01.09.2009

Friday Night – 400th Year of NYC Colonialism – Beaver, Wampum, Hoes – David Graeber, Sal Randolph, Renée Ridgway

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Friday Night 1.9.08 — 400th Year of NYC Colonialism — Beaver, Wampum, Hoes — David Graeber, Sal Randolph, Renée Ridgeway
Contents:
1. About this Friday
2. Beaver, Wampum, Hoes
3. About Renée Ridgeway
4. About David Graeber
5. About Sal Randolph
6. “Wampum” by David Graeber
7. “Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets” by David Graeber
8. Links
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday
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1. About this Friday Night
What: presentation / discussion
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)
When: Friday Night 1.09.08 @ 7:00 PM
Who: Open To All
This week we’re excited to begin 2009 with an event that takes up the 400th anniversary of Dutch colonialism in what we now know as New York City. This event also arrives, with more specificity, as the long-awaited answer to the origins of the Beaver in Beaver Street. So, we welcome Renée Ridgway and Sal Randolph, two artists/other professional things who have been a part of past discussions and events at Beaver, as well as welcome back David Graeber, to discuss research, concepts, and projects addressing the historical transformation of gift economies into commodity economies, including debt, that made capitalism possible. Finally, it should be made clear that all of this work seeks to address contemporary New York and beyond by thinking through the current financial crisis, debt economies, and alternative systems of value.
We envision a series of overlapping presentations that will hopefully move in the direction of a three-way conversation on specific research, and then fold out into a larger group discussion of the broader implications of these tactics and themes. This is a unique event in the sense that Renée and Sal’s work actually engages with David’s research and writing, and by extension that those of us who were present at the “Constituent Imagination” event with David and Stevphen Shukaitis at Beaver in 2007 know already that David is rare among academics: a social theorist who intends for his work to be useful to and in dialogue with social movements in a sustained and serious way. In this sense the conversation around Renée’s ongoing project “Beaver, Wampum, Hoes” and Sal’s project freely distributing David’s ‘Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value’ might speak to a series of practices in common, taken up in different forms.
Then there may be several questions (and hopefully many more) we might want to discuss as they emerge from these connected practices:
–The relationship between radical research, especially historical research, and cultural practices that attempt to use history as a way to undermine and resist dominance in the present.
–Following the first question, the possibility of producing financial accountability in the present through a closer understanding of economic history and context: what form and what demands could be made?
–What is the contemporary usage of a local or regional economic investigation vis-a-vis global financial systems? Can historical commemoration, such as upcoming Dutch colonial events in New York, be subverted toward a more radical popular relationship to economic histories and forms?

To download the texts by David Graeber (click and save):
1. Wampum

2. Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets

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2. About Beaver, Wampum, Hoes — a project by Renée Ridgway
In 2009 New York will celebrate 400 years of Dutch colonial settlement with museums presenting exhibitions on subjects relevant to the legendary voyage, programs exploring business and tourist opportunities, even a transatlantic race. Both Amsterdam and New York desire to intensify and renew historic, cultural, and commercial ties. Specifically the terms of diversity and tolerance top the agenda in the hope of creating productive new capitalistic business and cultural relationships at a time when the long-term viability of such a system of endless expansion is being called into question like rarely before.
What are the long-term effects of 16th century globalisation in 21st century New York? Commemoration and celebration in the form of spectacle will cultivate historical awareness without taking an in-depth look at how societies, famiies and the environment have been ravaged by 400 years of immigration. In which ways does the prosperity of ‘civilisation’ result in an eradication of indigenous peoples, flora and fauna yet now appears to result in a regeneration and reinscription of cultural legacies?
On April 4, 1609 Henry Hudson set sail from Amsterdam on a Dutch ship under the auspices of the Dutch East India company in order to find a passage to Asia. Instead he founded a settlement (West Indian Company) for the Dutch on the tip of Manhtattan (Museum of American Indian, near Beaver Street), a trading post exporting beaver pelts back to the old world because it was fashionable to make hats out of them. The company exchanged Europan goods (hoes, kettles, etc.) for wampum with the indigenous population living on Long Island, the Narragansett. They then traded the acquired wampum for beaver pelts with the Mohawk, part of the larger Haudonausaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) or Six Nations.
Today many Native American societies have set up systems of exchange with which to generate income from public money, voluntarily contributed by millions of vistiors each year at their casino and resorts. As Native American land is not under state law in this sovereign system where no tax is paid on earnings, this money (profit) is redistributed into the tribes and supports the peoples, their activities and those families living on tribal land (reservations). Controversial issues such as ‘no land into trust’ bring to bear the terms of repatriation and sovereignty. The terms with which land was ‘purchased’ was sealed with belts of wampum. What is this wampum and how is it still used today? Who negotiates it uses? May wampum be seen as a living ‘cultural currency’ within a value system not acknowledged by present day capitalism in the United States of America? Within the ‘clan’ systems and structures of the Native American nations how is value determined and what laws are still contained?
Beaver, Wampum and Hoes
Beaver, Wampum*, Hoes is an upcoming online, multimedia series of presentations that focuses on 400 years of Dutch colonization in NY. It uses the 17th c. trade triangle (Beaver, Wampum, Hoes) as the thread that weaves anecdotes with facts in an attempt to ask broader questions about the affects of colonization and the largest imminent questions (land) concerning taking account of this history. In the 21st century beavers are back in town, Native American casinos provide an alternative yet controversial signature of financial support, hoes a homonym comprised of European goods as well as human commodity. Beaver, Wampum, Hoes measures accountability through a heterogeneous, collective exchange platform.
Beaver, Wampum, Hoes is the latest installment of Ridgway’s nine-year ‘Manhattan Project’. Frequently involving audience participation along with the physical and intellectual recycling and reinscription of historic as well as contemporary positions, this project investigates the commonalities between the Netherlands and the U.S. Presented in public spaces and using an extension of this methodology on different materials/subjects, such as deerskin, flags, tulip bulbs, money/investment, speech, beaver, wampum, hoes, silver and gold, all are ‘killed’ and reconstituted as raw material that is particular to the colonization of North America. The ‘Manhattan Project’ may be seen as a kind of contemporary barometric reading of the cultural, economic and political relations between these two countries.
