Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

HONOR AND DEGRADA TION 171
all know, are almost invariably obsessed with honor). Hence the warrior's
ethos, where almost anything that could possibly be seen as a
sign of disrespect-in inappropriate word, an inappropriate glance--is
considered a challenge, or can be treated as such. Yet even where overt
violence has largely been put out of the picture, wherever honor Is at
issue, it comes with a sense that dignity can be lost, and therefore must
be constantly defended.
The result is that to this day, "honor" has two contradictory meanings.
On the one hand, we can speak of honor as simple integrity.
Decent people honor their commitments. This is clearly what "honor"
meant for Equiano: to be an honorable man meant to be one who
speaks the truth, obeys the law, keeps his promises, is fair and conscientious
in his commercial dealings.13 His problem was that honor
simultaneously meant something else, which had everything to do with
the kind of violence required to reduce human beings to commodities
to begin with.
The reader might be asking: But what does all this have to do with
the origins of money The answer is, surprisingly: everything. Some of
the most genuinely archaic forms of money we know about appear to
have been used precisely as measures of honor and degradation: that is,
the value of money was, ultimately, the value of the power to turn others
into money. The curious puzzle of the cumal-the slave-girl money
of medieval Ireland-would appear to be a dramatic illustration.
Honor Price (Early Medieval Ireland)
For much of its early history, Ireland's situation was not very different
than that in many of the African societies we looked at in the end of
the last chapter. It was a human economy perched uncomfortably on
the fringe of an expanding commercial one. What's more, at certain
periods there was a very lively slave trade. As one historian put it,
"Ireland has no mineral wealth, and foreign luxury goods could be
bought by Irish kings mainly for two export goods, cattle and people.
"14 Hardly surprising, perhaps, that cattle and people were the two
major denominations of the currency. Still,- by the time our earliest records
kick in, around 6ooAD, the slave trade appears to have died off,
and slavery itself was a waning institution, coming under severe disapproval
from the ChurchY Why, then, were cumal still being used as
units of account, to tally up debts that were actually paid out in cows,
and in cups and brooches and other objects made of silver, or, in the