In a critical re-reading of Marcel Mauss' Essai sur le don, Mario Schmidt develops an ethnological concept of money which looks away from its respective ethnographic lifeworld, unadjusted from its outset by the transfer of historically originating and contradictory modern money characteristics. As part of a historical reconstruction of the lifeworld of 17th Century northeastern North Americans, Schmidt analyzes wampum and beaver pelts as a circulating fetish money which obscures injustice within the overall social value distribution.