Debt

by David Graeber

  In other words, the whole thing turned into an endlessly complicated chess game—one reason, Douglas remarks, why the term “pawn” seems singularly apropos. Just about every adult Lele male was both someone else’s pawn, and engaged in a constant game of securing, swapping, or redeeming pawns. Every major drama or tragedy of village life would ordinarily lead to a transfer of rights in women. Almost all of those women would eventually get swapped again.

  Several points need to be emphasized here. First of all, what were being traded were, quite specifically, human lives. Douglas calls them “blood-debts,” but “life-debts” would be more appropriate. Say, for instance, a man is drowning, and another man rescues him. Or say he’s deathly ill but a doctor cures him. In either case, we would likely say one man “owes his life” to the other. So would the Lele, but they meant it literally. Save someone’s life, they owe you a life, and a life owed had to be paid back. The usual recourse was for a man whose life was saved to turn over his sister as a pawn—or if not that, a different woman; a pawn he had acquired from someone else.

  The second point is that nothing could substitute for a human life. “Compensation was based on the principle of equivalence, a life for a life, a person for a person.” Since the value of a human life was absolute, no amount of raffia cloth, or camwood bars, or goats, or transistor radios, or anything else could possibly take its place.

  The third and most important point is that in practice, “human life” actually meant “woman’s life”—or even more specifically, “young woman’s life.” Ostensibly this was to maximize one’s holdings: above all, one wished for a human being who could become pregnant and produce children, since those children would also be pawns. Still, even Mary Douglas, who was in no sense a feminist, was forced to admit that the whole arrangement did seem to operate as if it were one gigantic apparatus for asserting male control over women. This was true above all because women themselves could not own pawns.28 They could only be pawns. In other words: when it came to life-debts, only men could be either creditors or debtors. Young women were thus the credits and the debits—the pieces being moved around the chessboard—while the hands that moved them were invariably male.29

  Of course, since almost everyone was a pawn, or had been at some point in their lives, being one could not in itself be much of a tragedy. For male pawns it was in some ways quite advantageous, since one’s “owner” had to pay most of one’s fines and fees and even blood-debts. This is why, as Douglas’s informants uniformly insisted, pawnship had nothing in common with slavery. The Lele did keep slaves, but never very many. Slaves were war captives, usually foreigners. As such they had no family, no one to protect them. To be a pawn, on the other hand, meant to have not one, but two different families to look after you: you still had your own mother and her brothers, but now you also had your “lord.”

  For a woman, the very fact that she was the stakes in a game that all men were playing afforded all sorts of opportunities to game the system. In principle, a girl might be born a pawn, assigned to some man for eventual marriage. In practice, however,

  a little Lele girl would grow up a coquette. From infancy she was the centre of affectionate, teasing, flirting attention. Her affianced husband never gained more than a very limited control over her … Since men competed with one another for women there was scope for women to manoeuvre and intrigue. Hopeful seducers were never lacking and no woman doubted that she could get another husband if it suited her.30

  In addition, a young Lele woman had one unique and powerful card to play. Everyone was well aware that, if she completely refused to countenance her situation, she always had the option of becoming a “village-wife.”31

  The institution of village-wife was a peculiarly Lele one. Probably the best way to describe it is to imagine a hypothetical case. Let us say that an old, important man acquires a young woman as pawn through a blood-debt, and he decides to marry her himself. Technically, he has the right to do so, but it’s no fun for a young woman to be an old man’s third or fourth wife. Or, say he decides to offer her in marriage to one of his male pawns in a village far away from her mother and natal home. She protests. He ignores her protestations. She waits for an opportune moment and slips off at night to an enemy village, where she asks for sanctuary. This is always possible: all villages have their traditional enemies. Neither would an enemy village refuse a woman who came to them in such a situation. They would immediately declare her “wife of the village,” who all men living there would then be obliged to protect.

  It helps to understand that here, as in many parts of Africa, most older men had several wives. This meant that the pool of women available for younger men was considerably reduced. As our ethnographer explains, the imbalance was a source of considerable sexual tension:

  Everyone recognized that the young unmarried men coveted the wives of their seniors. Indeed, one of their pastimes was to plan seductions and the man who boasted of none was derided. Since the old men wished to remain polygynists, with two or three wives, and since adulteries were thought to disrupt the peace of the village, Lele had to make some arrangement to appease their unmarried men.

