Debt: The First 5000 Years Part 3

In other words, while most of us can imagine what we owe to our parents as a kind of debt, few of us can imagine being able to actually pay it-or even that such a debt ever should be paid. Yet if it can't be paid, in what sense is it a "debt" at all? And if it is not a debt, what is it?

One obvious place to look for alternatives is in cases of human interaction in which expectations of reciprocity seem to slam into a wall. Nineteenth-century travelers' accounts, for instance, are full of this sort of thing. Missionaries working in certain parts of Africa would often be astounded by the reactions they would receive when they administered medicines. Here's a typical example, from a British missionary in Congo: A day or two after we reached Vana we found one of the natives very ill with pneumonia. Comber treated him and kept him alive on strong fowl-soup; a great deal of careful nursing and attention was visited on him, for his house was beside the camp. When we were ready to go on our way again, the man was well. To our astonishment he came and asked us for a present, and was as astonished and disgusted as he had made us to be, when we declined giving it. We suggested that it was his place to bring us a present and to show some grat.i.tude. He said to us, "Well indeed! You white men have no shame!"7 In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in an attempt to prove that "natives" operated with an entirely different form of logic, compiled a list of similar stories: for instance, of a man saved from drowning who proceeded to ask his rescuer to give him some nice clothes to wear, or another who, on being nursed back to health after having been savaged by a tiger, demanded a knife. One French missionary working in Central Africa insisted that such things happened to him on a regular basis: You save a person's life, and you must expect to receive a visit from him before long; you are now under an obligation to him, and you will not get rid of him except by giving him presents.8 Now, certainly, there is almost always felt to be something extraordinary about saving a life. Anything surrounding birth and death almost cannot help but partake of the infinite, and, therefore, throw all everyday means of moral calculation askew. This is probably why stories like this had become something of a cliche in America when I was growing up. I remember as a child several times being told that among the Inuit (or sometimes it was among Buddhists, or Chinese, but curiously, never Africans)-that if one saves someone else's life, one is considered responsible for taking care of that person forever. It defies our sense of reciprocity. But somehow, it also makes a weird kind of sense.

We have no way of knowing what was really going on in the minds of the patients in these stories, since we don't know who they were or what sort of expectations they had (how they normally interacted with their doctors, for example). But we can guess. Let's try a thought experiment. Imagine that we are dealing with a place where, if one man saved another's life, the two became like brothers. Each was now expected to share everything, and to provide for the other when he was in need. If so, the patient would surely notice that his new brother appeared to be extraordinarily wealthy, not in much need of anything, but that he, the patient, was lacking in many things the missionary could provide.

Alternately (and more likely), imagine that we are dealing not with a relationship of radical equality but the very opposite. In many parts of Africa, accomplished curers were also important political figures with extensive clienteles of former patients. A would-be follower thus arrives to declare his political allegiance. What complicates the matter in this case is that followers of great men, in this part of Africa, were in a relatively strong bargaining position. Good henchmen were hard to come by; important people were expected to be generous with followers to keep them from joining some rival's entourage instead. If so, asking for a shirt or knife would be a way of asking for confirmation that the missionary does wish to have the man as a follower. Paying him back, in contrast, would be, like Seton's gesture to his father, an insult: a way of saying that despite the missionary having saved his life, he would just as soon have nothing further to do with him.

This is a thought experiment-because we don't really know what the African patients were thinking. The point is that such forms of radical equality and radical inequality do exist in the world, that each carries within it its own kind of morality, its own way of thinking and arguing about the rights and wrongs of any given situation, and these moralities are entirely different than that of t.i.t-for-tat exchange. In the rest of the chapter, I will provide a rough-and-ready way to map out the main possibilities, by proposing that there are three main moral principles on which economic relations can be founded, all of which occur in any human society, and which I will call communism, hierarchy, and exchange.

Communism.

I will define communism here as any human relationship that operates on the principles of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."

I admit that the usage here is a bit provocative. "Communism" is a word that can evoke strong emotional reactions-mainly, of course, because we tend to identify it with "communist" regimes. This is ironic, since the Communist parties that ruled over the USSR and its satellites, and that still rule China and Cuba, never described their own systems as "communist." They described them as "socialist." "Communism" was always a distant, somewhat fuzzy utopian ideal, usually to be accompanied by the withering away of the state-to be achieved at some point in the distant future.

Our thinking about communism has been dominated by a myth. Once upon a time, humans held all things in common-in the Garden of Eden, during the Golden Age of Saturn, in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands. Then came the Fall, as a result of which we are now cursed with divisions of power and private property. The dream was that someday, with the advance of technology and general prosperity, with social revolution or the guidance of the Party, we would finally be in a position to put things back, to restore common ownership and common management of collective resources. Throughout the last two centuries, Communists and anti-Communists argued over how plausible this picture was and whether it would be a blessing or a nightmare. But they all agreed on the basic framework: communism was about collective property, "primitive communism" did once exist in the distant past, and someday it might return.

We might call this "mythic communism"-or even, "epic communism"-a story we like to tell ourselves. Since the days of the French Revolution, it has inspired millions; but it has also done enormous damage to humanity. It's high time, I think, to brush the entire argument aside. In fact, "communism" is not some magical utopia, and neither does it have anything to do with ownership of the means of production. It is something that exists right now-that exists, to some degree, in any human society, although there has never been one in which everything has been organized in that way, and it would be difficult to imagine how there could be. All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us acts like a communist consistently. "Communist society"-in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle-could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

Starting, as I say, from the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions.9 Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it's just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.

Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project.10 If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, "Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?"-even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work"): if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.11 One might even say that it's one of the scandals of capitalism that most capitalist firms, internally, operate communistically. True, they don't tend to operate very democratically. Most often they are organized around military-style top-down chains of command. But there is often an interesting tension here, because top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top, resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom. The greater the need to improvise, the more democratic the cooperation tends to become. Inventors have always understood this, start-up capitalists frequently figure it out, and computer engineers have recently rediscovered the principle: not only with things like freeware, which everyone talks about, but even in the organization of their businesses. Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.

This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters-a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse-people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn. This is important, because it shows that we are not simply talking about cooperation. In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an a.s.sumption that anyone who is not actually an enemy can be expected on the principle of "from each according to their abilities," at least to an extent: for example, if one needs to figure out how to get somewhere, and the other knows the way.

We so take this for granted, in fact, that the exceptions are themselves revealing. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, an anthropologist who in the 1920s carried out research among the Nuer, Nilotic pastoralists in southern Sudan, reports his discomfiture when he realized that someone had intentionally given him wrong directions: On one occasion I asked the way to a certain place and was deliberately deceived. I returned in chagrin to camp and asked the people why they had told me the wrong way. One of them replied, "You are a foreigner, why should we tell you the right way? Even if a Nuer who was a stranger asked us the way we would say to him, 'You continue straight along that path,' but we would not tell him that the path forked. Why should we tell him? But you are now a member of our camp and you are kind to our children, so we will tell you the right way in future."12 The Nuer are constantly engaged in feuds; any stranger might well turn out to be an enemy there to scout out a good place for an ambush, and it would be unwise to give such a person useful information. What's more, Evans-Pritchard's own situation was obviously relevant, since he was an agent of the British government-the same government that had recently sent in the RAF to strafe and bomb the inhabitants of this very settlement before forcibly resettling them there. Under the circ.u.mstances, the inhabitants' treatment of Evans-Pritchard seems quite generous. The main point, though, is that it requires something on this scale-an immediate threat to life and limb, terror-bombing of civilian populations-before people will ordinarily consider not giving a stranger accurate directions.13 It's not just directions. Conversation is a domain particularly disposed to communism. Lies, insults, put-downs, and other sorts of verbal aggression are important-but they derive most of their power from the shared a.s.sumption that people do not ordinarily act this way: an insult does not sting unless one a.s.sumes that others will normally be considerate of one's feelings, and it's impossible to lie to someone who does not a.s.sume you would ordinarily tell the truth. When we genuinely wish to break off amicable relations with someone, we stop speaking to them entirely.

The same goes for small courtesies like asking for a light, or even for a cigarette. It seems more legitimate to ask a stranger for a cigarette than for an equivalent amount of cash, or even food; in fact, if one has been identified as a fellow smoker, it's rather difficult to refuse such a request. In such cases-a match, a piece of information, holding the elevator-one might say the "from each" element is so minimal that most of us comply without even thinking about it. Conversely, the same is true if another person's need-even a stranger's-is particularly spectacular or extreme: if he is drowning, for example. If a child has fallen onto the subway tracks, we a.s.sume that anyone who is capable of helping her up will do so.

I will call this "baseline communism": the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" will be a.s.sumed to apply. Of course, different communities apply very different standards. In large, impersonal urban communities, such a standard may go no further than asking for a light or directions. This might not seem like much, but it founds the possibility of larger social relations. In smaller, less impersonal communities-especially those not divided into social cla.s.ses-the same logic will likely extend much further: for example, it is often effectively impossible to refuse a request not just for tobacco, but for food-sometimes even from a stranger; certainly from anyone considered to belong to the community. Exactly one page after describing his difficulties in asking for directions, Evans-Pritchard notes that these same Nuer find it almost impossible, when dealing with someone they have accepted as a member of their camp, to refuse a request for almost any item of common consumption, so that a man or woman known to have anything extra in the way of grain, tobacco, tools, or agricultural implements can be expected to see their stockpiles disappear almost immediately.14 However, this baseline of openhanded sharing and generosity never extends to everything. Often, in fact, things freely shared are treated as trivial and unimportant for that very reason. Among the Nuer, true wealth takes the form of cattle. No one would freely share their cattle; in fact, young Nuer men learn that they are expected to defend their cattle with their lives; for this reason, cattle are neither bought nor sold.

The obligation to share food, and whatever else is considered a basic necessity, tends to become the basis of everyday morality in a society whose members see themselves as equals. Another anthropologist, Audrey Richards, once described how Bemba mothers, "such lax disciplinarians in everything else," will scold their children harshly if they give one an orange or some other treat and the child does not immediately offer to share it with her friends.15 But sharing is also, in such societies-in any, if we really think about it-a major focus of life's pleasures. As a result, the need to share is particularly acute in both the best of times and the worst of times: during famines, for example, but also during moments of extreme plenty. Early missionary accounts of native North Americans almost invariably include awestruck remarks on generosity in times of famine, often to total strangers.16 At the same time, On returning from their fishing, their hunting, and their trading, they exchange many gifts; if they have thus obtained something unusually good, even if they have bought it, or if it has been given to them, they make a feast to the whole village with it. Their hospitality towards all sorts of strangers is remarkable.17 The more elaborate the feast, the more likely one is to see some combination of free sharing of some things (for instance, food and drink) and careful distribution of others: say, prize meat, whether from game or sacrifice, which is often parceled out according to very elaborate protocols or equally elaborate gift exchange. The giving and taking of gifts often takes on a distinctly gamelike quality, continuous often with the actual games, contests, pageants, and performances that also often mark popular festivals. As with society at large, the shared conviviality could be seen as a kind of communistic base on top of which everything else is constructed. It also helps to emphasize that sharing is not simply about morality, but also about pleasure. Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root of most things we consider fun.

