The Social Organization of Primitive and Market Trade

Supply and demand are operative in the self-regulating market, pushing prices toward equilibrium, by virtue of a two-sided competi­tion between sellers over buyers, and between buyers over sellers. This double competition, symmetrical and inverse, is the social organiza­tion of formal market theory. Without it, supply and demand cannot be realized in price—so it is always present also, if only implicitly, in textbooks on microeconomics. In the theoretically perfect case, all deals are interconnected. All parties in question have access to each other as well as full knowledge of the market, such that buyers are in a position to compete among themselves by paying more (if neces­sary and possible), sellers by asking less. In the event of an oversupply relative to the quantity in demand at a given price, sellers contest for the limited patronage by reducing prices; then, certain sellers with­draw because they are unable to support the reduction, even as more buyers find the terms attractive, until a price is reached that clears the market. In the opposite circumstance, buyers bid up prices until the quantity available meets the quantity demanded. The "demand crowd" clearly has no solidarity inter se and as against the supply crowd, or vice versa. It is the exact opposite of trade between commu­nities of different tribes, where internal relations of kinship and amity would stand against the competition required by the business model— particularly in the context of an economic confrontation with outsid­ers. Caveat emptor, perhaps; but tribal sociability and homebred mo­rality constitute an unlikely arena for economic infighting—for no man can have honor and profit in his own camp.

The alienated intersections of supply curves and demand curves in the economists' diagrams presuppose a certain structure of competi­tion. Very different are the procedures of primitive trade. Anyone cannot just get into the act, enter the lists against people of his own side in quest of the exotic goods offered by visiting strangers. Once under way, usually in fact beforehand, trade is an exclusive relation with a specific outside party. T*he traffic is canalized in parallel and insulated transactions between particular pairs.⁹ Where trade is han­dled through parnerships, exactly who exchanges with whom is pre­scribed in advance: social relations, not prices, connect up "buyers" and "sellers." Lacking a trade contact, a man may not be able to get what he wants at any price.¹⁰ There is no evidence anywhere, so far as I know, of competitive bidding among members of a trading party for the custom of each other's partners; there is only the occasional observation that it is expressly forbidden.¹¹

9. Or else the trade of their respective communities is arranged between representa­tive chiefs, who redistribute the proceeds within their groups, for example, certain Pomotrade(Loeb, 1926, pp. 192-193), orin the Marquesas (Linton, 1939, p. 147). On corporate partnerships between groups, see below.

10. Oliver provides an example from Siuai of the difficulty of trade—even between people of the same ethnic group—In the absence of partnership: "It is not a simple matter to purchase a pig. Owners become fond of their beasts and are often loath to give them up. A would-be purchaser cannot merely let it be known that he is interested in buying, and then sit at home and await orders. . . . One situation was observed in which a hopeful purchaser visited a potential seller every day for nine days before finally concluding the transaction: all for a [small] pig worth 20 spans of mauail It is no wonder, then, that institutionalized arrangements have developed whereby acquir­ing a pig becomes simplified. One of these is the taovu [trade partner] relationship already described" (Oliver, 1955, p. 350).

11. "... it is a serious offense [among the Sio of northeast New Guinea] to steal or to attempt to lure away another person's trade-friend. In the old days, a man would attempt to kill an errant trade-friend as well as his new partner" (Harding, 1967, pp. 166-167). The following also suggests competitive impotence in trade: "One Komba man [an inland tribe] who is esteemed for his generosity complained that some Sio [trade-] friends were being intentionally impolite to him. He was very offended: 'They want me to visit [that is, exchange with] them, but I am only one man. What do they want me to do, cut off my arms and legs and distribute them around?'" (p. 168)

Haggling likewise, where it is practiced, is a discrete relation between individuals, not a free-for-all. The nearest documented approach to open-market trading ap­pears to be, on one hand, a kind of auctioning, involving competition within the demand party only, as testified in certain Eskimo and Australian materials (Spencer, 1959, p. 206; Aiston, 1936-37, pp. 376-377);¹² on the other hand, Pospisil adduces a single example of a Kapauku competing with other sellers by lowering his price on a pig for a prospective buyer—but, interestingly enough, the man tried to come to this agreement in secret (1958, p. 123). The double and interrelated competition intrinsic to the business model, competition by which the forces of supply and demand are understood to regulate price, is generally not apparent in the conduct of primitive exchange, and only exceptionally is it half-approximated.

There is always the possibility of implicit rate competition among buyers and among sellers. I can only say I have not succeeded in construing it from existing descriptions.¹³

12. Again, as bargained rates, auctioned rates are indeterminate and are unlikely to indicate the equilibrium. Aiston writes of the Australian pitcheri narcotic auction: "Intrinsic value had nothing to do with the sales; it was quite likely that a big bag of pitcheri would be exchanged for a single boomerang, but it was just as likely to be exchanged for half a dozen boomerangs and perhaps a shield and a pirra; it always depended on what the buyer and seller wanted; sometimes when the seller had as much as he could carry he would give a bag in exchange for food for his party (1936-37, pp. 376-377).

