Debt

by David Graeber

  This element of competition can work in completely different ways. In cases of barter or commercial exchange, when both parties to the transaction are only interested in the value of goods being transacted, they may well—as economists insist they should—try to seek the maximum material advantage. On the other hand, as anthropologists have long pointed out, when the exchange is of gifts, that is, the objects passing back and forth are mainly considered interesting in how they reflect on and rearrange relations between the people carrying out the transaction, then insofar as competition enters in, it is likely to work precisely the other way around—to become a matter of contests of generosity, of people showing off who can give more away.

  Let me take these one at a time.

  What marks commercial exchange is that it’s “impersonal”: who it is that is selling something to us, or buying something from us, should in principle be entirely irrelevant. We are simply comparing the value or two objects. True, as with any principle, in practice, this is rarely completely true. There has to be some minimal element of trust for a transaction to be carried out at all, and, unless one is dealing with a vending machine, that usually requires some outward display of sociality. Even in the most impersonal shopping mall or supermarket, clerks are expected to at least simulate personal warmth, patience, and other reassuring qualities; in a Middle-Eastern bazaar, one might have to go through an elaborate process of establishing a simulated friendship, sharing tea, food, or tobacco, before engaging in similarly elaborate haggling—an interesting ritual that begins by establishing sociality through baseline communism—and continues with an often prolonged mock battle over prices. It’s all done on the basis of the assumption that buyer and seller are, at least at that moment, friends (and thus each entitled to feel outraged and indignant at the other’s unreasonable demands), but it’s all a little piece of theater. Once the object changes hands, there is no expectation that the two will ever have anything to do with each other again.26

  Most often this sort of haggling—in Madagascar the term for it literally means “to battle out a sale” (miady varotra)—can be a source of pleasure in itself.

  The first time I visited Analakely, the great cloth market in Madagascar’s capital, I came with a Malagasy friend intent on buying a sweater. The whole process took about four hours. It went something like this: my friend would spot a likely sweater hanging in some booth, ask the price, and then she would begin a prolonged battle of wits with the vendor, invariably involving dramatic displays of insult and indignation, and simulated walkings off in disgust. Often it seemed ninety percent of the argument was spent on a final, tiny difference of a few ariary—literally, pennies—that seemed to become a profound matter of principle on either side, since a merchant’s failure to concede it could sink the entire deal.

  The second time I visited Analakely I went with another friend, also a young woman, who had a list of measures of cloth to buy supplied by her sister. At each booth she adopted the same procedure: she simply walked up and asked for the price.

  The man would quote her one.

  “All right,” she then asked, “and what’s your real final price?”

  He’d tell her, and she’d hand over the money.

  “Wait a minute!” I asked. “You can do that?

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  I explained what had happened with my last friend.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Some people enjoy that sort of thing.”

  Exchange allows us to cancel out our debts. It gives us a way to call it even: hence, to end the relationship. With vendors, one is usually only pretending to have a relationship at all. With neighbors, one might for this very reason prefer not to pay one’s debts. Laura Bohannan writes about arriving in a Tiv community in rural Nigeria; neighbors immediately began arriving bearing little gifts: “two ears corn, one vegetable marrow, one chicken, five tomatoes, one handful peanuts.”27 Having no idea what was expected of her, she thanked them and wrote down in a notebook their names and what they had brought. Eventually, two women adopted her and explained that all such gifts did have to be returned. It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept three eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything back. One did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring something back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money—there was nothing inappropriate in that—provided one did so at a discreet interval, and above all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor. Tiv women, she learned, might spend a good part of the day walking for miles to distant homesteads to return a handful of okra or a tiny bit of change, “in an endless circle of gifts to which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received”—and in doing so, they were continually creating their society. There was certainly a trace of communism here—neighbors on good terms could also be trusted to help each other out in emergencies—but unlike communistic relations, which are assumed to be permanent, this sort of neighborliness had to be constantly created and maintained, because any link can be broken off at any time.

  There are endless variations on this sort of tit-for-tat, or almost tit-for-tat, gift exchange. The most familiar is the exchange of presents: I buy someone a beer; they buy me the next one. Perfect equivalence implies equality. But consider a slightly more complicated example: I take a friend out to a fancy restaurant for dinner; after a discreet interval, they do the same. As anthropologists have long been in the habit of pointing out, the very existence of such customs—especially, the feeling that one really ought to return the favor—can’t be explained by standard economic theory, which assumes that any human interaction is ultimately a business deal and that we are all self-interested individuals trying to get the most for ourselves for the least cost or least amount of effort.28 But this feeling is quite real, and it can cause genuine strain for those of limited means trying to keep up appearances. So: Why, if I took a free-market economic theorist out to an expensive dinner, would that economist feel somewhat diminished—uncomfortably in my debt—until he had been able to return the favor? Why, if he were feeling competitive with me, would he be inclined to take me to someplace even more expensive?

