Blood and Money. David McNally
the classical Greek situation, historian Richard Seaford notes the novelty of coined money as “the single, ubiquitous, and visible embodiment of universal exchange value,” and observes that the Greek polis of the sixth century BCE produced “the first ever words for and thought about money.”22 A conceptual revolution was at work here as much as a socio-material one. In societies that are not extensively monetized, measures of wealth involve inventories: lists of discrete items, from cattle to gold chalices, from wheat to enslaved people. Rather than translating all forms of property into the single quantitative index provided by money, such societies require serial lists of qualitatively distinct objects. In the Old Testament, for instance, Solomon’s wealth is described by enumerating all the specific things that entered into his daily provisions—flour, meal, cattle, sheep, goats, deer, gazelles, roebucks, and fowl—as well as various items he received on a monthly basis, among them barley and straw for his horses (I Kings 4:22–28). But societies governed by a universal equivalent need merely compute every such item into units of money in order to produce a single sum, a homogeneous lump of wealth—be it drachmas or dollars, or Cicero’s sesterces. “From the Greeks onward, we find a new way of speaking and of thinking. Now a person might state the entirety of a household’s possessions in terms of money, as no member of a premonetary society would ever do.”23 Not for nothing did Aristotle declare that money (nomisma) “is a measure of everything,” and that it functions as such by “making things commensurable.”24 But if money is a measure of everything, we have entered a unique set of social relations with a history. And as much as that history involved cultural and intellectual revolutions, it equally pivoted on socioeconomic ones that refashioned aristocratic gift economies and reorganized social life.
Markets Powered by Warfare: Gifts, Reciprocity, and Violence
Homeric Greece, or at least the life of the Greek heroes depicted in the epics, revolved around an aristocratic gift economy.25 Social status was tied to “competitive generosity,” to the ability to bestow lavish gifts on one’s peers along with displays of munificence toward those beneath one in the social order.26 Gift giving was essential to the exercise and display of noble virtue. Guest-friendship (xenia) and gift exchange bound people together in a nexus of reciprocal obligation, where receivers owed their benefactors services, assistance, and counter-gifts. Gift-giving systems can certainly be hierarchical ones, reproducing patterns of social inequality. But some critics have mistakenly assumed that these patterns involved a sort of capitalist calculation. They were in fact something entirely different.27 As much as gifts involved expectations of counter-gifts (hospitality, services, or prized items), the wealthy were driven not to accumulate goods as ends in themselves, but rather to outdo other aristocrats in the extravagance of their generosity. More accurately, perhaps, they were driven to accumulate wealth in order to disperse it. Confronted with similar values in the gift-giving economy on the Solomon Islands, one appalled self-styled anthropologist proclaimed such actions “absurd.” “The only profit a man can make in a deal in this absurd society is a reputation for generosity,” she wrote.28 Yet generosity—which pivoted on accumulation of wealth for purposes of dispersal—was crucial to social esteem. Alongside valor on the battlefield, gift giving was the key to honor and power. Indeed, oral histories were built upon these exchanges and displays. “No single detail in the life of the heroes receives so much attention in the Iliad and the Odyssey as gift-giving,” writes M. I. Finley, “and always there is frank reference to adequacy, appropriateness, recompense.”29 Similar values pervaded the earliest written histories, so much so that Herodotus, often dubbed “the first historian,” exhibited an “obsessive” attention to the bestowal of aristocratic gifts that were “worthy to be seen.”30
It is often said by anthropologists that societies based on gift exchange are governed by principles of reciprocity.31 This distinguishes them from centralized systems of redistribution, in which the state (or a proto-state) receives contributions, like grain, and reallocates them. Whereas in a redistributive system the circulation of wealth is centrally organized, in reciprocal economies it is decentralized, often revolving around a small number of big men, or “chiefs,” and their gifting. To be sure, systems of reciprocity can be highly stratified and tilted in favor of those with greater resources. To get at these complexities, critical anthropology has identified three dominant forms of socioeconomic reciprocity: generalized, balanced, and negative. Generalized reciprocity approximates a system of “pure” gift giving: those who can shall give; those who need shall receive. Balanced reciprocity involves direct exchange (barter) of goods that are considered in some sense to be equivalents. Finally, negative reciprocity entails getting something for nothing, or at least for as little as possible, by means of plunder, theft, and other forms of violent appropriation. As Marshall Sahlins suggests, these three modes of reciprocity are governed by social distance. The closer and more intimate the social bond (e.g., kinship), the more the pure gift giving of generalized reciprocity will prevail. The greater the social distance, the more negative reciprocity (plunder and theft) will be the norm.32 Where two or more of these modes of interaction are in play, relations between them often become unstable. Indeed, it was characteristic of the archaic Greek world before coinage that a dramatic growth in the sphere of negative reciprocity—particularly raiding and plunder—began to undermine the generalized reciprocity that prevailed within more intimate social relations.
Before turning to those developments, let us note other crucial features of nonmonetary economies based on reciprocity. To begin with, they are multicentric systems.33 Their socioeconomic organization involves distinct spheres, governed by divergent principles and values. A realm in which direct exchange (trade, or balanced reciprocity) occurs may coexist with a domain of negative reciprocity (plunder and theft). Trade and plunder (balanced and negative reciprocity) are permissible only with “outsiders.” The sphere of generalized reciprocity will be allergic to such practices. There, within the domain of the clan, tribe, or village community, gift giving will dominate. In the intimate world of the local community, not only are theft and plunder considered evil, but so are efforts to commodify and instrumentalize people and most goods. The bulk of goods move through reciprocal circuits of societal reproduction, preserving and reproducing people and their social bonds in an ethos of mutuality. Rather than things belonging to people, persons adhere to things. People belong, for instance, to the land, the rivers, and the forest. They belong to their ancestors and their gods, to their community and kin, to the shared histories of the living and the dead. Individuals belong to their dwellings and to those of public life—the assembly spaces, sacred trees, temples, and communal sites. In fact, the Homeric adjective indicating that an individual is free, eleutheros, actually refers to a state of belonging to others and to the community. To be free is to belong, whereas the unfree lack belonging, like a captured foreigner ripped from her community, with whom the conquerors acknowledge no shared histories or communal obligations.34 Whereas the unfree inhabit a realm of disconnection, the free belong to a social world in which persons and things are alive with memory and life; they connect groups in the here and now, and they link generations throughout time.
As for aristocratic gift giving, the nature of a prestigious gift was that it had a distinguished history. The most prized shield was worn by a legendary hero in an epic battle; a valued goblet touched the lips of a great king; a treasured cauldron had been passed down through the generations of a noble household. The same was true, albeit on a much more modest scale, for commoners. Land, jewelry, treasured heirlooms, and pieces of clothing—all of these embodied histories and identities. They were no more alienable by the individual than was their own body (a condition that was reserved for enslaved people). For an individual to belong to these histories was to be a part of the very material items in which history was sedimented. This is why in societies where important goods are alive with sociality, many possessions are inalienable. Even when they change hands, they still belong to their histories and those who embody them. “Inalienable possessions,” writes anthropologist Annette Weiner, “are symbolic repositories of genealogies and historical events, their unique, subjective value gives them absolute value, placing them above the exchangeability of one thing for another.”35 I could no more give away such possessions—items of family jewelry or clothing, fertility stones,