The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so. Each village, clan, or nation within the League of the Hodenosaunee, or Iroquois, for example, was divided into two halves.18 This is a common pattern: in other parts of the world (Amazonia, Melanesia) too, there are arrangements in which members of one side can only marry someone from the other side, or only eat food grown on the other side; such rules are explicitly designed to make each side dependent on the other for some basic necessity of life. Among the Six Iroquois, each side was expected to bury the other's dead. Nothing would be more absurd than for one side to complain that, "last year, we buried five of your dead, but you only buried two of ours."

Baseline communism might be considered the raw material of sociality, a recognition of our ultimate interdependence that is the ultimate substance of social peace. Still, in most circ.u.mstances, that minimal baseline is not enough. One always behaves in a spirit of solidarity more with some people than others, and certain inst.i.tutions are specifically based on principles of solidarity and mutual aid. First among these are those we love, with mothers being the paradigm of selfless love. Others include close relatives, wives and husbands, lovers, one's closest friends. These are the people with whom we share everything, or at least to whom we know we can turn in need, which is the definition of a true friend everywhere. Such friendships may be formalized by a ritual as "bond-friends" or "blood brothers" who cannot refuse each other anything. As a result, any community could be seen as criss-crossed with relations of "individualistic communism," one-to-one relations that operate, to varying intensities and degrees, on the basis of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."19 This same logic can be, and is, extended within groups: not only cooperative work groups, but almost any in-group will define itself by creating its own sort of baseline communism. There will be certain things shared or made freely available within the group, others that anyone will be expected to provide for other members on request, that one would never share with or provide to outsiders: help in repairing one's nets in an a.s.sociation of fisherman, stationery supplies in an office, certain sorts of information among commodity traders, and so forth. Also, certain categories of people we can always call on in certain situations, such as harvesting or moving house.20 One could go on from here to various forms of sharing, pooling, who gets to call on whom for help with certain tasks: moving, or harvesting, or even, if one is in trouble, providing an interest-free loan. Finally, there are the different sorts of "commons," the collective administration of common resources.

The sociology of everyday communism is a potentially enormous field, but one which, owing to our peculiar ideological blinkers, we have been unable to write about because we have been largely unable to see it. Rather than try to further outline it, I will limit myself to three final points.

First, we are not really dealing with reciprocity here-or at best, only with reciprocity in the broadest sense.21 What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will. The Iroquois example brings home clearly what makes this possible: that such relations are based on a presumption of eternity. Society will always exist. Therefore, there will always be a north and a south side of the village. This is why no accounts need be taken. In a similar way, people tend to treat their mothers and best friends as if they will always exist, however well they know it isn't true.

The second point has to do with the famous "law of hospitality." There is a peculiar tension between a common stereotype of what are called "primitive societies" (people lacking both states and markets) as societies in which anyone not a member of the community is a.s.sumed to be an enemy, and the frequent accounts of early European travelers awestruck by the extraordinary generosity shown them by actual "savages." Granted, there is a certain truth to both sides. Wherever a stranger is a dangerous potential enemy, the normal way to overcome the danger is by some dramatic gesture of generosity whose very magnificence catapults them into that mutual sociality that is the ground for all peaceful social relations. True, when one is dealing with completely unknown quant.i.ties, there is often a process of testing. Both Christopher Columbus, in Hispaniola, and Captain Cook, in Polynesia, reported similar stories of islanders who either flee, attack, or offer everything-but who often later enter the boats and help themselves to anything they take a fancy to, provoking threats of violence from the crew, who then did their utmost to establish the principle that relations between strange peoples should be mediated instead by "normal" commercial exchange.

It's understandable that dealings with potentially hostile strangers should encourage an all-or-nothing logic, a tension preserved even in English in the etymology of the words "host," "hostile," "hostage," and indeed "hospitality," all of which are derived from the same Latin root.22 What I want to emphasize here is that all such gestures are simply exaggerated displays of that very "baseline communism" that I have already argued is the ground of all human social life. This is why, for instance, the difference between friends and enemies is so often articulated through food-and often the most commonplace, humble, domestic sorts of food: as in the familiar principle, common in both Europe and the Middle East, that those who have shared bread and salt must never harm one another. In fact, those things that exist above all to be shared often become those things one cannot share with enemies. Among the Nuer, so free with food and everyday possessions, if one man murders another, a blood feud follows. Everyone in the vicinity will often have to line up on one side or another, and those on opposite sides are strictly forbidden to eat with anyone on the other, or even to drink from a cup or bowl one of their newfound enemies has previously used, lest terrible results ensue.23 The extraordinary inconvenience this creates is a major incentive to try to negotiate some sort of settlement. By the same token, it is often said that people who have shared food, or the right, archetypal kind of food, are forbidden to harm one another, however much they might be otherwise inclined to do so. At times, this can take on an almost comical formality, as in the Arab story of the burglar who, while ransacking someone's house, stuck his finger in a jar to see if it was full of sugar, only to discover it was full of salt instead. Realizing that he had now eaten salt at the owner's table, he dutifully put back everything he'd stolen.

Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction-even commerce. If one is on sociable terms with someone, it's hard to completely ignore their situation. Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This is one of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it would be almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the neighborhood to make money, as they would be under constant pressure to give financial breaks, or at least easy credit terms, to their impoverished relatives and school chums. The opposite is true as well. An anthropologist who lived for some time in rural Java once told me that she measured her linguistic abilities by how well she could bargain at the local bazaar. It frustrated her that she could never get it down to a price as low as local people seemed pay. "Well," a Javanese friend finally had to explain, "they charge rich Javanese people more, too."

