Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

13 6 DEBT
able to marry and produce offspring, it's only natural that his spmt
would be angry. He had been, effectively, robbed of his eternity. The
best solution would be to use the cattle paid in settlement to acquire
what was called a "ghost-wife": a woman who would then be formally
married to the dead man. In practice, she was usually paired off with
one of the victim's brothers, but this was not particularly important;
it didn't really matter too much who impregnated her, since he would
be in no sense the father of her children. Her children would be considered
the children of the victim's ghost-and as a result, any boys
among them were seen as having been born with a particular commitment
to someday avenge his death.20
This latter is unusual. But Nuer appear to have been unusually
stubborn about feuds. Rospabe provides examples from other parts of
the world that are even more telling. Among North African Bedouins,
for instance, it sometimes happened that the only way to settle a feud
was for the killer's family to turn over a daughter, who would then
marry the victim's next of kin-his brother, say. If she bore him a male
child, the boy was given the same name as his dead uncle and considered
to be, at least in the broadest sense, a substitute for him.21 The
Iroquois, who traced descent in the female line, did not trade women
in this fashion. However, they had another, more direct approach. If a
man died-even of natural causes-his wife's relatives might "put his
name upon the mat," sending off belts of wampum to commission a
war party, which would then raid an enemy village to secure a captive.
The captive could either be killed, or, if the clan matrons were in a
benevolent mood (one could never tell; the grief of mourning is tricky),
adopted: this was signified by throwing a belt of wampum around his
shoulders, whereon he would be given the name of the deceased and
be considered, from that moment on, married to the victim's wife, the
owner of his personal possessions, and in every way, effectively, the
exact same person as the dead man used to be.22
All of this merely serves to underline Rospabe's basic point, which
is that money can be seen, in human economies, as first and foremost
the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be paid.
In a way, it's all very reminiscent of primordial-debt theory: money
emerges from the recognition of an absolute debt to that which has
given you life. The difference is that instead of imagining such debts
as between an individual and society, or perhaps the cosmos, here they
are imagined as a kind of network of dyadic relations: almost everyone
in such societies was in a relation of absolute debt to someone else. It's
not that we owe "society." If there is any notion of "society" here--and
it's not clear that there is-society is our debts.