On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange

In a discussion that has anthropological pretensions, "provisional generalization" is no doubt a redundant phrase. Yet the present ven­ture needs a doubly cautious introduction. Its generalizations have developed out of a dialogue with ethnographic materials—many of these are appended Tylorian fashion as "illustrative materials"—but no rigorous tests have been applied. Perhaps the conclusions may be offered as a plea to enthnography rather than a contribution to theo­ry, if these are not again the same thing. At any rate, there follow some suggestions about the interplay in primitive communities be­tween forms, material conditions, and social relations of exchange.

Material Flow and Social Relations

What are in the received wisdom "noneconomic" or "exogenous" conditions are in the primitive reality the very organization of econo­my.¹

1. For the present purpose,"economy" is viewed as the process of provisioning society (or the "socio-cultural system"). No social relation, institution, or set of institu­tions is of itself "economic." Any institution, say a family or a lineage order, if it has material consequence for provisioning society can be placed in an economic context and considered part of the economic process. The same institution may be equally or more involved in the political process, thus profitably considered as well in a political context. This way of looking at economics or politics—or for that matter, religion, education, and any number of other cultural processes—is dictated by the nature of primitive culture. Here we find no socially distinct "economy" or "government," merely social groups and relations with multiple functions, which we distinguish as economic, politi­cal, and so forth.

That economy thus presents itself as an aspect of things is probably generally accept­able. That the emphasis be the provisioning of society may not prove so acceptable. For the concern is not how individuals go about their business: "economy" has not been defined as the application of scarce available means against alternative ends (material ends or otherwise). From means to end "economy" is conceived as a component of culture rather than a kind of human action, the material life process of society rather than a need-satisfying process of individual behavior. Our purpose is not to analyze entrepreneurs but to compare cultures. We reject the historically specific Business Outlook. In terms of controversial positions recently developed in the American An­thropologist, the stand adopted is much more with Dalton (1961; cf. Sahlins, 1962) than with Burling (1962) or LeClair (1962). Also, solidarity is here affirmed with housewives the world over and Professor Malinowski. Professor Firth upbraids Malinowski's imprecision on a point of economic anthropology with the observation that "This is not the terminology of economics, it is almost the language of the housewife" (Firth, 1957, p. 220). The terminology of the present effort similarly departs from economic orthodoxy. This may be justly considered a necessity born of ignorance, but something is to be said as well for the appropriateness, in a study of kinship economies, of the housewife's perspective.

A material transaction is usually a momentary episode in a continuous social relation. The social relation exerts governance: the flow of goods is constrained by, is part of, a status etiquette. "One cannot treat Nuer economic relations by themselves, for they always form part of direct social relations of a general kind," Evans-Pritchard writes: "... there is always between them a general social relationship of one kind or another, and their economic relations, if such they may be called, must conform to this general pattern of behavior" (1940, pp. 90-91). The dictum is broadly applicable (cf. White, 1959, pp. 242-245).

Yet the connection between material flow and social relations is reciprocal. A specific social relation may constrain a given movement of goods, but a specific transaction—"by the same token"—suggests a particular social relation. If friends make gifts, gifts make friends. A great proportion of primitive exchange, much more than our own traffic, has as its decisive function this latter, instrumental one: the material flow underwrites or initiates social relations. Thus do primi­tive peoples transcend the Hobbesian chaos. For the indicative condi­tion of primitive society is the absence of a public and sovereign power: persons and (especially) groups confront each other not mere­ly as distinct interests but with the possible inclination and certain right to physically prosecute these interests. Force is decentralized, legitimately held in severalty, the social compact has yet to be drawn, the state nonexistent. So peacemaking is not a sporadic intersocietal event, it is a continuous process going on within society itself. Groups must "come to terms"—the phrase notably connotes a material ex­change satisfactory on both sides.²

2. Economy has been defined as the process of (materially) provisioning society and the definition opposed to the human act of satisfying wants. The great play of instru­mental exchange in primitive societies underscores the usefulness of the former defi­nition. Sometimes the peace-making aspect is so fundamental that precisely the same sorts and amounts of stuff change hands: the renunciation of opposed interest is in this way symbolized. On a strictly formal view the transaction is a waste of time and effort One might say that people are maximizing value, social value, but such is to misplace the determinant of the transaction, to fail to specify the circumstances which produce different material outcomes in different historical instances, to hold fast to the econo­mizing premise of the market by a false assignment of pecuniary-like qualities to social qualities, to take the high road to tautology. The interest of such transactions is precisely that they do not materially provision people and are not predicated on the satisfaction of human material needs. They do, however, decidedly provision society: they maintain social relations, the structure of society, even if they do not to the least advantage the stock of consumables. Without any further assumptions, they are "eco­nomic" in the suggested meaning of the term (cf. Sahlins, 1969).