13. Or at least I have not construed any definite or general covert price competition. There is one form of trade that possibly admits it—certain of the so-called "markets" or "market meetings" in Melanesia. This arrangement, of which Blackwood (1935) provides several examples, might reasonably be considered a corporate trade partner­ship between communities, the members of which meet at traditional places and prear­ranged times, and are free to trade with any opposite number who shows up. The trade is in customary products, is regulated by customary rates of equivalence, and custom­arily proceeds without haggle—and little enough of any talk. Blackwood did see one woman try to get more than the customary rate for a load of her produce—i. e., try to haggle—but she was foiled (1935, p. 440). There remains, however, the choice of particular partners and inspection of the goods offered; although hawking is not indica­ted, it is conceivable that women of a side compete with each other by varying the quantity or quality of their "standard" loads (cf. Blackwood, 1935, p. 443, on variations of certain loads).

One other possibility of implicit competition, more general than this, is discussed further along in the text.

Furthermore, there are two rather exceptional conditions of trade on which we have already put a construction of business-like competition. One was the mixed economy (Kapauku), combining bargaining and balanced reciprocity sectors whose differences in rates presumably would incline people, insofar as social relations permit, to withhold goods from one sector for the better returns available in the other. Or again, as in the Huon Gulf, two or more villages may handle the same good, and other communities have access to more than one of these suppliers. The marketlike effect in both cases would be equalization of rates over the different sectors or communities. But this interpretation does not solve the critical problems. How is the trend of indeterminate rates in the bargaining sector transposed to the customary rates of balanced partnership exchange, such that the latter too realize the influence of supply/demand? Likewise, in trade networks competitively patterned at the community level, it remains difficult to understand just how relative value is adjusted to supply and demand. For exchange still is conducted at customary rates between pairs of customary partners.

Nor would it seem wise to be cynical about the moral force of customary exchange rates, one of the few guarantees of equity and continuity in a context pregnant with hostility. More important, where customary rates prevail, and espe­cially where trade is by partnership, there are alternative strategies to competitive undercutting which avoid the material disadvantage of lowering selling rates or raising offers: one alternative is to acquire more partners for trade on the usual terms; another, to be examined later in more detail, is to overpay one's partner for the time being, obliging him thus to reciprocate within a reasonable period on pain of losing dignity or partnership, so completing the transaction at normal rates. No question that there may be competition for volume of external trade. Internal prestige systems often hinge on it. But it does not develop as price manipulation, product differentiation, or the like. The standard manoeuvre is to increase the number of outside-partners, or else to step up trade with existing partners. There are no markets properly so-called in these Melanesian soci-etiesYery likely there are none in any of the archaic societies. Bohan-nan and Dalton (1962) were wrong to speak of a "market principle," even peripheral, in this context. They were misled on two counts by transactions such as the gimtiali, the bargaining of Trobriand non-partnership trade. For one, they read the market from a type of competition not essential to it, an overt conflict between buyer and seller.¹⁴

14. Interesting that Marx reproached Proudhon for the same mistake: "II ne suffit pas,'a M. Proudhon, d'avoir elimine' du rapport de l'oflre et de la demande les elements dont nous yenons de parler. II pousse l'abstraction aux dernieres limites, en fondant tousles producteursen un jeu/producteiir, tousles consommateursen un.seu/consom-mateur, et en etablissant la lutte entre ces deux personnages chimeriques. Mais dans le monde reel les choses se passent autrement. La concurrence entre ceux qui offrent et la concurrence entre ceux qui demandent, forment un element necessaire de la lutte entre les acheteurs et les vendeurs, d'ou resulte la valeur venale" (Marx, 1968 [1847], pp. 53-54).

Secondly, they read the market from a type of transaction taken alone, impersonal and competitive, without reference to the global organization of these exchanges. The mistake should serve to underline Polyani's sometimes insistence (1959) that transactions be understood as types of integration, not simply as types (tout court). "Reciprocity," "redistribution," and market exchange were in the master's treatment not mere forms of economic transaction but modes of economic organization. The determinate forms of transaction found in markets, such as sale and (occasionally) bargaining, are encountered also in a number of primitive instances. But lacking a symmetrical and inverse competition among buyers and among sell­ers, these exchanges are not integrated as market systems. Unless and until Trobriand haggling was so integrated (not traditionally the case) it would afford no indication of a market principle or of a peripheral market. Markets properly so-called, competitive and price fixing, are universally absent from primitive society.

But then, if the trade is not classically constituted to absorb supply-demand pressure by price changes, the sensitivity we have observed in Melanesian exchange values remains an intriguing mystery.

Date: 2014-12-21; view: 900