Reciprocity and Food

The character of the goods exchanged seems to have an independ­ent effect on the character of exchange. Staple foodstuffs cannot always be handled just like anything else. Socially they are not quite like anything else. Food is life-giving, urgent, ordinarily symbolic of hearth and home, if not of mother. By comparison with other stuff, food is more readily, or more necessarily, shared; barkcloth and beads more readily lend themselves to balanced gift-giving. Direct and equivalent returns for food are unseemly in most social settings: they impugn the motives both of the giver and of the recipient. From this several characteristic qualities of food transfers appear to follow.

Food dealings are a delicate barometer, a ritual statement as it were, of social relations, and food is thus employed instrumentally as a starting, a sustaining, or a destroying mechanism of sociability:

Food is something over which relatives have rights, and conversely rela­tives are people who provide or take toll on one's food (Richards, 1939, p. 200).

The sharing of food [among the Kuma] symbolizes an identity of inter­ests. . . .Food is never shared with an enemy.. . .Food is not shared with strangers, for they are potential enemies. A man may eat with his cognatic and affinal relatives and also, people say, with the members of his own clan. Normally, however, only members of the same subclan have an unequivocal right to share each other's food. ... If two men or the members of two sub-subclans have a serious and lasting quarrel, neither they nor their descendants may use one another's fires. . . , When affinal relatives come together at marriage, the formal presentation of the bride and the pork and the valuables emphasizes the separate identity of the two clans, but the people actually participating in the ceremony share vegetable food informally, unobtrusively, as they might share it with intimate companions within the subclan. This is a way of expressing their common interest in linking the two groups. Symbolically, they belong now to a single group and so are "brothers," as affinal relatives should be (Reay, 1959, pp. 90-92).

Food offered in a generalized way, notably as hospitality, is good relations. As Jochelson says, putting it for the Yukaghir with near-Confucian pith: "hospitality often turns enemies into friends, and strengthens the amicable relations between groups foreign to one another" (1926, p. 125). But then, a complementary negative principle is implied, that food not offered on the suitable occasion or not taken is bad relations. Thus the Dobuan syndrome of suspicion of everyone save the nearest kinfolk finds its clearest expression in the social range of food-sharing and commensality—"Food or tobacco is not accepted except within a small circle" (Fortune,1932, p. 170; on rules proscrib­ing commensality, cf. pp. 74-75; Malinowski,1915, 545). Finally there is the principle that one does not exchange things for food, not directly that is, among friends and relatives. Traffic in food is traffic between foreign interests. (Look how a novelist quite simply suggests that one of his characters is a real bastard: "He brought his blankets to the bare house, took silent supper with the Boss family, insisted on paying them—he could not understand why they pretended reluctance when he offered to pay them; food cost money; they were not in the restau­rant business, but food cost money, you could not deny that"— MacKinlay Kantor.)

In these principles of instrumental food exchange there seems little variation between peoples. Of course, the extent to which they are employed, and which of them are employed, vary with the case. Dobuans proscribe intervillage visiting and hospitality, no doubt for good and sufficient reasons. Elsewhere, circumstances ranging from economic interdependence through political strategy enjoin both vis­iting and the hospitable entertainment of visitors. A detailed look at the circumstances would be beyond the present purview: the point is that where some coming to sociable terms with visitors is desirable, hospitality is an ordinary way of doing it. And the Dobuan syndrome is by no means typical. Ordinarily, "Savages pride themselves in being hospitable to strangers" (Harmon, 1957, p. 43).

Consequently the sphere of generalized exchange in food is some­times wider than the sphere of generalized exchange in other things. This tendency to transcend the sectoral plan is most dramatized in the hospitality afforded trade partners, or any kinsmen from afar, who make visits the occasion for exchanging presents (see examples in Appendix A). Here are people whose dealings in durables are con­sciously balanced out—or even potentially run on caveat emptor—by some miracle charitably supplying one another with food and shelter. But then hospitality counters the wabuwabu lurking in the back­ground, and provides an atmosphere in which direct exchange of presents and trade goods can be equitably consummated.

There is logic in an undue tendency to move food by generalized reciprocity. Like exchange between rich and poor, or between high and low, where food is concerned a greater inclination to sacrifice seems required just to sustain the given degree of sociability. Sharing needs to be extended to more distant relatives, generalized reciprocity broadened beyond ordinary sectoral limits. (It might be recalled from the Appendixes to previous sections that generosity is distinctively associated with food dealing.)

