Can there be such a thing as a paid volunteer? The idea of exchanging money for work seems to be at odds with how many naturally think about volunteering. To volunteer is to offer something for free, isn't it? Yet, the position from which a paid volunteer appears as a paradox is itself, I will argue, all but natural. In reality, the lines between voluntary and paid labour can be confusingly blurred and – for the purpose of this chapter – an interesting empirical point of focus. The question of whether one can purchase a volunteer goes to the contested core of what volunteerism should mean, in contemporary Africa and elsewhere. To see how this is so, we need to take a step back.

As with all forms of human life, exchange is influenced by considerations of appropriateness. Since Bohannan's paradigmatic study of spheres of exchange in western Africa (1955), and the dispute between the so-called substantivists and formalists was laid to rest, this general postulation has taken hold among the rare stock of anthropological truisms. Tacit or explicit considerations of proper economic behaviour has been a returning theme of inspiration for the study of African societies – from the Tiv's prohibition on converting metal rods ‘down’ into lowly subsistence market goods (ibid.), to Basotho farmers who disapprove of the interconversion of livestock and cash (Ferguson 1992) or Nuer conceptions of money as ‘sterile’ and unable to generate life (Hutchinson 1996; see also Piot 1991). In these works, Africans are described as guarding – or, more seldom, transgressing – moral boundaries of appropriate exchange. Such boundaries around forms of exchange extend well beyond Africa. Ethnographic research shows that even the seemingly unbridled ‘market-fundamentalist’ exchanges of Western societies are morally embedded and controlled (Miller 2001; Zelizer 1997). This challenges the idea that Western economic rationality is morally detached and calculative – an idea which arguably is still powerful in both academic and non-academic circles (Carrier 1995).

The present chapter draws on this genealogy of interest in anthropology about the kinds of relations that are made and prohibited through different forms of exchange.