Ardener sets out to make comparison possible across institutions that anthropologists had described piecemeal under names such as esusu and contribution club. Geertz's definition is too narrow, she argues: contributions are not always fixed, the entire fund is not always handed over, and payment is not always in cash. What is essential is regularity and rotation, a standing group of contributors paying in at set intervals into a fund that passes, entire or partly, to each of them by turns.

A survey of the literature follows, from nineteenth-century China through Japan, India, Africa and the Caribbean, with attention to how the fund is allocated: by lot, by dice, by auctioning a discount, by written tender.

She keeps returning to the point that members do not benefit equally. The first recipient owes the rest until the cycle closes; the last is owed throughout. A tentative field guide for future study closes the paper.