Games With Sex And Death

While overall I found this chapter of Graeber's particularly interesting, I did find some cases where his definition of "social currencies" can be debated. On page 130 Graeber says that social currencies "are economies systems primarily concerned not with the accumulation of wealth, but with the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings". I automatically thought of the Kula Trade after while reading this. There are the social currents in the Kula trade being the bracelets and necklaces, however there is an accumulation of wealth when certain items in the sphere of exchange are held onto for an extended period. There are various possibilities for why this is done, but I didn't feel the primary reason was to create, destroy, or rearrange human beings.

A point Graeber made in this chapter that I appreciate, in terms of challenging the Western perspective on the topic, were how the Tiv view bridewealth. The idea that the Tiv see brideprice as the acknowledgment of a debt that cannot be paid rather than quantifying the worth of a woman, makes this cultural practice feel less foreign to Western marriage practices. The Tiv do not see X dollars = to a wife, which is sometimes how bridewealth is explained when oversimplified. In mainstream American culture, the type of wedding ring that a man gets his wife is suppose to say a lot about his financial status. The same way that bridewealth is used to measure if a man has enough money to take care of someone’s daughter who he wants to marry, a wedding ring is seen as one way to display the financial status of a women's husband. In that particular sense they are similar, because both are used as a man’s way to show he is (financially) well off enough to have a wife.