Munier, Brigitte <br/><br/>
From Kula to Facebook: The Power of Prestige 

 -  2011.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 6 
<br/><br/> Our comparison between Facebook and Melanesia’s Kula, an archaic system of inter-tribal exchanges described by Marcel Mauss, has highlighted the ability of the flagship Web 2.0 platform to respond to anthropologically verified socio-cultural needs. Both systems obey an implicit demand for reciprocity, which, over and above the actual content of exchanges, has a symbolic function: the interactions at play and the search for partners reflect a quest for prestige, or mana as it is famously known in Chinook. Kula and Facebook’s walls are a gigantic shop window where anyone can show off their mana and look at other people’s, while also seeking out other partners. The use of Kula as described by Simmel—as a model of intelligibility—suggests the ancient roots of these cultural traits: the combination of material and symbolic dimensions in exchanges between peers and, if there is no regulating authority, the risk that this inevitably competitive process may spiral out of control