Three.docx
Three
EXCHANGE Hierarchies of Value in an Economy of Desire In this chapter I describe, and attempt to rethink, what anthropologists would call the “gift economy” (Mauss [1925] 1967; Gregory 1982; Strathern 1988) of Kabre. While my primary aim is to explore certain understandings about persons, hierarchy, and agency that operate in the exchange context, and thus to initiate a discussion that will carry into subsequent chapters, I also attempt to outline the exchange modes came into being, there are grounds for suggesting that their origins—and certainly their present character—are quite recent. To suggest as much, however, is to go against the conventional view about prestational economies—namely, that their apparent alterity (as represented in the sharp distinction anthropologists have drawn between gift and commodity exchange) is a measure of their exteriority to capitalist modernity. 1 Initiating Encounters Beneath the surface of what at first sight appear to be static social forms and fixed rules of conduct, Kabre social life is a welter of movement, a world of persons and things in motion. Indeed the quantity and complexity of exchanges people are constantly involved in was for me as an ethnographer simply overwhelming. My own attention was initially drawn to this aspect of Kabre life through the relationships I myself entered into with Kabre—through the flood of gifts I received and, often clumsily and inappropriately, tried to reciprocate. Immediately upon my arrival in the community of Kuwdé in November 1982 the gifts began. My wife and I were given chickens to welcome us. We were given meat and beer at the almost daily funeral ceremonies we attended throughout the months of December and January. (Most funeral ceremonies are held during these dry season months.) We were offered meat at ceremonies for the spirits in sacred in the homestead next door, often, to our chagrin, after we had already finished our dinner. Children who killed birds and bats with their slingshots, and mice with rock traps, brought us morsels of their prey. And then there were the markets: in each of the two or three we attended every week, dozens of people from our community and others bought us calabashes of beer. But what did these gifts mean? And how to respond to them? Were they just welcoming acts, and therefore not requiring a return? The chickens seemed to be, but what about the nightly food gifts? Surely they required a return. Still, should we reciprocate in kind, by sending back some of our own food as Kabre co-wives do to one another? Thatwould not work in our case, we realized, when we saw the decidedly mixed reactions of homestead members to our sauces. Or were they expecting other gifts—money?—in return? Or could we—should we?—politely refuse the food? We decided upon this latter strategy at one point when we discovered that Kabre are constantly offering and refusing one another food gifts. For instance, a woman who is cooking will offer food to any outsider (non-family member) who enters her homestead at dinnertime. In such a case, the polite response is “I’ve already eaten, but tomorrow I’ll come back and then we’ll eat.” We realized we had made a serious mistake when we tried this out one night on Kpèm, the cook in our homestead: our refusal of her food was met with her own refusal to speak to us for the rest of the night. Within the the cook on the sauce.” And then, we learned months later, if you are not hungry, you call in the children and give it to them to eat. But while this solution eased our guilt over accepting, and sometimes wasting, unwanted food, we were still left with the problem that the gift remained unreciprocated. So we decided to give them other, mostly nonfood gifts. Whenever we went to markets, we bought bread, tobacco, salt, and occasionally larger presents—cloth for the women, umbrellas for the men, sandals for the children. But there too we made mistakes. One day in one of the markets I bought what I thought would be a special gift for Halitoké, the head of our homestead—an uncooked piece of meat. When I gave it to him, however, he expressed surprise that I would give him such a gift. It turns out that such meat, as opposed to meat that has been sacrificed in the community, is not normally given as a gift. Reciprocating beer gifts in the markets was easier to figure out—a gift of beer was met with a similar return. Once, however, after buying some beer for someone who had bought for me earlier in the day, I was lectured by Tamouka, the head of the homestead next to mine, on the inappropriateness of returning such a gift on the same day. You wait, he said, before making the return. But how long? A month? Two months? “There is no specific time. You wait for another market when you see the man who gave to you wandering around with no money in his pocket. Then you buy him back.” In