Traditional forms of trade
So far, we have considered trade from the perspective of members of traditional societies, and of what they would find different and surprising, or else familiar, in our market economies. Let’s examine the corresponding mechanisms in traditional trade. I already mentioned the replacement of our cash purchases by their exchanges of objects, and occasionally by their use of valued objects such as cowrie shells in a manner somewhat similar to money. Now, let’s consider the traditional equivalents of the other features of market economies that we just discussed.
While in some cases traditional societies negotiate explicit exchanges, and both items pass hands at the same time, in other cases one party presents a gift, and the recipient thereby incurs the obligation to provide a gift of comparable value at some unspecified time in the future. The simplest form of such reciprocal gifting occurs among Andaman Islanders (Plate 4), for whom there is little delay between the two halves of the transaction. A local group invites one or more other local groups to a feast that lasts a few days, and to which the visitors bring objects such as bows, arrows, adzes, baskets, and clay. A visitor gives an object to a host, who cannot refuse the gift but is then expected to give something of equal value. If the second gift does not meet the guest’s expectations, the guest may become angry. Occasionally a giver, on making a present, names the gift that he would like in return, but that’s exceptional. Among South America’s Yanomamo Indians (Plate 12), reciprocal gift-giving is also associated with feasts to which one group invites a neighboring group. Yanomamo reciprocal gifting differs from the Andaman custom in that the second gift, which must be a different type of item from the first gift, is presented at a subsequent feast. Each Yanomamo gift is remembered long afterwards. The delay between the first and second gifts means that the accumulated obligations serve as an on-going excuse for neighboring villages to visit each other for feasts, because some members of one village always owe gifts to some members of another village from their last meeting.
Among the northwest Alaska Inuit, the Agta of the Philippines (Plate 3), Trobriand Islanders, and the !Kung, each person has recognized trading partners with whom gifts are exchanged. Each Inuit has between one and six such partners. Agta and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers have relationships with Philippine and Bantu farmer families respectively, and those relationships are passed on from generation to generation. Each Trobriand Islander traveling on a canoe trading voyage has on each visited island a trade partner to whom he gives a gift, and from whom he then expects an equivalent gift on his next visit a year later. The so-called hxaro long-distance trade system of the !Kung is distinctive in that each individual has dozens of trade partners, and it’s also distinctive in the long interval between the giving of one gift and the receipt of an equivalent gift when the two parties next meet, typically months or years later.
Who are the traders, and under what circumstances and how often do they meet? In small-scale societies everybody trades. However, in large chiefdoms and early states with specialization of economic roles, professional traders like our modern ones emerge, as documented already by records from the dawn of writing 4,000 or 5,000 years ago in the Near East. Another modern phenomenon with precedents in simpler societies consists of entire societies specialized in trading. The Malai Islanders whose “skyscrapers” surprised me lived on an island too small to provide all their food needs, became middlemen and manufacturers and overseas traders, and thereby obtained the remainder of their food requirements. Malai Island thus serves as a model for modern Singapore.
The formats and frequencies of traditional trade encompass a spectrum. At the simplest level are the occasional trips made by individual !Kung and Dani to visit their individual trading partners in other bands or hamlets. Suggestive of our open-air markets and flea markets were the occasional markets at which Sio villagers living on the coast of northeast New Guinea met New Guineans from inland villages. Up to a few dozen people from each side sat down in rows facing each other. An inlander pushed forward a net bag containing between 10 and 35 pounds of taro and sweet potatoes, and the Sio villager sitting opposite responded by offering a number of pots and coconuts judged equivalent in value to the bag of food. Trobriand Island canoe traders conducted similar markets on the islands that they visited, exchanging utilitarian goods (food, pots, bowls, and stone) by barter, at the same time as they and their individual trade partners gave each other reciprocated gifts of luxury items (shell necklaces and armbands).
