Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 4

During the time that the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy takes hold. There is no reciprocity. As anyone who has ever been in jail knows, the first thing the jailors communicate is that nothing that happens in jail has anything to do with justice. Similarly, debtor and creditor confront each other like a peasant before a feudal lord. The law of precedent takes hold. If you bring your creditor tomatoes from the garden, it never occurs to you that he would give something back. He might expect you to do it again, though. But always there is the a.s.sumption that the situation is somewhat unnatural, because the debt really ought to be paid.

This is what makes situations of effectively unpayable debt so difficult and so painful. Since creditor and debtor are ultimately equals, if the debtor cannot do what it takes to restore herself to equality, there is obviously something wrong with her; it must be her fault.

This connection becomes clear if we look at the etymology of common words for "debt" in European languages. Many are synonyms for "fault," "sin," or "guilt;" just as a criminal owes a debt to society, a debtor is always a sort of criminal.59 In ancient Crete, according to Plutarch, it was the custom for those taking loans to pretend to s.n.a.t.c.h the money from the lender's purse. Why, he wondered? Probably "so that, if they default, they could be charged with violence and punished all the more."60 This is why in so many periods of history insolvent debtors could be jailed, or even-as in early Republican Rome-executed.

A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.

It follows that debt is strictly a creature of reciprocity and has little to do with other sorts of morality (communism, with its needs and abilities; hierarchy, with its customs and qualities). True, if we were really determined, we could argue (as some do) that communism is a condition of permanent mutual indebtedness, or that hierarchy is constructed out of unpayable debts. But isn't this just the same old story, starting from the a.s.sumption that all human interactions must be, by definition, forms of exchange, and then performing whatever mental somersaults are required to prove it?

No. All human interactions are not forms of exchange. Only some are. Exchange encourages a particular way of conceiving human relations. This is because exchange implies equality, but it also implies separation. It's precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is cancelled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.

Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal. But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality. Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the very reason for having a relations.h.i.+p, just about everything interesting happens in between.61 In fact, just about everything human happens in between-even if this means that all such human relations bear with them at least a tiny element of criminality, guilt, or shame.

For the Tiv women whom I mentioned earlier in the chapter, this wasn't much of a problem. By ensuring that everyone was always slightly in debt to one another, they actually created human society, if a very fragile sort of society-a delicate web made up of obligations to return three eggs or a bag of okra, ties renewed and recreated, as any one of them could be cancelled out at any time.

Our own habits of civility are not so very different. Consider the custom, in American society, of constantly saying "please" and "thank you." To do so is often treated as basic morality: we are constantly chiding children for forgetting to do it, just as the moral guardians of our society-teachers and ministers, for instance-do to everybody else. We often a.s.sume that the habit is universal, but as the Inuit hunter made clear, it is not.62 Like so many of our everyday courtesies, it is a kind of democratization of what was once a habit of feudal deference: the insistence on treating absolutely everyone the way that one used only to have to treat a lord or similar hierarchical superior.

Perhaps this is not so in every case. Imagine we are on a crowded bus, looking for a seat. A fellow pa.s.senger moves her bag aside to clear one; we smile, or nod, or make some other little gesture of acknowledgment. Or perhaps we actually say "Thank you." Such a gesture is simply a recognition of common humanity: we are acknowledging that the woman who had been blocking the seat is not a mere physical obstacle but a human being, and that we feel genuine grat.i.tude toward someone we will likely never see again. None of this is generally true when one asks someone across the table to "please pa.s.s the salt," or when the postman thanks you for signing for a delivery. We think of these simultaneously as meaningless formalities and as the very moral basis of society. Their apparent unimportance can be measured by the fact that almost no one would refuse, on principle, to say "please" or "thank you" in just about any situation-even those who might find it almost impossible to say "I'm sorry" or "I apologize."

In fact, the English "please" is short for "if you please," "if it pleases you to do this"-it is the same in most European languages (French si il vous plait, Spanish por favor). Its literal meaning is "you are under no obligation to do this." "Hand me the salt. Not that I am saying that you have to!" This is not true; there is a social obligation, and it would be almost impossible not to comply. But etiquette largely consists of the exchange of polite fictions (to use less polite language, lies). When you ask someone to pa.s.s the salt, you are also giving them an order; by attaching the word "please," you are saying that it is not an order. But, in fact, it is.

In English, "thank you" derives from "think," it originally meant, "I will remember what you did for me"-which is usually not true either-but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English "much obliged"-it actually does means "I am in your debt." The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from "mercy," as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor's power-since a debtor is, after all, a criminal.63 Saying "you're welcome," or "it's nothing" (French de rien, Spanish de nada)-the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true-is a way of rea.s.suring the one to whom one has pa.s.sed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book. So is saying "my pleasure"-you are saying, "No, actually, it's a credit, not a debit-you did me a favor because in asking me to pa.s.s the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself!"64 Decoding the tacit calculus of debt ("I owe you one," "No, you don't owe me anything," "Actually, if anything, it's me who owes you," as if inscribing and then scratching off so many infinitesimal entries in an endless ledger) makes it easy to understand why this sort of thing is often viewed not as the quintessence of morality, but as the quintessence of middle-cla.s.s morality. True, by now middle-cla.s.s sensibilities dominate society. But there are still those who find the practice odd. Those at the very top of society often still feel that deference is owed primarily to hierarchical superiors and find it slightly idiotic to watch postmen and pastry cooks taking turns pretending to treat each other like little feudal lords. At the other extreme, those who grew up in what in Europe are called "popular" environments-small towns, poor neighborhoods, anyplace where there is still an a.s.sumption that people who are not enemies will, ordinarily, take care of one another-will often find it insulting to be constantly told, in effect, that there is some chance they might not do their job as a waiter or taxi driver correctly, or provide houseguests with tea. In other words, middle-cla.s.s etiquette insists that we are all equals, but it does so in a very particular way. On the one hand, it pretends that n.o.body is giving anybody orders (think here of the burly security guard at the mall who appears before someone walking into a restricted area and says, "Can I help you?"); on the other, it treats every gesture of what I've been calling "baseline communism" as if it were really a form of exchange. As a result, like Tiv neighborhoods, middle-cla.s.s society has to be endlessly recreated, as a kind of constant flickering game of shadows, the criss-crossing of an infinity of momentary debt relations, each one almost instantly cancelled out.

