 It is this armchair anthropology opposition that originally informed modern anthropological debate when Malinowski sought to overturn the opposition and argue that archaic societies are equally regulated by the norm of reciprocity and maximizing behaviour.The concept was key to the debate between early anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss on the meaning of "Kula exchange" in the Trobriand Islands off Papua New Guinea during the First World War.Malinowski used Kula exchange to demonstrate the apparently random gift-giving was in fact a key political process by which non-state political leadership spanning a vast archipelago was established.