4 ms·

"No ethnographic studies have shown that any present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, and anthropologists ha

"No ethnographic studies have shown that any present or past society has used barter without any other medium of exchange or measurement, and anthropologists have found no evidence that money emerged from barter. They instead found that gift-giving (credit extended on a personal basis with an inter-personal balance maintained over the long term) was the most usual means of exchange of goods and services. Nevertheless, economists since the times of Adam Smith (1723–1790) often inaccurately imagined pre-modern societies as examples to use the inefficiency of barter to explain the emergence of money, of "the" economy, and hence of the discipline of economics itself." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter

spottybanana 5y ago
Do you think that guy that runs an organisation called "Hustle Fund" is that interested in those details.
helpfulmandrill 5y ago
Anyone else find something distastefully cynical in the description of "gift-giving" as "credit extended on a personal basis with an inter-personal balance maintained over the long term"? I'm not saying its wrong exactly, it just tastes awful.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  2 people in my own family do this. it's absolutely horrific and has cost me the relationships with both.
- fsloth 5y ago
  No, that's what gifts are for in some cultures. They come with strings attached, and everyone is aware of the deal, and it's how it's worked always. Where things break down if one party expects to receive a "no strings attached gift" and one is expecting to participate in a complex system of social and economic credit balance.
  - helpfulmandrill 5y ago
    Do they have gift bailiffs who come and take your couch if you can't give an expected gift at some point? What's the interest rate on gifts? I'm not sure how to make the above sound less snarky - I'm genuinely interested in how this stuff compares to more formalized systems of debt in modern societies.
    - fsloth 5y ago
      The main difference is I suppose is the gift giving perceived as an obligation or an expression of caring and love. If you are culturally conditioned on one of these interpretations I presume the other feels plain wrong. If it's an obligation, then I suppose the retributive action (if any) from not meeting this obligation probably depends on the society and the event. Different societies have different responses to individual who don't play by the rules. In general even non-literate human societies are pretty good in carrying a common ledger of who-owes-what-to-whom. I suggest the book "Debt the first 5000 years" by David Graeber on the details. But overall, when traveling, check the local customs around gifts from a cultural guide :)
    - lelanthran 5y ago
      > Do they have gift bailiffs who come and take your couch if you can't give an expected gift at some point? Small groups of people (tribes, essentially) can and do use peer pressure (ostracisation) to enforce the agreed upon social contracts. IOW, if you get a reputation as a non-giver amongst your group of friends and family who are all givers, they'll soon stop associating with you.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      > Do they have gift bailiffs who come and take your couch if you can't give an expected gift at some point? You become a bad neighbor and everybody stops helping you. Things may get as bad as nobody trusting you at all, and you becoming the escape goat for some problem. People organize this way up to today, even in mature economies. There's mystery to solve.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It might be a naive attempt at describing the rituals through a cold economic grid. Or it might just be a cynical view of life. That said, I think a lot of economy is rooted in emotional bonding. I'm helping a lot of neighbors (people that saw me growing up). Offer my time for free since most of their issues are trivial computer stuff. They want to pay me even when it's a 3 minute check and there was nothing to do. Many times they say they don't want to feel indebted. Even though I clearly state that I'm really happy to spend time doing this for free, and will really have no future request to them because I moved a usb cable or something like that. Money is a kind of shared agreement on help here. If you don't use an intermediate medium, you get deeper but also messier relationship because no one is sure how the other party feels and if they'll think they will want more retribution later. With good and intimate relationships it's rarely an issue because you know they'll provide, there's no risk no fear.. but with many people you run into it's creating a lot of unknowns.
  - danielvaughn 5y ago
    This is what killed my interest in crypto. I was fascinated by the idea of money as a technology, but in reality, money is a culture.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      Interesting.. My only real interest "in" crypto now is the idea of ubiquitous planet wide management of petty stuff (ala vechain supply chain management). To me there's so many lame jobs, waste and friction that could be absorbed by systems like these, because a lot of inefficiencies are just information tracking and forwarding.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - archibaldJ 5y ago