Once again, we are back to the principle that if the needs (for instance, dire poverty), or the abilities (for instance, wealth beyond imagination), are sufficiently dramatic, then unless there is a complete absence of sociality, some degree of communistic morality will almost inevitably enter into the way people take accounts.24 A Turkish folktale about the Medieval Sufi mystic Nasruddin Hodja ill.u.s.trates the complexities thus introduced into the very concept of supply and demand: One day when Nasruddin was left in charge of the local teahouse, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting nearby, stopped in for breakfast.

"Do you have quail eggs?" asked the king.

"I'm sure I can find some," answered Nasruddin.

The king ordered an omelet of a dozen quail eggs, and Nasruddin hurried out to look for them. After the king and his party had eaten, he charged them a hundred gold pieces.

The king was puzzled. "Are quail eggs really that rare in this part of the country?"

"It's not so much quail eggs that are rare around here," Nasruddin replied. "It's more visits from kings."

Exchange.

Communism, then, is based neither in exchange nor in reciprocity-except, as I have observed, in the sense that it does involve mutual expectations and responsibilities. Even here, it seems better to use another word ("mutuality"?) so as to emphasize that exchange operates on entirely different principles; that it's a fundamentally different kind of moral logic.

Exchange is all about equivalence. It's a back-and-forth process involving two sides in which each side gives as good as it gets. This is why one can speak of people exchanging words (if there's an argument), blows, or even gunfire.25 In these examples, it's not that there is ever an exact equivalence-even if there were some way to measure an exact equivalence-but more a constant process of interaction tending toward equivalence. Actually, there's something of a paradox here: each side in each case is trying to outdo the other, but, unless one side is utterly put to rout, it's easiest to break the whole thing off when both consider the outcome to be more or less even. When we move to the exchange of material goods, we find a similar tension. Often there is an element of compet.i.tion; if nothing else, there's always that possibility. But at the same time, there's a sense that both sides are keeping accounts, and that, unlike what happens in communism, which always partakes of a certain notion of eternity, the entire relationship can be canceled out, and either party can call an end to it at any time.

This element of compet.i.tion can work in completely different ways. In cases of barter or commercial exchange, when both parties to the transaction are only interested in the value of goods being transacted, they may well-as economists insist they should-try to seek the maximum material advantage. On the other hand, as anthropologists have long pointed out, when the exchange is of gifts, that is, the objects pa.s.sing back and forth are mainly considered interesting in how they reflect on and rearrange relations between the people carrying out the transaction, then insofar as compet.i.tion enters in, it is likely to work precisely the other way around-to become a matter of contests of generosity, of people showing off who can give more away.

Let me take these one at a time.

What marks commercial exchange is that it's "impersonal": who it is that is selling something to us, or buying something from us, should in principle be entirely irrelevant. We are simply comparing the value or two objects. True, as with any principle, in practice, this is rarely completely true. There has to be some minimal element of trust for a transaction to be carried out at all, and, unless one is dealing with a vending machine, that usually requires some outward display of sociality. Even in the most impersonal shopping mall or supermarket, clerks are expected to at least simulate personal warmth, patience, and other rea.s.suring qualities; in a Middle-Eastern bazaar, one might have to go through an elaborate process of establishing a simulated friendship, sharing tea, food, or tobacco, before engaging in similarly elaborate haggling-an interesting ritual that begins by establishing sociality through baseline communism-and continues with an often prolonged mock battle over prices. It's all done on the basis of the a.s.sumption that buyer and seller are, at least at that moment, friends (and thus each ent.i.tled to feel outraged and indignant at the other's unreasonable demands), but it's all a little piece of theater. Once the object changes hands, there is no expectation that the two will ever have anything to do with each other again.26 Most often this sort of haggling-in Madagascar the term for it literally means "to battle out a sale" (miady varotra)-can be a source of pleasure in itself.

The first time I visited a.n.a.lakely, the great cloth market in Madagascar's capital, I came with a Malagasy friend intent on buying a sweater. The whole process took about four hours. It went something like this: my friend would spot a likely sweater hanging in some booth, ask the price, and then she would begin a prolonged battle of wits with the vendor, invariably involving dramatic displays of insult and indignation, and simulated walkings off in disgust. Often it seemed ninety percent of the argument was spent on a final, tiny difference of a few ariary-literally, pennies-that seemed to become a profound matter of principle on either side, since a merchant's failure to concede it could sink the entire deal.

The second time I visited a.n.a.lakely I went with another friend, also a young woman, who had a list of measures of cloth to buy supplied by her sister. At each booth she adopted the same procedure: she simply walked up and asked for the price.

The man would quote her one.

"All right," she then asked, "and what's your real final price?"

He'd tell her, and she'd hand over the money.

"Wait a minute!" I asked. "You can do that?

"Sure," she said. "Why not?"

I explained what had happened with my last friend.

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Some people enjoy that sort of thing."

Exchange allows us to cancel out our debts. It gives us a way to call it even: hence, to end the relationship. With vendors, one is usually only pretending to have a relationship at all. With neighbors, one might for this very reason prefer not to pay one's debts. Laura Bohannan writes about arriving in a Tiv community in rural Nigeria; neighbors immediately began arriving bearing little gifts: "two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts."27 Having no idea what was expected of her, she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had brought. Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that all such gifts did have to be returned. It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept three eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything back. One did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring something back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money-there was nothing inappropriate in that-provided one did so at a discreet interval, and above all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change, "in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received"-and in doing so, they were continually creating their society. There was certainly a trace of communism here-neighbors on good terms could also be trusted to help each other out in emergencies-but unlike communistic relations, which are a.s.sumed to be permanent, this sort of neighborliness had to be constantly created and maintained, because any link can be broken off at any time.

