This article offers suggestions for situating value in the liberal economic sense with respect to values understood in a broader, ethical sense. It is a conceptual exercise in bringing together ideas about value, which pertain largely to objects, with ethical ideas of virtue, which concern acts and character. I argue that economic value and ethical value are incommensurable insofar as the former deals with ostensibly relative, commensurable values and the latter with ostensibly absolute and incommensurable ones. The articulation of incommensurable values is better expressed as acts or practices of judgment rather than of choice. I suggest that sacrifice may be a site where meta-value is established.

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When kinship is viewed through the lens of succession rather than reproduction, conflict between siblings becomes salient and the gift of kinship can be experienced as theft. Developing an approach to kinship as ethically constituted through acts, I draw on the biblical story of Jacob and Esau to frame an account of succession in Mayotte that transpires in the register of spirit possession. This account follows the lives of two sisters I first described in this journal in 1988.

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