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3. About Renée Ridgway
Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator and writer, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and abroad (P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Gouda Museum, Lakenhal-Leiden Museum (forthcoming) She has made numerous public presentations at various conferences and forums and taught at several universities in the Netherlands and abroad. In 2009 Ridgway will organise ‘Negotiating Equity’, a collaborative project at DAI, (Dutch Art Institute) involving n.e.w.s. platform (http://northeastwestsouth.net/site/node/233) and her respective contributors.
Ridgway’s curatorial and collaborational practice has investigated alter egos and constructed identities- (Migrating Identity-Identifying the Migrant 2001), cat., the unseen other in society- (Migrating Identity-Transmission/Reconstruction 2004), cat., sovereignty- (Third Space in the Fourth World 2003) cat. and the boundaries of otherness- (Another Publication 2007) cat. available at Revolver Books. Ridgway’s writings have been published in MITR, Paraeducation-The Metropolitan Complex, Pages Supplement and the Amsterdam Weekly.
Ridgway is a co-initiator of n.e.w.s., an online platform for contemporary art and new media based on curatorial positionings from around the world.
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4. About David Graeber
David Graeber is a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London and is the author of Fragments of an ‘Anarchist Anthropology’ and Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams.’ He has done extensive anthropological work in Madagascar, writing his doctoral thesis (The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987: Memory and Violence in Rural Madagascar) on the continuing social division between the descendants of nobles and the descendants of former slaves. A book based on his dissertation, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar appeared from Indiana University Press in September 2007. A book of collected essays, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire was published by AK Press in November 2007 and Direct Action: An Ethnography is due to appear from the same press in 2008. He is currently working on three more book projects: one, a history of the concept of debt, scheduled to appear from Melville House in Fall 2009; another, an attempt with Andrej Grubacic to outline an anarchist version of world-systems analysis; and, finally, a small book tentatively entitled The Archaeology of Sovereignty, along with numerous minor projects. With Stevphen Shukaitis, he also is co-editor of a recently released collection of essays entitled “Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations//Collective Theorization” (May 2007).
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5. About Sal Randolph
Sal Randolph lives in New York and produces artworks involving internet-mediated gift economies, social architectures and one-on-one interactions. She is the founder of Opsound, an open sound exchange of copyleft music (opsound.org). Other projects include The Free Biennial (freebiennial.org) and Free Manifesta (freemanifesta.org) which brought together several hundred artists in open shows of free art in the public spaces of New York and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as well as Free Words (freewords.org) in which 3000 copies of a free book have been infiltrated into bookstores and libraries worldwide by a network of volunteers. Recently, she has created an open publishing house to which anyone could contribute at Röda Sten Contemporary Art Space in Göteborg, Sweden and given away money in one on one interactions at the LIVE Biennale in Vancouver, Canada. As part of the Reading Between project at La Box in Bourges France she distributed free copies of David Graeber’s book, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, to anyone around the world who requested one. http://salrandolph.com
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6. “Wampum” by David Graeber
From “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams” (Palgrave, 2001)
CHAPTER 5:
WAMPUM AND SOCIAL CREATIVITY AMONG THE IROQUOIS
In this chapter, I’d like to say a little bit about wampum, the white and purple shell beads which
became a currency of trade in early colonial Northeast North America. Among “primitive
valuables”—a category that includes such things as kula necklaces, Kwakiutl coppers, or the iron
bars used in bridewealth exchange by the West African Tiv—wampum holds a rather curious place.
Simply as an object, it’s by far the most familiar. The average reader is much more likely to know
what wampum looks like, or to have actually seen some in a museum, than any of the others.
Nonetheless, unlike the others, wampum has never been treated as a classic case in anthropological
exchange theory.
There are probably several reasons for this. For one thing, the contexts in which wampum
circulated is closer to what a Western observer would be inclined to see as political than economic.
The heyday of wampum was also a very long time ago: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
long before the birth of modern ethnography. But it’s also hard to escape the impression that the
case of wampum is in most other ways just a little bit too close to home. Wampum was, after all,
material manufactured from clams found primarily off the coast of Long Island, whose shells are
still to be found scattered on the beaches of Fire Island, the Hamptons, and other places where
New York’s stockbrokers and literati like to spend their summer weekends; it was used mainly for
trade with the Iroquois towns that then dotted what is now upstate New York. Wampum was first
manufactured in bulk by the Pequods of Connecticut, a group later to be wiped out by English
settlers in a notorious massacre in 1637. This is not the sort of history most New Yorkers like to
dwell on—or Americans in general, for that matter.
Finally, anthropologists’ own role has not always been entirely innocent. In the late 1960s,
when many of the Six Nations of the Iroquois were trying to win back control of their heirloom
wampum collection from New York State museums, William Fenton, who was then and remains to
this day one of the most respected Anglo authorities on the subject, took it upon himself to write a
major treatise entitled “The New York State Wampum Collection: the Case for Integrity of
Cultural Treasures” (1971) which made an elaborate case for refusing to accede to their requests.
The essay, as one might imagine, served only to reinforce the widespread (and to a large extent
historically justified) Native American impression that anthropologists were at best agents of
cultural imperialism, and at worst, of even worse. Resulting bitterness has made the whole issue of
anthropological views of wampum somewhat sensitive.