All of this is a relatively recent innovation. The habit of always saying "please" and "thank you" first began to take hold during the commercial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-among those very middle cla.s.ses who were largely responsible for it. It is the language of bureaus, shops, and offices, and over the course of the last five hundred years it has spread across the world along with them. It is also merely one token of a much larger philosophy, a set of a.s.sumptions of what humans are and what they owe one another, that have by now become so deeply ingrained that we cannot see them.

Sometimes, at the brink of a new historical era, some prescient soul can see the full implications of what is beginning to happen-sometimes in a way that later generations can't. Let me end with a text by such a person. In Paris, sometime in 1540s, Francois Rabelais-lapsed monk, doctor, legal scholar-composed what was to become a famous mock eulogy, which he inserted in the third book of his great Gargantua and Pantagruel, and which came to be known as "In Praise of Debt."

Rabelais places the encomium in the mouth of one Panurge, a wandering scholar and man of extreme cla.s.sical erudition who, he observes, "knew sixty-three ways of making money-the most honorable and most routine of which was stealing."65 The good-natured giant Pantagruel adopts Panurge and even provides him with a respectable income, but it bothers him that Panurge continues to spend money like water and remains up to his ears in debt. Wouldn't it be better, Pantagruel suggests, to be able to pay his creditors?

Panurge responds with horror: "G.o.d forbid that I should ever be out of debt!" Debt is, in fact, the very basis of his philosophy: Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever praying G.o.d to grant you a good, long and blessed life. Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying good things about you in every sort of company; he will be constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men's spoil.66 Above all else, they will always be praying that you come into money. It's like those ancient slaves destined to be sacrificed at their masters' funerals. When they wished their master long life and good health, they genuinely meant it! What's more, debt can make you into a kind of G.o.d, who can make something (money, well-wis.h.i.+ng creditors) out of absolutely nothing.

Worse still: I give myself to bonnie Saint Bobelin if all my life I have not reckoned debts to be, as it were, a connection and colligation between Heaven and Earth (uniquely preserving the lineage of Man without which, I say, all human beings would soon perish) and perhaps to be that great World Soul which, according to the Academics, gives life to all things.

That it really is so, evoke tranquilly in your mind the Idea and Form of a world-take if you like the thirtieth of the worlds imagined by Metrodorus-in which there were no debtors or lenders at all. A universe sans debts! Amongst the heavenly bodies there would be no regular course whatsoever: all would be in disarray. Jupiter, reckoning that he owed no debt to Saturn, would dispossess him of his sphere, and with his Homeric chain hold in suspension all the Intelligences, G.o.ds, heavens, daemons, geniuses, heroes, devils, earth, sea and all the elements ... The Moon would remain dark and b.l.o.o.d.y; why should the Sun share his light with her? He is under no obligation. The Sun would never s.h.i.+ne on their Earth; the heavenly bodies would pour no good influences down upon it.

Between the elements there will be no mutual sharing of qualities, no alternation, no trans.m.u.tation whatsoever, one will not think itself obliged to the other; it has lent it nothing. From earth no longer will water be made, nor water trans.m.u.ted into air; from air fire will not be made, and fire will not warm the earth. Earth will bring forth nothing but monsters, t.i.tans, giants. The rain will not rain, the light will shed no light, the wind will not blow, and there will be no summer, no autumn, Lucifer will tear off his bonds and, sallying forth from deepest h.e.l.l with the Furies, the Vengeances and the horned devils, will seek to turf the G.o.ds of both the greater and lesser nations out from their nests in the heavens.

And what's more, if human beings owed nothing to one another, life would "be no better than a dog-fight"-a mere unruly brawl.

Amongst human beings none will save another; it will be no good a man shouting Help! Fire! I'm drowning! Murder! n.o.body will come and help him. Why? Because he has lent nothing: and no one owes him anything. No one has anything to lose by his fire, his s.h.i.+pwreck, his fall, or his death. He has lent nothing. And: he would lend nothing either hereafter.

In short, Faith, Hope and Charity would be banished from this world.

Panurge-a man without a family, alone, whose entire calling in life was getting large amounts of money and then spending it-serves as a fitting prophet for the world that was just beginning to emerge. His perspective of course is that of a wealthy debtor-not one liable to be trundled off to some pestiferous dungeon for failure to pay. Still, what he is describing is the logical conclusion, the reductio ad absurdum, which Rabelais as always lays out with cheerful perversity, of the a.s.sumptions about the world as exchange slumbering behind all our pleasant bourgeois formalities (which Rabelais himself, incidentally, detested-the book is basically a mixture of cla.s.sical erudition and dirty jokes).

And what he says is true. If we insist on defining all human interactions as matters of people giving one thing for another, then any ongoing human relations can only take the form of debts. Without them, no one would owe anything to anybody. A world without debt would revert to primordial chaos, a war of all against all; no one would feel the slightest responsibility for one another; the simple fact of being human would have no significance; we would all become isolated planets who couldn't even be counted on to maintain our proper orbits.

Pantagruel will have none of it. His own feelings on the matter, he says, can be summed up with one line from the Apostle Paul: "Owe no man anything, save mutual love and affection."67 Then, in an appropriately biblical gesture, he declares, "From your past debts I shall free you."

"What can I do but thank you?" Panurge replies.

Chapter Six.

GAMES WITH s.e.x AND DEATH.

WHEN WE RETURN to an examination of conventional economic history, one thing that jumps out is how much has been made to disappear. Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism), but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to seek mutual advantage, melt away into the background.

