Debt

by David Graeber

  29. Hudson (2002:37) cites the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (i.79) who attributes this motive to the Egyptian pharaoh Bakenranef, though he too emphasizes that military considerations were not the only ones, but that cancellations reflected broader feelings about justice.

  30. Oppenheim 1964:88. Oppenheim suggests that interest-free loans were more common in the Levant, and that in Mesopotamia social equals were more likely to charge each other interest but on easier terms, citing an Old Assyrian merchant who speaks of “the rate one brother charges another” (op cit). In ancient Greece, friendly loans between social equals were known as eranos loans, usually of sums raised by an impromptu mutual-aid society and not involving the payment of interest (Jones 1956:171–73; Vondeling 1961; Finley 1981:67–68; Millet 1991:153–155). Aristocrats often made such loans to one another, but so did groups of slaves trying to pool money to buy back their freedom (Harrill 1998:167). This tendency, for mutual aid to be most marked at the very top and very bottom of the social scale is a consistent pattern to this day.

  31. Hence the constant invocation of the phrase “your brother,” particularly in Deuteronomy, e.g., “you shall not lend at interest to your brother” (23:20).

  Chapter Five

  1. As we’ll see in chapter seven, Plato begins The Republic in exactly the same way.

  2. For a polite but devastating assessment, see Kahneman 2003.

  3. Homans 1958, also Blau 1964; Levi-Strauss 1963:296. In anthropology, the first to propose reciprocity as a universal principle was Richard Thurnwald (1916), but it was made famous by Malinowski (1922).

  4. One reason no known law code has ever been known to enforce the principle; the penalty was always there to be commuted to something else.

  5. Atwood (2008:1). The author then proceeds to explore the nature of our sense of economic morality by comparing the behavior of caged apes with middle-class Canadian children to argue that all human relations are indeed either exchange or forcible appropriation (ibid:49). Despite the brilliance of many of its arguments, the result is a rather sad testimony to how difficult it is for the scions of the North Atlantic professional classes not to see their own characteristic ways of imagining the world as simple human nature.

  6. Seton’s father, a failed shipping magnate turned accountant, was, Seton later wrote, so cold and abusive that his son spent much of his youth in the woods trying to avoid him; after paying the debt—which incidentally came to $537.50, a tidy but not insurmountable sum in 1881—he changed his name and spent much of the rest of his life trying to develop more healthy child-rearing techniques.

  7. Rev. W.H. Beatley in Levy-Bruhl 1923:411

  8. Rev. Fr. Bulléon, in Levy-Bruhl 1923:425

  9. This phrase was not coined by Marx, incidentally, but was apparently a slogan current in the early French workers’ movement, first appearing in print in the work of socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. Marx only took up the phrase in his Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, and even then used it in a rather idiosyncratic way: for the principle he imagined could apply on the level of society as a whole once technology had reached the point of guaranteeing absolute material abundance. For Marx, “communism” was both the political movement aiming to bring about such a future society, and that society itself. I am drawing here more on the alternate strain of revolutionary theory, evident most famously perhaps in Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902).

  10. At least, unless there is some specific reason not to—for instance, a hierarchical division of labor that says some people get coffee and others do not.

  11. What this means of course is that command economies—putting government bureaucracies in charge of coordinating every aspect of the production and distribution of goods and services within a given national territory—tends to be much less efficient than other available alternatives. This is obviously true, though if it “just doesn’t work” at all, it’s hard to imagine how states like the Soviet Union could have existed, let alone maintain themselves as world powers, in the first place.

  12. Evans-Pritchard 1940:182

  13. Similarly, a middle-class pedestrian would be unlikely to ask a gang member for directions, and might even run in fear if one approached him to ask for the time, but this is again because of an assumption of a tacit state of war existing between them.

  14. Ibid, p. 183.

  15. Richards 1939:197. Max Gluckman, remarking on such customs, concludes that insofar as it is possible to speak of “primitive communism,” it exists in consumption, rather than production, which tends to be much more individually organized (1971:52).

