Authors: David Graeber
60.
Plutarch
Moralia
303 B, also discussed in Finley 1981:152, Millett 1991a:42. Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas made it a matter of Catholic doctrine that sins were “debts of punishment” owed to God.
61. This is one reason why it’s so easy to dress up other sorts of relationships as debts. Say one wishes to help out a friend in desperate need of money but doesn’t want to embarrass her. Usually, the easiest way to do it is to provide the money and then insist that it’s a loan (and then let both parties conveniently forget it ever happened). Or think of all the times and places where the rich acquire servants by advancing what is ostensibly a loan.
62.
One could argue that some equivalent of “please” and “thank you” could be identified in any human language, if one were determined to find them, but then the terms you find are often used so differently—for instance, only in ritual contexts, or to hierarchical superiors—that it’s hard to attach much significance to the fact. It is significant that over the last century or so just about every human language that is used in offices or to make transactions in shops has had to create terms that do function as an exact equivalent of the English “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.”
63.
In Spanish one first asks a favor
(por favor)
, and then says
gracias
, in order affirm you recognize one has been done for you, since it derives from the Latin word
gratia
, meaning “influence, or favor.” “Appreciate” is more monetary: if you say “I really appreciate your doing that for me,” you are using a word that derives from Latin
appretiare
, “to set a price.”
64.
“You’re welcome,” first documented in Shakespeare’s time, derives from Old English
wilcuma, wil
being “pleasure” and
cuma
being “guest.” This is why people are still welcomed into a house. It is thus like “be my guest,” implying that, no, if there is an obligation it’s on my part, as any host is obliged to be generous to guests, and that dispatching such obligations is a pleasure in itself. Still, it’s significant that moralists rarely chide anyone for failure to say “you’re welcome”—that one is much more optional.
65.
Book I.12. This and other quotes are from the 2006 Penguin Screech translation, in this case, p. 86.
66.
Compare the Medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Miskaway: “The creditor desires the well-being of the debtor in order to get his money back rather than because of his love for him. The debtor, on the other hand, does not take great interest in the creditor.” (in Hosseini 2003:36).
67.
Appropriate, since Panurge’s entire discourse is nothing but a comical elaboration of Marcelo Ficino’s argument that the entire universe is driven by the power of love.
1.
From: Peter Carlson, “The Relatively Charmed Life of Neil Bush,”
The Washington Post
, Sunday December 28, 2003, Page D01.
2.
Grierson 1977:20.
3.
To be fair to Grierson, he does later suggest that slavery played an important part in the origins of money—though he never speculates about the gender, which seems significant: slave girls also served as the highest denomination of currency in Medieval Iceland (Williams 1937), and in the Rig Veda, great gifts and payments are regularly designated in “gold, cattle, and slave girls” (Chakravarti 1985:56–57). By the way, I say “young” because elsewhere, when slaves are used as monetary units, the unit is assumed to be a slave about 18–20 years old. A
cumal
was considered the equivalent in value of three milch cows or six heifers.
4.
On
cumal
see Nolan 1926, Einzig 1949:247–48, Gerriets 1978, 1981, 1985, Patterson 1982:168–69, Kelly 1998:112–13. Most merely emphasize that
cumal
were just used as units of account and we don’t know anything about earlier practices. It’s notable, though, that in the law codes, when several different commodities are used as units of account, they will include
that country’s most significant exports, and trade currency (that’s why in Russian codes, the units were fur and silver). This would imply a significant trade in female slaves in the period just before written records.
5.
So Bender 1996.
6.
Here I am drawing on the detailed ethnographic survey work of Alain Testart (2000, 2001, 2002). Testart does a magnificent job synthesizing the evidence, though he too—as we’ll see in the next chapter—has some equally strange blind spots in his conclusions.
7.
“Although the rhetorical phrase ‘selling one’s daughter into prostitution’ has wide currency … the actual arrangement is more often presented as either a loan to the family or an advance payment for the girl’s (usually unspecified or misrepresented) services. The interest on these ‘loans’ is often 100 percent, and the principal may be increased by other debts—for living expenses, medical care, bribes to officials—accrued once the girl has begun work” (Bishop & Robinson 1998:105).
8.
