This is clear for the young man who had worked hard only to see his granaries attacked by ghosts and sorcerers, because people were jealous of his success. The adverse effects of these norms for economic incentives are not confined to such attacks. They also impede property rights, even if this takes a less obvious form than that which Hobbes anticipated would plague the economy of stateless societies. Suppose, for example, you invest and increase your production. With secure property rights, you would get to enjoy the greater output you produce, and you may do what you please with it. If you really enjoy being generous, that’s part of the reward. But in Tonga society, as in many other economies shaped by the cage of norms, you give that output away not because you enjoy it, but because you are afraid of the social retribution, and even the violence, you may suffer if you fall afoul of the norms. That effectively means you again do not have secure property rights, since the additional income you generate will be taken away from you, even if the taking looks voluntary, couched in customs of generosity. The consequence would be little different from what Hobbes observed; there would be “no place for industry.”
The obvious way that this manifested itself in Tonga society was in the constant presence of hunger. Hunger and begging. Colson noted how close people lived to the edge:
When a household has exhausted its own food supplies or is near to doing so, it attempts first to obtain food from kinsmen or friends who live nearby. Children and disabled people are sent to kinsmen in areas which still have food. Men go out to work to leave more food for those who must stay at home, but they take little comfort in the thought that they will be fed while at home there will be hunger. When local supplies are exhausted, people walk many miles to tap kinsmen living at a distance. Often they go to the Plateau where their appearance is looked upon with much the same enthusiasm as the settling of a swarm of locusts.
The founding father of economics, Adam Smith, emphasized the propensity of humans to “truck, barter and exchange.” In Tongaland, begging was more prevalent than trucking, bartering, or exchanging. Colson pointed out how “the Valley had no middlemen or markets to organize internal trade. It also had no universally accepted medium of exchange.” There was trade of sorts, but
much of the exchange is obligatory, consequent upon institutionalized relationships existing between the parties to the transaction: one has the right to receive and the other the obligation to give.
The result was a society trapped into subsistence agriculture, vulnerable to every sort of economic setback and adversity. Technology was stagnant and backward. Precolonial Tonga society did not use the wheel, either for pottery or transport. Farming, the economic mainstay in the area, was unproductive, not because the land was infertile, but because it was worked using digging sticks rather than plows.
As we have already seen, the origins of the Tonga cage of norms is not unrelated to Hobbes’s observations. Part of the reason why such norms have developed in many places is that egalitarianism has a clear political logic. Norms of egalitarianism maintain the status quo. When such norms are weak or nonexistent, hierarchy emerges, the slippery slope kicks in, and statelessness ends. The surviving stateless societies thus tend to be those where norms of egalitarianism are strong and ingrained. These norms also help control conflict. If conflict risks erupting into violence and feuds, it’s better to follow a closely scripted economic playbook. With new economic activities, new opportunities, and new inequalities, there will be new conflicts, which are much harder for existing norms to handle. Better not to risk tipping into Warre. Better to stay with the status quo.
The Caged Economy
This is of course very familiar from the Tiv. As you’ll recall from Chapter 2, the Tiv developed a set of norms to make sure they never got onto the slippery slope. Anyone who tried to accumulate power to start exerting authority over others was put back in his place by witchcraft accusations. It turns out that their norms and the cage they created also did the same economically, effectively forging a “caged” economy.
The Tiv were a society based on kin and descent. As we have seen, the Tiv word for a territory occupied by the descendants of a single ancestor is tar, and within a tar it was the elders who exercised what little authority there was in traditional Tiv society. They allocated sufficient land to people within the tar to provide a livelihood for their family. Sufficient, but not much more than that. As anthropologists Paul and Laura Bohannan noted, if a man “wants to plant many more yams than his wives and children need, so that he can sell them to get more money and goods than others in the compound, he is likely to be refused.”
There was also no market in Tivland where labor could be bought and sold, and no land or capital markets either. The labor of the family or the tar was the only thing available for agricultural production. Both men and women farmed, but they each farmed specific crops and only women grew the main staple, yams. Husbands were required to provide land for their wives to farm, but had no automatic claim on what they produced. There were markets for some of these produced goods, but the Bohannans remarked:
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of the Tiv market is that it is extraordinarily constrained and shows little tendency to invade the other institutions of society.
Indeed, the Tiv didn’t have free markets, they had markets that were caged—structured not to facilitate trade but to avoid the slippery slope.
Perhaps the most obvious instance of this is with respect to notions of the exchange of goods, which was strictly limited. The economy was separated into different spheres. One could trade within a sphere but not across spheres. The most flexible sphere was the market for foodstuffs and subsistence goods that included chickens, goats, sheep, household utensils, and other craft products (mortars, grindstones, calabashes, pots, and baskets). Raw materials used to produce any of these items would also be included here. These were traded on local markets that opened periodically, and prices were flexible and subject to haggling. Trading in such markets had already adapted to the availability of money. Nevertheless, this sphere remained completely separate from prestige goods, which could not be exchanged in a market. Prestige goods included cattle, horses, a special type of white cloth known as tugundu, medicines, magical items, and brass rods. Formerly slaves were also included in this category of goods. Money was not used in this sphere, but there were equivalences between different goods. For example, historically the price of slaves was quoted in cows and brass rods, the price of cattle in terms of brass rods and tugundu cloth.
Akiga, the Tiv elder we encountered in Chapter 2, mentions some specific ways in which various prestige items could be traded: “You could buy one iron bar for a tugundu cloth. In those days five tugundu cloths were equivalent to a bull. A cow was worth ten tugundu. One brass rod was worth about the same as one tugundu cloth; thus five brass rods were worth a bull.”
To the extent that something like modern-looking exchange happened, the terms of trade were strictly fixed and unchanging. Although these prestige items might be exchanged in this way, this did not mean they were bought or sold, or as the Bohannans put it, “Tiv will not buy cows or horses in a market.”
How do you acquire prestige goods then? Moving from subsistence goods to prestige goods was a process that the Bohannans dubbed “conversion.” The Tiv recognized that acquiring subsistence goods could be the fruit of hard work, but not so for prestige goods. It took “more than hard work—it takes a ‘strong heart.’” Conversion upward may be possible when someone who has to get rid of his existing prestige goods is therefore willing to convert down. But “they try to keep a man from making conversions,” because such a man “is both feared and respected. If he is strong enough to resist excessive demands of his kinsmen … he is feared as a man of special, potentially evil, talents (tsav).”