Debt

by David Graeber

  This is what I mean when I say that hierarchy operates by a principle that is the very opposite of reciprocity. Whenever the lines of superiority and inferiority are clearly drawn and accepted by all parties as the framework of a relationship, and relations are sufficiently ongoing that we are no longer simply dealing with arbitrary force, then relations will be seen as being regulated by a web of habit or custom. Sometimes the situation is assumed to have originated in some founding act of conquest. Or it might been seen as ancestral custom for which there is no need of explanation. But this introduces another complication to the problem of giving gifts to kings—or to any superior: there is always the danger that it will be treated as a precedent, added to the web of custom, and therefore considered obligatory thereafter. Xenophon claims that in the early days of the Persian Empire, each province vied to send the Great King gifts of its most unique and valuable products. This became the basis of the tribute system: each province was eventually expected to provide the same “gifts” every year.39 Similarly, according to the great Medieval historian Marc Bloch:

  [I]n the ninth century, when one day there was a shortage of wine in the royal cellars at Ver, the monks of Saint-Denis were asked to supply the two hundred hogs-heads required. This contribution was thenceforth claimed from them as of right every year, and it required an imperial charter to abolish it. At Ardres, we are told, there was once a bear, the property of the local lord. The inhabitants, who loved to watch it fight with dogs, undertook to feed it. The beast eventually died, but the lord continued to exact the loaves of bread.”40

  In other words, any gift to a feudal superior, “especially if repeated three of four times,” was likely to be treated as a precedent and added to the web of custom. As a result, those giving gifts to superiors often insisted on receiving a “letter of non-prejudice” legally stipulating that such a gift would not be required in the future. While it is unusual for matters to become quite so formalized, any social relation that is assumed from the start to be unequal will inevitably begin to operate on an analogous logic—if only because, once relations are seen as based on “custom,” the only way to demonstrate that one has a duty or obligation to do something is to show that one has done it before.

  Often, such arrangements can turn into a logic of caste: certain clans are responsible for weaving the ceremonial garments, or bringing the fish for royal feasts, or cutting the king’s hair. They thus come to be known as weavers or fishermen or barbers.41 This last point can’t be overemphasized because it brings home another truth regularly overlooked: that the logic of identity is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy. It is only when certain people are placed above others, or where everyone is being ranked in relation to the king, or the high priest, or Founding Fathers, that one begins to speak of people bound by their essential nature: about fundamentally different kinds of human being. Ideologies of caste or race are just extreme examples. It happens whenever one group is seen as raising themselves above others, or placing themselves below others, in such a way that ordinary standards of fair dealing no longer apply.

  In fact, something like this happens in a small way even in our most intimate social relations. The moment we recognize someone as a different sort of person, either above or below us, then ordinary rules of reciprocity become modified or are set aside. If a friend is unusually generous once, we will likely wish to reciprocate. If she acts this way repeatedly, we conclude she is a generous person, and are hence less likely to reciprocate.42

  We can describe a simple formula here: a certain action, repeated, becomes customary; as a result, it comes to define the actor’s essential nature. Alternately, a person’s nature may be defined by how others have acted toward him in the past. To be an aristocrat is largely to insist that in the past, others have treated you as an aristocrat (since aristocrats don’t really do anything in particular, most spend their time simply existing in some sort of putatively superior state), and therefore should continue to do so. Much of the art of being such a person is that of treating oneself in such a manner that it conveys how you expect others to treat you: in the case of actual kings, covering oneself with gold so as to suggest that others do likewise. On the other end of the scale, this is also how abuse becomes self-legitimating. As a former student of mine, Sarah Stillman, pointed out: in the United States, if a middle-class thirteen-year-old girl is kidnapped, raped, and killed, it is considered an agonizing national crisis that everyone with a television is expected to follow for several weeks. If a thirteen-year-old girl is turned out as a child prostitute, raped systematically for years, and ultimately killed, all this is considered unremarkable—really just the sort of thing one can expect to end up happening to someone like that.43

  When objects of material wealth pass back and forth between superiors and inferiors as gifts or payments, the key principle seems to be that the sorts of things given on each side should be considered fundamentally different in quality, their relative value impossible to quantify—the result being that there is no way to even conceive of a squaring of accounts. Even if Medieval writers insisted on imagining society as a hierarchy in which priests pray for everyone, nobles fight for everyone, and peasants feed everyone, it never even occurred to anyone to establish how many prayers or how much military protection was equivalent to a ton of wheat. Nor did anyone ever consider making such a calculation. Neither is it that “lowly” sorts of people are necessarily given lowly sorts of things and vice versa. Sometimes it is quite the opposite. Until recently, just about any notable philosopher, artist, poet, or musician was required to find a wealthy patron for support. Famous works of poetry or philosophy are often prefaced—oddly, to the modern eye—with gushing, sycophantic praise for the wisdom and virtue of some long-forgotten earl or count who provided a meager stipend. The fact that the noble patron merely provided room and board, or money, and that the client showed his gratitude by painting the Mona Lisa, or composing the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, was in no way seen to compromise the assumption of the noble’s intrinsic superiority.