So Michael Hudson (cited in Wray 1999), but it’s clear enough if one looks at the language of the original: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s” (Exodus 20:17, Deuteronomy 5:21).
9.
Wampum is a good example: Indians never seem to have used it to buy things from other members of the same community, although it was regularly used in conducting trade with settlers (see Graeber 2001:117–150). Others, like Yurok shell money or some Papuan currencies, are widely used as currencies in addition to their social functions, but the first seems to have emerged from the second.
10.
The most important texts on the “brideprice debate”: Evans-Pritchard 1931, Raglan 1931, Gray 1968, Comaroff 1980, Valeri 1994. One reason why Evans-Pritchard originally proposed to change the name from “brideprice” to “bridewealth” because the League of Nations had in 1926 outlawed the practice as a form of slavery (Guyer 1994).
11.
On Tiv kinship and economy: Duggan 1932; Abraham 1933; Downes 1933; Akiga 1939; L. Bohannan 1952; P. Bohannan 1955, 1957, 1959; P. & L. Bohannan 1953, 1968, Tseayo 1975; Keil 1979.
12.
Akiga Sai 1939:106 for a good analysis of how this could happen. For a later comparative reanalysis in regional perspective, see Fardon 1984, 1985.
13.
Paul Bohannan puts it: “The
kem
relationship of debt between a man and his wife’s guardian is never broken, because
kem
is perpetual, the debt can never be fully paid.” (1957:73.) Otherwise the account is from Akiga (1939:126–127).
14.
Rospabé 1993:35.
15.
Evans-Pritchard 1940:153.
16.
As the ethnographer puts it, “that they are accepting the cattle only in order to honour him and not because they are ready to take cattle for the life of their dead kinsman.” (1940:153)
17.
Op cit 154–155.
18.
Morgan 1851:332. Morgan, a lawyer by training, is using a technical term here, “condonation,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the voluntary overlooking of an offence.”
19.
Morgan 1851:333. The baseline was five fathoms for a man, ten for a woman, but other factors might intervene (T. Smith 1983:236; Morgan 1851:331–34; Parker 1926). On “mourning wars” see Richter 1983; the expression “putting his name upon the mat” is from Fenton 1978:315. Incidentally I am assuming it’s a man who dies, since these are the examples in the sources. It’s not clear if the same was done for women who died naturally.
20.
Evans-Pritchard 1940:155, 1951:109–11; Howell 1954:71–80, Gough 1971, Hutchinson 1996:62, 175–76.
21.
Rospabe 1995:47–48, citing Peters 1947.
22.
On mourning war: Richter 1983. Interestingly, something similar occurred among the Nambikwara. I mentioned in chapter 3 that the feasts held after barter could lead to seductions and jealous murders; Levi-Strauss adds that the ordinary way of resolving such murders is for the killer to marry the victim’s wife, adopt his children, and thus, effectively, become the person the victim used to be (1943:123).
23.
Though people did use them to commission certain fancy craft goods (say, musical instruments) from specialists in other villages (1963:54–55).
24.
Douglas 1958: 112; also 1982:43.
25.
Douglas (1963:58) estimates that a successful man will have spent at minimum 300 raffia cloths in payments, and given away at least 300 more as gifts, by the time he reached full social maturity.
26.
As anthropologists often note, the fact that one traces descent through the female line does not necessarily mean that women themselves have a lot of power. It can; it did among the Iroquois, and it does among Minangkabau right now. But it doesn’t necessarily.
27.
Douglas 1963:144–45, which is an adoption of 1960:3–4.
28.
She was in fact a conservative Catholic, married a Tory economist, and tended to look with disdain on all liberal concerns.
29.
As if to hammer this home, a man was actually considered to be owed a life-debt for fathering female children (Douglas 1963:115)—that could only be paid by allowing him to take one of his own daughters’ daughters as a pawn. This only makes sense if we assume a principle that only men can be owed a life, and therefore, in the case of women, the creation of life was assumed to be given free. Men, as noted, could be pawns and many were, but they were never traded.
30.
Douglas 1966:150.
31.
On “village-wives,” see particularly Douglas 1951, also 1963:128–40.
32.
Douglas 1963:76; compare 1951:11. The author is clearly simply repeating her informants’ explanation for the custom: the Lele didn’t “have to” make such an arrangement; in fact, most African societies did not.