As a result, we end up with a sanitized view of the way actual business is conducted. The tidy world of shops and malls is the quintessential middle-cla.s.s environment, but at either the top or the bottom of the system, the world of financiers or of gangsters, deals are often made in ways not so completely different from ways that the Gunwinggu or Nambikwara make them-at least in that s.e.x, drugs, music, extravagant displays of food, and the potential for violence do often play parts.

Consider the case of Neil Bush (George W.'s brother) who, during divorce proceedings with his wife, admitted to multiple infidelities with women who, he claimed, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room door after important business meetings in Thailand and Hong Kong.

"You have to admit it's pretty remarkable," remarked one of his wife's attorneys, "for a man to go to a hotel-room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have s.e.x with her."

"It was very unusual," Bush replied, admitting however that this had happened to him on numerous occasions.

"Were they prost.i.tutes?"

"I don't know."

In fact, such things seem almost par for the course when really big money comes into play.

In this light, the economists' insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian.

As a result, though, the histories we tell are full of blank s.p.a.ces, and the women in them seem to appear out of nowhere, without explanation, much like the Thai women who appeared at Bush's door. Recall the pa.s.sage cited in Chapter Three, from numismatist Philip Grierson, about money in the barbarian law codes: Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (c.u.mal), with considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic codes it is mainly in precious metal ...2 How is it possible to read this pa.s.sage without immediately stopping at the end of the first line? "Bondmaids"? Doesn't that mean "slaves?" (It does.) In ancient Ireland, female slaves were so plentiful and important that they came to function as currency. How did that happen? And if we are trying to understand the origins of money, here, isn't the fact that people are using one another as currency at all interesting or significant?3 Yet none of the sources on money remark much on it. It would seem that by the time of the law codes, slave girls were not actually traded, but just used as units of account. Still, they must have been traded at some point. Who were they? How were they enslaved? Were they captured in war, sold by their parents, or reduced to slavery through debt? Were they a major trade item? The answer to all these questions would seem to be yes, but it's hard to say more because the history remains largely unwritten.4 Or let's return to the parable of the ungrateful servant. "Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt." How did that happen? Note that we're not even speaking of debt service here (he is already his creditor's servant), but outright slavery. How did a man's wife and children come to be considered no different than his sheep and crockery-as property to be liquidated on the occasion of default? Was it normal for a man in first-century Palestine to be able to sell his wife? (It wasn't.)5 If he didn't own her, why was someone else allowed to sell her if he couldn't pay his debts?

The same could be asked of the story in Nehemiah. It's hard not to empathize with the distress of a father watching his daughter taken off by strangers. On the other hand, one might also ask: Why weren't they taking him? The daughter hadn't borrowed any money.

It's not as if it is ordinary for fathers in traditional societies to be able to sell their children. This is a practice with a very specific history: it appears in the great agrarian civilizations, from Sumer to Rome to China, right around the time when we also start to see evidence of money, markets, and interest-bearing loans; later, more gradually, it also appears in those surrounding hinterlands that supplied those civilizations with slaves.6 What's more, if we examine the historical evidence, there seems good reason to believe that the very obsession with patriarchal honor that so defines "tradition" in the Middle East and Mediterranean world itself arose alongside the father's power to alienate his children-as a reaction to what were seen as the moral perils of the market. All of this is treated as somehow outside the bounds of economic history.

Excluding all this is deceptive not only because it excludes the main purposes to which money was actually put in the past, but because it doesn't give us a clear vision of the present. After all, who were those Thai women who so mysteriously appeared at Neil Bush's hotel door? Almost certainly, they were children of indebted parents. Likely as not, they were contractual debt peons themselves.7 Focusing on the s.e.x industry would be deceptive, though. Then as now, most women in debt bondage spend the vast majority of their time sewing, preparing soups, and scouring latrines. Even in the Bible, the admonition in the Ten Commandments not to "covet thy neighbor's wife" clearly referred not to l.u.s.t in one's heart (adultery had already been covered in commandment number seven), but to the prospect of taking her as a debt-peon-in other words, as a servant to sweep one's yard and hang out the laundry.8 In most such matters, s.e.xual exploitation was at best incidental (usually illegal, sometimes practiced anyway, symbolically important.) Again, once we remove some of our usual blinders, we can see that matters have changed far less, over the course of the last five thousand years or so, than we really like to think.

These blinders are all the more ironic when one looks at the anthropological literature on what used to be called "primitive money"-that is, the sort one encounters in places where there are no states or markets-whether Iroquois wampum, African cloth money, or Solomon Island feather money, and discovers that such money is used almost exclusively for the kinds of transactions that economists don't like to have to talk about.

In fact, the term "primitive money" is deceptive for this very reason, since it suggests that we are dealing with a crude version of the kind of currencies we use today. But this is precisely what we don't find. Often, such currencies are never used to buy and sell anything at all.9 Instead, they are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relations between people: to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers-almost anything but trade in yams, shovels, pigs, or jewelry.

Often, these currencies were extremely important, so much so that social life itself might be said to revolve around getting and disposing of the stuff. Clearly, though, they mark a totally different conception of what money, or indeed an economy, is actually about. I've decided therefore to refer to them as "social currencies," and the economies that employ them as "human economies." By this I mean not that these societies are necessarily in any way more humane (some are quite humane; others extraordinarily brutal), but only that they are economic systems primarily concerned not with the acc.u.mulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.

Historically, commercial economies-market economies, as we now like to call them-are a relative newcomer. For most of human history, human economies predominated. To even begin to write a genuine history of debt, then, we have to start by asking: What sort of debts, what sort of credits and debits, do people acc.u.mulate in human economies? And what happens when human economies begin to give away to or are taken over by commercial ones? This is another way of asking the question, "How do mere obligations turn into debts?"-but it means not just asking the question in the abstract, but examining the historical record to try to reconstruct what actually did happen.

This is what I will do over the course of the next two chapters. First I will look at the role of money in human economies, then describe what can happen when human economies are suddenly incorporated into the economic orbits of larger, commercial ones. The African slave trade will serve as a particularly catastrophic case in point. Then, in the next chapter, I will return to the first emergence of commercial economies in early civilizations of Europe and the Middle East.