this clumsy manner, then, we muddled along gift-giving we were involved in as on anything else. And while the meaning of much of what we were experiencing remained opaque to us, certain things about this flow of gifts nevertheless became quite clear. First, because we were unable at that point to communicate through spoken language—we were still struggling to learn the basics of Kabre and very few of Kuwdé’s inhabitants spoke any French—gift-giving became for all of us a kind of surrogate language: the gifts were attempts to communicate, to bridge the gap between us, to express relationship. But they represented more than that as well. They were also probings of a sort—attempts to discover what we were like, how we responded to others, what knowledge we had of the proper formsof exchange. What kind of people are these, Kabre seemed to be asking, and how should we treat them? Such probing is not, of course, unlike what they do with one another when they exchange gifts: gift-giving is always a type of moral inquiry, an interrogation of the other. 2 And, finally, these gifts had, I now realize, one additional purpose. They were attempts to contain and control us. Gifts obligate and indebt, and in so doing they render the receiver subservient (Mauss [1925] 1967; Gregory 1982). What better way, then, to gain some mastery over an uncertain situation—over outsiders who often responded in surprising and unpredictable ways, who seemed to have a never-ending supply of money and material objects, and whose motives for living in this out-of-the-way place seemed enigmatic and suspicious—than through the gift? of exchange and of some of its underlying principles, I begin with some examples of the types of exchanges of things-as-gifts (Gregory 1982) I witnessed in Kuwdé during the 1980s and 1990s. In a year-long household budget survey I conducted in 1983, I found that 50 percent of all cash brought in by men from the sale of food surpluses in the markets was turned directly into gifts to other men, often beer gifts in the markets. Much of the rest of a man’s cash income was ultimately given away as well, for he used it either to purchase sorghum to make beer so that he could thank the work group for working his fields, or tobuy animals for sacrifice. To give another example, a male household head gives away fully one third of what he harvests in his fields to women who help in transporting the harvested grain back to his homestead. For their aid, these women—up to a dozen affines and outmarried sisters of the man—each receive a basket of grain which they take home and put in their granaries to use later in the year to feed their families. What a household loses in this manner, however, its married women usually regain from the similar aid they give to their brothers and male affines. In the households I surveyed, these to-and-fro transfers of harvested grain roughly cancelled one another out. In addition, in June, during the period before the first harvest when food is short, the women who harvested from a man’s field will often send him a the household. Things circulate around the community in other ways as well. All adults I knew repeatedly engaged in the bartering, or direct exchange, of products—seed yams for chickens, grain for animals, chicken baskets for hoe handles, and so on—with other members of the community. It was not uncommon to find that the seeds a man had planted in a particular field, the tools he used for cultivation, and even the field itself had been obtained through exchanges like this. Another type of circulation, the borrowing of animals and land, is ubiquitous in Kuwdé. Every adult male and female I interviewed, for instance, was either borrowing an animal from, or lendingone to, another person; in many cases, people were doing both at the same time. The same was true of fields. Thus, while all male household heads owned fields of their own, most also borrowed fields from and lent fields out to others at the same time. For instance, Nnamnawé, the one whose fields I tour whenever I return to Kuwdé, was cultivating eight fields in 1996. Of these, he owned two and borrowed the remaining six. At the same time, however, he was lending two additional fields to others. 