All this is quite a shame because it seems to me that the study of wampum is of potentially
enormous interest to any theory of value. For one thing, it is probably the best documented case of
beads being used as a medium of exchange between European traders and a very differently
organized society in which we have a fairly clear picture of what the non-European parties to the
transaction did with the beads once they got them. The focus in this chapter will be on the
Iroquoian peoples of what came to be known as the Five (later, Six) Nations. What I’m going to do
first of all is tell the history of wampum, up to around the end of the eighteenth century, which
took on an extraordinary importance in the creation of the Iroquois Federation itself. The first
effect of the arrival of European traders in search of fur, and soon after, settlers, on the coast of
Northeast North America was, predictably, to plunge the peoples of the interior into an almost
constant state of violent upheaval: a world of endless feuding, massacres, forced migrations, whole
peoples scattered and displaced, of two hundred years of almost continual war. Wampum had a
peculiar role in all this. It was the principle medium of the fur trade, which had sparked so much of
the trouble to begin with—wampum was one of the lures held out by the newcomers to inspire
people to attack each other; but at the same time, within the Iroquois confederacy—and the
Iroquois were considered by their Indian neighbors a particularly ferocious and terrifying
population of warriors—it was valued primarily for its ability to create peace.
the origins of wampum
So much changed so quickly once Europeans began to arrive on the coasts of Northeastern North
America that it becomes difficult to say anything for certain about the years before. There’s no
consensus about whether something that could be called “wampum” even existed before 1500;
nonetheless, this is something of a technical question, since polished beads of one kind or another—
rare stones, mica, beads of shell or quill—and similar bright and mirrored objects certainly did, and
they were an important indigenous category of wealth across the northeast woodlands (Hammond
1984).
During the sixteenth century, European interest in North America focused mainly on fur—
particularly beaver pelts, then in great demand for the manufacture of hats. Dutch and English
traders began arriving on the coast armed with liberal supplies of glass trade beads—these were
already being mass-produced in Venice and the Netherlands for use in the markets of Africa and
the Indian Ocean—and usually found the inhabitants willing to accept them in exchange for pelts.
For a time, they became a regular currency of trade. There was even an attempt to manufacture
them in Massachusetts. But as time went on and European settler enclaves grew, their place was
gradually supplanted by wampum: the small, tubular white and purple beads that the Algonkianspeaking
peoples of Massachusetts and Long Island had long been in the habit of manufacturing
from whelks and quahog clams. English and Dutch colonists apparently found it a relatively simple
matter to force them to mass-producie them, stringing the beads together in belts of pure white or
pure purple (the latter, because of their relative rarity, were worth twice as much) and setting
fixed rates of exchange with the Indians of the interior: so many fathoms of wampum for such and
such a pelt. Later, after the coastal Indians had been largely exterminated, colonists began to
manufacture the beads themselves (Ceci 1977, 1982; Beauchamp 1901).
Wampum was not just a currency of trade. Settlers used it in dealing with each other. The
early colonies were also notoriously cash-poor; silver money was almost unheard of, and most
transactions between settlers were conducted through barter, credit, and wampum. Colonial
governments recognized wampum as legal tender until the middle of the eighteenth century, many
settlers preferring wampum to coins, even when the latter had become easily available—if only,
perhaps, because Indians were more likely to accept them (Weeden 1884; Martien 1996). On the
other hand there’s no evidence that even the Indians living in the closest proximity to Europeans
used wampum to buy and sell things to one another. We really are talking, then, about two
profoundly different regimes of value.
When the first European settlers arrived, most of the coast was occupied by speakers of
Algonkian languages; the woodlands west of the Hudson were inhabited mainly by speakers of
Iroquoian ones. These latter were people who lived mainly in large fortified towns and who were
grouped into a patchwork of political confederacies, of whom the most prominent were the Huron
along the Saint Lawrence and Iroquois, scattered across the north of what is now upstate New
York. Since most of the beaver along the coast were quickly hunted out, the Huron (allied with the
French traders then established in Quebec) were best positioned to control the rotes to hunting
grounds out further west. In the early seventeenth century, then, we have much more detailed
information on the Huron than any other Iroquoian peoples, particularly because of the fact that
French Jesuits had settled in most Huron communities and kept detailed records of their work. The
Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy to the south—the Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk,
and Cayuga—were less well known. Most of the Algonkian peoples of the coast seem to have
considered them as terrifying cannibals1—but the Iroquois had the advantage of alliance with the
Dutch, and therefore, acess to a much more dependable source of firearms. During the so called
“Beaver Wars” from 1641 to 1649, they managed to destroy most of the major Huron towns, carry
off a large number of Huron as captives, and scatter most of the remaining population. By 1656 the
Iroquois had broken the power of the Petun and Neutral Confederations to the west as well, thus
establishing a monopoly over the trade that they were to maintain for at least a century.
During the next hundred and fifty years or so, the Iroquois were involved in an endless
series of wars: between the British and French, the British and American colonists, and any number
of other Indian nations. It was especially during this period that wampum—which the Iroquois
acquired both as payment for furs and as tribute from subjugated peoples—came to play a central
role in their political life, even, one might argue, in the constitution of Iroquois society itself.2 This
is the period which I especially want to look at; but in order to understand what happened, it will
first be necessary to try to at least attempt to reconstruct something of early Iroquoian social
structure.
the resurrection of names
Like the Algonkian peoples to the east, Iroquoian nations were matrilineal and matrilocal. Unlike
them, the Iroquoians (Five Nations and Huron alike) shared a very particular constitution: they saw
their societies not as a collection of living individuals but as a collection of eternal names, which
over the course of time passed from one individual holder to another.
Most of the peoples of northeast North America had a custom of the occasional
“resurrection” of names. If a famous warrior, for example, were to die, another man might be given
his name, and then be considered in a certain sense an incarnation of the same person; if he were a
chief, he might also inherit his office. According to a Jesuit relation written in 1642 about the
Huron:
It has often been said that the dead were brought back to life by making
the living bear their names. This is done for several reasons,—to revive the memory
of a brave man, and to incite him who shall bear his name to imitate his courage; to
take revenge upon the enemies, for he who takes the name of a man killed in battle
binds himself to avenge his death; to assist the family of a dead man, because he
who brings him back to life, and who represents him, assumes all the duties of the
deceased. . . (JR 22: 287-89)
It was accomplished, significantly, by hanging a collar of wampum around the man’s neck; if
the latter accepted it, and did not shake it off, he would then become the dead man’s former self.
