The Price of Prestige

120 chapter four

of prosociality is driven by an exchange of material and social capitals. As

Veblen, Polanyi, Mauss, Bataille, and others note, this trade- off between

the material and the social is inherent to many patterns of human behav-

ior and is especially prevalent in the gift economy. A theory that does not

recognize this exchangeability between the material and the social is likely

to miss crucial facets of the politics of international prosociality. In the

absence of such an exchange, we would not expect to see a growing set of

prosocial policies take hold in the self- help environment of the interna-

tional system. Indeed, it is this connection between the material and the

social that allows for an almost symbiotic relation between self- help and

other- help.