Andaman Island bands and Yanomamo Indian villages arranged to meet at irregular intervals for multi-day feasts that served as occasions for gifts. Northwest Alaska Inuit held summer trade fairs and winter messenger feasts at which groups that were passionate enemies for the rest of the year managed to sit down peacefully together for a week or two of trade and feasting. Specialized societies of canoe traders, such as the Siassi Islanders, Trobriand Islanders, southeast New Guinea’s Mailu Islanders, and Indonesians (Macassans) who visited northern Australia to obtain trepang (dried sea cucumbers) for the Chinese soup market, sent groups of merchants hundreds or even thousands of miles over the ocean on annual trading trips.
Traditional trade items
As for the objects exchanged in trading, one is tempted to begin by dividing them into two categories: utilitarian items (like food and tools) versus luxury items (like cowrie shells and diamond rings). But this dichotomy becomes gray as soon as one tries to apply it. As the economist Frank Knight wrote, “Of all the fallacious and absurd misconceptions which so largely vitiate economic and social discussion, perhaps the very worst is the notion…that an interpretation of utility, or usefulness, in biological or physical survival terms has any considerable significance at the human level.” For example, a BMW car is undoubtedly a luxury and a status symbol, but it can still be used to drive to the grocery store, and the image that it projects may be essential to its bearer in earning money by closing business deals and in wooing mates. The same is true for a beautiful Siassi wooden carved bowl, which is used to hold vegetables at feasts but is also a status symbol indispensable for buying a wife in the Vitiaz Strait region. As for pigs, they are by far the most valuable status symbol in New Guinea. That gave rise to Thomas Harding’s remark, “It can be said of pigs, too, that the least important thing one can do is simply to eat them.”
Table 1.1. Objects traded by some traditional societies
Despite all those strictures, if one is presented with a list of 59 trade items, it is still useful to categorize them rather than to lump them all into an undivided laundry list. Hence Table 1.1 gives examples of trade items in 13 small-scale societies, partitioned into four categories: objects immediately useful for survival, obtaining subsistence, and daily life, further divided into raw materials versus manufactured objects; luxuries or decorative objects not immediately useful for survival; and an intermediate category of objects that are used but that also convey status raising their value far above the material value of an object with the same utility but not conveying status (e.g., a cashmere jacket compared to a cheap synthetic jacket of similar size and warmth).
Table 1.1 shows that certain types of useful raw materials have been traded by many societies around the world: especially stone, and more recently metal, for making tools and weapons; plus salt, food, wood, animal hides and furs, pitch for caulking, and clay for making pots. Commonly traded useful manufactured objects include finished tools and weapons, baskets and other containers, fiber for weaving, bags and nets and ropes, cloth and clothing, and processed foods such as bread, sago, and pemmican. The long list of luxury and decorative items, sometimes traded as raw materials, more often worked into manufactured objects, includes bird feathers; shells of mollusks and turtles, raw or worked into necklaces and armbands; amber; dog, pig, and shark teeth; elephant and walrus ivory; beads; paints and paint bases, such as red ocher and black manganese oxide; tree oil; and stimulants such as tobacco, alcohol, and betelnut. For example, by 2,000 years ago lo
ng-distance specialist traders from Asia were bringing bird-of-paradise plumes from New Guinea to China, and the plumes were thence traded as far as Persia and Turkey. Finally, trade objects that are simultaneously useful and luxurious include pigs, trepang, spices, and other prestige foods (the traditional equivalents of our caviar); and beautiful but useful manufactured goods such as pottery, carved bows and arrows, and decorated bags, clothing, and mats.
Table 1.1 and the preceding discussion omit two other important categories of things that one people may offer to another people but that we don’t normally count among trade goods: labor and spouses. African rainforest Pygmies and Agta forest Negritos of the Philippines, and more recently some !Kung, intermittently work for neighboring Bantu farmers, Philippine farmers, and Bantu herders respectively. That’s a big part of the quid pro quo arrangement under which those groups of foragers receive iron plus garden crops or milk from those neighboring food-producers, in return for hunted and gathered products plus labor. Most neighboring peoples exchange spouses, occasionally as direct simultaneous exchanges (you give me your sister and I’ll give you my sister), more often as separate acts (you give me your sister now, and I’ll give you my little sister when she reaches the age of menarche). Between African rainforest Pygmies (Plate 8) and neighboring Bantu farmers such movements of spouses are virtually one way, with Pygmy women becoming wives of Bantu men but not vice versa.
