Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

10 8 DEBT
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.16 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.