A second feature of our market economy that would surprise many traditional peoples is that our process of buying something is conceived explicitly as an exchange, in which the buyer’s handing-over of something else (usually money) is considered a payment, not a reciprocal gift. Almost always, the buyer either pays at the time of acquisition, or at least agrees on a price if the payment will be made later or in installments. If the seller does agree to wait until later for part or all of the payment, as in the case of many new-car purchases, the payment is still a specified obligation, not a subsequent reciprocal gift at the buyer’s discretion. Contrast this procedure with the imaginary case of a car salesman “giving” a customer a car and expecting an unspecified future gift: we’d consider such a transaction absurd. But we’ll see that that’s exactly how trade does proceed in many traditional societies.
A third feature is that most of our market transactions take place between the buyer and a specialist professional middleman (“salesman”) in a specialist professional facility (“store”), rather than between the buyer and the ultimate supplier near the house of either one. A simpler model operating at the lowest level of our economic hierarchy consists of one-off direct transactions whereby a seller advertises his wares (by a sign in front of his house, a newspaper ad, or an eBay notice) and sells his house or car directly to a buyer who has scanned ads. Conversely, a complex model at the highest level of our economic hierarchy consists of sales from governments to governments, such as contracts between governments for oil deliveries, or weapon sales by First World countries to other countries.
While our market transactions do assume these varied forms, in all forms the buyer and the seller usually have little or no on-going personal relationship beyond the transaction. They may never have seen or dealt with each other before, they may never deal with each other again, and they care mainly about the items that change hands (the purchased goods and the money), not about their relationship. Even in cases where the buyer and the seller repeatedly carry out transactions with each other, as in the case of a shopper who visits the farmers’ market stall of some particular farmer every week, the transaction is primary, and the relationship is secondary. We shall see that this basic fact of market economies, which readers of this book take for granted, often does not apply to traditional small-scale societies, where the parties aren’t professional sellers or buyers, the relationship between the two parties is on-going, and they may consider the exchanged items to be of negligible significance compared to the personal relationship that the exchange serves to strengthen.
A fourth feature of market economies is related to that third feature: most professional markets operate either constantly or else regularly and often. Typically, a store is open daily except Sundays, while a farmers’ market operates weekly (e.g., on Wednesday mornings). In contrast, much traditional small-scale trade brings parties together infrequently, often just once a year or even once every several years.
The next-to-last feature of markets constitutes a similarity to rather than a difference from trading by traditional small-scale societies. In both cases the objects traded cover a spectrum from materially essential (“necessities”) to materially useless (“luxuries”). At one extreme are objects that facilitate or are indispensible for surviving, such as food, warm clothing, and tools and machines. At the opposite extreme are objects irrelevant to survival but prized as luxuries, as decorations, for entertainment, or for conferring status, such as jewelry and television sets. In the gray middle ground lie objects that are materially useful, but that are available either as minimum-cost low-prestige functional items or as expensive high-prestige items with the same function. For instance, a $10 synthetic tote bag and a $2,000 leather Gucci tote bag are equally suitable for toting, but the latter confers status and the former doesn’t. This example already hints that we shouldn’t dismiss materially “useless” luxury items as useless: the status that they confer may bring huge material benefits, such as business opportunities or the wooing of prospective trophy wives and husbands. This same spectrum of “usefulness” already existed in the earliest trade that can be documented archaeologically: Cro-Magnons tens of thousands of years ago traded obsidian spear points necessary for hunting meat, shells and amber useful purely for decoration, and beautiful finely finished spear points of translucent quartz. The Cro-Magnons presumably no more dreamed of using their quartz spear points in hunting and thereby risking breaking them than we would use our best Gucci tote bag to carry home our fish purchase dripping with redolent fish oil from the seafood market.
The remaining feature of modern markets is one that is often duplicated by traditional trade, but that traditional societies in other cases replace with a behavior that has little precedent among us moderns. We buy something mainly just because we want the thing purchased (rather than to cement a personal relationship with the seller), and we buy it from someone who complements us economically and can sell us something to which we don’t have access or that we don’t know how to make. For instance, ordinary non-farming consumers don’t have access to apples of their own: they have to buy apples from apple farmers or from grocery stores. Apple farmers in turn buy medical and legal services from physicians and lawyers who possess medical and legal knowledge lacking to apple farmers. No apple farmer would sell apples to and buy apples from other apple farmers merely to maintain the goodwill of other apple farmers. We shall see that traditional small-scale societies, like modern consumers and suppliers, often do trade objects to which one party has access and the other doesn’t (e.g., a type of stone available only locally), and they trade objects that one party knows how to make but the other doesn’t (e.g., sophisticated ocean-going wooden dugout canoes). But they also do much trading of objects equally available to either party, and they do that trading to maintain relationships for political and social reasons.
Traditional forms of trade
So far, we have considered trade from the perspective of members of traditional societies, and of what they would find different and surprising, or else familiar, in our market economies. Let’s examine the corresponding mechanisms in traditional trade. I already mentioned the replacement of our cash purchases by their exchanges of objects, and occasionally by their use of valued objects such as cowrie shells in a manner somewhat similar to money. Now, let’s consider the traditional equivalents of the other features of market economies that we just discussed.
While in some cases traditional societies negotiate explicit exchanges, and both items pass hands at the same time, in other cases one party presents a gift, and the recipient thereby incurs the obligation to provide a gift of comparable value at some unspecified time in the future. The simplest form of such reciprocal gifting occurs among Andaman Islanders (Plate 4), for whom there is little delay between the two halves of the transaction. A local group invites one or more other local groups to a feast that lasts a few days, and to which the visitors bring objects such as bows, arrows, adzes, baskets, and clay. A visitor gives an object to a host, who cannot refuse the gift but is then expected to give something of equal value. If the second gift does not meet the guest’s expectations, the guest may become angry. Occasionally a giver, on making a present, names the gift that he would like in return, but that’s exceptional. Among South America’s Yanomamo Indians (Plate 12), reciprocal gift-giving is also associated with feasts to which one group invites a neighboring group. Yanomamo reciprocal gifting differs from the Andaman custom in that the second gift, which must be a different type of item from the first gift, is presented at a subsequent feast. Each Yanomamo gift is remembered long afterwards. The delay between the first and second gifts means that the accumulated obligations serve as an on-going excuse for neighboring villages to visit each other for feasts, because some members of one village always owe gifts to some members of another village from their last meeting.