  Therefore, when a sufficient number of them reached the age of eighteen or so, they were allowed to buy the right to a common wife.32

  After paying an appropriate fee in raffia cloth to the village treasury, they were permitted to build a collective house, and then they were either allotted a wife to put in it, or allowed to form a party that would try to steal one from a rival village. (Or, alternately, if one showed up as a refugee, they would ask the rest of the village for the right to accept her: this was invariably granted.) This common wife is what’s referred to as a “village wife.” The position of village wife was more than respectable. In fact, a newly married village wife was treated very much like a princess. She was not expected to plant or weed in the gardens, fetch wood or water, or even to cook; all household chores were done by her eager young husbands, who provided the best of everything, spending much of their time hunting in the forest vying to bring her the choicest delicacies, or plying her with palm wine. She could help herself to others’ possessions and was expected to make all sorts of mischief to the bemused indulgence of all concerned. She was also expected to make herself sexually available to all members of the age-set—perhaps ten or twelve different men—at first, pretty much whenever they wanted her.33

  Over time, a village wife would usually settle down with just three or four of her husbands, and finally, just one. The domestic arrangements were flexible. Nonetheless, in principle, she was married to the village as a whole. If she had children, the village was considered to be their father, and as such expected to bring them up, provide them with resources, and eventually, get them properly married off—which is why villages had to maintain collective treasuries full of raffia and camwood bars in the first place. Since at any time a village was likely to have several village wives, it would also have its own children and grandchildren, and therefore be in a position to both demand and pay blood-debts, and thus, to accumulate pawns.

  As a result, villages became corporate bodies, collective groups that, like modern corporations, had to be treated as if they were individuals for purposes of law. However there was one key difference. Unlike ordinary individuals, villages could back up their claims with force.

  As Douglas emphasizes, this was crucial, because ordinary Lele men were simply not able to do this to one another.34 In everyday affairs, there was an almost complete lack of any systematic means of coercion. This was the main reason, she notes, that pawnship was so innocuous. There were all sorts of rules, but with no government, no courts, no judges to make authoritative decisions, no group of armed men willing or able to employ the threat of force to back those decisions up, rules were there to be adjusted and interpreted. In the end, everyone’s feelings had to be taken into account. In everyday affairs, Lele put great stock on gentle and agreeable behavior. Men might have been regularly seized with
the urge to throw themselves at each other in fits of jealous rage (often they had good reason to), but they very rarely did. And if a fight did break out, everyone would immediately jump in to break it up and submit the affair to public mediation.35

  Villages, in contrast, were fortified, and age-sets could be mobilized to act as military units. Here, and only here, did organized violence enter the picture. True, when villages fought, it was also always over women (everyone Douglas talked to expressed incredulity at the very idea that grown men, anywhere, could ever come to blows over anything else). But in the case of villages, it could come to an actual war. If another village’s elders ignored one’s claims to a pawn, one’s young men might organize a raiding party and kidnap her, or carry off some other likely young women to be their collective wife. This might lead to deaths, and to further claims for compensation. “Since it had the backing of force,” Douglas observes drily, “the village could afford to be less conciliatory towards the wishes of its pawns.”36

  It’s at exactly this point, too, where the potential for violence enters, that the great wall constructed between the value of lives and money can suddenly come tumbling down.

  Sometimes when two clans were disputing a claim to blood compensation, the claimant might see no hope of getting satisfaction from his opponents. The political system offered no direct means for one man (or clan) to use physical coercion or to resort to superior authority to enforce claims against another. In such a case, rather than abandon his claim to a pawn-woman, he would be ready to take the equivalent in wealth, if he could get it. The usual procedure was to sell his case against the defendants to the only group capable of extorting a pawn by force, that is, to a village.

  The man who meant to sell his case to a village asked them for 100 raffia cloths or five bars of camwood. The village raised the amount, either from its treasury, or by a loan from one of its members, and thereby adopted as its own his claim to a pawn.37

  Once he held the money, his claim was over, and the village, which had now bought it, would proceed to organize a raid to seize the woman in dispute.

  In other words, it was only when violence was brought into the equation that there was any question of buying and selling people. The ability to deploy force, to cut through the endless maze of preferences, obligations, expectations, and responsibilities that mark real human relationships, also made it possible to overcome what is otherwise the first rule of all Lele economic relationships: that human lives can only be exchanged for other human lives, and never for physical objects. Significantly, the amount paid—a hundred cloths, or an equivalent amount of camwood—was also the price of a slave.38 Slaves were, as I mentioned, war captives. There seem never to have been very many of them; Douglas only managed to locate two descendants of slaves in the 1950s, some twenty-five years after the practice had been abolished.39 Still, the numbers were not important. The mere fact of their existence set a precedent. The value of a human life could, sometimes, be quantified; but if one was able to move from A = A (one life equals another) to A = B (one life = one hundred cloths), it was only because the equation was established at the point of a spear.

  Flesh-Debt (Tiv)

  I have dwelt on the Lele in such detail in part because I wanted to convey some sense of why I was using the term “human economy,” what life is like inside one, what sort of dramas fill people’s days, and how money typically operates in the midst of all this. Lele currencies are, as I say, quintessential social currencies. They are used to mark every visit, every promise, every important moment in a man’s or woman’s life. It is surely significant, too, what the objects used as currency here actually were. Raffia cloth was used for clothing. In Douglas’s day, it was the main thing used to clothe the human body; camwood bars were the source of a red paste that was used as a cosmetic—it was the main substance used as makeup, by both men and women, to beautify themselves each day. These, then, were the materials used to shape people’s physical appearance, to make them appear mature, decent, attractive, and dignified to their fellows. They were what turned a mere naked body into a proper social being.