Even on its strictly practical side, exchange in primitive communi­ties has not the same role as the economic flow in modern industrial communities. The place of transaction in the total economy is differ­ent: under primitive conditions it is more detached from production, less firmly hinged to production in an organic way. Typically, it is less involved than modern exchange in the acquisition of means of prod­uction, more involved with the redistribution of finished goods through the community. The bias is that of an economy in which food holds a commanding position, and in which day-to-day output does not depend on a massive technological complex nor a complex divi­sion of labor. It is the bias also of a domestic mode of production: of household producing units, division of labor by sex and age dominant, production that looks to familial requirements, and direct access by domestic groups to strategic resources. It is the bias of a social order in which rights to control returns go along with rights to use resources of production, and in which there is very limited traffic in titles or income privileges in resources. It is the bias, finally, of societies or­dered in the main by kinship. Such characteristics of primitive econo­mies as these, so broadly stated, are of course subject to qualification in specific instances. They are offered only as a guide to the detailed analysis of distribution that follows. It is also advisable to repeat that "primitive" shall refer to cultures lacking a political state, and it applies only insofar as economy and social relations have not been modified by the historic penetration of states.

On a very general view, the array of economic transactions in the ethnographic record may be resolved into two types.³

3. The reader familiar with recent discussions of primitive distribution will recog­nize my indebtedness to Polanyi (1944, 1957, 1959) on this score, and likewise the departures from Polanyi's terminology and threefold scheme of principles of integra­tion. It is also a pleasure to affirm with Firth that "Every student of primitive eco­nomics, in fact, gratefully builds upon the foundations which Malinowski has laid" (Firth, 1959, p. 174).

First, those "vice-versa" movements between two parties known familiarly as Reciprocity* (A B). The second, centralized movements: collec­tion from members of a group, often under one hand, and redivision within this group:

This is "pooling" or "redistribution." On an even more general view, the two types merge. For pooling is an organization of reciprocities, a system of reciprocities—a fact of central bearing upon the genesis of large-scale redistribution under chiefly aegis. But this most general understanding merely suggests concentration in the first place on reciprocity; it remains the course of analytic wisdom to separate the two.

Their social organizations are very different. True, pooling and reciprocity may occur in the same social contexts—the same close kinsmen that pool their resources in household commensality, for instance, also as individuals share things with one another—but the precise social relations of pooling and reciprocity are not the same. Pooling is socially a within relation, the collective action of a group. Reciprocity is a between relation, the action and reaction of two parties. Thus pooling is the complement of social unity and, in Polanyi's term, "centricity"; whereas, reciprocity is social duality and "symmetry." Pooling stipulates a social center where goods meet and thence flow outwards, and a social boundary too, within which per­sons (or subgroups) are cooperatively related. But reciprocity stip­ulates two sides, two distinct social-economic interests. Reciprocity can establish solidary relations, insofar as the material flow suggests assistance or mutual benefit, yet the social fact of sides is inescapable.

Considering the established contributions of Malinowski and Firth, Gluckman, Richards, and Polanyi, it does not seem too sanguine to say that we know fairly well the material and social concomitants of pooling. Also, what is known fits the argument that pooling is the material side of "collectivity" and "centricity." Cooperative food production, rank and chieftainship, collective political and ceremoni­al action, these are some of the ordinary contexts of pooling in primi­tive communities. To review very briefly:

The everyday, workaday variety of redistribution is familial pooling of food. The principle suggested by it is that products of collective effort in provisioning are pooled, especially should the cooperation entail division of labor. Stated so, the rule applies not only to house-holding but to higher-level cooperation as well, to groups larger than households that develop about some task of procurement—say, buffa­lo impounding in the Northern Plains or netting fish in a Polynesian lagoon. With qualifications—such as the special shares locally accord­ed special contributions to the group endeavor—the principle remains at the higher, as at the lower, household level: "goods collectively procured are distributed through the collectivity."