  Recall the feasts and festivals alluded to above: here, too, there is a base of conviviality and playful (sometimes not so playful) competition. On the one hand, everyone’s pleasure is enhanced—after all, how many people would really want to eat a superb meal at a French restaurant all alone? On the other, things can easily slip into games of one-upmanship—and hence obsession, humiliation, rage … or, as we’ll soon see, even worse. In some societies, these games are formalized, but it’s important to stress that such games only really develop between people or groups who perceive themselves to be more or less equivalent in status.29 To return to our imaginary economist: it’s not clear that he would feel diminished if he received a present, or was taken out to dinner, by just anyone. He would be most likely to feel this way if the benefactor were someone he felt was of roughly equivalent status or dignity: a colleague, for example. If Bill Gates or George Soros took him out to dinner, he would likely conclude that he had indeed received something for nothing and leave it at that. If some ingratiating junior colleague or eager graduate student did the same, he’d be likely to conclude that he was doing the man a favor just by accepting the invitation—if indeed he did accept, which he probably wouldn’t.

  This, too, appears to be the case wherever we find society divided into fine gradations of status and dignity. Pierre Bourdieu has described the “dialectic of challenge and riposte” that governs all games of honor among Kabyle Berber men in Algeria, in which the exchange of insults, attacks (in feud or battles), thefts, or threats was seen to follow exactly the same logic as the exchange of gifts.30 To give a gift is
both an honor and a provocation. To respond to one requires infinite artistry. Timing is all-important. So is making the counter-gift just different enough, but also just slightly grander. Above all is the tacit moral principle that one must always pick on someone one’s own size. To challenge someone obviously older, richer, and more honorable is to risk being snubbed, and hence humiliated; to overwhelm a poor but respectable man with a gift he couldn’t possibly pay back is simply cruel, and will do equal damage to your reputation. There’s an Indonesian story about that too: about a rich man who sacrificed a magnificent ox to shame a penurious rival; the poor man utterly humiliated him, and won the contest, by calmly proceeding to sacrifice a chicken.31

  Games like this become especially elaborate when status is to some degree up for grabs. When matters are too clear-cut, that introduces its own sorts of problems. Giving gifts to kings is often a particularly tricky and complicated business. The problem here is that one cannot really give a gift fit for a king (unless, perhaps, one is another king), since kings by definition already have everything. On the one hand, one is expected to make a reasonable effort:

  Nasruddin was once called up to visit the king. A neighbor saw him hurrying along the road carrying a bag of turnips.

  “What are those for?” he asked.

  “I’ve been called to see the king. I thought it would be best to bring some kind of present.”

  “You’re bringing him turnips? But turnips are peasant food! He’s a king! You should bring him something more appropriate, like grapes.”

  Nasruddin agreed, and came to the king carrying a bunch of grapes. The king was not amused. “You’re giving me grapes? But I’m a king! This is ridiculous. Take this idiot out and teach him some manners! Throw each and every one of the grapes at him and then kick him out of the palace.”

  The emperor’s guards dragged Nasruddin into a side room and began pelting him with grapes. As they did so, he fell on his knees and began crying, “Thank you, thank you God, for your infinite mercy!”

  “Why are you thanking God?” they asked. “You’re being totally humiliated!”

  Nasruddin replied, “Oh, I was just thinking, ‘Thank God I didn’t bring the turnips!’ ”

  On the other hand, to give something that a king does not already have can get you in even greater trouble. One story circulating in the early Roman Empire concerned an inventor who, with great fanfare, presented a glass bowl as a gift to the emperor Tiberius. The emperor was puzzled: What was so impressive about a piece of glass? The man dropped it on the ground. Rather than shattering, it merely dented. He picked it up and simply pushed it back into its former shape.

  “Did you tell anyone else how you made this thing?” asked a startled Tiberius.

  The inventor assured him that he had not. The emperor therefore ordered him killed, since, if word of how to make unbreakable glass got out, his treasury of gold and silver would soon be worthless.32

  The best bet when dealing with kings was to make a reasonable effort to play the game, but one that is still bound to fail. The fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta tells of the customs of the King of Sind, a terrifying monarch who took a particular delight in displays of arbitrary power.33 It was customary for foreign worthies visiting the king to present him with magnificent presents; whatever the gift was, he would invariably respond by presenting the bearer with something many times its value. As a result, a substantial business developed where local bankers would lend money to such visitors to finance particularly spectacular gifts, knowing they could be well repaid from the proceeds of royal one-upmanship. The king must have known about this. He didn’t object—since the whole point was to show that his wealth exceeded all possible equivalence—and if he really needed to, he could always expropriate the bankers. They knew that the really important game was not economic, but one of status, and his was absolute.