The Iroqouis, however, took this principle much further: all names should eventually, be
resurrected by being passed on to someone else. An Iroquois nation (or “tribe”) was normally
composed of a series of matrilineal clans, which were in turn grouped into two moieties. Each clan
had its own collection of names and a matron who was its keeper. The most important, chiefly,
names could equally well be thought of as titles—since each corresponded to a position in the
political structure of the tribe or confederation. When one such office-holder died, the name was,
as the Huron put it, “resurrected” by being conveyed to some person of similar qualities, would
thereby also be invested in the title’s associated regalia and thus in the office itself (Goldenweiser
1914; Parker 1926:61-65; Shimony 1961; Heidenreich 1978:371-72; for the Huron, see Tooker
1964:44-45). One might say then that the number of “persons”—using the term in the Maussian
sense, as particular social identities fixed by socially recognized insignia of one sort or another—in
the Iroquois cosmos was fixed, since, like Tylor’s “images,” they survived the death of the holder.3
At any point in history, one would encounter the same basic collection of personae, the only
difference being that while all the chiefly roles would be filled, some of the less exalted ones would
be likely to be without occupants at any given moment.
Iroquois sources often spoke of this as “hanging the name around the neck.” Evidence is
sketchy, but at least among certain Iroquois nations—and perhaps all of them—each clan did have a
collection of “name-necklaces” corresponding to its stock of names, and kept by the same matron
responsible for keeping track of them (Fenton 1926:65). The major chiefly titles came with their
own belts of wampum, which functioned as insignia of office, and which were indeed placed around
the neck of the man who succeeded to it, along with other insignia of office (Hewitt 1944:65-66;
Beauchamp 1901:347-49; Fenton 1946:118; cf. Druke 1981:109-110).
It is a little difficult to generalize because we are dealing with a variety of peoples whose
habits were probably not entirely consistent even within any one time and place. Probably even
different clans or longhouses had different practices. But it’s clear that among the Five Nations in
particular, the resurrection of names became crucial to the constitution of society itself. It is
possible this was simply a cultural quirk, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that this had
something to do with the unusually predatory nature of Iroqouis society.
war and social structure
The League of the Hodenosaunee (or “Iroquois”) consisted, at first, of Five Nations, the Onondaga,
Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Oneida, all of whom occupied a swath of territory to the direct south
of Lake Erie in what is now upstate New York.4 The population was concentrated in a series of large,
fortified towns—Dutch and English sources usually call them “castles”—perched on hilltops and
surrounded by elaborate palisades.
Inside the palisades was female territory. Each longhouse was organized around a core of
related women. The male domain was “the forest,” with the usual emphasis on war and hunting.
Villages and nations were of course connected by an overarching network of political institutions—
the organization of the Iroquois League, which seems to have emerged in the years before 1500,
just before Europeans appeared on the scene, was one of the inspirations for the federal system
adopted in the United States. There were thus a set of different councils operating on different
levels: from longhouse to village, village to nation, nation to the federation itself. There are two
points here that I think deserve special emphasis. The first is that this system involved an
extremely important role for women. Longhouses were governed by councils made up entirely of
women, who, since they controlled its food supplies, could evict any in-married male at will. Villages
were governed by both male and female councils. Councils on the national and league level were also
made up of both male and female office-holders. It’s true that the higher one went in the
structure, the less relative importance the female councils had—on the longhouse level, there
wasn’t any male organization at all, while on the league level, the female council merely had veto
power over male decisions—but it’s also true that decisions on the lower level were of much more
immediate relevance to daily life. In terms of everyday affairs, Iroquois society often seems to
have been about as close as there is to a documented case of a matriarchy. The second is that for
all the complex federative structure, society was in most respects highly egalitarian. Officeholders,
male and female, were elected from among a pool of possible heirs; the offices themselves,
at least the male political ones, were considered as much a responsibility as a reward as they
involved no real material rewards and certainly granted the holder no coercive power.
Of course, most of our evidence comes from a time of constant war. It’s hard to tell
precisely how all this affected the relative roles of men and women. On the one hand, it could only
have increased the relative importance of the male councils, which were largely concerned with
matters of war and peace. On the other, it eventually created a situation in which a large proportion
of the men in any given community were not really Iroquois at all, which could only have increased
the authority of women on the local level.
Iroquois warfare conformed to a pattern common to much of aboriginal North America.
Daniel Richter (1983, 1992:32-38) calls it the “mourning war” complex. The logic is similar to, but
not quite the same as, that of the feud. The death of almost any important person might lead to the
organization of a military expedition, whether or not that person had been killed by enemies. Among
the Five Nations, the logic might be considered an extension of the principle of replacing the dead.
Whenever a man or woman holding an important office died, his or her name would be transferred
immediately to someone new: the ceremony has come to be known in the literature as a
“Requickening” ceremony, because it restored the life and vitality that had been lost to the entire
community through death. More humble members of society would eventually be replaced as well.
But in the meantime, the effects of loss could be disastrous, especially for those closest to the
deceased. The grief and pain of mourning was seen as capable of driving survivors entirely insane.
Often, then, the women of the bereaved household could demand a raiding party be got together
(usually from among their male affines) to capture a replacement. Normally this raid would be
directed against some neighboring people who were considered traditional enemies. At times, they
could escalate into major wars, replete with stand-up battles in which large parties of warriors
would meet each other in “largely ceremonial confrontations between massed forced protected by
wooden body armor and bedecked in elaborate headdresses” (Richter 1992:35). Death in battle was
quite unusual, in part, because the main purpose of war was taking of prisoners.