Money as Inadequate Subst.i.tute.

The most interesting theory of the origin of money is the one recently put forward by a French economist-turned-anthropologist named Philippe Rospabe. While his work is largely unknown in the English-speaking world, it's quite ingenious, and it bears directly on our problem. Rospabe's argument is that "primitive money" was not originally a way to pay debts of any sort. It's a way of recognizing the existence of debts that cannot possibly be paid. His argument is worth considering in detail.

In most human economies, money is used first and foremost to arrange marriages. The simplest and probably most common way of doing this was by being presented as what used to be called "bride-price": a suitor's family would deliver a certain number of dog teeth, or cowries, or bra.s.s rings, or whatever is the local social currency, to a woman's family, and they would present their daughter as his bride. It's easy to see why this might be interpreted as buying a women, and many colonial officials in Africa and Oceania in the early part of the twentieth century did indeed come to that conclusion. The practice caused something of a scandal, and by 1926, the League of Nations was debating banning the practice as a form of slavery. Anthropologists objected. Really, they explained, this was nothing like the purchase of, say, an ox-let alone a pair of sandals. After all, if you buy an ox, you don't have any responsibilities to the ox. What you are really buying is the right to dispose of the ox in any way that pleases you. Marriage is entirely different, since a husband will normally have just as many responsibilities toward his wife as his wife will have toward him. It's a way of rearranging relations between people. Second of all, if you were really buying a wife, you'd be able to sell her. Finally, the real significance of the payment concerns the status of the woman's children: if he's buying anything, it's the right to call her offspring his own.10 The anthropologists ended up winning the argument, and "bride-price" was dutifully redubbed "bridewealth." But they never really answered the question: What is actually happening here? When a Fijian suitor's family presents a whale tooth to ask for a woman's hand in marriage, is this an advance payment for the services the woman will provide in cultivating her future husband's gardens? Or is he purchasing the future fertility of her womb? Or is this a pure formality, the equivalent of the dollar that has to change hands in order to seal a contract? According to Rospabe, it's none of these. The whale tooth, however valuable, is not a form of payment. It is really an acknowledgment that one is asking for something so uniquely valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible. The only appropriate payment for the gift of a woman is the gift of another woman; in the meantime, all one can do is to acknowledge the outstanding debt.

There are places where suitors say this quite explicitly. Consider the Tiv of Central Nigeria, who we have already met briefly in the last chapter. Most of our information on the Tiv comes from mid-century, when they were still under British colonial rule.11 Everyone at that time insisted that a proper marriage should take the form of an exchange of sisters. One man gives his sister in marriage to another, that man marries the sister of his newfound brother-in-law. This is the perfect marriage because the only thing one can really give in exchange for a woman is another woman.

Obviously, even if every family had exactly equal numbers of brothers and sisters, things couldn't always work this neatly. Say I marry your sister but you don't want to marry mine (because, say, you don't like her, or because she's only five years old). In that case, you become her "guardian," which means you can claim the right to dispose of her in marriage to someone else-for instance, someone whose sister you actually do wish to marry. This system quickly grew into a complex system in which most important men became guardians of numerous "wards," often scattered over wide areas; they would swap and trade them and in the process acc.u.mulate numerous wives for themselves, while less-fortunate men were only able to marry late in life, or not at all.12 There was one other expedient. The Tiv at that time used bundles of bra.s.s rods as their most prestigious form of currency. Bra.s.s rods were only held by men, and never used to buy things in markets (markets were dominated by women); instead, they were exchanged only for things that men considered of higher importance: cattle, horses, ivory, ritual t.i.tles, medical treatment, magical charms. It was possible, as one Tiv ethnographer, Akiga Sai, explains, to acquire a wife with bra.s.s rods, but it required quite a lot of them. You would need to give two or three bundles of them to her parents to establish yourself as a suitor; then, when you did finally make off with her (such marriages were always first framed as elopements), another few bundles to a.s.suage her mother when she showed up angrily demanding to know what was going on. This would normally be followed by five more to get her guardian to at least temporarily accept the situation, and more still to her parents when she gave birth, if you were to have any chance of their accepting your claims to be the father of her children. That might get her parents off your back, but you'd have to pay off the guardian forever, because you could never really use money to acquire the rights to a woman. Everyone knew that the only thing you can legitimately give in exchange for a woman is another woman. In this case, everyone has to abide by the pretext that a woman will someday be forthcoming. In the meantime, as one ethnographer succinctly puts it, "the debt can never be fully paid."13 According to Rospabe, the Tiv are just making explicit the underlying logic of bridewealth everywhere. The suitor presenting bridewealth is never paying for a woman, or even for the rights to claim her children. That would imply that bra.s.s rods, or whale's teeth, cowrie sh.e.l.ls, or even cattle are somehow the equivalent of a human being, which by the logic of a human economy is obviously absurd. Only a human could ever be considered equivalent to another human. All the more so since, in the case of marriage, we are speaking of something even more valuable than one human life: we are speaking of a human life that also has the capacity to generate new lives.

Certainly, many of those who pay bridewealth are, like the Tiv, quite explicit about all this. Bridewealth money is presented not to settle a debt, but as a kind of acknowledgment that there exists a debt that cannot be settled by means of money. Often the two sides will maintain at least the polite fiction that there will, someday, be a recompense in kind: that the suitor's clan will eventually provide one of its own women, perhaps even that very woman's daughter or granddaughter, to marry a man of the wife's natal clan. Or maybe there will be some arrangement about the disposition of her children; perhaps her clan will get to keep one for itself. The possibilities are endless.