      crypto can still Work out as intended iff we become a Type I civilisation [1]. Now it’s more like some kind of anthropological stress test (and an emerging culture too. Hopefully it’s one that helps to drive people to see the urgentness and inevitability of reaching Type I or-we-are-doomed) [1] eg Large-scale application of fusion power. According to mass–energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civilization_methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz...
- lkrubner 5y ago
  It has a long history in anthropology. If you take a course in anthropology, especially if the focus of the course is on the so-called "primitive tribes" who were the focus of so much research in the early and mid 20th Century, then you realize "gift-giving" is, in this field, a bit of technical jargon, given a very specific meaning in this kind of research.
- legulere 5y ago
  You feel this way because debt has been demonized for centuries.
- dqpb 5y ago
  I believe in this context, the “gifts” are primarily staple goods that people need to survive. So, reciprocal balance takes on a level of urgency when one party finds themself in need.
- gumby 5y ago
  As a society we love to talk about meals (menu, conversation, ritual) and don’t like to talk about the output stage which is just as important and has just as many rituals. I’m glad there is a Wikipedia page that discusses the reciprocity of non-cash relationships. It’s an enormously important element of social societies (of humans and other species) and is probably 60% of the content of advice columnists (my child isn’t calling me / I have a clingy friend / I didn’t get invited to a party though the hosts were at my house for dinner …)
DylanSp 5y ago
Heck, even with the classical understanding of barter leading to the creation of money, it's not like fiat money immediately replaced it.
Linosaurus 5y ago
Since I figure there would be some scalability problems, I like this bit from the wiki: "Anthropologists have argued, in contrast, "that when something resembling barter does occur in stateless societies it is almost always between strangers.""
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  Though barter in these societies wasn't even intended to be efficient/scalable at all. People back then had much more imagination and playfulness in their trades, and some did this in quite flamboyant ways. From an example from Graeber's red book (Debt: The First 5000 Years): "What follows is from a description of a dzamalag held in the 1940s, as observed by an anthropologist named Ronald Berndt. Once again, it begins as strangers, after some initial negotiations, are invited into the hosts’ main camp. The visitors in this particular example were famous for their “much-prized serrated spears”—their hosts had access to good European cloth. The trading begins when the visiting party, which consisted of both men and women, enters the camp’s dancing ground of “ring place,” and three of them began to entertain their hosts with music. Two men start singing, a third accompanies them on the didjeridu. Before long, women from the hosts’ side come and attack the musicians: Men and women rise and begin to dance. The dzamalag opens when two Gunwinggu women of the opposite moiety to the singing men “give dzamalag” to the latter. They present each man with a piece of cloth, and hit or touch him, pulling him down on the ground, calling him a dzamalag husband, and joking with him in an erotic vein. Then another woman of the opposite moiety to the pipe player gives him cloth, hits and jokes with him. This sets in motion the dzamalag exchange. Men from the visiting group sit quietly while women of the opposite moiety come over and give them cloth, hit them, and invite them to copulate; they take any liberty they choose with the men, amid amusement and applause, while the singing and dancing continue. Women try to undo the men’s loin coverings or touch their penises, and to drag them from the “ring place” for coitus. The men go with their dzamalag partners, with a show of reluctance, to copulate in the bushes away from the fires which light up the dancers. They may give the women tobacco or beads. When the women return, they give part of this tobacco to their own husbands, who have encouraged them to go dzamalag. The husbands, in turn, use the tobacco to pay their own female dzamalag partners… New singers and musicians appear, are again assaulted and dragged off to the bushes; men encourage their wives “not to be shy,” so as to maintain the Gunwinggu reputation for hospitality; eventually those men also take the initiative with the visitors’ wives, offering cloth, hitting them, and leading them off into the bushes. Beads and tobacco circulate. Finally, once participants have all paired off at least once, and the guests are satisfied with the cloth they have acquired, the women stop dancing and stand in two rows and the visitors line up to repay them. Then visiting men of one moiety dance towards the women of the opposite moiety, in order to “give them dzamalag.” They hold shovel-nosed spears poised, pretending to spear the women, but instead hit them with the flat of the blade. “We will not spear you, for we have already speared you with our penises.” They present the spears to the women. Then visiting men of the other moiety go through the same actions with the women of their opposite moiety, giving them spears with serrated points. This terminates the ceremony, which is followed by a large distribution of food."

