Debt: The First 5,000 Years

by David Graeber

I’ve already mentioned the tendency of gift exchange to turn into games of one-upmanship, and how in some societies this potential is formalized in great public contests. This is typical, above all, of what are often called “heroic societies”: those in which governments are weak or nonexistent and society is organized instead around warrior noblemen, each with his entourage of loyal retainers and tied to the others by ever-shifting alliances and rivalries. Most epic poetry—from the Iliad to the Mahabharata to Beowulf—harkens back to this sort of world, and anthropologists have discovered similar arrangements among the Maori of New Zealand and the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, and Haida of the American Northwest coast. In heroic societies, the throwing of feasts and resulting contests of generosity are often spoken of as mere extensions of war: “fighting with property” or “fighting with food.”