As for the prisoners, their fate, once brought back to the Iroquois homeland, could be
either surprisingly benign or utterly horrendous. All prisoners were formally adopted into the local
family that had suffered a recent loss. It was up to family members whether they would then be
tortured to death or kept on as a replacement for the deceased. European observers saw the choice
as a matter of whim, almost entirely unpredictable. Those to be killed were first feasted, then tied
to a stake where they were systematically cut, gouged, and most of all, burned with firebrands and
red-hot metal, often over the course of an entire night before dying—ceremonies that, apparently
sometimes did end with a communal feast on parts of the body of the dead (in other words, what
their neighbors said was not entirely untrue). The vast majority of women and children captured on
raids, and a very good proportion—probably the majority—of the men were not, however, killed but
permanently adopted. They would be given the name of the deceased and, ideally, almost instantly
find themselves treated like a member of the family, having all rights and relations of the deceased
(i.e., a man would normally take his place as husband of the dead man’s wife), and treated with the
utmost tenderness by his female relatives. After a trial period during which they were carefully
watched for any sign of disaffection, such prisoners could eventually become fully accepted
members of society, even in some cases leading war parties or receiving higher names and offices
with political responsibilities.
This anyway was how the situation appears to have worked in indigenous times. Warfare
became much more severe and destructive during the seventeenth century, during which the
Iroquois managed to break, one after the other, a series of rival federations, including the
Mohicans, Hurons, Petuns, Neutrals, Erie, and Susquahannock—wars that often involved both
unprecedented massacres (one Iroquois chief ordered eighty Huron prisoners slaughtered in one
day, in order to assuage his grief and anger at the death of his brother) and the massive
incorporation of alien prisoners into Iroquoian society. It was around this period one reads accounts
of a society effectively divided into classes, with adopted prisoners doing the bulk of the menial
labor and with members of their adopted families having the right to kill them for the slightest
infractions or impertinence (Starna and Watkins 1991), and missionaries complained that in many
communities most men were not particularly fluent speakers of their own nation’s languages (Quain
1937). It may be that the unusually systematic nature of the Iroquoian naming practices only
emerged in this period (alternately, it may be that it had existed for a very long time, and this was
one of the reasons the Five Nations were able to expand and incorporate others more effectively
than their neighbors). Anyway, this exceptionally brutal period did not last long: the children of
these captives were considered full members of their adoptive clans.
the making of peace
At this point, let me return to the role of wampum. Wampum in fact played an essential role in the
mechanics of both making war and ending it.
For example, if a man’s death inspired members of his family to commission a war party, the
clan matron was said to “put his name on the mat” by sending a belt of wampum to a related war
chief; he would then gather together a group of men to try to bring back a captive to replace him
(Lafitau in Fenton 1978:315). If the man in question had been killed, however—at least, if the killer
was not from a completely alien group—the usual practice was to appoint an avenger.5 The only way
to prevent this, in fact, was for the killer’s people to pay a gift of wampum immediately to the
victim’s family. The usual fee was five fathoms for the life of a man, ten for that of a woman (T.
Smith 1983:236; Morgan 1854:331-34; Parker 1926). Within the league, elaborate mechanisms
existed to ensure any such matters would be quickly resolved; councils would be convoked, large
amounts of wampum raised by canvassing the important members of the killer’s clan. Even then, it
was still the bereaved family who had the last word. If stubborn, they could still insist on sending
the avenger on his way.
The mechanics of peacemaking are especially important because this is what the League was
essentially about. The Iroquois term translated “league,” in fact, really just means “peace”: the
entire political apparatus was seen by its creators primarily as a way of resolving murderous
disputes. The League was less a government, or even alliance,6 than a series of treaties establishing
amity and providing the institutional means for preventing feuds and maintaining harmony among the
five nations that made it up. For all their reputation as predatory warriors, the Iroquois themselves
saw the essence of political action to lie in making peace.
Wampum was the essential medium of all peacemaking. Every act of diplomacy, both within
the League and outside it, had to be carried out through the giving and receiving of wampum. If a
message had to be sent, it would be “spoken into” belts or strings of wampum, which the messenger
would present to the recipient. Such belts or strings were referred to as “words”; they were often
woven into mnemonic patterns bearing on the important of the message. Without them, no message
stood a chance of being taken seriously by its recipient. In council, too, speakers would accompany
their arguments with belts of wampum—also called “words”—laying them down one after the other
as the material embodiments of their arguments (Beauchamp 1901; Smith 1983:231-32).7
When envoys were sent to propose a treaty to another nation, not only would the conditions
of the treaty itself be “spoken into” belts of wampum, but the envoys would be given belts and
strings to convey as gifts for the nation to whom the treaty was proposed. These might also be
woven into “words”; at any rate, they would be presented one by one to the accompaniment of words
of conciliation. Since Iroquois diplomacy is well documented, we have a good record of what these
conciliatory speeches were like:
They run somewhat as follows, each sentence being pronounced with great
solemnity, and confirmed by the delivery of a wampum belt: ‘Brothers, with this belt
I open your ears that you may hear; I draw from your feet the thorns that pierced
them as you journeyed thither; I clean the seats of the council-house, that you may
sit at ease; I wash your head and body, that your spirits may be refreshed; I
condole you on the loss of your friends who have died since we last met; I wipe out
any blood which may have been spilt between us’. . .
And his memory was refreshed by belts of wampum, which he delivered
after every clause in his harangue, as a pledge of the sincerity and the truth of his
words (Brice in Holmes 1883:242).
Afterward, an envoy might place the treaty belts themselves over the shoulders of the
chief, who could either accept the treaty or reject it by shaking them off (Heckewelder in Holmes
1883:246-47). If accepted, copies of the treaty belts would be sent back with the envoy, and both
sides would keep their belts as a permanent record of their mutual obligations.
Michael Foster (1985) has suggested that the exchange of wampum in such negotiations was
seen first and foremost as a way of opening up channels of communication. Hence the rhetorical
emphasis on “opening the ears” and “unstopping the throats” of those who received it, and of
otherwise putting them at ease with one another. This was particularly important if (as was usually
the case) there had previously been hostilities between the two parties. It seems to me this is true
as far as it goes; but the notion of “communication” plays into much larger cosmological ideas.
