Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

116 DEBT
This was such a recommendation in the Eskimo way of
backwards bragging that everyone's mouths began to water . ..
The reader will recall the walrus hunter of the last chapter, who
took offense when the author tried to thank him for giving him a share
of meat-after all, humans help one another, and once we treat something
as a gift, we turn into something less than human: "Up here we
say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."48
"Gift" here does not mean something given freely, not mutual aid
that we can ordinarily expect human beings to provide to one another.
To thank someone suggests that he or she might not have acted that
way, and that therefore the choice to act this way creates an obligation,
a sense of debt-and hence, inferiority. Communes or egalitarian
collectives in the United States often face similar dilemmas, and they
have to come up with their own safeguards against creeping hierarchy.
It's not that the tendency for communism to slip into hierarchy
is inevitable-societies like the Inuit have managed to fend it off for
thousands of years-but rather, that one must always guard against it.
In contrast, it's notoriously difficult-often downright impossibleto
shift relations based on an assumption of communistic sharing to
relations of equal exchange. We observe this all the time with friends: if
someone is seen as taking advantage of your generosity, it's often much
easier to break off relations entirely than to demand that they somehow
pay you back. One extreme example is the Maori story about a
notorious glutton who used to irritate fishermen up and down the coast
near where he lived by constantly asking for the best portions of their
catch. Since to refuse ;1 direct request for food was effectively impossible,
they .would dutifully turn it over; until one day, people decided
enough was enough and killed him.49
We've already seen how creating a ground of sociability among
strangers can often require an elaborate process of testing the others'
limits by helping oneself to their possessions. The same sort of
thing can happen in peacemaking, or even in the creation of business
partnerships.50 In Madagascar, people told me that two men who are
thinking of going into business together will often become blood brothers.
Blood brotherhood, fa tidra, consists of an unlimited promise of
mutual aid. Both parties solemnly swear that they will never refuse any
request from the other. In reality, partners to such an agreement are
usually fairly circumspect in what they actually request. But, my friends
insisted, when people first make such an agreement, they sometimes
like to test it out. One may demand the other's house, the shirt off
his back, or (everyone's favorite example) the right to spend the night