  In exchange, the objects being traded are seen as equivalent. Therefore, by implication, so are the people: at least, at the moment when gift is met with counter-gift, or money changes hands; when there is no further debt or obligation and each of the two parties is equally free to walk away. This in turn implies autonomy. Both principles sit uncomfortably with monarchs, which is the reason that kings generally dislike any sort of exchange.34 But within that overhanging prospect of potential cancellation, of ultimate equivalence, we find endless variations, endless games one can play. One can demand something from another person, knowing that by doing so, one is giving the other the right to demand something of equivalent value in return. In some contexts, even praising another’s possession might be interpreted as a demand of this sort. In eighteenth-century New Zealand, English settlers soon learned that it was not a good idea to admire, say, a particularly beautiful jade pendant worn around the neck of a Maori warrior; the latter would inevitably insist on giving it, not take no for an answer, and then, after a discreet interval, return to praise the settler’s coat or gun. The only way to head this off was to quickly give him a gift before he could ask for one. Sometimes gifts are offered in order for the giver to be able to make such a demand: if one accepts the present, one is tacitly agreeing to allow the giver to claim whatever he deems equivalent.35

  All this, in turn, can shade into something very much like barter, directly swapping one thing for another—which as we’ve seen does occur even in what Marcel Mauss liked to refer to as “gift economies,” even if largely between strangers.36 Within communities, there is almost always a reluctance, as the Tiv example so nicely illustrates, to allow things to cancel out—one reason that if there is money in common usage, people will often either refuse to use it with friends or relatives (which in a village society includes pretty much everyone), or alternately, like the Malagasy villagers in chapter 3, use it in radically different ways.

  Hierarchy

  Exchange, then, implies formal equality—or at least, the potential for it. This is precisely why kings have such trouble with it.

  In contrast, relations of explicit hierarchy—that is, relations between at least two parties in which one is considered superior to the other—do not tend to operate by reciprocity at all. It’s hard to see because the relation is often justified in reciprocal terms (“the peasants provide food, the lords provide protection”), but the principle by which they operate is exactly the opposite. In practice, hierarchy tends to work by a logic of precedent.

  To illustrate what I mean by this, let us imagine a kind of continuum of one-sided social relations, ranging from the most exploitative to the most benevolent. At one extreme is theft, or plunder; on the other selfless charity.37 Only at these two extremes is it is possible to have material interactions between people who otherwise have no social relation of any kind. Only a lunatic would mug his next-door neighbor. A band of marauding soldiers or nomadic horsemen falling on a peasant hamlet to rape and pillage also obviously have no intention of forming any ongoing relations with the survivors. But in a similar way, religious traditions often insist that the only true charity is anonymous—in other words, not meant to place the recipient in one’s debt. One extreme form of this, documented in various parts of the world, is the gift by stealth, in a kind of reverse burglary: to literally sneak into the recipient’s house at night and plant one’s present so no one can know for sure who has left it. The figure of Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas (who, it must be remembered, was not just the patron saint of children, but also the patron saint of thieves) would appear to be the mythological version of the same principle: a benevolent burglar with whom no social relations are possible and therefore to whom no one could possibly owe anything, in his case, above all, because he does not actually exist.

  Observe, however, what happens when one moves just a little bit less far out on the continuum in either direction. I have been told (I suspect it isn’t true) that in parts of Belarus, gangs prey so systematically on travelers on trains and busses that they have developed the habit of giving each victim a little token, to confirm that the
bearer has already been robbed. Obviously one step toward the creation of a state. Actually, one popular theory of the origins of the state, that goes back at least to the fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun, runs precisely along these lines: nomadic raiders eventually systematize their relations with sedentary villagers; pillage turns into tribute, rape turns into the “right of the first night” or the carrying off of likely candidates as recruits for the royal harem. Conquest, untrammeled force, becomes systematized, and thus framed not as a predatory relation but as a moral one, with the lords providing protection, and the villagers, their sustenance. But even if all parties assume they are operating by a shared moral code, that even kings cannot do whatever they want but must operate within limits, allowing peasants to argue about the rights and wrongs of just how much of their harvest a king’s retainers are entitled to carry off, they are very unlikely to frame their calculation in terms of the quality or quantity of protection provided, but rather in terms of custom and precedent: How much did we pay last year? How much did our ancestors have to pay? The same is true on the other side. If charitable donations become the basis for any sort of social relation, it will not be one based on reciprocity. If you give some coins to a panhandler, and that panhandler recognizes you later, it is unlikely that he will give you any money—but he might well consider you more likely to give him money again. Certainly this is true if one donates money to a charitable organization. (I gave money to the United Farm Workers once and I still haven’t heard the end of it.) Such an act of one-sided generosity is treated as a precedent for what will be expected afterward.38 It’s quite the same if one gives candy to a child.