Iroquois religion, as Elisabeth Tooker (1970:7; Chafe 1961) has aptly put it, was in its essence “a
religion of thanksgiving.” Ritual was seen above all as a way to give thanks to the Creator by showing
one’s joy at the existence of the cosmos he had created. Even today just about every ritual event
or even meeting involves thanksgiving speeches, in which the speaker lists the main elements of the
cosmos—earth, trees, wind, sun, moon, sky—and celebrates the existence of each in turn.8 This
celebration or joy could also be imagined as feeling of expansiveness, an opening of oneself to the
totality of creation and to the social world. In a similar way acts of condolence, such as the giving
of wampum, were meant to clear all the grief and anger that obstructed the minds and bodies of
those bereaved by death and to restore them to full communication with the world and other
people. This is why the givers spoke not only of opening the eyes and ears and throats of their
recipients but also of “revealing the sun” and “revealing the sky” to them once more. “Opening up
channels of communication,” then, is not simply a matter of creating an environment in which people
can talk to one another; it is a matter of opening them up to the universe as a whole.
But why should gifts of wampum be an appropriate medium for this?
The most plausible explanation is provided by George Hammel (1984). Throughout the
eastern woodlands of North America, he suggests, there was a broad category of objects that were
seen as embodying what he calls “life and light”—illumination, in Hammel’s analysis, being roughly
equivalent to my “expansiveness.” These included a wide range of bright or mirrored objects,
ranging from quartz crystals to obsidian to certain sorts of shell, as well as, later, wampum and
glass beads. Even before the advent of Europeans, these constituted a category of wealth that was
traded over long distances, and in special demand by those engaged in shamanistic pursuits.
Wampum was thus seen as carrying an intrinsic capacity to lift away grief. A Seneca myth about
Hiawatha—who was said to be the inventor of wampum, as well as one of the founders of the
League—has him gathering together the first string and vowing:
If I should see anyone in deep grief I would remove these strings from the pole and
console them. The strings would become words and lift away the darkness with
which they are covered. (Hammel 1984:19)
Just in these few references one can already see a fairly clear set of terms of opposition. The
difference between pleasure and pain, joy and grief is conceived as one between expansion and
contraction; and by extension between light (which allows extend one’s vision into the world, to see
the sun and sky) and darkness (in which one’s vision contracts to the immediate environs of the
self). Even more importantly, perhaps, it is an opposition between articulate speech and silence or
inarticulate rage; strings of wampum are themselves things of light, but they are also “words,” that
unstop the ears and throats of those who receive them, allowing them to pass into that domain of
“self-extension” which is made possible only through language (Scarry 1985). The two possible fates
of Iroquois prisoners are a perfect expression of this: one the one hand, to have a name hung
around the neck, in the form of a string of wampum; on the other, to have red-hot axes hung around
the neck, which burn into the flesh and send the prisoner into a spiral of agony that will ultimately
lead to the ultimate contraction, that of death.
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7. “Debt, Violence, and Impersonal Markets” by David Graeber
If The Great Transformation will be remembered for anything a century from now, it willbe as the definitive rejoinder to the great liberal myth. This is, of course, the assumption that there is something natural about what Polanyi called “self-regulating markets”, that they arise oftheir own accord as long as state interference doesn’t prevent them. Polanyi examined the very period when this ideology first emerged, and managed to demonstrate just how crucial government interference was in creating “the self-regulating market” to begin with—just as it has continued to be necessary to maintain it.
One need hardly point out that in the current, neoliberal age, Polanyi’s insights are morerelevant than ever. The ideology that Polanyi felt was gone forever in the ‘40s has returned with a vengeance—returned to reap a terrible vengeance, in fact, on the most vulnerable of the peopleof the earth. Yet at the same time the intellectual landscape has shifted dramatically. Among what passes as the intellectual opposition, grand sweeping theory in the Polanyian tradition hasfallen largely out of favor. At the same time, the high theorists of neoliberalism—at least, the most sophisticated of them—often appear more than happy to incorporate many of Polanyi’sinsights. Most will, if pressed, be happy to admit that “the market” isn’t really an empiricalobject at all, that when they refer to “markets” they are really talking about abstract models,constructed by selecting only certain features of reality and intentionally ignore all others; and that of course one needs constant political work to maintain conditions where those models willtake on any semblance of empirical form. Of course, when giving policy advice, these sameeconomists will then turn around and declare that “the market”—now transformed from an abstract model to a quasi-deity—will punish those who disregard its sovereign dictates.
When arguments don’t even have to make logical sense, critique might well seem to loseits point. Nonetheless, it strikes me that new theoretical tools would be helpful here—if only because how we conceptualize the moment has everything to do with how we imaginealternatives. Polanyi wrote at an historical moment when it seemed that the very governments that had created self-regulating markets seemed to be in the process of transcending them. Todaywe’ve seen those same social democratic regimes often leading the way in stripping away socialprotections, and anti-capitalist movements increasingly moving away from any notion that the state—which is, after all, basically a means of organizing violence—can help solve anything.
What I would like to do in this essay then is to make a few suggestions about how we might begin to reconceptualize Polanyi’s approach to economic history from this, ratherdifferent, historical perspective. This means coming up with new terms to supplement, and to some degree supplant, Polanyi’s distinctions between reciprocity, redistribution, and market, special and general purpose monies, and introduce distinctions between what I will call “human economies” and different sorts of market, some dominated by credit institutions, others by anonymous exchange of metal bullion. In both cases, I want at least to consider the importanceof war and violence as critical elements in allowing the transformations of one form into theother.1 The easiest way to begin to reconstruct this history, I think, is by looking at the history of money.
1: Value versus Debt
The approach to economic history I will propose here has larger theoretical implications.While this is not the place to develop them in any detail, it seems to me that we have come to thepoint where we have largely moved past the hoary opposition between individual and society,and might better begin instead from an opposition between value and debt: that is, between websof dyadic relations based on various forms of (usually mutual) obligation, and the creation of virtual arenas for the realization of human creativity.
