Table 1.1 and the preceding discussion omit two other important categories of things that one people may offer to another people but that we don’t normally count among trade goods: labor and spouses. African rainforest Pygmies and Agta forest Negritos of the Philippines, and more recently some !Kung, intermittently work for neighboring Bantu farmers, Philippine farmers, and Bantu herders respectively. That’s a big part of the quid pro quo arrangement under which those groups of foragers receive iron plus garden crops or milk from those neighboring food-producers, in return for hunted and gathered products plus labor. Most neighboring peoples exchange spouses, occasionally as direct simultaneous exchanges (you give me your sister and I’ll give you my sister), more often as separate acts (you give me your sister now, and I’ll give you my little sister when she reaches the age of menarche). Between African rainforest Pygmies (Plate 8) and neighboring Bantu farmers such movements of spouses are virtually one way, with Pygmy women becoming wives of Bantu men but not vice versa.
Those are the main categories of objects exchanged. As for who trades what to whom, New Guinea’s Daribi people, living at low population densities in a still heavily forested area at the edge of the densely populated and deforested Highland valleys, exported to Highlanders the plumes of birds of paradise, abundant in Daribi forests, in exchange for salt and polished stone axes imported from the Highlands. Pygmy groups of African rainforests export forest products such as honey, game meat, and mushrooms to neighboring Bantu farmers, from whom they import garden-grown foods, pots, iron, tobacco, and alcohol. In the Vitiaz Strait region the islanders export pig tusks, dogs, sago, betelnut, mats, beads, obsidian, and red ocher to mainlanders, from whom they import pigs, dog teeth, taro, tobacco, pots, net bags, bows and arrows, and black paint. In trade between coastal and inland Inuit of Alaska’s north slope, coastal people could offer marine mammal products such as seal oil for fuel and food, seal and walrus skins, whale blubber, and walrus ivory, plus beach driftwood and wooden vessels, plus pottery and bags that they made. Inlanders could in turn supply caribou hides and legs and antlers, furs of wolves and other terrestrial mammals, pitch for caulking, and pemmican and berries.
Who trades what?
These examples of objects exchanged illustrate a pattern that we moderns take for granted, because it describes almost all trade today: each partner supplies objects that it has or can readily make, and that the other partner lacks. Raw materials, and the skills required to manufacture finished products, are both unevenly distributed around the world. For example, the United States is the world’s leading exporter of raw foods and manufactured aircraft, because we can grow food and build airplanes in excess of our own needs. However, we are an importer of oil, because we don’t produce enough of it for our needs, while some other countries (such as Saudi Arabia) produce oil in excess of their needs. Such imbalances of raw materials and of skills also characterize much, but not all, traditional trade.
As for unevenly distributed raw materials, a common pattern is for neighboring peoples occupying different habitats each to supply the other with raw materials confined to or more abundant in the exporter’s habitat. Many examples include trade between coastal and inland peoples. In each such case, as I detailed two paragraphs above for Alaska’s Inuit, the coastal partner has preferential or sole access to marine or coastal resources such as marine mammals and fish and shells, while the inland partner has preferential or sole access to terrestrial resources such as game, gardens, and forests.
Another common pattern consists of trade in very local raw materials not tied to specific habitat types, notably salt and stone. The Dugum Dani obtained all of their salt from the Iluekaima brine pool, and all of their stone for axes and adzes from a single quarry in the Nogolo Basin, while for much of the Southwest Pacific the main source of obsidian (the volcanic glass used to make the sharpest stone artifacts) was quarries near Talasea on the island of New Britain. Talasea obsidian became traded over an expanse of more than 4,000 miles, from Borneo 2,000 miles west of Talasea to Fiji 2,000 miles east of Talasea.
The remaining common pattern of trade in different types of raw materials involves neighboring groups with different subsistence strategies, giving them access to different materials. In many places around the world, hunter-gatherers trade meat, honey, resins, and other forest products that they hunt and gather to nearby village farmers in return for crops that the villagers grow. Examples include plains bison hunters and Pueblo farmers of the U.S. Southwest, Semang hunters and Malay farmers of peninsular Malaysia, and numerous hunter-farmer associations of India, as well as the African Pygmy hunters and Bantu farmers, and the Agta hunters and Philippine farmers whom I’ve already described. There are similar trade relations between herders and farmers in many parts of Asia and Africa, and between herders and hunter-gatherers in Africa.
Traditional trade, like modern trade, often also involves unevenly distributed skills. An example is the virtual local monopolies of pottery and ocean-going canoes enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mailu Island off the coast of southeast New Guinea, studied by the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski. While pottery was initially also produced by nearby New Guinea mainlanders, the Mailu achieved an export monopoly by figuring out how to mass-produce finer, thinner, stylistically standardized pots. Such pots were advantageous both to Mailu pot-makers and to their pot-using customers. Thin pots enabled the pot-makers to produce more pots from a given quantity of clay, to dry the pots faster, and to reduce the risk of damage while the pots were being fired. As for pot-using consumers, they preferred thin Mailu pots because less fuel was required for cooking in them, and the contents boiled faster. Mailu Islanders similarly acquired a monopoly on making and operating long-distance ocean-going canoes, which were more complicated and required more skill to construct than did the simpler canoes with which mainlanders were confined to making short trips in more sheltered coastal waters. Comparable manufacturing monopolies were enjoyed a thousand years ago by Chinese porcelain- and paper-makers, until their manufacturing secrets leaked out or were duplicated. In our modern times of industrial espionage and diffusion of knowledge, it has become difficult to maintain monopolies for long. However, the United States briefly (for four years) enjoyed a monopoly of making atomic bombs (which we didn’t export), and the United States and Europe today dominate the world market in very large commercial jet aircraft (which we do export).
The remaining type of traditional trade, which scarcely has a parallel today, has been called “conventional monopolies.” This term refers to trade in an item which either of the two trade partners could obtain or manufacture, but which one side chooses to rely on the other partner to supply, as an excuse for maintaining trade relations. For example, among the items that the Dugum Dani receive from the Jalemo area are wooden arrows with elaborate barbs and decorations, plus net bags with bright orchid fibers woven around the strings. The Dani make simple undecorated arrows and bags themselves. With a Jalemo arrow or bag in front of them, the Dani could perfectly well duplicate it, because the level of carving or weaving skill required is not high. But the Dani instead continue to depend on the Jalemo area for imported arrows and bags, as well as for forest materials that the Jalemo area has in more abundance than does the Dani homeland. Dani recognition of the Jalemo “conventional monopoly” of decorated arrows and bags is advantageous to both parties by helping to even out effects of fluctuations in supply and demand. The Jalemo people can continue to obtain salt from the Dani even if Jalemo harvests of forest products should temporarily decline, and the Dani can continue to sell salt to the Jalemo people even if Dani demand for forest products is temporarily glutted.