Those are the main categories of objects exchanged. As for who trades what to whom, New Guinea’s Daribi people, living at low population densities in a still heavily forested area at the edge of the densely populated and deforested Highland valleys, exported to Highlanders the plumes of birds of paradise, abundant in Daribi forests, in exchange for salt and polished stone axes imported from the Highlands. Pygmy groups of African rainforests export forest products such as honey, game meat, and mushrooms to neighboring Bantu farmers, from whom they import garden-grown foods, pots, iron, tobacco, and alcohol. In the Vitiaz Strait region the islanders export pig tusks, dogs, sago, betelnut, mats, beads, obsidian, and red ocher to mainlanders, from whom they import pigs, dog teeth, taro, tobacco, pots, net bags, bows and arrows, and black paint. In trade between coastal and inland Inuit of Alaska’s north slope, coastal people could offer marine mammal products such as seal oil for fuel and food, seal and walrus skins, whale blubber, and walrus ivory, plus beach driftwood and wooden vessels, plus pottery and bags that they made. Inlanders could in turn supply caribou hides and legs and antlers, furs of wolves and other terrestrial mammals, pitch for caulking, and pemmican and berries.
Who trades what?
These examples of objects exchanged illustrate a pattern that we moderns take for granted, because it describes almost all trade today: each partner supplies objects that it has or can readily make, and that the other partner lacks. Raw materials, and the skills required to manufacture finished products, are both unevenly distributed around the world. For example, the United States is the world’s leading exporter of raw foods and manufactured aircraft, because we can grow food and build airplanes in excess of our own needs. However, we are an importer of oil, because we don’t produce enough of it for our needs, while some other countries (such as Saudi Arabia) produce oil in excess of their needs. Such imbalances of raw materials and of skills also characterize much, but not all, traditional trade.
As for unevenly distributed raw materials, a common pattern is for neighboring peoples occupying different habitats each to supply the other with raw materials confined to or more abundant in the exporter’s habitat. Many examples include trade between coastal and inland peoples. In each such case, as I detailed two paragraphs above for Alaska’s Inuit, the coastal partner has preferential or sole access to marine or coastal resources such as marine mammals and fish and shells, while the inland partner has preferential or sole access to terrestrial resources such as game, gardens, and forests.
Another common pattern consists of trade in very local raw materials not tied to specific habitat types, notably salt and stone. The Dugum Dani obtained all of their salt from the Iluekaima brine pool, and all of their stone for axes and adzes from a single quarry in the Nogolo Basin, while for much of the Southwest Pacific the main source of obsidian (the volcanic glass used to make the sharpest stone artifacts) was quarries near Talasea on the island of New Britain. Talasea obsidian became traded over an expanse of more than 4,000 miles, from Borneo 2,000 miles west of Talasea to Fiji 2,000 miles east of Talasea.
The remaining common pattern of trade in different types of raw materials involves neighboring groups with different subsistence strategies, giving them access to different materials. In many places around the world, hunter-gatherers trade meat, honey, resins, and other forest products that they hunt and gather to nearby village farmers in return for crops that the villagers grow. Examples include plains bison hunters and Pueblo farmers of the U.S. Southwest, Semang hunters and Malay farmers of peninsular Malaysia, and numerous hunter-farmer associations of India, as well as the African Pygmy hunters and Bantu farmers, and the Agta hunters and Philippine farmers whom I’ve already described. There are similar trade relations between herders and farmers in many parts of Asia and Africa, and between herders and hunter-gatherers in Africa.