This point may seem obscure. Perhaps the best way to explain it is to explain how I came to it.
In 2001, I wrote a book which among other things tried to develop a new approach to some of the intricate problems of Marxian value theory. My key point was that our distinction between “value” (in the economic sense) and “values” (in the social sense) really turns on thecommoditization of labor. Where human energies are directed at profit, or wages, we are in thedomain of “the economy” or “the market”, which operates according to the law of value. When we enter into other pursuits, such as domestic life (housework being probably the most importantform of unremunerated labor in industrialized societies), or religion, politics, and so on, we aresuddenly said to jump into the domain of “values”: this is precisely where people begin to talk about “family values”, religious faith, political ideals, the pursuit of beauty, patriotism and so on.All these are seen as commitments that ought to be uncorrupted by the market. At the same time,they are also seen as utterly unique, effectively, incommensurable. It would be absurd to search for a mathematic formula that could allow one to calculate just how much personal integrity it isright to sacrifice in the pursuit of art, or how to balance responsibilities to God and to yourfamily.
The entire argument here turns on money being an impersonal abstraction. “Value” isthat which money measures. Money is a generic substance whose only quality is that is can beprecisely counted; aside from its denomination, one banknote is precisely the same as any other.Therefore no particular dollar bill can develop a unique history. It is pure potentiality. Withoutsuch a generic medium, one is left with a series of unique historical crystallizations.
1 This might be considered an extension of an argument about the similarities between impersonal market relations and violence itself as forms of radical simplification(Graeber 1996).
Marx as we all know saw the value of money as ultimately rooted in human capacities forcreative action, or “labor power”. He also argued that it was only through the institution of wagelabor that such creative potential itself becomes a commodity. One interesting concomitant isthat as a result, wage laborers—who are after all working in order to get money—are effectively working in order to obtain symbolic tokens that represent the importance of their own work. Money, then, is a symbol that effectively brings into being the very thing it represents. As such itcomes to seem the source of the value of the labor, rather than something having been produced by it. The premise of the book was that any system of value tends to operate this way. Value issimply the way that we represent the meaning or importance of our own actions to ourselves.Our actions become meaningful and important by becoming part of some larger social totality,real or imagined; this must also necessarily happen through some material medium: if notmoney, then treasures, tokens, performances, privileges, and so on. The medium can be almostanything, but its nature has very definite implications as to how this realization of value takes place. With a quantifiable abstraction like money, one can develop systems of abstract value;when the most important tokens of value are unique but permanent heirlooms, betokening “fame”, one might end up with something more like a kula system (Munn 1986); when they areelaborate, but ephemeral, ritual performances that express “beauty”, one can end up withsomething more like the Kayapo rituals described by Turner (1984, 1985, 1987). Nonetheless,there are always certain constants. One is that since value can only be realized in the eyes of others, what we think of as “society” largely emerges as the audience for different projects forthe realization of value. From the perspective of the actor, at least, “society” is simply all thosewhose opinions he actually cares about. It is always to a certain degree an imaginary totality.Another is that the tokens through which they are realized tend to become fetishized, in the sensethat from the point of view of the actors, they are seen as the source of that which they motivate.The desire to acquire tokens of honor inspires honorable behavior; the desire to attain tokens offaith, or certificates of educational attainment, comes to inspire piety or learning, even to organize the form such actions take. The result, as in the case of money, is that it often seems as if these tokens, rather than the human actions aimed at acquiring them, are what brings piety orlearning into being in the world to begin with—since, from the point of view of the actors, this often might as well be true.
Value theory then is about how desire becomes social. It is about how our actions becomemeaningful by being reflected back at us in the form of representations—ultimately, of those very actions—that come to seem their aim and origin. And this is about how different conceptions of “society” are constantly being thrown up, like shadows on a wall, as a necessary part of that process.
The main weakness in this approach, I soon discovered, was its treatment of money. Like Marx, I emphasized the anonymous, impersonal qualities of money. These do exist. There’sabsolutely no way to know where a dollar bill in one’s pocket has been; the result is that thehistory of objects bought and sold by dollar bills tend to be effaced as well. This is of course, thekey to Marx’s conception of fetishism, where objects come to seem to embody the intentions oftheir designers and producers, since one has no way of knowing who those people actually were.
The problem is that, while this may be true of cash, most transactions in contemporarysocieties do not employ cash; and the largest, most significant transactions almost never do— unless, that is, they are criminal in nature. There is a reason why bank robbers and drug kingpinsare the only people who prefer to operate with suitcases full of hundred dollar bills. Ordinary monetary transactions do indeed leave a history, since they usually operate through credit and, as
law enforcement agents are well aware, it is quite possible to keep exact and detailed tabs on the movements of any citizen simply by monitoring their bank and credit card transactions. Whilethis does not change Marx’s main point about commodity fetishism—I still don’t have the slightest idea who was involved in creating and assembling my cell phone or my toaster—it means that money is a far more complex object than we might otherwise assume. Where somesee money as wiping away the possibility of memory, Keith Hart, for example, insists instead that money “is mainly… an act of remembering, a way of keeping track of the exchanges which we enter into with the rest of humanity” (1999:234).2
It seems to me Hart is a good place to start on a reconsideration of this problem becausehe’s one of the few authors who looks at money neither as a means of recording history nor as a means of effacing history, but rather sees the peculiar quality of money as lying in the fact that it is an unstable suspension of both:
Look at a coin from your pocket. On one side is ‘heads’—the symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on the other side is ‘tails’—the precisespecification of the amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange. One sidereminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is originally a relation between persons in society, a token perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing,capable of entering into definite relations with other things, as a quantitative ratio independent of the persons engaged in any particular transaction. In this latterrespect money is like a commodity and its logic is that of anonymous markets (Hart 1986:638).