Money, then, begins, as Rospabe himself puts it, "as a subst.i.tute for life."14 One might call it the recognition of a life-debt. This, in turn, explains why it's invariably the exact same kind of money that's used to arrange marriages that is also used to pay wergeld (or "bloodwealth" as it's sometimes also called): money presented to the family of a murder victim so as to prevent or resolve a blood-feud. Here the sources are even more explicit. On the one hand, one presents whale teeth or bra.s.s rods because the murderer's kin recognize they owe a life to the victim's family. On the other, whale teeth or bra.s.s rods are in no sense, and can never be, compensation for the loss of a murdered relative. Certainly no one presenting such compensation would ever be foolish enough to suggest that any amount of money could possibly be the "equivalent" to the value of someone's father, sister, or child.

So here again, money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money.

In the case of a blood-feud, both parties will also be aware that even a revenge killing, while at least it conforms to the principle of a life for a life, won't really compensate for the victim's grief and pain either. This knowledge allows for some possibility of settling the matter without violence. But even here, there is often a feeling that, as in the case of marriage, the real solution to the problem is simply being temporarily postponed.

An ill.u.s.tration might be helpful. Among the Nuer, there is a special cla.s.s of priestly figures who specialize in mediating feuds, referred to in the literature as "leopard-skin chiefs." If one man murders another, he will immediately seek out one of their homesteads, since such a homestead is treated as an inviolate sanctuary: even the dead man's family, who will be honor-bound to avenge the murder, will know that they cannot enter it, lest terrible consequences ensue. According to Evans-Pritchard's cla.s.sic account, the chief will immediately start trying to negotiate a settlement between the murderer and victim's families, a delicate business, because the victim's family will always first refuse: The chief first finds out what cattle the slayer's people possess and what they are prepared to pay in compensation.... He then visits the dead man's people and asks them to accept cattle for the life. They usually refuse, for it is a point of honor to be obstinate, but their refusal does not mean that they are unwilling to accept compensation. The chief knows this and insists on their acceptance, even threatening to curse them if they do not give way ...15 More-distant kin weigh in, reminding everyone of their responsibility to the larger community, of all the trouble that an outstanding feud will cause to innocent relatives, and after a great show of holding out, insisting that it is insulting to suggest that any number of cattle could possibly subst.i.tute for the life of a son or brother, they will usually grudgingly accept.16 In fact, even once the matter has technically been settled, it really hasn't-it usually takes years to a.s.semble the cattle, and even once they have been paid, the two sides will avoid each other, "especially at dances, for in the excitement they engender, merely b.u.mping into a man whose kinsman has been slain may cause a fight to break out, because the offense is never forgiven and the score must finally be paid with a life."17 So it's much the same as with bridewealth. Money does not wipe out the debt. One life can only be paid for with another. At best those paying bloodwealth, by admitting the existence of the debt and insisting that they wish they could pay it, even though they know this is impossible, can allow the matter to be placed permanently on hold.

Halfway around the world, one finds Lewis Henry Morgan describing the elaborate mechanisms set up by the Six Nations of the Iroquois to avoid precisely this state of affairs. In the event one man killed another, Immediately on the commission of a murder, the affair was taken up by the tribes to which the parties belonged, and strenuous efforts were made to effect a reconciliation, lest private retaliation should lead to disastrous consequences.

The first council ascertained whether the offender was willing to confess his crime, and to make atonement. If he was, the council immediately sent a belt of white wampum, in his name, to the other council, which contained a message to that effect. The latter then endeavored to pacify the family of the deceased, to quiet their excitement, and to induce them to accept the wampum as condonation.18 Much as in the case of the Nuer, there were complicated schedules of exactly how many fathoms of wampum were paid over, depending on the status of the victim and the nature of the crime. As with the Nuer, too, everyone insisted that this was not payment. The value of the wampum in no sense represented the value of the dead man's life: The present of white wampum was not in the nature of a compensation for the life of the deceased, but of a regretful confession of the crime, with a pet.i.tion for forgiveness. It was a peace-offering, the acceptance of which was pressed by mutual friends ...19 Actually, in many cases there was also some way to manipulate the system to turn payments meant to a.s.suage one's rage and grief into ways of creating a new life that would in some sense subst.i.tute for the one that was lost. Among the Nuer, forty cattle were set as the standard fee for bloodwealth. But it was also the standard rate of bridewealth. The logic was this: if a man had been murdered before he was able to marry and produce offspring, it's only natural that his spirit would be angry. He had been, effectively, robbed of his eternity. The best solution would be to use the cattle paid in settlement to acquire what was called a "ghost-wife": a woman who would then be formally married to the dead man. In practice, she was usually paired off with one of the victim's brothers, but this was not particularly important; it didn't really matter too much who impregnated her, since he would be in no sense the father of her children. Her children would be considered the children of the victim's ghost-and as a result, any boys among them were seen as having been born with a particular commitment to someday avenge his death.20 This latter is unusual. But Nuer appear to have been unusually stubborn about feuds. Rospabe provides examples from other parts of the world that are even more telling. Among North African Bedouins, for instance, it sometimes happened that the only way to settle a feud was for the killer's family to turn over a daughter, who would then marry the victim's next of kin-his brother, say. If she bore him a male child, the boy was given the same name as his dead uncle and considered to be, at least in the broadest sense, a subst.i.tute for him.21 The Iroquois, who traced descent in the female line, did not trade women in this fas.h.i.+on. However, they had another, more direct approach. If a man died-even of natural causes-his wife's relatives might "put his name upon the mat," sending off belts of wampum to commission a war party, which would then raid an enemy village to secure a captive. The captive could either be killed, or, if the clan matrons were in a benevolent mood (one could never tell; the grief of mourning is tricky), adopted: this was signified by throwing a belt of wampum around his shoulders, whereon he would be given the name of the deceased and be considered, from that moment on, married to the victim's wife, the owner of his personal possessions, and in every way, effectively, the exact same person as the dead man used to be.22 All of this merely serves to underline Rospabe's basic point, which is that money can be seen, in human economies, as first and foremost the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be paid.

In a way, it's all very reminiscent of primordial-debt theory: money emerges from the recognition of an absolute debt to that which has given you life. The difference is that instead of imagining such debts as between an individual and society, or perhaps the cosmos, here they are imagined as a kind of network of dyadic relations: almost everyone in such societies was in a relation of absolute debt to someone else. It's not that we owe "society." If there is any notion of "society" here-and it's not clear that there is-society is our debts.

