Debt (75 page)

31.
Hence the constant invocation of the phrase “your brother,” particularly in Deuteronomy, e.g., “you shall not lend at interest to your brother” (23:20).

1.
As we’ll see in chapter seven, Plato begins
The Republic
in exactly the same way.

2.
For a polite but devastating assessment, see Kahneman 2003.

3.
Homans 1958, also Blau 1964; Levi-Strauss 1963:296. In anthropology, the first to propose reciprocity as a universal principle was Richard Thurnwald (1916), but it was made famous by Malinowski (1922).

4.
One reason no known law code has ever been known to enforce the principle; the penalty was always there to be commuted to something else.

5.
Atwood (2008:1). The author then proceeds to explore the nature of our sense of economic morality by comparing the behavior of caged apes with middle-class Canadian children to argue that all human relations are indeed either exchange or forcible appropriation (ibid:49). Despite the brilliance of many of its arguments, the result is a rather sad testimony to how difficult it is for the scions of the North Atlantic professional classes not to see their own characteristic ways of imagining the world as simple human nature.

6.
Seton’s father, a failed shipping magnate turned accountant, was, Seton later wrote, so cold and abusive that his son spent much of his youth in the woods trying to avoid him; after paying the debt—which incidentally came to $537.50, a tidy but not insurmountable sum in 1881—he changed his name and spent much of the rest of his life trying to develop more healthy child-rearing techniques.

7.
Rev. W.H. Beatley in Levy-Bruhl 1923:411

8.
Rev. Fr. Bulléon, in Levy-Bruhl 1923:425

9.
This phrase was not coined by Marx, incidentally, but was apparently a slogan current in the early French workers’ movement, first appearing in print in the work of socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. Marx only took up the phrase in his
Critique of the Gotha Programme
in 1875, and even then used it in a rather idiosyncratic way: for the principle he imagined could apply on the level of society as a whole once technology had reached the point of guaranteeing absolute material abundance. For Marx, “communism” was both the political movement aiming to bring about such a future society, and that society itself. I am drawing here more on the alternate strain of revolutionary theory, evident most famously perhaps in Peter Kropotkin’s
Mutual Aid
(1902).

10.
At least, unless there is some specific reason not to—for instance, a hierarchical division of labor that says some people get coffee and others do not.

11.
What this means of course is that command economies—putting government bureaucracies in charge of coordinating every aspect of the production and distribution of goods and services within a given national territory—tends to be much less efficient than other available alternatives. This is obviously true, though if it “just doesn’t work” at all, it’s hard to imagine how states like the Soviet Union could have existed, let alone maintain
themselves as world powers, in the first place.

12.
Evans-Pritchard 1940:182

13.
Similarly, a middle-class pedestrian would be unlikely to ask a gang member for directions, and might even run in fear if one approached him to ask for the time, but this is again because of an assumption of a tacit state of war existing between them.

14.
Ibid, p. 183.

15.
Richards 1939:197. Max Gluckman, remarking on such customs, concludes that insofar as it is possible to speak of “primitive communism,” it exists in consumption, rather than production, which tends to be much more individually organized (1971:52).

16.
A typical example: “if a cabin of hungry people meets another whose provisions are not entirely exhausted, the latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to them without waiting to be asked, although they expose themselves thereby to the same danger of perishing as those whom they help …” Lafitau 1974 Volume II:61.

17.
Jesuit Relations (1635) 8:127, cited in Delâge 1993:54.

18.
This is a common arrangement in certain parts of the world (particularly the Andes, Amazonia, insular Southeast Asia, and Melanesia), and invariably there is some rule whereby each half is dependent on the other for something considered essential to human life. One can only marry someone from the other side of the village, or maybe one can only eat pigs raised on the other side, or perhaps one side needs people from the other side to sponsor the rituals that initiate its male children into manhood.

