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Such statements are not to be taken literally—another feature of such societies is a highly developed art of boasting.
One ancient Greek source describes Celtic festivals where rival nobles would alternate between jousts and contests of generosity, presenting their enemies with magnificent gold and silver treasures. Occasionally this could lead to a kind of checkmate; someone would be faced with a present so magnificent that he could not possibly match it. In this case, the only honorable response was for him to cut his own throat, thus allowing his wealth to be distributed to his followers.
Trusting a Greek source seems questionable
Competitive gift exchange, then, does not literally render anyone slaves; it is simply an affair of honor. These are people, however, for whom honor is everything.
The law of hospitality in the ancient world, for instance, insisted that any traveler must be fed, given shelter, and treated as an honored guest—but only for a certain length of time. If a guest did not go away, he would eventually become a mere subordinate.
In many periods—from imperial Rome to medieval China—probably the most important relationships, at least in towns and cities, were those of patronage.
Similarly, for much of human history, being respectable and middle-class meant spending one’s mornings going from door to door, paying one’s respects to important local patrons. To this day, informal patronage systems still crop up, whenever relatively rich and powerful people feel the need to assemble networks of supporters—a practice well documented in many parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Latin America.
If a man in a factory went to the boss and asked for a job, and the boss found him one, this would be an example of someone giving service. The man who got the job could never repay the boss, but he could show him respect, or perhaps give him symbolic gifts of garden produce. If a gift demands a return, and no tangible return is possible, the repayment will be through support or esteem.56 Thus does mutual aid slip into inequality.
A wage-labor contract is, ostensibly, a free contract between equals—but an agreement between equals in which both agree that once one of them punches the time clock, they won’t be equals any more.
Such arrangements are only acceptable if the boss’s power is not absolute, if it is limited to work time, and if you have the legal right to break off the contract and thereby to restore yourself to full equality, at any time.)
Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.
With money loans, all that is required is that the two parties be of equal legal standing. (You can’t lend money to a child, or to a lunatic. Well, you can, but the courts won’t help you get it back.)
Legal—rather than moral—debts have other unique qualities. For instance, they can be forgiven, which isn’t always possible with a moral debt.
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.
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.
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.
In ancient Crete, according to Plutarch, it was the custom for those taking loans to pretend to snatch 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.”
A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.
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.
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 canceled, 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.
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.
Propaganda in other words
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.”
When you ask someone to pass 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.
This lacks nuance.
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-class morality.
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 chefs taking turns pretending to treat each other like little feudal lords.
They could just be assholes.
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.
Which it is, often. We've seen many examples.
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, melts away into the background.
Even most economists agreed by this point though
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.
Or just misogynist.
How is it possible to read this passage 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?
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.
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.
Footnotes?
Focusing on the sex 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.
In most such matters, sexual exploitation was at best incidental (usually illegal, sometimes practiced anyway, symbolically important).
Not to the woman you ass.
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.
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.
You're describing a contract though
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 accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings.
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 accumulate in human economies?
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.
Why are obligations 'mere?' And how are they not debts? You called them as much
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.
In most human economies, money is used first and foremost to arrange marriages.
That would make it inherently misogynist no?
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.
Oh boy my dude no
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.
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.
The women might have a different opinion
This system quickly gave rise to a very complex set of arrangements 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 accumulate numerous wives for themselves, while less-fortunate men were only able to marry late in life, or not at all.12
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.
This sounds more like mutually agreed upon common law.
So here again, money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than money.
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 substitute for the life of a son or brother, they will usually grudgingly accept.
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.