  16. A typical example: “if a cabin of hungry people meets another whose provisions are not entirely exhausted, the latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to them without waiting to be asked, although they expose themselves thereby to the same danger of perishing as those whom they help …” Lafitau 1974 Volume II:61.

  17. Jesuit Relations (1635) 8:127, cited in Delâge 1993:54.

  18. This is a common arrangement in certain parts of the world (particularly the Andes, Amazonia, insular Southeast Asia, and Melanesia), and invariably there is some rule whereby each half is dependent on the other for something considered essential to human life. One can only marry someone from the other side of the village, or maybe one can only eat pigs raised on the other side, or perhaps one side needs people from the other side to sponsor the rituals that initiate its male children into manhood.

  19. As I have suggested elsewhere, Graeber 2001:159–60; cf. Mauss 1947: 104–5.

  20. I’m side-stepping the whole question of one-sided examples discussed in Graeber 2001:218.

  21. Marshall Sahlins (1972) coined the phrase “generalized reciprocity” to describe this sort of relation, on the principle that if everything circulates freely, eventually, all accounts will balance out. Marcel Mauss was already making such an argument in lectures back in the 1930s (1947), but he also recognized the problems: while this might be true of Iroquois moieties, some relationships never balance out—for instance, between mother and child. His solution, “alternating reciprocity”—that we repay our parents by having children ourselves—is clearly drawn from his study of the Vedas, but it ultimately demonstrates that if one has already decided that all relations are based on reciprocity, one can always define the term so broadly as to make it true.

  22. Hostis: see Benveniste 1972:72. The Latin terminology concerning hospitality emphasizes the absolute mastery of the house by its (male) owner as the precondition of any act of hospitality; Derrida (2000, 2001) argues that this points to a central contradiction in the very concept of hospitality, since it implies an already-existing absolute dominium or power over others, the kind that might be seen as taking its most exploitative form in Lot’s offering his own daughters up to a crowd of Sodomites to dissuade them from raping his houseguests. However, this same principle of hospitality can be equally well documented in societies—such as the Iroquois—that were anything but patriarchal.

  23. Evans-Pritchard 1940:154, 158.

  24. This is of course one reason why the very rich like to associate mainly with one another.

  25. In a less hostile vein one can speak of an exchange of prisoners, notes, or compliments.

  26. A good source on haggling: Uchendo 1967.

  27. Bohannan 1964:47.

  28. Not even a real business deal, since these may often involve a great deal of collective wining and dining and giving of presents. More the sort of imaginary business deal that appears in economics textbooks.

  29. One need only glance at the vast anthropological literature on “competitive feasting”: e.g., Valeri 2001.

  30. Bourdieu 1965 is the key text, but he repeats the main points in Bourdieu 1990:98–101.

  31. Onvlee 1980:204.

  32. Petronius 51; Pliny Natural History 36.195; Dio 57.21.5–7.

  33. “This king is of all men the most addicted to the making of gifts and the shedding of blood. His gate is never withou
t some poor man enriched or some living man executed.”

  34. Or even the very rich. Nelson Rockefeller, for example, used to pride himself on never carrying a wallet. He didn’t need one. Every now and then when he was working late and wanted cigarettes, he would borrow some from the security people at the desk at Rockefeller Center, who would then be able to boast that they had lent a Rockefeller money and would rarely ask for it back. In contrast, “the sixteenth-century Portuguese monarch Dom Manuel, newly rich from the Indies trade, adopted the title ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation, and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India.’ Others called him the “grocer king.” (Ho 2004:227).

  35. See Graeber 2001:175–76.

  36. Even between strangers it’s a bit unusual: as Servet (1981, 1982) has emphasized, most “primitive trade” takes place through trade partnership and specialized regional middlemen.

  37. I frame things this way because I am mainly interested here in economics. If we were thinking simply of human relations, I suppose one might say that at one extreme is killing, and at the other, giving birth.