  There is one great exception to this principle, and that is the phenomenon of hierarchical redistribution. Here, though, rather than giving back and forth the same sorts of things, they give back and forth exactly the same thing: as, for instance, when fans of certain Nigerian pop stars throw money onto the stage during concerts, and the pop stars in question make occasional tours of their fans’ neighborhoods tossing (the same) money from the windows of their limos. When this is all that’s going on, we may speak of an absolutely minimal sort of hierarchy. In much of Papua New Guinea, social life centers on “big men,” charismatic individuals who spend much of their time coaxing, cajoling, and manipulating in order to acquire masses of wealth to give away again at some great feast. One could, in practice, pass from here to, say, an Amazonian or indigenous North American chief. Unlike big men, their role is more formalized; but actually such chiefs have no power to compel anyone to do anything they don’t want to (hence North American Indian chiefs’ famous skill at oratory and powers of persuasion). As a result, they tended to give away far more than they received. Observers often remarked that in terms of personal possessions, a village chief was often the poorest man in the village, such was the pressure on him for constant supply of largesse.

  Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to accumulate riches. The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add another element: war and plunder. After all, just about anyone who comes into a very large amount of wealth will ultimately give at least part of it away—often in grandiose and spectacular ways to large numbers of people. The more of one’s wealth is obtained by plunder or extortion, the more spectacular and self-aggrandizing will be the forms in which it’s given away.44 And what is true of warrior aristocracies is all the more true of ancient states, where rulers a
lmost invariably represented themselves as the protectors of the helpless, supporters of widows and orphans, and champions of the poor. The genealogy of the modern redistributive state—with its notorious tendency to foster identity politics—can be traced back not to any sort of “primitive communism” but ultimately to violence and war.

  Shifting between Modalities

  I should underline again that we are not talking about different types of society here (as we’ve seen, the very idea that we’ve ever been organized into discrete “societies” is dubious) but moral principles that always coexist everywhere. We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to imagine a society where people wouldn’t be both.

  The obvious question is: If we are all ordinarily moving back and forth between completely different systems of moral accounting, why hasn’t anybody noticed this? Why, instead, do we continually feel the need to reframe everything in terms of reciprocity?

  Here we must return to the fact that reciprocity is our main way of imagining justice. In particular, it is what we fall back on when we’re thinking in the abstract, and especially when we’re trying to create an idealized picture of society. I’ve already given examples of this sort of thing. Iroquois communities were based on an ethos that required everyone to be attentive to the needs of several different sorts of people: their friends, their families, members of their matrilineal clans, even friendly strangers in situations of hardship. It was when they had to think about society in the abstract that they started to emphasize the two sides of the village, each of which had to bury the other’s dead. It was a way of imagining communism through reciprocity. Similarly, feudalism was a notoriously messy and complicated business, but whenever Medieval thinkers generalized about it, they reduced all its ranks and orders into one simple formula in which each order contributed its share: “Some pray, some fight, still others work.”45 Even hierarchy was seen as ultimately reciprocal, despite this formula having nothing to do with the real relations between priests, knights, and peasants really operated on the ground. Anthropologists are familiar with the phenomenon: it’s only when people who have never had occasion to really think about their society or culture as a whole, who probably weren’t even aware they were living inside something other people considered a “society” or a “culture,” are asked to explain how everything works that they say things like “this is how we repay our mothers for the pain of having raised us,” or puzzle over conceptual diagrams in which clan A gives their women in marriage to clan B who gives theirs to clan C, who gives theirs back to A again, but which never seem to quite correspond to what real people actually do.46 When trying to imagine a just society, it’s hard not to evoke images of balance and symmetry, of elegant geometries where everything balances out.

  The idea that there is something called “the market” is not so very different. Economists will often admit this, if you ask them in the right way. Markets aren’t real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaging in the same self-interested calculating exchange. Economists are aware that reality is always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with a mathematical model, one always has to make the world into a bit of a cartoon. There’s nothing wrong with this. The problem comes when it enables some (often these same economists) to declare that anyone who ignores the dictates of the market shall surely be punished—or that since we live in a market system, everything (except government interference) is based on principles of justice: that our economic system is one vast network of reciprocal relations in which, in the end, the accounts balance and all debts are paid.

