trade offer curves!). After Keynes---that is after and including Samuelson---the sacred got absorbed into "taste" and the adventures of that unattractive, and prudence-only, character, Mr. Max U. Sincerely, Deirdre McCloskey