The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (17 page)

The remaining feature of modern markets is one that is often duplicated by traditional trade, but that traditional societies in other cases replace with a behavior that has little precedent among us moderns. We buy something mainly just because we want the thing purchased (rather than to cement a personal relationship with the seller), and we buy it from someone who complements us economically and can sell us something to which we don’t have access or that we don’t know how to make. For instance, ordinary non-farming consumers don’t have access to apples of their own: they have to buy apples from apple farmers or from grocery stores. Apple farmers in turn buy medical and legal services from physicians and lawyers who possess medical and legal knowledge lacking to apple farmers. No apple farmer would sell apples to and buy apples from other apple farmers merely to maintain the goodwill of other apple farmers. We shall see that traditional small-scale societies, like modern consumers and suppliers, often do trade objects to which one party has access and the other doesn’t (e.g., a type of stone available only locally), and they trade objects that one party knows how to make but the other doesn’t (e.g., sophisticated ocean-going wooden dugout canoes). But they also do much
trading of objects equally available to either party, and they do that trading to maintain relationships for political and social reasons.

So far, we have considered trade from the perspective of members of traditional societies, and of what they would find different and surprising, or else familiar, in our market economies. Let’s examine the corresponding mechanisms in traditional trade. I already mentioned the replacement of our cash purchases by their exchanges of objects, and occasionally by their use of valued objects such as cowrie shells in a manner somewhat similar to money. Now, let’s consider the traditional equivalents of the other features of market economies that we just discussed.

While in some cases traditional societies negotiate explicit exchanges, and both items pass hands at the same time, in other cases one party presents a gift, and the recipient thereby incurs the obligation to provide a gift of comparable value at some unspecified time in the future. The simplest form of such reciprocal gifting occurs among Andaman Islanders (
Plate 4
), for whom there is little delay between the two halves of the transaction. A local group invites one or more other local groups to a feast that lasts a few days, and to which the visitors bring objects such as bows, arrows, adzes, baskets, and clay. A visitor gives an object to a host, who cannot refuse the gift but is then expected to give something of equal value. If the second gift does not meet the guest’s expectations, the guest may become angry. Occasionally a giver, on making a present, names the gift that he would like in return, but that’s exceptional. Among South America’s Yanomamo Indians (
Plate 12
), reciprocal gift-giving is also associated with feasts to which one group invites a neighboring group. Yanomamo reciprocal gifting differs from the Andaman custom in that the second gift, which must be a different type of item from the first gift, is presented at a subsequent feast. Each Yanomamo gift is remembered long afterwards. The delay between the first and second gifts means that the accumulated obligations serve as an on-going excuse for neighboring villages to visit each other for feasts, because some members of one village always owe gifts to some members of another village from their last meeting.

Among the northwest Alaska Inuit, the Agta of the Philippines (
Plate 3
), Trobriand Islanders, and the !Kung, each person has recognized trading partners with whom gifts are exchanged. Each Inuit has between one and six such partners. Agta and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers have relationships with Philippine and Bantu farmer families respectively, and those relationships are passed on from generation to generation. Each Trobriand Islander traveling on a canoe trading voyage has on each visited island a trade partner to whom he gives a gift, and from whom he then expects an equivalent gift on his next visit a year later. The so-called
hxaro
long-distance trade system of the !Kung is distinctive in that each individual has dozens of trade partners, and it’s also distinctive in the long interval between the giving of one gift and the receipt of an equivalent gift when the two parties next meet, typically months or years later.

Who are the traders, and under what circumstances and how often do they meet? In small-scale societies everybody trades. However, in large chiefdoms and early states with specialization of economic roles, professional traders like our modern ones emerge, as documented already by records from the dawn of writing 4,000 or 5,000 years ago in the Near East. Another modern phenomenon with precedents in simpler societies consists of entire societies specialized in trading. The Malai Islanders whose “skyscrapers” surprised me lived on an island too small to provide all their food needs, became middlemen and manufacturers and overseas traders, and thereby obtained the remainder of their food requirements. Malai Island thus serves as a model for modern Singapore.

The formats and frequencies of traditional trade encompass a spectrum. At the simplest level are the occasional trips made by individual !Kung and Dani to visit their individual trading partners in other bands or hamlets. Suggestive of our open-air markets and flea markets were the occasional markets at which Sio villagers living on the coast of northeast New Guinea met New Guineans from inland villages. Up to a few dozen people from each side sat down in rows facing each other. An inlander pushed forward a net bag containing between 10 and 35 pounds of taro and sweet potatoes, and the Sio villager sitting opposite responded by offering a number of pots and coconuts judged equivalent in value to the bag of food. Trobriand Island canoe traders conducted similar markets on the
islands that they visited, exchanging utilitarian goods (food, pots, bowls, and stone) by barter, at the same time as they and their individual trade partners gave each other reciprocated gifts of luxury items (shell necklaces and armbands).