  These principles get tangled up in each other and it’s thus often difficult to tell which predominates in a given situation—one reason that it’s ridiculous to pretend we could ever reduce human behavior, economic or otherwise, to a mathematical formula of any sort. Still, this means that some degree of reciprocity can be detected as potentially present in any situation; so a determined observer can always find some excuse to say it’s there. What’s more, certain principles appear to have an inherent tendency to slip into others. For instance, a lot of extremely hierarchical relationships can operate (at least some of the time) on communistic principles. If you have a rich patron, you come to him in times of need, and he is expected to help you. But only to a certain degree. No one expects the patron to provide so much help that it threatens to undermine the underlying inequality.47

  Likewise, communistic relations can easily start slipping into relations of hierarchical inequality—often without anyone noticing it. It’s not hard to see why this happens. Sometimes different people’s “abilities” and “needs” are grossly disproportionate. Genuinely egalitarian societies are keenly aware of this and tend to develop elaborate safeguards around the dangers of anyone—say, especially good hunters, in a hunting society—rising too far above themselves; just as they tend to be suspicious of anything that might make one member of the society feel in genuine debt to another. A member who draws attention to his own accomplishments will find himself the object of mockery. Often, the only polite thing to do if one has accomplished something significant is to instead make fun of oneself. The Danish writer Peter Freuchen, in his Book of the Eskimo, described how in Greenland, one could tell what a fine delicacy someone had to offer his guests by how much he belittled it beforehand:

  The old man laughed. “Some people don’t know much. I am such a poor hunter and my wife a terrible cook who ruins everything. I don’t have much, but I think there is a piece of meat outside. It might still be there as the dogs have refused it several times.”

  This was such a recommendation in the Eskimo way of backwards bragging that everyone’s mouths began to water …

  The reader will recall the walrus hunter of the last chapter, who took offense when the author tried to thank him for giving him a share of meat—after all, humans help one another, and once we treat something as a gift, we turn into something less than human: “Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”48

  “Gift” here does not mean something given freely, not mutual aid that we can ordinarily expect human beings to provide to one another. To thank someone suggests that he or she might not have acted that way, and that therefore the choice to act this way creates an obligation, a sense of debt—and hence, inferiority. Communes or egalitarian collectives in the United States often face similar dilemmas, and they have to come up with their own safeguards against creeping hierarchy. It’s not that the tendency for communism to slip into hierarchy is inevitable—societies like the Inuit have managed to fend it off for thousands of years—but rather, that one must always guard against it.

  In contrast, it’s notoriously difficult—often downright impossible—to shift relations based on an assumption of communistic sharing to relations of equal exchange. We observe this all the time with friends: if someone is seen as taking advantage of your generosity, it’s often much easier to break off relations entirely than to demand that they somehow pay you back. One extreme example is the Maori story about a notorious glutton who used to irritate fishermen up and down the coast near where he lived by constantly asking for the best portions of their catch. Since to refuse a direct request for food was effectively impossible, they would dutifully turn it over; until one day, people decided enough was enough and killed him.49

  We’ve already seen how creating a ground of sociability among strangers can often require an elaborate process of testing the others’ limits by helping oneself to their possessions. The same sort of thing can happen in peacemaking, or even in the creation of business partnerships.50 In Madagascar, people told me that two men who are thinking of going into business together will often become blood brothers. Blood brotherhood, fatidra, consists of an unlimited promise of mutual aid. Both parties solemnly swear that they will never refuse an
y request from the other. In reality, partners to such an agreement are usually fairly circumspect in what they actually request. But, my friends insisted, when people first make such an agreement, they sometimes like to test it out. One may demand the other’s house, the shirt off his back, or (everyone’s favorite example) the right to spend the night with his wife. The only limit is the knowledge that anything one can demand, the other one can too.51 Here, again, we are talking about an initial establishment of trust. Once the genuineness of the mutual commitment has been confirmed, the ground is prepared, as it were, and the two men can begin to buy and sell on consignment, advance funds, share profits, and otherwise trust that each will look after the other’s commercial interests from then on. The most famous and dramatic moments, however, are those when relations of exchange threaten to break down into hierarchy: that is, when two parties are acting like equals, trading gifts, or blows, or commodities, or anything else, but one of them does something that completely flips the scale.

  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.” Those who throw such feasts often indulge in colorful speeches about how their enemies are thus crushed and destroyed by glorious feats of generosity aimed in their direction (Kwakiutl chiefs liked to speak of themselves as great mountains from which gifts rolled like giant boulders), and of how conquered rivals are thus reduced—much as in the Inuit metaphor—to slaves.