19.
As I have suggested elsewhere, Graeber 2001:159–60; cf. Mauss 1947: 104–5.

20.
I’m side-stepping the whole question of one-sided examples discussed in Graeber 2001:218.

21.
Marshall Sahlins (1972) coined the phrase “generalized reciprocity” to describe this sort of relation, on the principle that if everything circulates freely, eventually, all accounts will balance out. Marcel Mauss was already making such an argument in lectures back in the 1930s (1947), but he also recognized the problems: while this might be true of Iroquois moieties, some relationships never balance out—for instance, between mother and child. His solution, “alternating reciprocity”—that we repay our parents by having children ourselves—is clearly drawn from his study of the Vedas, but it ultimately demonstrates that if one has already decided that all relations are based on reciprocity, one can always define the term so broadly as to make it true.

22.
Hostis:
see Benveniste 1972:72. The Latin terminology concerning hospitality emphasizes the absolute mastery of the house by its (male) owner as the precondition of any act of hospitality; Derrida (2000, 2001) argues that this points to a central contradiction in the very concept of hospitality, since it implies an already-existing absolute dominium or power over others, the kind that might be seen as taking its most exploitative form in Lot’s offering his own daughters up to a crowd of Sodomites to dissuade them from raping his houseguests. However, this same principle of hospitality can be equally well documented in societies—such as the Iroquois—that were anything but patriarchal.

23.
Evans-Pritchard 1940:154, 158.

24.
This is of course one reason why the very rich like to associate mainly with one another.

25.
In a less hostile vein one can speak of an exchange of prisoners, notes, or compliments.

26.
A good source on haggling: Uchendo 1967.

27.
Bohannan 1964:47.

28.
Not even a real business deal, since these may often involve a great deal of collective wining and dining and giving of presents. More the sort of imaginary
business deal that appears in economics textbooks.

29.
One need only glance at the vast anthropological literature on “competitive feasting”: e.g., Valeri 2001.

30.
Bourdieu 1965 is the key text, but he repeats the main points in Bourdieu 1990:98–101.

31.
Onvlee 1980:204.

32.
Petronius 51; Pliny
Natural History
36.195; Dio 57.21.5–7.

33.
“This king is of all men the most addicted to the making of gifts and the shedding of blood. His gate is never without some poor man enriched or some living man executed.”

34.
Or even the very rich. Nelson Rockefeller, for example, used to pride himself on never carrying a wallet. He didn’t need one. Every now and then when he was working late and wanted cigarettes, he would borrow some from the security people at the desk at Rockefeller Center, who would then be able to boast that they had lent a Rockefeller money and would rarely ask for it back. In contrast, “the sixteenth-century Portuguese monarch Dom Manuel, newly rich from the Indies trade, adopted the title ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India.’ Others called him the “grocer king.” (Ho 2004:227).

35.
See Graeber 2001:175–76.

36.
Even between strangers it’s a bit unusual: as Servet (1981, 1982) has emphasized, most “primitive trade” takes place through trade partnership and specialized regional middlemen.

37.
I frame things this way because I am mainly interested here in economics. If we were thinking simply of human relations, I suppose one might say that at one extreme is killing, and at the other, giving birth.

38.
In fact, it seems essential to the nature of charity that, like a gifts to a king, it can never lead to reciprocity. Even if it turns out that the pathetic-looking beggar is really a god wandering the earth in mortal form, or Harun al-Rashid, your reward will be entirely disproportionate. Or consider all those stories about drunken millionaires on a binge who, when they got their life back together, hand out fancy cars or houses to their earlier benefactors. It’s easier to imagine a panhandler giving you a fortune than returning an exact equivalent to the dollar that you gave him.

39.
Xenophon
Cyropedia
VIII.6, Herodotus 3.8.9; see Briant 2006:193–194, 394–404, who acknowledges that something broadly along these lines probably did take place, with a more impromptu gift system under Cyrus and Cambyses being systematized under Darius.

40.
Marc Bloch (1961:114–15), who adds “every act, especially if it was repeated three or four times, was likely to be transformed into a precedent—even if in the first instance it had been exceptional or even frankly unlawful.”

