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Barter and Economic Disintegration Author(S): Caroline Humphrey Source: Man, New Series, Vol Barter and Economic Disintegration Author(s): Caroline Humphrey Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 48-72 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2802221 . Accessed: 17/10/2014 05:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Man. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 110.22.32.138 on Fri, 17 Oct 2014 05:02:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BARTER AND ECONOMIC DISINTEGRATION CAROLINE HUMPHREY Universityof Cambridge The mainstreameconomists' view thatbarter should be seen as a 'natural'phenomenon of human natureand as the originof moneyis rejected.Barter occurs in specificsocio-economic conditionswhich may obtainalso in economieswhich know money.When thereis a verylow supply of currency,money may cease to functionas an index of value forall goods and itself become an item bartered.This is likely to occur when small discretesocial groups wish to maintainautonomy. Unlike moneypayment, which requires a furthertransaction before value is realised,barter satisfies demand immediatelyand is of its naturediscontinuous. As with car trade-insin our economybarter occurs when people cannotafford to keepmoney, and it becomes a systemwhen societyis atomised to the extentthat people do not exploit the variationsin exchangeratios between different communities. Using thecase ofthe Lhomi of north-east Nepal, it is shown thatalthough the exchange of commonproduce, as opposed to rarevaluables, is most likelyto approximateto a notional'equilibrium price', the practice of barterwith no established measuresof weight and volumemeans that there can be no underlyingindex of value /numeraire. Each transactionexists virtuallyon its own. Thus, althoughbarter is an egalitarianmode, it containsno protectionagainst changing exchange ratios which may harmone partner.Barter tendsto takeplace betweenpeople who know one another,because it is onlyby theestablishment of customarytimes and places forexchange that the costs of searchingfor partners, waiting etc. areavoided. Delayed barter,which often occurs with valuables, requires non-economic means of ensuringrepayment, but the ritualisedtrade-partnerships which the Lhomi employ are self- limiting:restricted relations cut tradersoff from the wide, unpredictableworld of the capitalist end sale. Businessoften fails and thetraders suffer. Barteris at once a cornerstoneof modern economic theoryand an ancient subjectof debate about politicaljustice, fromPlato and Aristotleonwards. In bothdiscourses, which are distinct though related, barter provides the imagined preconditionsfor the emergenceof money. Why should anthropologistsbe interestedin logical deductionsfrom an imaginedstate? No exampleof a barter economy,pure and simple,has ever been described,let alone the emergence fromit of money;all availableethnography suggests that there never has been sucha thing.But thereare economies today which are nevertheless dominated by barter,and hereanthropology can bothlearn from and add to theancient debate. In Plato, non-monetaryexchange provides the firstmeans of satisfying complementaryneeds established by thedivision of labour, which is a condition of the ideal Republic (Plato I908: II, 369-72). Aristotledevelops the idea of 'proportionalexchange', relative to social evaluationsof the worthof persons and theirproducts, in his considerationof whatis just. Here money,which can measureeverything, is introducedby conventionas a 'kind of substitutefor Man (N.S.) 20, 48-72 This content downloaded from 110.22.32.138 on Fri, 17 Oct 2014 05:02:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CAROLINE HUMPHREY 49 need or demand', its value being derived not from nature but from law (AristotleI895: 5, I-I7). Economistsof the contemporaryorthodoxy, on the otherhand, which stems at least fromAdam Smithand was revivedin the marginalisteconomics of Menger andJevons and reachesClower in thepresent, propose an evolutionarydevelopment of economieswhich places barter,as a 'natural'human characteristic, at themost primitive stage, to be supersededby monetaryexchange as soon as people become aware of the latter'sgreater efficiency. Anthropologistshave also tendedto see barteras a transactionof the primitive economy, although in the classic examples, such as Malinowski (I922), Thurnwald(I934-5) and Sahlins(I972) theethnographic diversity and com- plexityof distributionis recognised.Dominated by