Myth of the woman as property

Chapter six of David Graeber’s Debt describes ways in which human economies – those based on the exchange and movement of human beings rather than wealth – function. In particular, he recounts a study by the anthropologist Phillipe Rospabé of “bridewealth” across several continents. Rospabé concluded that the exchange of goods or currency at the time of marriage is not a means of purchasing a wife like one would in the market economy; rather, it was a symbolic gesture indicating that a human life – the future wife – is so valuable that it cannot be compensated for by anything but another human. This then ties back to the Tiv economy, which we have studied in recent weeks through the work of Bohannan and Guyer and also Rospabé. Rospabé challenges Bohannan’s spheres of exchange, in which women and children occupied the highest sphere, by noting that it is impossible within the Tiv economy to convert cattle or brass rods into a value great enough for a wife.

Graeber explains bridewealth and bloodwealth as similar in this, as both recognize the impossibility of compensating for a human life. However, there exists at least a myth of the woman as property in at least Western culture. Does this myth have any grounding in reality, and, if so, where did it originate? If not, why would such a myth exist? In those societies that do/did treat women as property, what value did she hold in society?

Social Meanings and Uses of Money

In Graeber's chapter, Games with Sex and Money, he makes a distinction between Human Economies and Commercial Economies in a bid to distinguish between different kinds of debts. Money “can be seen, in human economies, as first and foremost the acknowledgment of the existence of a debt that cannot be paid” (136). What I liked about the chapter was Graeber's efforts at showing how societies transition form one kind of economic system to the other (i.e from human economies to commercial economies) and how this transition, or replacement, of the human economy system also affects the social structure and social relations. Graeber's assertion that violence plays a major role in the shift to a more commercial economy is something that particularly interested me. Why is it that commercial economies thrive even with all the evidenced problems brought about by violence? And with commercial economies thriving, can it be argued that people being removed violently (and sometimes voluntarily and willing) from their context to further the commercial economies is perhaps the new context? 

Dreaming of Money

In Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Min City, Truitt elaborates on the many ways in which the economy is affected by politics, and how strongly the changes in government policy in Vietnam have affected the lives of everyday people. One of the overall themes of these chapters seems to be how much national ideologies and political strategies have an impact on people’s economic decisions. Another theme is the level of privacy that people have based on their economic status and value, which are ultimately defined by the government. Truitt also discusses the many ways in which money is perceived by people based on its appearance and its source.

My overall impression was that it is important to understand how money, and what a society defines as currency, cannot be completely standardized. This is because many societies tend to use multiple forms of currency, and the presumed values of these different currencies are constantly changing. As someone who has grown up in the U.S., a country with a relatively stable currency, it is interesting to learn how countries that are going through periods of political and economic instability, are finding ways to cope with drastic fluctuations in prices and inflation. If for some reason the U.S. government had to create a new currency system, how would its citizens, as well as the global economy, react to such a drastic change?

Reference:

Allison J. Truitt. Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City. Edition: 2013. Publisher: University of Washington Press.

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.

Games with Sex and Death

In Graeber’s chapter Games with Sex and Death he discusses “human economies” or economies that are deal primarily in the “creation, destruction, and rearrangement of human beings” (Graeber, 130).  In these sorts of economies money, though given at times for a life, is known as an inadequate substitute for a human being.  When a life is taken, a life is owed and this can be collected in a variety of ways.   One example Graeber looks at in depth is that of the Lele, who deal in ‘blood debts’.  In this system they practice pawning, and seek to own as many pawns as possible so that if he (and it is only males who can own pawns) was to incur a blood debt he could pay it off with a pawn and not one of his own family members. Pawns, however, are distinct from slaves in that they still have a context in their community and masters often end up paying for some of their societal debts

I found these economies to be very interesting and the example of the Lele both in depth and intriguing.  I’m not sure I quite understand what the role of pawnship is and how many people actually own pawns and are not pawns themselves.  It seems like becoming a pawn or being born in to being a pawn is more common that having no obligations to anyone.  I also wonder if there is a way to buy oneself out completely?  Though Graeber answers some of this when he tells how young males are often okay with being pawns because it means their masters may pay their own blood-debts.  It seems like being a pawn is not a horrible thing, but it doesn’t sound great, so I guess I’m just confused as to what exactly a pawn does day-to-day? Also I wonder how this operates into their justice system—would they then be super connected if the punishment for murder was a pawning of a family member, and is that the only punishment?

Fear or Blood

Graeber defines Human Economy as reorganizing relations between people, while Rospabe Theory acknowledges these arrangements for reciprocating unpayable life-debt through material means. This is fascinating to consider from roots such as slave trade ports funded from European sugar-tobacco, but rely on locally situated cultures to delegate internal meaning of unpayable debt.

If mutual recognition of these spontaneous forms of debt paid through one set of identities recognized within African communities and yet another in European centers, how does this transition of meaning become materialized into goals like slave labor?

Creation of rules from Aro Confederacy ritual laws or Tiv Society of Witches fictional fines based from inequalities of “strong heart” are seemingly accepted forms of violence that rely on fear and sense of unknowable group obligation. How do you protest against norms that presently threaten life, but are codified by greater organizational structures accepted by neighbors and not fully understood?

When internal local African human economies seem founded on codes that relegate life imbibing means for external European resource ends, where does one exchange end and another fully paid? Underlying physical or mental qualities that merit quantifiable acceptance by both cultures seems reasonable area to focus on like reproduction and self-protection. However, I think both groups leave unknowable sustainability limits of these quantifiable qualities to their overall society consensus, which by my guesstimate are unlikely to distinguish universal meanings of that caliber without some disagreement.

Games With Sex and Death

Most of us sell ourselves as commodities every day, yet it's not quite equivalent to how Grabber describes it historically. Through most of human history, the only way a person could be turned into a commodity was through massive debt and overt violence, but now we commodify ourselves routinely.

Graeber highlights how the first people to be commodified and enslaved are women. Does this history play into the objectification and trafficking of women today? Can a human being be purchased to satisfy one's own needs?

I love how Graber ends the chapter. "If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It's still there, logged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It's just that we can no longer see that is it there." 

I disagree with the last sentence, but I say Amen to the statement as a whole.