Perhaps interestingly, the example of the cigarettes is exactly the example Graeber gives in his book of an instance where barter does emerge, and it does so pr

Perhaps interestingly, the example of the cigarettes is exactly the example Graeber gives in his book of an instance where barter does emerge, and it does so precisely because normal economic conditions have broken down: "Elaborate barter systems often crop up in the wake of the collapse of national economies: most recently in Russia in the '90s, and in Argentina around 2002, when rubles in the first case, and dollars in the second, effectively disappeared. Occasionally one can even find some kind of currency beginning to develop: for instance, in POW camps and many prisons, inmates have indeed been known to use cigarettes as a kind of currency, much to the delight and excitement of professional economists. But here too we are talking about people who grew up using money and now have to make do without it - exactly the situation "imagined" by the economics textbooks" (p. 37 of Debt) Further, the second place where Graeber notes that barter tends to emerges are precisely in those cases where different groups have no established societal relationships, and are thus exceptional to almost all well established societies - as exactly in a case like Columbus meeting natives: "True, barter does sometimes occur between people who do not consider each other strangers, but they're usually people who might as well be strangers-that is, who feel no sense of mutual responsibility or trust, or the desire to develop ongoing relations. The Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan, for instance, are famous for their open-handed hospitality. Barter is what you do with those to whom you are not bound by ties of hospitality (or kinship, or much of anything else)" (p.33). Which is all to say that the two examples used above are very much exceptional, and exactly what one would expect if the anthropological understanding of debt holds.