There are endless variations on this sort of t.i.t-for-tat, or almost t.i.t-for-tat, gift exchange. The most familiar is the exchange of presents: I buy someone a beer; they buy me the next one. Perfect equivalence implies equality. But consider a slightly more complicated example: I take a friend out to a fancy restaurant for dinner; after a discreet interval, they do the same. As anthropologists have long been in the habit of pointing out, the very existence of such customs-especially, the feeling that one really ought to return the favor-can't be explained by standard economic theory, which a.s.sumes that any human interaction is ultimately a business deal and that we are all self-interested individuals trying to get the most for ourselves for the least cost or least amount of effort.28 But this feeling is quite real, and it can cause genuine strain for those of limited means trying to keep up appearances. So: Why, if I took a free-market economic theorist out to an expensive dinner, would that economist feel somewhat diminished-uncomfortably in my debt-until he had been able to return the favor? Why, if he were feeling compet.i.tive with me, would he be inclined to take me to someplace even more expensive?

Recall the feasts and festivals alluded to above: here, too, there is a base of conviviality and playful (sometimes not so playful) compet.i.tion. On the one hand, everyone's pleasure is enhanced-after all, how many people would really want to eat a superb meal at a French restaurant all alone? On the other, things can easily slip into games of one-upmanship-and hence obsession, humiliation, rage ... or, as we'll soon see, even worse. In some societies, these games are formalized, but it's important to stress that such games only really develop between people or groups who perceive themselves to be more or less equivalent in status.29 To return to our imaginary economist: it's not clear that he would feel diminished if he received a present, or was taken out to dinner, by just anyone. He would be most likely to feel this way if the benefactor were someone he felt was of roughly equivalent status or dignity: a colleague, for example. If Bill Gates or George Soros took him out to dinner, he would likely conclude that he had indeed received something for nothing and leave it at that. If some ingratiating junior colleague or eager graduate student did the same, he'd be likely to conclude that he was doing the man a favor just by accepting the invitation-if indeed he did accept, which he probably wouldn't.

This, too, appears to be the case wherever we find society divided into fine gradations of status and dignity. Pierre Bourdieu has described the "dialectic of challenge and riposte" that governs all games of honor among Kabyle Berber men in Algeria, in which the exchange of insults, attacks (in feud or battles), thefts, or threats was seen to follow exactly the same logic as the exchange of gifts.30 To give a gift is both an honor and a provocation. To respond to one requires infinite artistry. Timing is all-important. So is making the counter-gift just different enough, but also just slightly grander. Above all is the tacit moral principle that one must always pick on someone one's own size. To challenge someone obviously older, richer, and more honorable is to risk being snubbed, and hence humiliated; to overwhelm a poor but respectable man with a gift he couldn't possibly pay back is simply cruel, and will do equal damage to your reputation. There's an Indonesian story about that too: about a rich man who sacrificed a magnificent ox to shame a penurious rival; the poor man utterly humiliated him, and won the contest, by calmly proceeding to sacrifice a chicken.31 Games like this become especially elaborate when status is to some degree up for grabs. When matters are too clear-cut, that introduces its own sorts of problems. Giving gifts to kings is often a particularly tricky and complicated business. The problem here is that one cannot really give a gift fit for a king (unless, perhaps, one is another king), since kings by definition already have everything. On the one hand, one is expected to make a reasonable effort: Nasruddin was once called up to visit the king. A neighbor saw him hurrying along the road carrying a bag of turnips.

"What are those for?" he asked.

"I've been called to see the king. I thought it would be best to bring some kind of present."

"You're bringing him turnips? But turnips are peasant food! He's a king! You should bring him something more appropriate, like grapes."

Nasruddin agreed, and came to the king carrying a bunch of grapes. The king was not amused. "You're giving me grapes? But I'm a king! This is ridiculous. Take this idiot out and teach him some manners! Throw each and every one of the grapes at him and then kick him out of the palace."

The emperor's guards dragged Nasruddin into a side room and began pelting him with grapes. As they did so, he fell on his knees and began crying, "Thank you, thank you G.o.d, for your infinite mercy!"

"Why are you thanking G.o.d?" they asked. "You're being totally humiliated!"

Nasruddin replied, "Oh, I was just thinking, 'Thank G.o.d I didn't bring the turnips!' "

On the other hand, to give something that a king does not already have can get you in even greater trouble. One story circulating in the early Roman Empire concerned an inventor who, with great fanfare, presented a gla.s.s bowl as a gift to the emperor Tiberius. The emperor was puzzled: What was so impressive about a piece of gla.s.s? The man dropped it on the ground. Rather than shattering, it merely dented. He picked it up and simply pushed it back into its former shape.

"Did you tell anyone else how you made this thing?" asked a startled Tiberius.

The inventor a.s.sured him that he had not. The emperor therefore ordered him killed, since, if word of how to make unbreakable gla.s.s got out, his treasury of gold and silver would soon be worthless.32 The best bet when dealing with kings was to make a reasonable effort to play the game, but one that is still bound to fail. The fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta tells of the customs of the King of Sind, a terrifying monarch who took a particular delight in displays of arbitrary power.33 It was customary for foreign worthies visiting the king to present him with magnificent presents; whatever the gift was, he would invariably respond by presenting the bearer with something many times its value. As a result, a substantial business developed where local bankers would lend money to such visitors to finance particularly spectacular gifts, knowing they could be well repaid from the proceeds of royal one-upmanship. The king must have known about this. He didn't object-since the whole point was to show that his wealth exceeded all possible equivalence-and if he really needed to, he could always expropriate the bankers. They knew that the really important game was not economic, but one of status, and his was absolute.