  38. In fact, it seems essential to the nature of charity that, like a gifts to a king, it can never lead to reciprocity. Even if it turns out that the pathetic-looking beggar is really a god wandering the earth in mortal form, or Harun al-Rashid, your reward will be entirely disproportionate. Or consider all those stories about drunken millionaires on a binge who, when they got their life back together, hand out fancy cars or houses to their earlier benefactors. It’s easier to imagine a panhandler giving you a fortune than returning an exact equivalent to the dollar that you gave him.

  39. Xenophon Cyropedia VIII.6, Herodotus 3.8.9; see Briant 2006:193–194, 394–404, who acknowledges that something broadly along these lines probably did take place, with a more impromptu gift system under Cyrus and Cambyses being systematized under Darius.

  40. Marc Bloch (1961:114–15), who adds “every act, especially if it was repeated three or four times, was likely to be transformed into a precedent—even if in the first instance it had been exceptional or even frankly unlawful.”

  41. The approach is often identified with British anthropologist A.M. Hocart (1936). The important thing is that this does not necessarily mean that these became their main or exclusive occupations: most of the time, such people remained simple farmers like everybody else. Yet what they did for the king, or later, on ritual occasions, for the community, was seen as defining their essential nature, their identity within the whole.

  42. In fact, we may become indignant at her for an act of stinginess we would never even consider stingy in anyone else—especially, ourselves.

  43. A version has been published as: Sarah Stillman, “The missing white girl syndrome: disappeared women and media activism” (Stillman, 2007): publications.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam/display.asp?K=002J1246&sf_01=cat_class&st_01=620&sort=SORT_DATE/

  d&m=84&dc=719

  44. Karatani (2003:203–205) makes this point compellingly. The Kwakiutl and other First Nations of the Northwest Coast are something of an intermediary case—aristocratic, but at least in the period we know about, using non-coercive means to gather resources (though Codere 1950.)

  45. Georges Duby (1980) provides the definitive history of this concept, which goes back to much older Indo-European ideas.

  46. For a typical example of imaginary reciprocity between father and son, see Oliver 1955:230. Anthropological theory buffs will notice that I am here endorsing Edmund Leach’s (1961) position on the “circulating connubium” problem. He later applied the same argument to the famous “kula chain” (1983).

  47. Actually, there are hierarchical relations that are explicitly self-subverting: the one between teacher and student, for example, since if the teacher is successful in passing her knowledge to the student, there is no further basis for inequality.

  48. Freuchen 1961: 154. It’s not clear what the original language was here, considering that the Inuit did not have an institution of slavery. Also, the passage would not make sense unless there were some contexts in which gift exchange did operate, and therefore, in which debts accrued. What the hunter is emphasizing is that it was felt important that this logic did not extend to basic needs like food.

  49. Firth 1959:411–12 (also in Graeber 2001:175). His name was Tei Reinga.

  50. For one famous example: Chagnon 1996:170–76.

  51. Similarly, two groups might form an alliance by contracting a “joking relation,” in which any member of one could at least in theory make similar outrageous demands of the other (Hébert 1958).

  52. Marcel Mauss, in his famous “Essay on the Gift” (1924), often did, and the results have sometimes confused debate for generations to come.

  53. Mauss 1925, the Greek source being Posidonius. As usual one does not know how literally to take this account. Mauss thought it likely accurate; I suspect it might have happened once or twice.

  54. As retold by William Ian Miller (1993:15–16). The first quote is directly from the original, Egil’s Saga, chapter 78. Egil remained ambivalent about the shield: he later took it to a wedding party and contrived to drop it into a vat of sour whey. Afterward, concluding it was ruined, he stripped it for its raw materials.

