Abstract
Among the Saamaka Maroons (or Businenge) of Upper Suriname, despite growing monetization and their integration into the global capitalist economy, there are some types of exchange in which money is not supposed to circulate, at least not explicitly. In these exchanges, objects - revealingly, objects of foreign manufacturing - act in a way similar to “currencies”. The rejection by the Saamaka of money in certain spheres in which objects, persons, services and words circulate will lead us to the classic - and so often muddled - anthropological distinction between gifts and commodities. I will try to understand how the distinction between exteriority and the interiority is composed in Saamaka, and how money is marked as external, while “gifts”, such as rum and fabric, are made internal.
Key words:
Saamaka; Economy; Money; Gifts; Exchange