About the only sociable thing to do with food is to give it away, and the commensurably sociable return, after an interval of suitable de­cency, is the return of hospitality or assistance. The implication is not only a rather loose or imperfect balance in food dealing, but specifical­ly a restraint on exchanges of food for other goods. One notes with interest normative injunctions against the sale of food among peoples possessed of primitive currencies, among certain Melanesian and Cali­fornia tribes for instance. Here balanced exchange is run of the mill. Money tokens serve as more or less general equivalents and are ex­changed against a variety of stuff. But not foodstuff. Within a broad social sector where money talks for other things, staples are insulated against pecuniary transactions and food shared perhaps but rarely sold. Food has too much social value—ultimately because it has too much use value—to have exchange value.

Food was not sold. It might be given away, but being "wild stuff" should not be sold, according to Pomo etiquette. Manufactured articles only were bought and sold, such as baskets, bows and arrows (Gifford,1926, p. 329; cf. Kroeber, 1925, p. 40, on the Yurok—same sort of thing).

[To the Tolowa-Tututni] food was only edible, not saleable (Drucker 1937, p. 241; cf. DuBois, 1936, pp. 50-51).

The staple articles of food, taro, bananas, coconuts, are never sold [by Lesu], and are given to kindred, friends, and strangers passing through the village as an act of courtesy (Powdermaker, 1933, p. 195).

In a similar way, staple foodstuffs were excluded from balanced trading among Alaskan Eskimo—"The feeling was present that to trade for food was reprehensible—and even luxury foods that were exchanged between trade partners were transferred as presents and apart from the main trading" (Spencer, 1959, pp. 204-205).

It would seem that common foodstuffs are likely to have an insulat­ed "circuit of exchange," separate from durables, particulary wealth." (See Firth, 1950; Bohannan, 1955; Bohannan and Dalton, 1962, on "spheres of exchange"). Morally and socially this should be so. For a wide range of social relations, balanced and direct food-for-goods transactions (conversions) would rend the solidary bonds. Distinctve categorizations of food versus other goods, i.e. "wealth," express the sociological disparity and protect food from dysfunctional compari­sons of its worth—as among the Salish:

Food was not classed as "wealth" [i.e. blankets, shell ornaments, canoes, etc.]. Nor was it treated as wealth... "holy food," a Semiahmoo informant called it. It should be given freely, he felt, and could not be refused. Food was evidently not freely exchanged with wealth. A person in need of food might ask to buy some from another household in his community, offering wealth for it, but food was not generally offered for sale (Suttles,1960, p. 301; Vayda, 1961).

But an important qualification must in haste be entered. These food and nonfood spheres are sociologically based and bounded. The im­morality of food-wealth conversions has a sectoral dimension: at a certain socially peripheral point the circuits merge and thus dissolve. (At this point, food-for-goods exchange is a "conveyance" in Bohan-nan and Dalton's usage.) Food does not move against money or other stuff within the community or tribe, yet it may be so exchanged outside these social contexts, and not merely under duress but as use and wont. The Salish did customarily take food, "holy food," to affinal relatives in other Salish villages and received wealth in return (Suttles, 1960). Likewise, Porno did "buy"— at any rate gave beads for—acorns, fish, and like necessities from other communities (Kroe-ber,1925, p. 260; Loeb,1926,pp.l92-193). The separation of food and wealth cycles is contextual. Within communities these are insulated circuits, insulated by community relations; they are kept apart where a demand of return on necessities would contradict prevailing kinship relations. Beyond this, in the intercommunity or intertribal sector, the insulation of the food circuit may be worn through by frictions of social distance.

(Foodstuffs, incidentally, are not ordinarily divorced from the cir­cuit of labor assistance. On the contrary, a meal is in the host of primitive societies the customary return for labor solicited for garden­ing, housebuilding, and other domestic tasks. "Wages" in the usual sense is not at issue. The feeding amounts to an extraordinary exten­sion to other relatives and to friends of the household economy. Rather than a tentative move toward capitalism, it is perhaps better understood by a principle something to the opposite: that those who participate in a productive effort have some claim on its outcome.)

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 949