Rights of call on the produce of the underlying population, as well as obligations of generosity, are everywhere associated with chieftain­ship. The organized exercise of these rights and obligations is redistri­bution:

I think that throughout the world we would find that the relations between economics and politics are of the same type. The chief, everywhere, acts as a tribal banker, collecting food, storing it, and protecting it, and then using it for the benefit of the whole community. His functions are the prototype of the public finance system and the organization of State treas­uries of to-day. Deprive the chief of his privileges and financial benefits and who suffers most but the whole tribe? (Malinowski, 1937, pp. 232-233).

This use "for the benefit of the whole community" takes various forms: subsidizing religious ceremony, social pageantry, or war; un­derwriting craft production, trade, the construction of technical appa­ratus and of public and religious edifices; redistributing diverse local products; hospitality and succor of the community (in severalty or in general) during shortage. Speaking more broadly, redistribution by powers-that-be serves two purposes, either of which may be dominant in a given instance. The practical, logistic function—redistribution— sustains the community, or community effort, in a material sense. At the same time, or alternatively, it has an instrumental function: as a ritual of communion and of subordination to central authority, redis­tribution sustains the corporate structure itself, that is in a social sense. The practical benefits may be critical, but, whatever the practi­cal benefits, chiefly pooling generates the spirit of unity and centricity, codifies the structure, stipulates the centralized organization of social order and social action—

. . . every person who takes part in the aria [feast organized by a Tiko-pia ch ief ] is impelled to participate in forms of cooperation which for the time being go far beyond his personal interests and those of his family and reach the bounds of the whole community. Such a feast gathers to­gether chiefs and their clansf oik who at other times are rivals ready to criticize and slander each other, but who assemble here with an outward show of amity. . . . In addition, such purposive activity subserves certain wider social ends, which are common in the sense that every person or nearly every person knowingly or unknowingly promotes them. For in­stance, attendance at the aria and participation in the economic contri­butions does in fact help to support the Tikopia system of authority (Firth, 1950, pp. 230-231).

So we have at least the outline of a functional theory of redistribu­tion. The central issues are now likely to be developmental ones, the specification by comparison or phylogenetic study of selective cir­cumstances. The economic anthropology of reciprocity, however, is not at the same stage. One reason, perhaps, is a popular tendency to view reciprocity as balance, as unconditional one-f or-one exchange. Considered as a material transfer, reciprocity is often not that at all. Indeed, it is precisely through scrutiny of departures from balanced exchange that one glimpses the interplay between reciprocity, social relations and material circumstances.

Reciprocity is a whole class of exchanges, a continuum of forms. This is specially true in the narrow context of material transactions— as opposed to a broadly conceived social principle or moral norm of give-and-take. At one end of the spectrum stands the assistance free­ly given, the small currency of everyday kinship, friendship, and neighborly relations, the "pure gift" Malinowski called it, regarding which an open stipulation of return would be unthinkable and unso­ciable. At the other pole, self-interested seizure, appropriation by chicanery or force requited only by an equal and opposite effort on the principle of lex talionis, "negative reciprocity" as Gouldner phrases it. The extremes are notably positive and negative in a moral sense. The intervals between them are not merely so many grada­tions of material balance in exchange, they are intervals of sociabil­ity. The distance between poles of reciprocity is, among other things, social distance:

Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend usury (Deuteronomy xxiii, 21).

Native [Siuai] moralists assert that neighbors should be friendly and mutually trustful, whereas people from far-off are dangerous and un­worthy of morally just consideration. For example, natives lay great stress on honesty involving neighbors while holding that trade with strangers may be guided by caveat emptor (Oliver, 1955, p. 82).

Gain at thecost of othercommunities, particularly communities at a dis­tance, and more especially such as are felt to be aliens, is not obnoxious to the standards of homebred use and wont (Veblen, 1915, p. 46).

A trader always cheats people. For this reason intra-regional trade is rather frowned upon while inter-tribal trade gives to the (Kapauku) businessman prestige as well as profit (Pospisil, 1958, p. 127).

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 969