70 SOCIAL SCIENTIST life, according to C. Toren. In Imerina, in Central Madagascar, the moral neutrality is made evident. Maurice Bloch points out that in Imerina any traditional gift can be made either in kind or in money without the substitution having much significance. But sharp distinction is made between unpaid work carried out within the kinship bonds and paid work carried out for strangers. The former is considered morally good activity, the latter is an ambiguous or even an immoral activity. Similarly, there is a prohibition on selling ancestral lands to strangers but no objection to selling it for money to close relatives or for obligatory funeral rites. The ancestral goods including ancestral silver coins are preciously kept and not dispersed, whereas non-ancestral goods including currency, called harena, are considered desirable but morally irrelevant. Individuation is considered anti-descent and harena have to be distributed before death. Also, there is a prohibition on the planting of trees because these endure longer than the individual's life. The symbolism of money is inevitably linked with the position of exchange in the entire ideological system. The earlier writings have viewed money as giving rise to a particular world view, the emphasis here is how an existing world view gives rise to particular ways of representing money. In Zimbabwe, medium spirits avoid the products of modern capitalist society, but money is not dangerous to medium or mhondoro. As chiefs began to be closely identified with the state under colonial rule, they lost their legitimacy as representatives of the ancestors, so the mhondoro mediums took over many of the responsibilities which they had held in the past. One means of demonstrating their opposition to the state was to refuse to make use of any of the commodities obtained only in exchange for cash. David Lan argues that th6 focus ot traditional authority had shifted from chief and spirit medium to spirit medium alone but in local conception this implied a shift from the chiefs of the present to the chiefs of the past. M.J. Sallnow discusses cultural notions that surround the mining of precious metals in the Andean moral economy which consider mining as an illicit, amoral and ritually dangerous activity in which the successful prospector may well pay for his new found wealth with his life. The extraction, control and circulation of precious metals in pre-Hispanic times was wholly congruent with the cultural logic in which state power, community morality and subsistence production, locked together in a single ideological gestalt, are symbolised by the controlled release and transmission of gold and silver to the state. Anarchy and its inevitable concomitants, moral breakdown and the abandonment of food production, are symbolised by the collapse of those controls, the dissemination of precious metals to the populace. The supernatural perils of goldmining are a consequence, not of the ultimate commoditisation of the product, but of the cultural logic in which it is initially embedded. 0. Harris shows that the twin processes of tribute