Andaman Island bands and Yanomamo Indian villages arranged to meet at irregular intervals for multi-day feasts that served as occasions for gifts. Northwest Alaska Inuit held summer trade fairs and winter messenger feasts at which groups that were passionate enemies for the rest of the year managed to sit down peacefully together for a week or two of trade and feasting. Specialized societies of canoe traders, such as the Siassi Islanders, Trobriand Islanders, southeast New Guinea’s Mailu Islanders, and Indonesians (Macassans) who visited northern Australia to obtain trepang (dried sea cucumbers) for the Chinese soup market, sent groups of merchants hundreds or even thousands of miles over the ocean on annual trading trips.

As for the objects exchanged in trading, one is tempted to begin by dividing them into two categories: utilitarian items (like food and tools) versus luxury items (like cowrie shells and diamond rings). But this dichotomy becomes gray as soon as one tries to apply it. As the economist Frank Knight wrote, “Of all the fallacious and absurd misconceptions which so largely vitiate economic and social discussion, perhaps the very worst is the notion … that an interpretation of utility, or usefulness, in biological or physical survival terms has any considerable significance at the human level.” For example, a BMW car is undoubtedly a luxury and a status symbol, but it can still be used to drive to the grocery store, and the image that it projects may be essential to its bearer in earning money by closing business deals and in wooing mates. The same is true for a beautiful Siassi wooden carved bowl, which is used to hold vegetables at feasts but is also a status symbol indispensable for buying a wife in the Vitiaz Strait region. As for pigs, they are by far the most valuable status symbol in New Guinea. That gave rise to Thomas Harding’s remark, “It can be said of pigs, too, that the least important thing one can do is simply to eat them.”

Despite all those strictures, if one is presented with a list of 59 trade items, it is still useful to categorize them rather than to lump them all into an undivided laundry list. Hence
Table 1.1
gives examples of trade items in 13 small-scale societies, partitioned into four categories: objects immediately useful for survival, obtaining subsistence, and daily life, further divided into raw materials versus manufactured objects; luxuries or decorative objects not immediately useful for survival; and an intermediate category of objects that are used but that also convey status raising their value far above the material value of an object with the same utility but not conveying status (e.g., a cashmere jacket compared to a cheap synthetic jacket of similar size and warmth).

Table 1.1
shows that certain types of useful raw materials have been traded by many societies around the world: especially stone, and more recently metal, for making tools and weapons; plus salt, food, wood, animal hides and furs, pitch for caulking, and clay for making pots. Commonly traded useful manufactured objects include finished tools and weapons, baskets and other containers, fiber for weaving, bags and nets and ropes, cloth and clothing, and processed foods such as bread, sago, and pemmican. The long list of luxury and decorative items, sometimes traded as raw materials, more often worked into manufactured objects, includes bird feathers; shells of mollusks and turtles, raw or worked into
necklaces and armbands; amber; dog, pig, and shark teeth; elephant and walrus ivory; beads; paints and paint bases, such as red ocher and black manganese oxide; tree oil; and stimulants such as tobacco, alcohol, and betelnut. For example, by 2,000 years ago long-distance specialist traders from Asia were bringing bird-of-paradise plumes from New Guinea to China, and the plumes were thence traded as far as Persia and Turkey. Finally, trade objects that are simultaneously useful and luxurious include pigs, trepang, spices, and other prestige foods (the traditional equivalents of our caviar); and beautiful but useful manufactured goods such as pottery, carved bows and arrows, and decorated bags, clothing, and mats.

Table 1.1
and the preceding discussion omit two other important categories of things that one people may offer to another people but that we don’t normally count among trade goods: labor and spouses. African rainforest Pygmies and Agta forest Negritos of the Philippines, and more recently some !Kung, intermittently work for neighboring Bantu farmers, Philippine farmers, and Bantu herders respectively. That’s a big part of the quid pro quo arrangement under which those groups of foragers receive iron plus garden crops or milk from those neighboring food-producers, in return for hunted and gathered products plus labor. Most neighboring peoples exchange spouses, occasionally as direct simultaneous exchanges (you give me your sister and I’ll give you my sister), more often as separate acts (you give me your sister now, and I’ll give you my little sister when she reaches the age of menarche). Between African rainforest Pygmies (
Plate 8
) and neighboring Bantu farmers such movements of spouses are virtually one way, with Pygmy women becoming wives of Bantu men but not vice versa.