Westerners appear to think that including money in a transaction makes a huge
difference to its social significance. It is not so in most of the world’s societies. I was once talking to a Ghanaian student about exchanges between lovers in his country and he said that it was common there for a boy, after sleeping with a girl he has met at a party, to leave some money as a gift and token of esteem. Once he had done this with a visiting American student and the resulting explosion was gigantic – “Do you imagine that I am a prostitute?” And so on. Where does that moral outrage come from? Why does money matter so much to us? //Keith Hart, Notes towards an anthropology of money