Lecture 8: Exchange

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Lecture 8 Exchange
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Oppositions

• Pre-industrial economies embedded in moral
  systems vs. impersonal market exchange
• Value socially, politically and morally embedded
  vs. the product of the forces of supply and
  demand in a market
• Money as an index of modernity

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Tiv spheres of exchange

• Subsistence goods - gift or market exchange
  (barter).
• Prestige goods (slaves, cattle, ritual
  offices, a special white cloth, medicines,
  magic and metal rods).
• Human beings other than slaves, usually women and
  children. Conducted in terms of kinship and
  marriage.

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Conversion between spheres

• Conversion between spheres was morally evaluated.
• Conversion upwards was through kem payments.
• With the introduction of money the
  multi-centric economy became a unicentric
  one.

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Exchange in Darfur

• Two spheres market exchange for most goods vs.
  the exchange of labour for beer.
• Shameful to work for wages in the local
  community, and the sale of beer is considered
  immoral.
• Monetised local economy cash needed to buy
  tools, livestock, for bridewealth payments and
  for the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

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Unstable situation

• The development of orchards and beer-mobilised
  labour used more and more for a cash crop
  production. Changed the land tenure system.
• Outside entrepreneurs playing the system.

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Money and cattle among the Neur

• Cattle and money not mutually exchangeable.
• Cattle were associated with human beings.
• Enduring bonds amongst people and with the
  divinity.
• Bolstered the authority of senior men.

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Effects of colonial rule

• Spread of monetary transactions
• Created a market for cattle through the
  imposition of court fines and taxes.
• Opportunities for seasonal wage work

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Uneven commoditisation

• Money grain, fishing hooks, cloth, guns,
  medicines, taxes, fines, court fees etc.
• Cattle marriage, initiation and sacrifice
  (enduring bonds affirmed within the community and
  with the divinity).
• Cattle, like people, have blood, but money has no
  blood

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Categories of money and cattle

• Money of shit
• Cattle of girls/daughters
• The cattle of money (purchased cattle).
• Money of work (associated with human sweat and so
  blood)
• Money of cattle (from the sale of collective
  cattle)
• Cattle of money (money substituted for a portion
  of bridewealth cattle)

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Long term and short term transactional orders

• Long term concerned with the reproduction of
  social relations and the moral order
• Short term - concerned with short term
  transactions and individual competition.

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Rice labour

• Rice is a subsistence crop
• Field preparation is by men and is almost
  completely commercialised.
• Harvesting and threshing is dominated by women.
• Gotong pinjam (borrowed cooperation) is unpaid
  help to kin
• Berderau is a team of women (2-30) who work for 1
  season of planting and harvesting each members
  crop in turn.
• Upah pinjam (borrowed wages)

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Fishing

• Fishing is highly commercialised.
• Boats owned by one man, who hires a crew.
• Relations between crew members is temporary,
  flexible and mobile.
• Ill-adapted to behaviour ideally associated with
  close kin (where relations are ideally based on
  reciprocity and permanence).

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Cooking money

• Men provide most of the households cash income
  but turn it over to their wives.
• The house is a single undivided dapur and the
  precise division of everyday household expenses
  is explicitly left uncalculated.
• The individuation of money earned through fishing
  is negated.
• Earnings become imbued with the ideals of kinship
  - socialised through the action of women
  associated with the house.