Blood Debts (Lele).

Obviously, this leads us to the same familiar problem: How does a token of recognition that one cannot pay a debt turn into a form of payment by which a debt can be extinguished? If anything, the problem seems even worse than it was before.

In fact, it isn't. The African evidence clearly shows how such things can happen-though the answer is a bit unsettling. To demonstrate this, it will be necessary to look at one or two African societies with a closer focus.

I'll start with the Lele, an African people who had, at the time that Mary Douglas studied them in the 1950s, managed to turn the principle of blood debts into the organizing principle of their entire society.

The Lele were, at that time, a group of perhaps ten thousand souls, living on a stretch of rolling country near the Kasai River in the Belgian Congo, and considered a rude backcountry folk by their richer and more cosmopolitan neighbors, the Kuba and Bushong. Lele women grew maize and manioc; the men thought of themselves as intrepid hunters but spent most of their time weaving and sewing raffia-palm cloth. This cloth was what the area was really known for. It was not only used for every sort of clothing, but also exported: the Lele considered themselves the clothiers of the region, and it was traded with surrounding people to acquire luxuries. Internally, it functioned as a sort of currency. Still, it was not used in markets (there were no markets), and, as Mary Douglas discovered to her great inconvenience, within a village, one couldn't use it to acquire food, tools, tableware, or really much of anything.23 It was the quintessential social currency.

Informal gifts of raffia cloth smooth all social relations: husband to wife, son to mother, son to father. They resolve occasions of tension, as peace-offerings; they make parting gifts, or convey congratulations. There are also formal gifts of raffia which are neglected only at risk of rupture of the social ties involved. A man, on reaching adulthood, should give 20 cloths to his father. Otherwise he would be ashamed to ask his father's help for raising his marriage dues. A man should give 20 cloths to his wife on each delivery of a child ...24 Cloth was also used for various fines and fees, and to pay curers. So for instance, if a man's wife reported a would-be seducer, it was customary to reward her with 20 cloths for her fidelity (it was not required, but not doing so was considered decidedly unwise); if an adulterer was caught, he was expected to pay 50 or 100 cloths to the woman's husband; if the husband and lover disturbed the peace of the village by fighting before the matter was settled, each would have to pay two in compensation, and so forth.

Gifts tended to flow upward. Young people were always giving little presents of cloth as marks of respect to fathers, mothers, uncles, and the like. These gifts were hierarchical in nature: that is, it never occurred to those receiving them that they should have to reciprocate in any way. As a result, elders, and especially elder men, usually had a few extra pieces lying around, and young men, who could never weave quite enough to meet their needs, would have to turn to them whenever time for some major payment rolled around: for instance, if they had to pay a major fine, or wished to hire a doctor to a.s.sist their wife in child-birth, or wanted to join a cult society. They were thus always slightly in debt, or at least slightly beholden, to their elders. But everyone also had a whole range of friends and relatives who they had helped out, and so could turn to for a.s.sistance.25 Marriage was particularly expensive, since the arrangements usually required getting one's hands on several bars of camwood. If raffia cloth was the small change of social life, camwood-a rare imported wood used for the manufacture of cosmetics-was the high-denomination currency. A hundred raffia cloths were equivalent to three to five bars. Few individuals owned much in the way of camwood, usually just little bits to grind up for their own use. Most was kept in each village's collective treasury.

This is not to say that camwood was used for anything like bridewealth-rather, it was used in marriage negotiations, in which all sorts of gifts were pa.s.sed back and forth. In fact, there was no bridewealth. Men could not use money to acquire women; nor could they use it to claim any rights over children. The Lele were matrilineal. Children belonged not to their father's clan, but to their mother's.

There was another way that men gained control over women, however.26 This was the system of blood debts.

It is a common understanding among many traditional African peoples that human beings do not simply die without a reason. If someone dies, someone must have killed them. If a Lele woman died in childbirth, for example, this was a.s.sumed to be because she had committed adultery. The adulterer was thus responsible for the death. Sometimes she would confess on her deathbed, otherwise the facts of the matter would have to be established through divination. It was the same if a baby died. If someone became sick, or slipped and fell while climbing a tree, one would check to see if they had been involved in any quarrel that could be said to have caused the misfortune. If all else failed, one could employ magical means to identify the sorcerer. Once the village was satisfied that a culprit had been identified, that person owed a blood-debt: that is, he owed the victim's next of kin a human life. The culprit would thus have to transfer over a young woman from his family, his sister or her daughter, to be the victim's ward, or "p.a.w.n."

As with the Tiv, the system quickly became immensely complicated. p.a.w.ns.h.i.+p was inherited. If a woman was someone's p.a.w.n, so would her children be, and so would her daughters' children. This meant that most males were also considered someone else's man. Still, no one would accept a male p.a.w.n in payment of blood-debts: the whole point was to get hold of a young woman, who would then go on to produce additional p.a.w.n children. Douglas's Lele informants emphasized that any man would naturally want to have many of these as possible: Ask "Why do you want to have more p.a.w.ns?" and they invariably say, "The advantage of owning p.a.w.ns is that if you incur a blood-debt, you can settle it by paying one of your p.a.w.ns, and your own sisters remain free." Ask, "Why do you wish your own sisters to remain free?" and they reply, "Ah! then if I incur a blood-debt, I can settle it by giving one of them as a p.a.w.n ..."