41.
The approach is often identified with British anthropologist A.M. Hocart (1936). The important thing is that this does not necessarily mean that these became their main or exclusive occupations: most of the time, such people remained simple farmers like everybody else. Yet what they did for the king, or later, on ritual occasions, for the community, was seen as defining their essential nature, their identity within the whole.

42.
In fact, we may become indignant at her for an act of stinginess we would never even consider stingy in anyone else—especially, ourselves.

43.
A version has been published as: Sarah Stillman, “The missing white girl syndrome: disappeared women and media activism” (Stillman, 2007):
publications.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam/display.asp?K=002J1246&sf_01=cat_class&st_01=620&sort=SORT_DATE/
d&m=84&dc=719

44.
Karatani (2003:203–205) makes this point compellingly. The Kwakiutl and other First Nations of the Northwest Coast are something of an intermediary
case—aristocratic, but at least in the period we know about, using non-coercive means to gather resources (though Codere 1950.)

45.
Georges Duby (1980) provides the definitive history of this concept, which goes back to much older Indo-European ideas.

46.
For a typical example of imaginary reciprocity between father and son, see Oliver 1955:230. Anthropological theory buffs will notice that I am here endorsing Edmund Leach’s (1961) position on the “circulating connubium” problem. He later applied the same argument to the famous “kula chain” (1983).

47.
Actually, there are hierarchical relations that are explicitly self-subverting: the one between teacher and student, for example, since if the teacher is successful in passing her knowledge to the student, there is no further basis for inequality.

48.
Freuchen 1961: 154. It’s not clear what the original language was here, considering that the Inuit did not have an institution of slavery. Also, the passage would not make sense unless there were
some
contexts in which gift exchange did operate, and therefore, in which debts accrued. What the hunter is emphasizing is that it was felt important that this logic did not extend to basic needs like food.

49.
Firth 1959:411–12 (also in Graeber 2001:175). His name was Tei Reinga.

50.
For one famous example: Chagnon 1996:170–76.

51.
Similarly, two groups might form an alliance by contracting a “joking relation,” in which any member of one could at least in theory make similar outrageous demands of the other (Hébert 1958).

52.
Marcel Mauss, in his famous “Essay on the Gift” (1924), often did, and the results have sometimes confused debate for generations to come.

53.
Mauss 1925, the Greek source being Posidonius. As usual one does not know how literally to take this account. Mauss thought it likely accurate; I suspect it might have happened once or twice.

54.
As retold by William Ian Miller (1993:15–16). The first quote is directly from the original, Egil’s Saga, chapter 78. Egil remained ambivalent about the shield: he later took it to a wedding party and contrived to drop it into a vat of sour whey. Afterward, concluding it was ruined, he stripped it for its raw materials.

55.
See, for instance, Wallace-Hadrill 1989.

56.
Blaxter 1971:127–28.

57.
Another anthropologist, for instance, defines patron-client relations as “long-term contracted relations in which the client’s support is exchanged for the patron’s protection; there is an ideology which is morally charged and appears to rule out strict, open accounting, but both parties keep some tacit rough account; the goods and services exchanged are not similar, and there is no implication of fair exchange or balance of satisfactions, since the client is markedly weaker in power and needs the patron more than he is needed by him” (Loizos 1977:115). Again, it both is and isn’t an exchange, it’s both a matter of accounting and not a matter of accounting.

58.
It’s exactly the same if one takes a job at a doughnut shop; legally, it must be a free contract between equals, even if in order to be able to say this we have to maintain the charming legal fiction that one of them is an imaginary person named “Krispy Kreme.”

59.
For instance the word “should,” in English, originally derives from German
schuld
, meaning “guilt, fault, debt.” Benveniste provides similar examples from other Indo-European languages (1963:58). East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese rarely conflate the actual words, but a similar identification of debt with sin, shame, guilt, and fault can be easily documented (Malamoud 1988).