Marx, of course, made the famous argument that in fetishism, what are actually relationsbetween persons are displaced and made to appear as if they were relations between things. Mauss’ distinction between gifts and commodities actually works by an analogous logic: atransaction is a gift if it is largely concerned with the relations between persons, a commodityexchange, if what is being established is instead equivalence between things. What Hart ispointing out is that this distinction is inscribed into the very nature of money itself, so much so that economists have produced completely contradictory theories as to what money even is. Onthe one hand we find the familiar “Metallist” or “commodity” theory of money (what Hart wouldcall the “tails” approach), that sees money as having first emerged from the inconveniences ofbarter. We’ve all heard this story.3 At first human beings bartered useful objects directly one for another; after a while, they came to realize that it would be much easier simply to denominate asingle commodity as a means to pay for every other one. For various reasons, precious metals seemed the most convenient choice. According to this view (e.g., Samuelson 1947), modern economies are still really just elaborate systems of barter, a way for economic actors to tradeuseful commodities for others, with money merely serving as a convenient technology ofexchange. This view is, effectively, economic orthodoxy: the overwhelming majority of
2 In fact, the very word is derived from memory: the English “money” ultimately derives fromthe temple of Juno Moneta in ancient Rome, where coins were struck during the Punic Wars— Moneta being the goddess of Memory and mother of the muses (1999:15, 256).3 This theory of the origin of money already appears in Adam Smith, though in itscanonical version it was most famously laid out by Jevons (1875) and Menger (1892).
professional economists accept it, despite there being virtually no evidence that anything like thisever happened.
Ranged against it is a variety of heretical, “Chartalist” approaches that rely on the other side of Hart’s coin. These assume that money did not arise from individual actors trying tomaximize their material advantage, but rather, from public institutions aiming to calculate and manage social obligations: that money arises, in effect, from debt. The paradigm is Knapp’s “State Theory of Money” (1928), where he argued that money arose not as a medium of exchange but as a unit of account (and secondarily, means of payment), specifically, as a means of assessing and levying tax payments. Money, here, is a way of managing debt, starting with the debt that subjects or citizens were assumed to have to their sovereign. In order to do so, the statemust establish the nominal units of account, and fixes the conversion rates between commodities.
Moreover, as colonial regimes were to rediscover in the 18th and 19th centuries,demanding cash payments from one’s subjects is the most effective way to encourage a marketin goods and services, and this might often have been at least half the point. It is in fact much easier, from the point of view of a government, to create a market for goods and services, and then buy what it needs, than to requisition everything directly, either in kind or in labor. The key point though is, as Michael Innes (1913, 1914) originally put it, that “money is debt”: the stateissues tokens of its own obligations that become validated and go into general use by citizensseeking to cancel their debts with one another, because the state is willing to accept them tocancel debts which (it has declared) citizens owe to it.4
The Chartalist view has always been in a minority among professional economists—even though almost all the historical evidence seems to support it. Still, it has its exponents, especially amongst the followers of John Maynard Keynes. However, the two camps have always, as Hartnoted, tended to state their positions in absolute terms, arguing money is purely one thing or theother. Hence Keynesians end up arguing for state-managed manipulation of the money supply as a tool of policy, while “monetarists” insist the government’s role is simply to back up a stablecurrency but otherwise let the market do its work, and policy tends to swing back and forth wildly between them.
As Hart observes, for the most part anthropologists have simply ignored these debates. They have had especially little to say about the phenomenon of debt. This is in a way surprising,since anthropologists have over the years had a great deal to say about social obligation.Structural functionalist anthropology was, more than anything else, an elaborate system ofmapping out “rights and duties” (two concepts which are, like credit and debt, themselves two sides of the same coin.) In fact, it seems to me that such oppositions between theories of value and theories of debt open up a much more interesting set of theoretical problems than more familiar (and increasingly sterile) divisions between “individual” and “society”. The Metallistview, for example, doesn’t begin with one individual who confronts society: it begins with a series of dyadic relations (mainly buyer-seller) and then tries to see how an endless network ofsuch relations can gradually produce an imaginary totality it calls “the market”. The Chartalist
4 Innes also noted that banks, which specializing in the canceling credits against debts,developed as intermediaries with the state: in every case we know about, it wasgovernments (even, in the case of Medieval Europe, no longer existing governments: seeEinaudi 1953) that were seen as establishing the abstract units of exchange, just as they were seen as establishing systems of weights and measures.
view starts from the state—an entity that I have argued always begins primarily as a utopian project (Graeber 2003)—and works its way down to the regulation of networks of obligation.The state in this view creates money in much the same way as it regulates justice: as a means of balancing moral accounts.
This in turn raises two particularly sticky conceptual questions. The first is about theorigin of the idea of debt. How do social obligations, rights and duties that people have with oneanother, end up becoming attached themselves to objects of material wealth, so that the meretransfer of such objects can often render one person entirely at another’s command? The second is even larger: how does one relate a theory of value to a theory of debt? It is possible toconceive what we call “societies” as an endless web of inter-personal relations; it is possible to conceive them as imaginary totalities that serve as arenas for the realization of value. It is very difficult to understand them as both at the same time.
I cannot solve all these problems here. But I want to attempt an outline of what a theory of debt might look like, because I think it should be critical to the larger task of conceptualizing the current historical moment in a way that allows for alternatives. Certainly the problem is profoundly under-theorized. The modern state, after all, is often said to have emerged withdeficit financing; the economies of wealthy countries are now driven largely by consumer debt;international relations are increasingly dominated by the debt bondage of the poor to the IMF and World Bank and by the debt of the United States to East Asia. Yet there is remarkably little written about the nature of debt itself. It’s a question of particular political interest, it seems to me, since debt has long been one of the chief ways in which relations based on exploitation and even violence have come to seem moral in the eyes of those living inside them. Throughouthistory, there have been classes of people who essentially live off the labors of others; in aremarkably large number of cases, they appear to have managed to convince the latter that it is they who are somehow in their debt. Yet they do not do this, normally, as a class. They do so through an endless multiplication of individual—or, more accurately, dyadic—ties.
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8. Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum
http://reneeridgway.net
http://salrandolph.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
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