spottybanana 5y ago

Do you think that guy that runs an organisation called "Hustle Fund" is that interested in those details.

helpfulmandrill 5y ago

Anyone else find something distastefully cynical in the description of "gift-giving" as "credit extended on a personal basis with an inter-personal balance maintained over the long term"? I'm not saying its wrong exactly, it just tastes awful.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
2 people in my own family do this. it's absolutely horrific and has cost me the relationships with both.
fsloth 5y ago
No, that's what gifts are for in some cultures. They come with strings attached, and everyone is aware of the deal, and it's how it's worked always. Where things break down if one party expects to receive a "no strings attached gift" and one is expecting to participate in a complex system of social and economic credit balance.
- helpfulmandrill 5y ago
  Do they have gift bailiffs who come and take your couch if you can't give an expected gift at some point? What's the interest rate on gifts? I'm not sure how to make the above sound less snarky - I'm genuinely interested in how this stuff compares to more formalized systems of debt in modern societies.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    The main difference is I suppose is the gift giving perceived as an obligation or an expression of caring and love. If you are culturally conditioned on one of these interpretations I presume the other feels plain wrong. If it's an obligation, then I suppose the retributive action (if any) from not meeting this obligation probably depends on the society and the event. Different societies have different responses to individual who don't play by the rules. In general even non-literate human societies are pretty good in carrying a common ledger of who-owes-what-to-whom. I suggest the book "Debt the first 5000 years" by David Graeber on the details. But overall, when traveling, check the local customs around gifts from a cultural guide :)
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > Do they have gift bailiffs who come and take your couch if you can't give an expected gift at some point? Small groups of people (tribes, essentially) can and do use peer pressure (ostracisation) to enforce the agreed upon social contracts. IOW, if you get a reputation as a non-giver amongst your group of friends and family who are all givers, they'll soon stop associating with you.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    > Do they have gift bailiffs who come and take your couch if you can't give an expected gift at some point? You become a bad neighbor and everybody stops helping you. Things may get as bad as nobody trusting you at all, and you becoming the escape goat for some problem. People organize this way up to today, even in mature economies. There's mystery to solve.
agumonkey 5y ago
It might be a naive attempt at describing the rituals through a cold economic grid. Or it might just be a cynical view of life. That said, I think a lot of economy is rooted in emotional bonding. I'm helping a lot of neighbors (people that saw me growing up). Offer my time for free since most of their issues are trivial computer stuff. They want to pay me even when it's a 3 minute check and there was nothing to do. Many times they say they don't want to feel indebted. Even though I clearly state that I'm really happy to spend time doing this for free, and will really have no future request to them because I moved a usb cable or something like that. Money is a kind of shared agreement on help here. If you don't use an intermediate medium, you get deeper but also messier relationship because no one is sure how the other party feels and if they'll think they will want more retribution later. With good and intimate relationships it's rarely an issue because you know they'll provide, there's no risk no fear.. but with many people you run into it's creating a lot of unknowns.
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  This is what killed my interest in crypto. I was fascinated by the idea of money as a technology, but in reality, money is a culture.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Interesting.. My only real interest "in" crypto now is the idea of ubiquitous planet wide management of petty stuff (ala vechain supply chain management). To me there's so many lame jobs, waste and friction that could be absorbed by systems like these, because a lot of inefficiencies are just information tracking and forwarding.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - archibaldJ 5y ago
    crypto can still Work out as intended iff we become a Type I civilisation [1]. Now it’s more like some kind of anthropological stress test (and an emerging culture too. Hopefully it’s one that helps to drive people to see the urgentness and inevitability of reaching Type I or-we-are-doomed) [1] eg Large-scale application of fusion power. According to mass–energy equivalence, Type I implies the conversion of about 2 kg of matter to energy per second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civilization_methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I_civiliz...
lkrubner 5y ago
It has a long history in anthropology. If you take a course in anthropology, especially if the focus of the course is on the so-called "primitive tribes" who were the focus of so much research in the early and mid 20th Century, then you realize "gift-giving" is, in this field, a bit of technical jargon, given a very specific meaning in this kind of research.
legulere 5y ago
You feel this way because debt has been demonized for centuries.
dqpb 5y ago
I believe in this context, the “gifts” are primarily staple goods that people need to survive. So, reciprocal balance takes on a level of urgency when one party finds themself in need.
gumby 5y ago
As a society we love to talk about meals (menu, conversation, ritual) and don’t like to talk about the output stage which is just as important and has just as many rituals. I’m glad there is a Wikipedia page that discusses the reciprocity of non-cash relationships. It’s an enormously important element of social societies (of humans and other species) and is probably 60% of the content of advice columnists (my child isn’t calling me / I have a clingy friend / I didn’t get invited to a party though the hosts were at my house for dinner …)