In exchange, the objects being traded are seen as equivalent. Therefore, by implication, so are the people: at least, at the moment when gift is met with counter-gift, or money changes hands; when there is no further debt or obligation and each of the two parties is equally free to walk away. This in turn implies autonomy. Both principles sit uncomfortably with monarchs, which is the reason that kings generally dislike any sort of exchange.34 But within that overhanging prospect of potential cancellation, of ultimate equivalence, we find endless variations, endless games one can play. One can demand something from another person, knowing that by doing so, one is giving the other the right to demand something of equivalent value in return. In some contexts, even praising another's possession might be interpreted as a demand of this sort. In eighteenth-century New Zealand, English settlers soon learned that it was not a good idea to admire, say, a particularly beautiful jade pendant worn around the neck of a Maori warrior; the latter would inevitably insist on giving it, not take no for an answer, and then, after a discreet interval, return to praise the settler's coat or gun. The only way to head this off was to quickly give him a gift before he could ask for one. Sometimes gifts are offered in order for the giver to be able to make such a demand: if one accepts the present, one is tacitly agreeing to allow the giver to claim whatever he deems equivalent.35 All this, in turn, can shade into something very much like barter, directly swapping one thing for another-which as we've seen does occur even in what Marcel Mauss liked to refer to as "gift economies," even if largely between strangers.36 Within communities, there is almost always a reluctance, as the Tiv example so nicely ill.u.s.trates, to allow things to cancel out-one reason that if there is money in common usage, people will often either refuse to use it with friends or relatives (which in a village society includes pretty much everyone), or alternately, like the Malagasy villagers in chapter 3, use it in radically different ways.

Hierarchy.

Exchange, then, implies formal equality-or at least, the potential for it. This is precisely why kings have such trouble with it.

In contrast, relations of explicit hierarchy-that is, relations between at least two parties in which one is considered superior to the other-do not tend to operate by reciprocity at all. It's hard to see because the relation is often justified in reciprocal terms ("the peasants provide food, the lords provide protection"), but the principle by which they operate is exactly the opposite. In practice, hierarchy tends to work by a logic of precedent.

To ill.u.s.trate what I mean by this, let us imagine a kind of continuum of one-sided social relations, ranging from the most exploitative to the most benevolent. At one extreme is theft, or plunder; on the other selfless charity.37 Only at these two extremes is it is possible to have material interactions between people who otherwise have no social relation of any kind. Only a lunatic would mug his next-door neighbor. A band of marauding soldiers or nomadic hors.e.m.e.n falling on a peasant hamlet to rape and pillage also obviously have no intention of forming any ongoing relations with the survivors. But in a similar way, religious traditions often insist that the only true charity is anonymous-in other words, not meant to place the recipient in one's debt. One extreme form of this, doc.u.mented in various parts of the world, is the gift by stealth, in a kind of reverse burglary: to literally sneak into the recipient's house at night and plant one's present so no one can know for sure who has left it. The figure of Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas (who, it must be remembered, was not just the patron saint of children, but also the patron saint of thieves) would appear to be the mythological version of the same principle: a benevolent burglar with whom no social relations are possible and therefore to whom no one could possibly owe anything, in his case, above all, because he does not actually exist.

Observe, however, what happens when one moves just a little bit less far out on the continuum in either direction. I have been told (I suspect it isn't true) that in parts of Belarus, gangs prey so systematically on travelers on trains and busses that they have developed the habit of giving each victim a little token, to confirm that the bearer has already been robbed. Obviously one step toward the creation of a state. Actually, one popular theory of the origins of the state, that goes back at least to the fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun, runs precisely along these lines: nomadic raiders eventually systematize their relations with sedentary villagers; pillage turns into tribute, rape turns into the "right of the first night" or the carrying off of likely candidates as recruits for the royal harem. Conquest, untrammeled force, becomes systematized, and thus framed not as a predatory relation but as a moral one, with the lords providing protection, and the villagers, their sustenance. But even if all parties a.s.sume they are operating by a shared moral code, that even kings cannot do whatever they want but must operate within limits, allowing peasants to argue about the rights and wrongs of just how much of their harvest a king's retainers are ent.i.tled to carry off, they are very unlikely to frame their calculation in terms of the quality or quant.i.ty of protection provided, but rather in terms of custom and precedent: How much did we pay last year? How much did our ancestors have to pay? The same is true on the other side. If charitable donations become the basis for any sort of social relation, it will not be one based on reciprocity. If you give some coins to a panhandler, and that panhandler recognizes you later, it is unlikely that he will give you any money-but he might well consider you more likely to give him money again. Certainly this is true if one donates money to a charitable organization. (I gave money to the United Farm Workers once and I still haven't heard the end of it.) Such an act of one-sided generosity is treated as a precedent for what will be expected afterward.38 It's quite the same if one gives candy to a child.

This is what I mean when I say that hierarchy operates by a principle that is the very opposite of reciprocity. Whenever the lines of superiority and inferiority are clearly drawn and accepted by all parties as the framework of a relationship, and relations are sufficiently ongoing that we are no longer simply dealing with arbitrary force, then relations will be seen as being regulated by a web of habit or custom. Sometimes the situation is a.s.sumed to have originated in some founding act of conquest. Or it might been seen as ancestral custom for which there is no need of explanation. But this introduces another complication to the problem of giving gifts to kings-or to any superior: there is always the danger that it will be treated as a precedent, added to the web of custom, and therefore considered obligatory thereafter. Xenophon claims that in the early days of the Persian Empire, each province vied to send the Great King gifts of its most unique and valuable products. This became the basis of the tribute system: each province was eventually expected to provide the same "gifts" every year.39 Similarly, according to the great Medieval historian Marc Bloch: [I]n the ninth century, when one day there was a shortage of wine in the royal cellars at Ver, the monks of Saint-Denis were asked to supply the two hundred hogs-heads required. This contribution was thenceforth claimed from them as of right every year, and it required an imperial charter to abolish it. At Ardres, we are told, there was once a bear, the property of the local lord. The inhabitants, who loved to watch it fight with dogs, undertook to feed it. The beast eventually died, but the lord continued to exact the loaves of bread."40 In other words, any gift to a feudal superior, "especially if repeated three of four times," was likely to be treated as a precedent and added to the web of custom. As a result, those giving gifts to superiors often insisted on receiving a "letter of non-prejudice" legally stipulating that such a gift would not be required in the future. While it is unusual for matters to become quite so formalized, any social relation that is a.s.sumed from the start to be unequal will inevitably begin to operate on an a.n.a.logous logic-if only because, once relations are seen as based on "custom," the only way to demonstrate that one has a duty or obligation to do something is to show that one has done it before.