3 All of these various forms of exchange—gift, barter, loan—are, Kabre say, motivated by the practical “need/desire” ( s ɔ ɣ ɔ l ɩ m ) 4 of one of the parties. For instance, people borrowed fields because they didn’t have enough of their own, or because they wanted fields closer to their houses, or fields with special soil types. Similarly, people was equally true of beer gifts: people insisted that you only bought beer for someone when they were out of money themselves and, therefore, in “need.” But there were several interesting cases that led me to realize that there was more than just the exchange of utilities going on here. A particularly striking example involved a land-rich man in the community who owned twenty fields. Of these, he cultivated six for himself, loaned out four to friends, and left the other ten to lie fallow. However, he also cultivated two additional borrowed fields. When I discovered this, I assumed there must be a utilitarian explanation for these borrowings—that the land was more fertile than that in his fallowfields, or that it was closer to his house. However, neither of these was the case. In fact, some of his fallow land was better land closer to his house than the land he had borrowed. Rather, he borrowed, he claimed, because “it is not good to die without having eaten off someone else’s plate.” The metaphor here expressed a desire to establish social relations that lies behind much Kabre exchange (cf. Mauss [1925] 1967; Gregory 1982; Strathern 1988). Indeed, I would say that all of the exchanges described above, and others as well, have as much to do with relationships as with utilities. 5 Persons and Things The relational dimension of Kabre exchange is perhaps best illustrated through the following describing ɩ kpant Ʊ rε , the friendship that can develop between two exchange partners over the course of many years through exchanges such as those described above. Every adult I knew in Kuwdé, both male and female, had anywhere from two to a dozen such relationships. “With each ɩ kpant Ʊ (friend) it is different,” Karabu began, describing his own ɩ kpant Ʊ rε relationships. “With one, for instance, we started by buying each other beer in the markets. I bought him some beer one day and then, later, he bought me back. And so we went, back and forth. Then, one day he came to me when he needed something—a red chicken for a sacrifice—and asked if we mightexchange chickens. I accepted, and he gave me his white one for my red one. Then, later on, I wanted to borrow a field and noticed that he had an extra field, so I asked if I could borrow it. Now we loan fields back and forth all the time.” “But there are many ways to begin ɩ kpant Ʊ rε ,” Karabu continued, drawing deeply on a pipe and releasing a pungent cloud of smoke into the air between us. “When I was young, I had an enemy from Tchi-Kawa [a community in the plain]. I was carrying on one day with a girl from his village. He took offense and insulted me. We almost came to blows. The insults continued for awhile, but then one day he bought me beer and we became ɩ kpant Ʊ na . Now, if either of us needs something, we may go to the other and ask him for it. For instance, I am borrowing a field of his down in the plain the ɩ kpant Ʊ of another woman after she had squirted the other with breast milk in the market one day. It was an accident but, still, there is no bigger insult. 6 To cool the temper of the one offended, my friend bought her beer. They have been ɩ kpant Ʊ na ever since.” 7 “Two others—a man and a woman—may find ɩ kpant Ʊ rε over the selling of beer. He may go to her house often to drink her beer but may not always be able to pay. If she is nice, she will continue to serve him. For his part, whenever he sees her, he will remind her of his debt to her. Then, after the harvest, he will take her a basket of sorghum to pay off the debt. This will please her, and the next time she makes beer she may invite him to come drink. And, so, they become ɩ kpant Ʊ na .” “Many men here in Kuwdé found ɩ kpant Ʊ rε with men from other villages during the time of forced labor [1920–1955, when the French were conscripting Kabre to build roads for the colony]. The relationship often began with some small act—the help someone gave you lifting a rock from the road, their covering for you so you could slip into the bush while the “colon” was looking the other way—and grew from there. When we returned to the north, we continued the relationship.” (In 1996, I asked another man with whom I was discussing exchange relationships whether the transborder relationships many Lomé residents developed during the political turmoil of the early 1990s were also a type of ɩ kpant Ʊ rε , and he immediately agreed. “These are deep ɩ kpant Ʊ rε relationships that involve continued. “Each follows its own path. Some of these friendships go nowhere, or they ‘break’ altogether. Perhaps your partner is so poor that he can never make return gifts, or perhaps you see something about him, something inside him, that you don’t like and you stop sending him gifts. In any case, ɩ kpant Ʊ rε is costly and it is not possible to continue with everyone.” “With certain of your ɩ kpant Ʊ na , however, maybe two or three of them, you will build something bigger. One day, after many years of small exchanges, and much good feeling between you, an ɩ kpant Ʊ may invite you and your family to his house on s ɩ ŋkar ɩ ŋ [the day of the harvest festival]. He asksyou to sit and brings out food and beer. He has killed a chicken