Every man is always aware that at any time he is liable for a blood-debt. If any woman he has seduced confesses his name in the throes of child-birth, and subsequently dies, or if her child dies, or if anyone he has quarreled with dies of illness or accident, he may be held responsible ... Even if a woman runs away from her husband, and fighting breaks out on her account, the deaths will be laid at her door, and her brother or mother's brother will have to pay up. Since only women are accepted as blood-compensation, and since compensation is demanded for all deaths, of men as well as of women, it is obvious that there can never be enough to go around. Men fall into arrears in their p.a.w.ns.h.i.+p obligations, and girls used to be pledged before their birth, even before their mothers were of marriageable age.27 In other words, the whole thing turned into an endlessly complicated chess game-one reason, Douglas remarks, why the term "p.a.w.n" seems singularly apropos. Just about every adult Lele male was both someone else's p.a.w.n, and engaged in a constant game of securing, swapping, or redeeming p.a.w.ns. Every major drama or tragedy of village life would ordinarily lead to a transfer of rights in women. Almost all of those women would eventually get swapped again.

Several points need to be emphasized here. First of all, what were being traded were, quite specifically, human lives. Douglas calls them "blood-debts," but "life-debts" would be more appropriate. Say, for instance, a man is drowning, and another man rescues him. Or say he's deathly ill but a doctor cures him. In either case, we would likely say one man "owes his life" to the other. So would the Lele, but they meant it literally. Save someone's life, they owe you a life, and a life owed had to be paid back. The usual recourse was for a man whose life was saved to turn over his sister as a p.a.w.n-or if not that, a different woman; a p.a.w.n he had acquired from someone else.

The second point is that nothing could subst.i.tute for a human life. "Compensation was based on the principle of equivalence, a life for a life, a person for a person." Since the value of a human life was absolute, no amount of raffia cloth, or camwood bars, or goats, or transistor radios, or anything else could possibly take its place.

The third and most important point is that in practice, "human life" actually meant "woman's life"-or even more specifically, "young woman's life." Ostensibly this was to maximize one's holdings: above all, one wished for a human being who could become pregnant and produce children, since those children would also be p.a.w.ns. Still, even Mary Douglas, who was in no sense a feminist, was forced to admit that the whole arrangement did seem to operate as if it were one gigantic apparatus for a.s.serting male control over women. This was true above all because women themselves could not own p.a.w.ns.28 They could only be p.a.w.ns. In other words: when it came to life-debts, only men could be either creditors or debtors. Young women were thus the credits and the debits-the pieces being moved around the chessboard-while the hands that moved them were invariably male.29 Of course, since almost everyone was a p.a.w.n, or had been at some point in their lives, being one could not in itself be much of a tragedy. For male p.a.w.ns it was in some ways quite advantageous, since one's "owner" had to pay most of one's fines and fees and even blood-debts. This is why, as Douglas's informants uniformly insisted, p.a.w.ns.h.i.+p had nothing in common with slavery. The Lele did keep slaves, but never very many. Slaves were war captives, usually foreigners. As such they had no family, no one to protect them. To be a p.a.w.n, on the other hand, meant to have not one, but two different families to look after you: you still had your own mother and her brothers, but now you also had your "lord."

For a woman, the very fact that she was the stakes in a game that all men were playing afforded all sorts of opportunities to game the system. In principle, a girl might be born a p.a.w.n, a.s.signed to some man for eventual marriage. In practice, however, a little Lele girl would grow up a coquette. From infancy she was the centre of affectionate, teasing, flirting attention. Her affianced husband never gained more than a very limited control over her ... Since men competed with one another for women there was scope for women to manoeuvre and intrigue. Hopeful seducers were never lacking and no woman doubted that she could get another husband if it suited her.30 In addition, a young Lele woman had one unique and powerful card to play. Everyone was well aware that, if she completely refused to countenance her situation, she always had the option of becoming a "village-wife."31 The inst.i.tution of village-wife was a peculiarly Lele one. Probably the best way to describe it is to imagine a hypothetical case. Let us say that an old, important man acquires a young woman as p.a.w.n through a blood-debt, and he decides to marry her himself. Technically, he has the right to do so, but it's no fun for a young woman to be an old man's third or fourth wife. Or, say he decides to offer her in marriage to one of his male p.a.w.ns in a village far away from her mother and natal home. She protests. He ignores her protestations. She waits for an opportune moment and slips off at night to an enemy village, where she asks for sanctuary. This is always possible: all villages have their traditional enemies. Neither would an enemy village refuse a woman who came to them in such a situation. They would immediately declare her "wife of the village," who all men living there would then be obliged to protect.

It helps to understand that here, as in many parts of Africa, most older men had several wives. This meant that the pool of women available for younger men was considerably reduced. As our ethnographer explains, the imbalance was a source of considerable s.e.xual tension: Everyone recognized that the young unmarried men coveted the wives of their seniors. Indeed, one of their pastimes was to plan seductions and the man who boasted of none was derided. Since the old men wished to remain polygynists, with two or three wives, and since adulteries were thought to disrupt the peace of the village, Lele had to make some arrangement to appease their unmarried men.

Therefore, when a sufficient number of them reached the age of eighteen or so, they were allowed to buy the right to a common wife.32 After paying an appropriate fee in raffia cloth to the village treasury, they were permitted to build a collective house, and then they were either allotted a wife to put in it, or allowed to form a party that would try to steal one from a rival village. (Or, alternately, if one showed up as a refugee, they would ask the rest of the village for the right to accept her: this was invariably granted.) This common wife is what's referred to as a "village wife." The position of village wife was more than respectable. In fact, a newly married village wife was treated very much like a princess. She was not expected to plant or weed in the gardens, fetch wood or water, or even to cook; all household ch.o.r.es were done by her eager young husbands, who provided the best of everything, spending much of their time hunting in the forest vying to bring her the choicest delicacies, or plying her with palm wine. She could help herself to others' possessions and was expected to make all sorts of mischief to the bemused indulgence of all concerned. She was also expected to make herself s.e.xually available to all members of the age-set-perhaps ten or twelve different men-at first, pretty much whenever they wanted her.33 Over time, a village wife would usually settle down with just three or four of her husbands, and finally, just one. The domestic arrangements were flexible. Nonetheless, in principle, she was married to the village as a whole. If she had children, the village was considered to be their father, and as such expected to bring them up, provide them with resources, and eventually, get them properly married off-which is why villages had to maintain collective treasuries full of raffia and camwood bars in the first place. Since at any time a village was likely to have several village wives, it would also have its own children and grandchildren, and therefore be in a position to both demand and pay blood-debts, and thus, to acc.u.mulate p.a.w.ns.

