Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

14 0 DEBT
seems singularly apropos. Just about every adult Lele male was both
someone else's pawn, and engaged in a constant game of securing,
swapping, or redeeming pawns. Every major drama or tragedy of village
life would ordinarily lead to a transfer of rights in women. Almost
all of those women would eventually get swapped again.
Several points need to be emphasized here. First of all, what were
being traded were, quite specifically, human lives. Douglas calls them
"blood-debts," but "life-debts" would be more appropriate. Say, for
instance, a man is drowning, and another man rescues him. Or say
he's deathly ill but a doctor cures him. In either case, we would likely
say one man "owes his life" to the other. So would the Lele, but they
meant it literally. Save someone's life, they owe you a life, and a life
owed had to be paid back. The usual recourse was for a man whose life
was saved to turn over his sister as a pawn-or if not that, a different
woman; a pawn he had acquired from someone else.
The second point is that nothing could substitute for a human life.
"Compensation was based on the principle of equivalence, a life for a
life, a person for a person." Since the value of a human life was absolute,
no amount of raffia cloth, or camwood bars, or goats, or transistor
radios, or anything else could possibly take its place.
The third and most important point is that in practice, "human
life" actually meant "woman's life"-or even more specifically, "young
woman's life." Ostensibly this was to maximize one's holdings: above
all, one wished for a human being who could become pregnant and
produce children, since those children would also be pawns. Still, even
Mary Douglas, who was in no sense a feminist, was forced to admit that
the whole arrangement did seem to operate as if it were one gigantic
apparatus for asserting male control over women. This was true above
all because women themselves could not own pawns.28 They could only
be pawns. In other words: when it came to life-debts, only men could
be either creditors or debtors. Young women were thus the credits and
the debits-the pieces being moved around the chessboard-while the
hands that moved them were invariably male.29
Of course, since almost everyone was a pawn, or had been at some
point in their lives, being one could not in itself be much of a tragedy.
For male pawns it was in some ways quite advantageous, since one's
"owner" had to pay most of one's fines and fees and even blood-debts.
This is why, as Douglas's informants uniformly insisted, pawnship had
nothing in common with slavery. The Lele did keep slaves, but never
very many. Slaves were war captives, usually foreigners. As such they
had no family, no one to protect them. To be a pawn, on the other
hand, meant to have not one, but two different families to look after