  This is no coincidence. In fact, it’s extraordinarily common in what I’ve been calling human economies. Money almost always arises first from objects that are used primarily as adornment of the person. Beads, shells, feathers, dog or whale teeth, gold, and silver are all well-known cases in point. All are useless for any purpose other than making people look more interesting, and hence, more beautiful. The brass rods used by the Tiv might seem an exception, but actually they’re not: they were used mainly as raw material for the manufacture of jewelry, or simply twisted into hoops and worn at dances. There are exceptions (cattle, for instance), but as a general rule, it’s only when governments, and then markets, enter the picture that we begin to see currencies like barley, cheese, tobacco, or salt.40

  It also illustrates the peculiar progression of ideas that so often mark human economies. On the one hand, human life is the absolute value. There is no possible equivalent. Whether a life is given or taken, the debt is absolute. In places, this principle is indeed sacrosanct. More often, it is compromised by the elaborate games played by the Tiv, who treat the giving of lives, and the Lele, who treat the taking of lives, as creating debts that can only be paid by delivering another human being. In each case, too, the practice ends up engendering an extraordinarily complex game in which important men end up exchanging women, or at least, rights over their fertility.

  But this is already a kind of opening. Once the game exists, once the principle of substitution comes in, there was always the possibility of extending it. When that begins to happen, systems of debt that were premised on creating people can—even here—suddenly become the means of destroying them.

  As an example, let us once again return to the Tiv. The reader will recall that if a man did not have a sister or a ward to give in exchange for one’s wife, it was possible to assuage her parents and guardians by gifts of money. However, such a wife would never be considered truly his. Here too, there was one dramatic exception. A man could buy a slave, a woman kidnapped in a raid from a distant country.41 Slaves, after all, had no parents, or could be treated as if they didn’t; they had been forcibly removed from all those networks of mutual obligation and debt in which ordinary people acquired their outward identities. This was why they could be bought and sold.

  Once married, though, a purchased wife would quickly develop new ties. She was no longer a slave, and her children were perfectly legitimate—more so, in fact, than those of a wife who was merely acquired through the continual payment of brass rods.

  We have perhaps a general principle: to make something saleable, in a human economy, one needs to first rip it from its context. That’s what slaves are: people stolen from the community that made them what they are. As strangers to their new communities, slaves no longer had mothers, fathers, kin of any sort. This is why they could be bought and sold or even killed: because the only relation they had was to their owners. A Lele village’s ability to organize raids and kidnap a woman from an alien community seems to have been the key to its ability to start trading women for money—even if in their case, they could do so only to a very limited extent. After all, her relatives were not very far away, and they would surely come around demanding an explanation. In the end, someone would have to come up with an arrangement that everyone could live with.42

  Still, I would also insist that there is something more than this. One gets the distinct sense, in much of the literature, that many African societies were haunted by the awareness that these elaborate networks of debt could, if things went just slightly wrong, be transformed into something absolutely terrible. The Tiv are a dramatic case in point.

  Among students of anthropology, the Tiv are mainly famous for the fact that their economic life was divided into what their best-known ethnographers, Paul and Laura Bohannan, referred to as three separate “spheres of exchange.” Ordinary, everyday economic activity was mostly t
he affair of women. They were the ones who filled the markets, and who trod the paths giving and returning minor gifts of okra, nuts, or fish. Men concerned themselves with what they considered higher things: the kind of transactions that could be conducted using the Tiv currency, which, as with the Lele, consisted of two denominations, a kind of locally made cloth called tugudu, widely exported, and, for major transactions, bundles of imported brass rods.43 These could be used to acquire certain flashy and luxurious things (cows, purchased foreign wives), but they were mainly for the give and take of political affairs, hiring curers, acquiring magic, gaining initiation into cult societies. In political matters, Tiv were even more resolutely egalitarian than the Lele: successful old men with their numerous wives might have lorded it over their sons and other dependants within their own house compounds, but beyond that, there was no formal political organization of any sort. Finally, there was the system of wards, which consisted entirely of men’s rights in women. Hence, the notion of “spheres.” In principle, these three levels—ordinary consumption goods, masculine prestige goods, and rights in women—were completely separate. No amount of okra could get you a brass rod, just as, in principle, no number of brass rods could give you full rights to a woman.

  In practice, there were ways to game the system. Say a neighbor was sponsoring a feast but was short on supplies; one might come to his aid, then later, discreetly, ask for a bundle or two in repayment. To be able to wheel and deal, to “turn chickens into cows,” as the saying went, and ultimately, broker one’s wealth and prestige into a way of acquiring wives, required a “strong heart”—that is, an enterprising and charismatic personality.44 But “strong heart” had another meaning too. There was believed to be a certain actual biological substance called tsav that grew on the human heart. This was what gave certain people their charm, their energy, and their powers of persuasion. Tsav therefore was both a physical substance and that invisible power that allows certain people to bend others to their will.45