Traditional trade, like modern trade, often also involves unevenly distributed skills. An example is the virtual local monopolies of pottery and ocean-going canoes enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mailu Island off the coast of southeast New Guinea, studied by the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski. While pottery was initially also produced by nearby New Guinea mainlanders, the Mailu achieved an export monopoly by figuring out how to mass-produce finer, thinner, stylistically standardized pots. Such pots were advantageous both to Mailu pot-makers and to their pot-using customers. Thin pots enabled the pot-makers to produce more pots from a given quantity of clay, to dry the pots faster, and to reduce the risk of damage while the pots were being fired. As for pot-using consumers, they preferred thin Mailu pots because less fuel was required for cooking in them, and the contents boiled faster. Mailu Islanders similarly acquired a monopoly on making and operating long-distance ocean-going canoes, which were more complicated and required more skill to construct than did the simpler canoes with which mainlanders were confined to making short trips in more sheltered coastal waters. Comparable manufacturing monopolies were enjoyed a thousand years ago by Chinese porcelain- and paper-makers, until their manufacturing secrets leaked out or were duplicated. In our modern times of industrial espionage and diffusion of knowledge, it has become difficult to maintain monopolies for long. However, the United States briefly (for four years) enjoyed a monopoly of making atomic bombs (which we didn’t export), and the United States and Europe today dominate the world market in very large commercial jet aircraft (which we do export).
The remaining type of traditional trade, which scarcely has a parallel today, has been called “conventional monopolies.” This term refers to trade in an item which either of the two trade partners could obtain or manufacture, but which one side chooses to rely on the other partner to supply, as an excuse for maintaining trade relations. For example, among the items that the Dugum Dani receive from the Jalemo area are wooden arrows with elaborate barbs and decorations, plus net bags with bright orchid fibers woven around the strings. The Dani make simple undecorated arrows and bags themselves. With a Jalemo arrow or bag in front of them, the Dani could perfectly well duplicate it, because the level of carving or weaving skill required is not high. But the Dani instead continue to depend on the Jalemo area for imported arrows and bags, as well as for forest materials that the Jalemo area has in more abundance than does the Dani homeland. Dani recognition of the Jalemo “conventional monopoly” of decorated arrows and bags is advantageous to both parties by helping to even out effects of fluctuations in supply and demand. The Jalemo people can continue to obtain salt from the Dani even if Jalemo harvests of forest products should temporarily decline, and the Dani can continue to sell salt to t
he Jalemo people even if Dani demand for forest products is temporarily glutted.
More elaborate conventional monopolies prevail among Brazil’s and Venezuela’s Yanomamo Indians, and among Brazil’s Xingu Indians. Each Yanomamo village could be self-sufficient, but it isn’t. Instead, each village specializes in some product that it provides to its allies, including arrow points, arrow shafts, baskets, bows, clay pots, cotton yarn, dogs, hallucinogenic drugs, or hammocks. Similarly, each Xingu village specializes in producing and exporting bows, pottery, salt, shell belts, or spears. Lest you think that most Yanomamo villagers really couldn’t make the crude and undecorated Yanomamo pottery, consider recent changes in how the Yanomamo village of Mömariböwei-teri obtained pots. Initially, Mömariböwei-teri imported pots from another politically allied village, Möwaraöba-teri. In explanation, Mömariböwei-teri villagers vigorously insisted then that they didn’t know how to make pots, that they formerly did make pots but had long ago forgotten how to do so, that the clay in their area was no good for making pots anyway, and that they got all the pots that they needed from Möwaraöba-teri. But then a war interrupted the alliance between Mömariböwei-teri and Möwaraöba-teri, so that Mömariböwei-teri could no longer import pots from Möwaraöba-teri. Miraculously, Mömariböwei-teri villagers suddenly “remembered” how they had long ago made pots, suddenly “discovered” that the hitherto scorned clay in their area was perfectly good for making pots, and resumed making their own pots. Thus, it’s clear that the Mömariböwei-teri villagers had previously been importing pots from Möwaraöba-teri out of choice (to cement a political alliance), not out of necessity.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 9