Often, such arrangements can turn into a logic of caste: certain clans are responsible for weaving the ceremonial garments, or bringing the fish for royal feasts, or cutting the king's hair. They thus come to be known as weavers or fishermen or barbers.41 This last point can't be overemphasized because it brings home another truth regularly overlooked: that the logic of ident.i.ty is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy. It is only when certain people are placed above others, or where everyone is being ranked in relation to the king, or the high priest, or Founding Fathers, that one begins to speak of people bound by their essential nature: about fundamentally different kinds of human being. Ideologies of caste or race are just extreme examples. It happens whenever one group is seen as raising themselves above others, or placing themselves below others, in such a way that ordinary standards of fair dealing no longer apply.

In fact, something like this happens in a small way even in our most intimate social relations. The moment we recognize someone as a different sort of person, either above or below us, then ordinary rules of reciprocity become modified or are set aside. If a friend is unusually generous once, we will likely wish to reciprocate. If she acts this way repeatedly, we conclude she is a generous person, and are hence less likely to reciprocate.42 We can describe a simple formula here: a certain action, repeated, becomes customary; as a result, it comes to define the actor's essential nature. Alternately, a person's nature may be defined by how others have acted toward him in the past. To be an aristocrat is largely to insist that in the past, others have treated you as an aristocrat (since aristocrats don't really do anything in particular, most spend their time simply existing in some sort of putatively superior state), and therefore should continue to do so. Much of the art of being such a person is that of treating oneself in such a manner that it conveys how you expect others to treat you: in the case of actual kings, covering oneself with gold so as to suggest that others do likewise. On the other end of the scale, this is also how abuse becomes self-legitimating. As a former student of mine, Sarah Stillman, pointed out: in the United States, if a middle-cla.s.s thirteen-year-old girl is kidnapped, raped, and killed, it is considered an agonizing national crisis that everyone with a television is expected to follow for several weeks. If a thirteen-year-old girl is turned out as a child prost.i.tute, raped systematically for years, and ultimately killed, all this is considered unremarkable-really just the sort of thing one can expect to end up happening to someone like that.43 When objects of material wealth pa.s.s back and forth between superiors and inferiors as gifts or payments, the key principle seems to be that the sorts of things given on each side should be considered fundamentally different in quality, their relative value impossible to quantify-the result being that there is no way to even conceive of a squaring of accounts. Even if Medieval writers insisted on imagining society as a hierarchy in which priests pray for everyone, n.o.bles fight for everyone, and peasants feed everyone, it never even occurred to anyone to establish how many prayers or how much military protection was equivalent to a ton of wheat. Nor did anyone ever consider making such a calculation. Neither is it that "lowly" sorts of people are necessarily given lowly sorts of things and vice versa. Sometimes it is quite the opposite. Until recently, just about any notable philosopher, artist, poet, or musician was required to find a wealthy patron for support. Famous works of poetry or philosophy are often prefaced-oddly, to the modern eye-with gushing, sycophantic praise for the wisdom and virtue of some long-forgotten earl or count who provided a meager stipend. The fact that the n.o.ble patron merely provided room and board, or money, and that the client showed his grat.i.tude by painting the Mona Lisa, or composing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, was in no way seen to compromise the a.s.sumption of the n.o.ble's intrinsic superiority.

There is one great exception to this principle, and that is the phenomenon of hierarchical redistribution. Here, though, rather than giving back and forth the same sorts of things, they give back and forth exactly the same thing: as, for instance, when fans of certain Nigerian pop stars throw money onto the stage during concerts, and the pop stars in question make occasional tours of their fans' neighborhoods tossing (the same) money from the windows of their limos. When this is all that's going on, we may speak of an absolutely minimal sort of hierarchy. In much of Papua New Guinea, social life centers on "big men," charismatic individuals who spend much of their time coaxing, cajoling, and manipulating in order to acquire ma.s.ses of wealth to give away again at some great feast. One could, in practice, pa.s.s from here to, say, an Amazonian or indigenous North American chief. Unlike big men, their role is more formalized; but actually such chiefs have no power to compel anyone to do anything they don't want to (hence North American Indian chiefs' famous skill at oratory and powers of persuasion). As a result, they tended to give away far more than they received. Observers often remarked that in terms of personal possessions, a village chief was often the poorest man in the village, such was the pressure on him for constant supply of largesse.

Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to acc.u.mulate riches. The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add another element: war and plunder. After all, just about anyone who comes into a very large amount of wealth will ultimately give at least part of it away-often in grandiose and spectacular ways to large numbers of people. The more of one's wealth is obtained by plunder or extortion, the more spectacular and self-aggrandizing will be the forms in which it's given away.44 And what is true of warrior aristocracies is all the more true of ancient states, where rulers almost invariably represented themselves as the protectors of the helpless, supporters of widows and orphans, and champions of the poor. The genealogy of the modern redistributive state-with its notorious tendency to foster ident.i.ty politics-can be traced back not to any sort of "primitive communism" but ultimately to violence and war.

Shifting between Modalities.