33.
Some village wives were literally princesses, since chiefs’ daughters invariably chose to marry age-sets in this way. The daughters of chiefs were allowed to have sex with anyone they wanted, regardless of age-set, and also had the right to refuse sex, which ordinary village wives did not. Princesses of this sort were rare: there were only three chiefs in all Lele territory. Douglas estimates that the number of Lele women who became village wives, on the other hand, was about 10 percent (1951).
34.
For instance: 1960:4, 1963:145–46, 168–73, 1964:303. Obviously, men could sometimes put a great deal of physical pressure on women, at least, if everyone else agreed they had a moral right to do so, but even here Douglas emphasizes most women had a good deal of room for maneuver.
35.
On peacefulness, particularly, 1963:70–71.
36.
1963:170.
37.
1963:171.
38.
Cost of slaves: 1963:36, 1982:46–47.
39.
Partly, though, this was because the main purpose of male slaves was to be sacrificed at important men’s funerals (1963:36).
40.
See Graeber 2001, chapter 4. The great exception might seem to be the cattle money of the Nuer, and similar pastoral peoples. Yet even these were arguably adornment of the person of a sort.
41.
Akiga Sai 1939: 121, 158–60.
42.
So too when Tiv practiced marriage by capture: Akiga Sai (1939:137–41).
43.
Here I’m drawing on the classic “spheres of exchange” analysis by Paul Bohannan (1955, 1959), supplemented by Dorward (1976) and Guyer (2004:27–31).
44.
So Akiga Sai 1939:241; P. Bohannan 1955:66, P. & L. Bohannnan 1968:233, 235. As charisma in general: East in Akiga Sai 1939:236, Downes 1971:29.
45.
See Abraham 1933:26; Akiga Sai 1939:246; P. Bohannan 1958:3; Downes 1971:27.
46.
On witches in general: P. Bohannan 1957:187–88, 1958; Downes 1971: 32–25. On flesh debts (or
ikipindi):
Abraham 1933:81–84; Downes 1971:36–40.
47.
Akiga Sai 1939:257.
48.
Akiga Sai 1939:260.
49.
Following here Wilson 1951.
50.
Paul Bohannan (1958:4) makes a similar but not identical argument.
51.
Tiv migration stories (e.g. Abraham 1933:17–26; Akiga & Bohannan 1954; P. Bohannan 1954) do not explicitly say this, but they could easily be read this way. Akiga’s story (1939:137) about Tiv migrants painting what looked like sores on their women’s bodies so raiders would not take them is particularly suggestive. Despite their lack of government, Tiv did have a notoriously effective war organization, and as Abrahams notes (1933:19), managed to successfully play the Fulani and Jukun against each other by intervening in their own wars with each other.
52.
Some of these raids were not entirely unsuccessful. For a while, it would appear, the nearby Jukun kingdom, which made several ultimately unsuccessful efforts to incorporate the Tiv in the eighteenth century, appear to have been selling Tiv captives to slave dealers operating on the coast (Abraham 1933:19; Curtin 1965:255, 298; Latham 1973:29; Tambo 1976: 201–3.) It’s doubtless significant here that many Tiv insisted in the 1930s that the Jukun were themselves cannibals, and that the origins of the
mbatsav
“organization” lay in certain chiefly titles that Tiv acquired from them when they finally came to a political rapprochement (Abraham 1933:33–35).
53.
Jones 1958; Latham 1971; Northrup 1978:157–64; Herbert 2003:196. The famous Medieval Arab traveler Ibn Battuta, who we’ve already met at the court of the King of Singh in chapter 2, saw people using them as money in the Niger region, not far away, in the 1340s.
54.
Herbert (2003:181) estimates that Europeans imported about 20,000 tons of English brass and copper into Africa between 1699 and 1865. It was manufactured in Bristol, Cheadle, and Birmingham. The vast majority was exchanged for slaves
55.
I base this number on the fact that 152,076 slaves are known to have been exported from the Bight of Biafra as a whole in those years (Eltis, Behrent, Richardson & Klein 2000). The slave trade at Old Calabar lasted roughly from 1650 to 1841, during which time the port was by far the largest in the Bight, and the exports from the Bight itself during its height represent about 20 percent of all Africa (Lovejoy & Richardson 1999:337).