DylanSp 5y ago

Heck, even with the classical understanding of barter leading to the creation of money, it's not like fiat money immediately replaced it.

Linosaurus 5y ago

Since I figure there would be some scalability problems, I like this bit from the wiki: "Anthropologists have argued, in contrast, "that when something resembling barter does occur in stateless societies it is almost always between strangers.""

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
Though barter in these societies wasn't even intended to be efficient/scalable at all. People back then had much more imagination and playfulness in their trades, and some did this in quite flamboyant ways. From an example from Graeber's red book (Debt: The First 5000 Years): "What follows is from a description of a dzamalag held in the 1940s, as observed by an anthropologist named Ronald Berndt. Once again, it begins as strangers, after some initial negotiations, are invited into the hosts’ main camp. The visitors in this particular example were famous for their “much-prized serrated spears”—their hosts had access to good European cloth. The trading begins when the visiting party, which consisted of both men and women, enters the camp’s dancing ground of “ring place,” and three of them began to entertain their hosts with music. Two men start singing, a third accompanies them on the didjeridu. Before long, women from the hosts’ side come and attack the musicians: Men and women rise and begin to dance. The dzamalag opens when two Gunwinggu women of the opposite moiety to the singing men “give dzamalag” to the latter. They present each man with a piece of cloth, and hit or touch him, pulling him down on the ground, calling him a dzamalag husband, and joking with him in an erotic vein. Then another woman of the opposite moiety to the pipe player gives him cloth, hits and jokes with him. This sets in motion the dzamalag exchange. Men from the visiting group sit quietly while women of the opposite moiety come over and give them cloth, hit them, and invite them to copulate; they take any liberty they choose with the men, amid amusement and applause, while the singing and dancing continue. Women try to undo the men’s loin coverings or touch their penises, and to drag them from the “ring place” for coitus. The men go with their dzamalag partners, with a show of reluctance, to copulate in the bushes away from the fires which light up the dancers. They may give the women tobacco or beads. When the women return, they give part of this tobacco to their own husbands, who have encouraged them to go dzamalag. The husbands, in turn, use the tobacco to pay their own female dzamalag partners… New singers and musicians appear, are again assaulted and dragged off to the bushes; men encourage their wives “not to be shy,” so as to maintain the Gunwinggu reputation for hospitality; eventually those men also take the initiative with the visitors’ wives, offering cloth, hitting them, and leading them off into the bushes. Beads and tobacco circulate. Finally, once participants have all paired off at least once, and the guests are satisfied with the cloth they have acquired, the women stop dancing and stand in two rows and the visitors line up to repay them. Then visiting men of one moiety dance towards the women of the opposite moiety, in order to “give them dzamalag.” They hold shovel-nosed spears poised, pretending to spear the women, but instead hit them with the flat of the blade. “We will not spear you, for we have already speared you with our penises.” They present the spears to the women. Then visiting men of the other moiety go through the same actions with the women of their opposite moiety, giving them spears with serrated points. This terminates the ceremony, which is followed by a large distribution of food."