just for you and your family. Such an act makes a very strong impression. It is a sign of great friendship. The following year, it is your turn. You invite him to your house and serve him food and drink. If you can, you kill an animal that has more value [a guinea hen, a dog, a goat] than the one he killed for you, and you make a pot of beer that is bigger than the one he gave you. This shows that the relationship is growing. And so it goes, back and forth, each time a larger pot of beer and a more valuable animal. But it is the intention of the giver that is important, not the size of the gift. If my ɩ kpant Ʊ cannot afford to increase the gift, he will come to me and tell me that he would like to kill a goat but can only afford a chicken. If he does this, I will accept and the relationship will continue.” and intention rather than object—is illustrated in an experience of my own, an experience that also reveals something of the complicated dynamics at work between myself and those with whom I lived and worked most closely. On a return trip to Kuwdé in 1989, I asked Tikénawé, a woman in her early twenties with an upbeat personality and a sugar smile, if I could pay her, as I had previously, to bring us water from the spring and do our laundry. She readily agreed to do the work but insisted that I not pay her this time. When I asked why, she said that the money I had sent as a gift the previous May had “saved” her at a time when she was low on food and out of money. She was returning my gift, she said, with one of her own—one that she hoped wouldmeet my need. I remained intent on paying her, however, as I had the money to do so and knew that she did not have a lot. But she refused and said that if I insisted, I could find someone else to do the work. Needless to say, I relented but in the end I was able to get my way by converting the payment I wanted to make into the terms of ɩ kpant Ʊ rε: I made a separate “gift” to her at the end of the summer of the money I would have paid her along the way (though, of course, I never referred to it as anything other than a “gift”). This, it turned out, was acceptable to her. Of course, I was delighted with all that Tikénawé’s gesture implied—a paradigmatic display of gifting behavior, the apparent triumph of altruism over self-interest, a friendship that suggested a narrowing of the gap between myself (as outsider that was all the more striking given her meager resources. I also found refreshing the contrast between her attitude and that of Kouwènam, my main assistant. I had hired Kouwènam early on to help me learn the language, and then continued with him as interpreter when I began doing interviews. He was extremely bright and had extraordinary translation skills. He always seemed able, even in the midst of discussions about the most abstract and esoteric of topics, to quickly grasp what I was after and translate it into the local idiom, and vice versa. And yet it had always bothered me that he unfailingly wore his self-interest on his sleeve: I paid him well and almost daily gave him additional gifts of food and beer, but unlike virtually everyone else Iknew in Kuwdé, he constantly pestered me for more. Needless to say, when I gave him money at the same time as Tikenawé, he did not make a gesture like hers. I now realize, however, that Tikénawé’s generosity was more complicated, and perhaps less altruistic, than it at first seemed. I have seen her befriend other Europeans and Americans over the years—a French nurse, a Peace Corps volunteer—and have been struck by her ability to easily win them over. In part it is her personality—self-effacing, coy, a quick wit and ready laugh; but it is also her demeanor—she seems to enjoy and appreciate friendship for its own sake, and will invariably decline a gift when it is first offered. Indeed, there seems nothing more touching for many European travelers to West Africa than to find friendship that seems “real”—and on her, and in the end she accepts. It is also clear that Tikénawé desires the material benefits that come to her as a result of such friendships, but that, unlike Kouwènam, she is simply good at concealing her desires. What ironies, however: Kouwènam, the schooled cosmopolitan who has always seemed ambivalent about his attachments to local culture and never misses an opportunity to befriend a European, is often less successful at making such relationships work than Tikénawé, the unschooled local who speaks much less polished French and has never wanted to leave her village. I find myself asking, however, whether my overwhelmingly positive feelings toward her—and, indeed my fascination with gift exchange more generally—are not the product of hers and others’ inventions and manipulations, and/or of the mirror they hold up for me. Who’s pulling the strings here?
Jojuh
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