I should underline again that we are not talking about different types of society here (as we've seen, the very idea that we've ever been organized into discrete "societies" is dubious) but moral principles that always coexist everywhere. We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where people wouldn't be both.

The obvious question is: If we are all ordinarily moving back and forth between completely different systems of moral accounting, why hasn't anybody noticed this? Why, instead, do we continually feel the need to reframe everything in terms of reciprocity?

Here we must return to the fact that reciprocity is our main way of imagining justice. In particular, it is what we fall back on when we're thinking in the abstract, and especially when we're trying to create an idealized picture of society. I've already given examples of this sort of thing. Iroquois communities were based on an ethos that required everyone to be attentive to the needs of several different sorts of people: their friends, their families, members of their matrilineal clans, even friendly strangers in situations of hardship. It was when they had to think about society in the abstract that they started to emphasize the two sides of the village, each of which had to bury the other's dead. It was a way of imagining communism through reciprocity. Similarly, feudalism was a notoriously messy and complicated business, but whenever Medieval thinkers generalized about it, they reduced all its ranks and orders into one simple formula in which each order contributed its share: "Some pray, some fight, still others work."45 Even hierarchy was seen as ultimately reciprocal, despite this formula having nothing to do with the real relations between priests, knights, and peasants really operated on the ground. Anthropologists are familiar with the phenomenon: it's only when people who have never had occasion to really think about their society or culture as a whole, who probably weren't even aware they were living inside something other people considered a "society" or a "culture," are asked to explain how everything works that they say things like "this is how we repay our mothers for the pain of having raised us," or puzzle over conceptual diagrams in which clan A gives their women in marriage to clan B who gives theirs to clan C, who gives theirs back to A again, but which never seem to quite correspond to what real people actually do.46 When trying to imagine a just society, it's hard not to evoke images of balance and symmetry, of elegant geometries where everything balances out.

The idea that there is something called "the market" is not so very different. Economists will often admit this, if you ask them in the right way. Markets aren't real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaging in the same self-interested calculating exchange. Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with a mathematical model, one always has to make the world into a bit of a cartoon. There's nothing wrong with this. The problem comes when it enables some (often these same economists) to declare that anyone who ignores the dictates of the market shall surely be punished-or that since we live in a market system, everything (except government interference) is based on principles of justice: that our economic system is one vast network of reciprocal relations in which, in the end, the accounts balance and all debts are paid.

These principles get tangled up in each other and it's thus often difficult to tell which predominates in a given situation-one reason that it's ridiculous to pretend we could ever reduce human behavior, economic or otherwise, to a mathematical formula of any sort. Still, this means that some degree of reciprocity can be detected as potentially present in any situation; so a determined observer can always find some excuse to say it's there. What's more, certain principles appear to have an inherent tendency to slip into others. For instance, a lot of extremely hierarchical relationships can operate (at least some of the time) on communistic principles. If you have a rich patron, you come to him in times of need, and he is expected to help you. But only to a certain degree. No one expects the patron to provide so much help that it threatens to undermine the underlying inequality.47 Likewise, communistic relations can easily start slipping into relations of hierarchical inequality-often without anyone noticing it. It's not hard to see why this happens. Sometimes different people's "abilities" and "needs" are grossly disproportionate. Genuinely egalitarian societies are keenly aware of this and tend to develop elaborate safeguards around the dangers of anyone-say, especially good hunters, in a hunting society-rising too far above themselves; just as they tend to be suspicious of anything that might make one member of the society feel in genuine debt to another. A member who draws attention to his own accomplishments will find himself the object of mockery. Often, the only polite thing to do if one has accomplished something significant is to instead make fun of oneself. The Danish writer Peter Freuchen, in his Book of the Eskimo, described how in Greenland, one could tell what a fine delicacy someone had to offer his guests by how much he belittled it beforehand: The old man laughed. "Some people don't know much. I am such a poor hunter and my wife a terrible cook who ruins everything. I don't have much, but I think there is a piece of meat outside. It might still be there as the dogs have refused it several times."

This was such a recommendation in the Eskimo way of backwards bragging that everyone's mouths began to water ...

The reader will recall the walrus hunter of the last chapter, who took offense when the author tried to thank him for giving him a share of meat-after all, humans help one another, and once we treat something as a gift, we turn into something less than human: "Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."48 "Gift" here does not mean something given freely, not mutual aid that we can ordinarily expect human beings to provide to one another. To thank someone suggests that he or she might not have acted that way, and that therefore the choice to act this way creates an obligation, a sense of debt-and hence, inferiority. Communes or egalitarian collectives in the United States often face similar dilemmas, and they have to come up with their own safeguards against creeping hierarchy. It's not that the tendency for communism to slip into hierarchy is inevitable-societies like the Inuit have managed to fend it off for thousands of years-but rather, that one must always guard against it.

In contrast, it's notoriously difficult-often downright impossible-to shift relations based on an a.s.sumption of communistic sharing to relations of equal exchange. We observe this all the time with friends: if someone is seen as taking advantage of your generosity, it's often much easier to break off relations entirely than to demand that they somehow pay you back. One extreme example is the Maori story about a notorious glutton who used to irritate fishermen up and down the coast near where he lived by constantly asking for the best portions of their catch. Since to refuse a direct request for food was effectively impossible, they would dutifully turn it over; until one day, people decided enough was enough and killed him.49 We've already seen how creating a ground of sociability among strangers can often require an elaborate process of testing the others' limits by helping oneself to their possessions. The same sort of thing can happen in peacemaking, or even in the creation of business partnerships.50 In Madagascar, people told me that two men who are thinking of going into business together will often become blood brothers. Blood brotherhood, fatidra, consists of an unlimited promise of mutual aid. Both parties so