otheractivities considered to be 'more socially embedded', such as ceremonialexchange, gift-giving, sharingof food, or dues to chiefs,barter is foundin a cornerof the economy -and one that is despised by the people and anthropologistsalike. Barter, accordingto Sahlins summarisinga wide range of ethnography,is 'negative reciprocity,the unsociable extreme'. Characterised as 'haggling',barter is held to takeplace withoutsiders, along with'chicanery' and 'theft',each participant tryingto outwitthe other with an eye to his own benefit(I972: I95). There is somethingunsatisfactory about each of thesemodern arguments. If we take barterto be the more or less simultaneousexchange of one good for anotherwith the possibility of bargaining,the anthropologists have no justifi- cation in regardingit as 'negative reciprocity'.By definition,barter is a complementaryexchange in whicheach participantbargains until he or she is satisfied.It does not necessarilyimply antagonism. As faras the economists' argumentis concerned,we know fromthe accumulated evidence of ethnogra- phy that barter was indeed very rare as a system dominatingprimitive economies.' Money of variouskinds has been aroupd forover two millennia, and in thelast century,in its purest,non 'commodity-money'form, has pen- etratedvirtually every economy on earth,and yet barteris common todayin economieswhich also know money.I shallpropose in thisarticle that barter in thepresent world is, in thevast majorityof cases, a post-monetaryphenomenon (i.e. it coexistswith money),and thatit characteriseseconomies which are, or have become, de-coupled from monetarymarkets. In these circumstances bartercan become a dominantprinciple of transaction,to whichmoney itself is subject.As was well known to Marx and even Aristotle(I895: 5, 14), but has somehow escaped the generalattention of anthropologists,currency may be barteredlike any othercommodity. As an idea 'barter'is partof thehistory of economicsand anthropology,and theassumption that it was theforerunner of monetaryexchange is crucialin the way it is normallyconceptualised. Polanyi's suggestion, in Thegreat transform- ation,that the evolutionarydoctrine of the economistspreoccupied with the emergenceof marketsmight virtually be reversed,has been largelyignored (I957: 58).2 His own view is considerablycloser to thatof the ancientphil- osophers,suggesting as he does theprior existence of long-distancetrade as a resultof regionalenvironmental differences and only laterthe emergenceof local marketsand bargainingor barter.In thisarticle I shouldalso liketo escape This content downloaded from 110.22.32.138 on Fri, 17 Oct 2014 05:02:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 50 CAROLINE HUMPHREY fromthe notion of 'truck'or 'barter'as a naturalhuman propensity which still appearsas a mythof our subject.This impliesthe disentangling of two concepts of barter,(a) the notion of a simple exchangeof goods withoutmoney and without specifyingthe mode of the non-monetarytransaction, and (b) the processof barterin timeas a practicewhich involves bargaining. It is thelatter thatwill be my focus. The word barteras I use it impliesan open-ended,potentially innovative, negotiable,transaction, in whichneed not onlyanswers need but can also create a new demand: 'If you don't want thesepotatoes, perhaps you would like this pair of scissors?'Furthermore, barter, which in itselfrefers only to a social relationof transaction and not to economicvalues, can encompassthe idea ofan exchangeof goods whichhave one value to one side and anotherto theother. I use 'barter'in thissense to differentiateit from 'primitive trade' in which, as Malinowskishowed, sociallydetermined rates of exchangeoutweigh bargain- ing in thegreat majority of typesof transaction. For barterto become dominantin an area, such thatit can incorporateeven puremoney, we mustsuppose not only economic but also someparticular social and culturalconditions which allow the 'construction'of barteras a system.I shallattempt to describethis on thebasis of the economy of the Lhomi3 and their neighboursof the Nepal-Tibetborder in I979-80. The Lhomi are farmersbut also traders,and clearly theirhistorical role as intermediariesbetween the highlandpastoral economy of theTibet hillsand theagriculture of the Nepali hills,is a basis forthe cultureof tradingwhich they find so attractive.I would argue, however, thatit is not because the Lhomi were tradersthat they now engagein barter.Similar Himalayan peoples are now almostentirely
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