As a result, villages became corporate bodies, collective groups that, like modern corporations, had to be treated as if they were individuals for purposes of law. However there was one key difference. Unlike ordinary individuals, villages could back up their claims with force.

As Douglas emphasizes, this was crucial, because ordinary Lele men were simply not able to do this to one another.34 In everyday affairs, there was an almost complete lack of any systematic means of coercion. This was the main reason, she notes, that p.a.w.ns.h.i.+p was so innocuous. There were all sorts of rules, but with no government, no courts, no judges to make authoritative decisions, no group of armed men willing or able to employ the threat of force to back those decisions up, rules were there to be adjusted and interpreted. In the end, everyone's feelings had to be taken into account. In everyday affairs, Lele put great stock on gentle and agreeable behavior. Men might have been regularly seized with the urge to throw themselves at each other in fits of jealous rage (often they had good reason to), but they very rarely did. And if a fight did break out, everyone would immediately jump in to break it up and submit the affair to public mediation.35 Villages, in contrast, were fortified, and age-sets could be mobilized to act as military units. Here, and only here, did organized violence enter the picture. True, when villages fought, it was also always over women (everyone Douglas talked to expressed incredulity at the very idea that grown men, anywhere, could ever come to blows over anything else). But in the case of villages, it could come to an actual war. If another village's elders ignored one's claims to a p.a.w.n, one's young men might organize a raiding party and kidnap her, or carry off some other likely young women to be their collective wife. This might lead to deaths, and to further claims for compensation. "Since it had the backing of force," Douglas observes drily, "the village could afford to be less conciliatory towards the wishes of its p.a.w.ns."36 It's at exactly this point, too, where the potential for violence enters, that the great wall constructed between the value of lives and money can suddenly come tumbling down.

Sometimes when two clans were disputing a claim to blood compensation, the claimant might see no hope of getting satisfaction from his opponents. The political system offered no direct means for one man (or clan) to use physical coercion or to resort to superior authority to enforce claims against another. In such a case, rather than abandon his claim to a p.a.w.n-woman, he would be ready to take the equivalent in wealth, if he could get it. The usual procedure was to sell his case against the defendants to the only group capable of extorting a p.a.w.n by force, that is, to a village.

The man who meant to sell his case to a village asked them for 100 raffia cloths or five bars of camwood. The village raised the amount, either from its treasury, or by a loan from one of its members, and thereby adopted as its own his claim to a p.a.w.n.37 Once he held the money, his claim was over, and the village, which had now bought it, would proceed to organize a raid to seize the woman in dispute.

In other words, it was only when violence was brought into the equation that there was any question of buying and selling people. The ability to deploy force, to cut through the endless maze of preferences, obligations, expectations, and responsibilities that mark real human relations.h.i.+ps, also made it possible to overcome what is otherwise the first rule of all Lele economic relations.h.i.+ps: that human lives can only be exchanged for other human lives, and never for physical objects. Significantly, the amount paid-a hundred cloths, or an equivalent amount of camwood-was also the price of a slave.38 Slaves were, as I mentioned, war captives. There seem never to have been very many of them; Douglas only managed to locate two descendants of slaves in the 1950s, some twenty-five years after the practice had been abolished.39 Still, the numbers were not important. The mere fact of their existence set a precedent. The value of a human life could, sometimes, be quantified; but if one was able to move from A = A (one life equals another) to A = B (one life = one hundred cloths), it was only because the equation was established at the point of a spear.

Flesh-Debt (Tiv).

I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term "human economy," what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people's days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this. Lele currencies are, as I say, quintessential social currencies. They are used to mark every visit, every promise, every important moment in a man's or woman's life. It is surely significant, too, what the objects used as currency here actually were. Raffia cloth was used for clothing. In Douglas's day, it was the main thing used to clothe the human body; camwood bars were the source of a red paste that was used as a cosmetic-it was the main substance used as makeup, by both men and women, to beautify themselves each day. These, then, were the materials used to shape people's physical appearance, to make them appear mature, decent, attractive, and dignified to their fellows. They were what turned a mere naked body into a proper social being.

This is no coincidence. In fact, it's extraordinarily common in what I've been calling human economies. Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, sh.e.l.ls, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful. The bra.s.s rods used by the Tiv might seem an exception, but actually they're not: they were used mainly as raw material for the manufacture of jewelry, or simply twisted into hoops and worn at dances. There are exceptions (cattle, for instance), but as a general rule, it's only when governments, and then markets, enter the picture that we begin to see currencies like barley, cheese, tobacco, or salt.40 It also ill.u.s.trates the peculiar progression of ideas that so often mark human economies. On the one hand, human life is the absolute value. There is no possible equivalent. Whether a life is given or taken, the debt is absolute. In places, this principle is indeed sacrosanct. More often, it is compromised by the elaborate games played by the Tiv, who treat the giving of lives, and the Lele, who treat the taking of lives, as creating debts that can only be paid by delivering another human being. In each case, too, the practice ends up engendering an extraordinarily complex game in which important men end up exchanging women, or at least, rights over their fertility.

But this is already a kind of opening. Once the game exists, once the principle of subst.i.tution comes in, there was always the possibility of extending it. When that begins to happen, systems of debt that were premised on creating people can-even here-suddenly become the means of destroying them.

As an example, let us once again return to the Tiv. The reader will recall that if a man did not have a sister or a ward to give in exchange for one's wife, it was possible to a.s.suage her parents and guardians by gifts of money. However, such a wife would never be considered truly his. Here too, there was one dramatic exception. A man could buy a slave, a woman kidnapped in a raid from a distant country.41 Slaves, after all, had no parents, or could be treated as if they didn't; they had been forcibly removed from all those networks of mutual obligation and debt in which ordinary people acquired their outward ident.i.ties. This was why they could be bought and sold.