  55. See, for instance, Wallace-Hadrill 1989.

  56. Blaxter 1971:127–28.

  57. Another anthropologist, for instance, defines patron-client relations as “long-term contracted relations in which the client’s support is exchanged for the patron’s protection; there is an ideology which is morally charged and appears to rule out strict, open accounting, but both parties keep some tacit rough account; the goods and services exchanged are not similar, and there is no implication of fair exchange or balance of satisfactions, since the client is markedly weaker in power and needs the patron more than he is needed by him” (Loizos 1977:115). Again, it both is and isn’t an exchange, it’s both a matter of accounting and not a matter of accounting.

  58. It’s exactly the same if one takes a job at a doughnut shop; legally, it must be a free contract between equals, even if in order to be able to say this we have to maintain the charming legal fiction that one of them is an imaginary person named “Krispy Kreme.”

  59. For instance the word “should,” in English, originally derives from German schuld, meaning “guilt, fault, debt.” Benveniste provides similar examples from other Indo-European languages (1963:58). East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese rarely conflate the actual words, but a similar identification of debt with sin, shame, guilt, and fault can be easily documented (Malamoud 1988).

  60. Plutarch Moralia 303 B, also discussed in Finley 1981:152, Millett 1991a:42. Similarly, St. Thomas Aquinas made it a matter of Catholic doctrine that sins were “debts of punishment” owed to God.

  61. This is one reason why it’s so easy to dress up other sorts of relationships as debts. Say one wishes to help out a friend in desperate need of money but doesn’t want to embarrass her. Usually, the easiest way to do it is to provide the money and then insist that it’s a loan (and then let both parties conveniently forget it ever happened). Or think of all the times and places where the rich acquire servants by advancing what is ostensibly a loan.

  62. One could argue that some equivalent of “please” and “thank you” could be identified in any human language, if one were determined to find them, but then the terms you find are often used so differently—for instance, only in ritual contexts, or to hierarchical superiors—that it’s hard to attach much significance to the fact. It is significant that over the last century or so just about every human language that is used in offices or to make transactions in shops has had to create terms that do function as an exact equivalent of the English “please,” “thank you,” and “you’re welcome.”

  63. In Spanish one first asks a favor (por favor), and then says gracias, in order affirm you recognize one has been done for you, since it derives from the Latin word gratia, meaning “influence, or favor.” “Appreciate” is mor
e monetary: if you say “I really appreciate your doing that for me,” you are using a word that derives from Latin appretiare, “to set a price.”

  64. “You’re welcome,” first documented in Shakespeare’s time, derives from Old English wilcuma, wil being “pleasure” and cuma being “guest.” This is why people are still welcomed into a house. It is thus like “be my guest,” implying that, no, if there is an obligation it’s on my part, as any host is obliged to be generous to guests, and that dispatching such obligations is a pleasure in itself. Still, it’s significant that moralists rarely chide anyone for failure to say “you’re welcome”—that one is much more optional.

  65. Book I.12. This and other quotes are from the 2006 Penguin Screech translation, in this case, p. 86.

  66. Compare the Medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Miskaway: “The creditor desires the well-being of the debtor in order to get his money back rather than because of his love for him. The debtor, on the other hand, does not take great interest in the creditor.” (in Hosseini 2003:36).

  67. Appropriate, since Panurge’s entire discourse is nothing but a comical elaboration of Marcelo Ficino’s argument that the entire universe is driven by the power of love.

  Chapter Six

  1. From: Peter Carlson, “The Relatively Charmed Life of Neil Bush,” The Washington Post, Sunday December 28, 2003, Page D01.

  2. Grierson 1977:20.

  3. To be fair to Grierson, he does later suggest that slavery played an important part in the origins of money—though he never speculates about the gender, which seems significant: slave girls also served as the highest denomination of currency in Medieval Iceland (Williams 1937), and in the Rig Veda, great gifts and payments are regularly designated in “gold, cattle, and slave girls” (Chakravarti 1985:56–57). By the way, I say “young” because elsewhere, when slaves are used as monetary units, the unit is assumed to be a slave about 18–20 years old. A cumal was considered the equivalent in value of three milch cows or six heifers.