The base may have community value - as a symbol of identity, an expres — Stephen Gudeman

"Our own practices - dispersed and fragmented - illustrate the pull of keeping sacra and maintaining community identity, and they challenge standard theory as well."

"Although modern economy seems devoid of allotment practices, and prevailing ideology obscures their presence, we do practice them in many arenas. For example, in the domestic sphere, age cycle events are marked by apportionments."

"The model of economy with multiple and interwoven sources makes us less certain of our own system and induces a greater understanding of others. I cannot picture an economic finality or utopia, given the cultural legacies that make variant arrangements fitting, and the shifting balances that deny the possibility of stasis. This book represents a plea for openness to the values of equity, merit, and identity as well as efficiency in economy, and for openness with ourselves and others in trying new combinations of community and market that compose economy. With its historical and cross-cultural perspective, the anthropology of economy offers tools for undertaking these conversations and imagining such other outcomes."

"Making and keeping the base is a central concern in community, for the base makes a community as it is made. An endowment that welds together people and things, the base is passed across generations and provides the beginning for its legatees."

"In a market people exchange goods, buying and selling at the best price available until satisfied they cannot better their personal holdings. Exchanges in community are different, for they revolve about ways of dividing a shared base, are guided by multiple values, and have to do with fashioning identities as well as material life. Ethnographic illustrations of sharing the base possess the virtue of openly displaying these general processes, for the same activities often are more hidden in industrial economies."

"The base in a system of social value is the counterpart of capital in a system of commercial value. But differing in qualities and different in their uses, many parts of the base have no common measure, unlike capital, all parts of which are measured by money and deemed commensurate in exchange. A key feature of competitive, market capitalism is making profits and accumulating them as capital, whereas the central process in community is making and sustaining a commons. But like capital, a base is a savings against contingency. Indeed, savings often have a Janus-faced appearance."