So for how much longer are we to com-fuse the force [sic] of attraction (that grave aesthetic principle of chemistry and geo-magnetic motion dynamics) with the sick attraction to force? In grand potlatch style, the greatest return may be to destroy the so-called wealth than expropriate and redistribute it to the poor. To end the circulation of capital is to end its system-input, the sacrificial gift of labour; to stop the flow of paper under or across tables is to burn (or /shift+delete/) it, releasing noxious clouds of vapour-bits back into the vortex to return as harmless black rain visible only to the clothed eye.
Yet the connection between material flow and social relations is reciprocal. A specific social relation may constrain a given movement of goods, but a specific transaction – "by the a same token" – suggests particular social relation. If friends make gifts, gifts make friends.
A great proportion of primitive[1] exchange, much more than our own traffic, has as its decisive function this latter, instrumental one: the material flow underwrites or initiates social relations. Thus do primitive peoples transcend the Hobbesian chaos. For the indicative condition of primitive society is the absence of a public and sovereign power: persons and (especially) groups confront each other not merely as distinct interests but with the possible inclination and certain right to physically prosecute these interests. Force is decentralized, legitimately held in severalty, the social compact has yet to be drawn, the state nonexistent. So peacemaking is not a sporadic intersocietal event, it is a continuous process going on within society itself. Groups must "come to terms" – the phrase notably connotes a material exchange satisfactory on both sides.
Economy has been defined as the process of (materially) provisioning society and the definition opposed to the human act of satisfying wants. The great play of instrumental exchange in primitive societies underscores the usefulness of the former definition. Sometimes the peace-making aspect is so fundamental that precisely the same sorts and amounts of stuff change hands: the renunciation of opposed interest is in this way symbolized. On a strictly formal view the transaction is a waste of time and effort. One might say that people are maximizing value, social value, but such is to misplace the determinant of the transaction, to fail to specify the circumstances which produce different material outcomes in different historical instances, to hold fast to the economizing premise of the market by a false assignment of pecuniary-like qualities to social qualities, to take the high road to tautology. The interest of such transactions is precisely that they do not materially provision people and are not predicated on the satisfaction of human material needs. They do, however, decidedly provision society: they maintain social relations, the structure of society, even if they do not to the least advantage the stock of consumables. Without any further assumptions, they are "economic" in the suggested meaning of the term (cf. Sahlins, 1969).
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Hobbes's particular inability to conceive primitive society as such is manifest by his assimilation of it, that is of the patriarchal chiefdom, to the commonwealth. This is clear enough in the passages of Leviathan on commonwealths by acquisition, but even more definitive in the parallel sections of Elements of Law and De Cive. Thus, in the latter: "A father with his sons and servants, grown into a civil person by virtue of his paternal jurisdiction, is called a family. This family, if through multiplying of children and acquisition of servants it becomes numerous, insomuch as without casting the uncertain die of war it cannot be subdued, will be termed an hereditary kingdom. Which though it differ from an institutive monarchy, being acquired by force, in the original and manner of its constitution; yet being constituted, it hath all the same properties, and the right of authority is everywhere the same; insomuch as it is not needful to speak anything of them apart" (English Works [Molesworth, ed.], 1839, vol. 2, pp. 121- 122)...
A few last words about the fate of The Gift. Since Mauss, and in part by way of rapprochment with modern economics, anthropology has become more consistently rational in its treatment of exchange. Reciprocity is contract pure and mainly secular, sanctioned perhaps by a mixture of considerations of which a carefully calculated self-interest is not the least (cf. Firth, 1 967) . Mauss seems in this regard much more like Marx in the first chapter of Capital: if it can be said without disrespect, more animistic. One quarter of corn is exchangeable for X hundredweight iron. What is it in these things, so obviously different, that yet is equal? Precisely, the question was, for Marx, what in these things brings them into agreement?-and not what is it about these parties to the exchange? Similarly, for Mauss; "What force is there in the thing given that makes the beneficiary reciprocate?" And the same kind of answer, from "intrinsic" properties : here the hau, if there the socially necessary labor time. Yet "animistic" is manifestly an improper characterization of the thought involved. If Mauss, like Marx, concentrated singularly on the anthropomorphic qualities of the things exchanged, rather than the (thinglike?) qualities of the people, it was because each saw in the transactions respectively at issue a determinate form and epoch of alienation : mystic alienation of the donor in primitive reciprocity, alienation of human social labor in commodity production (cf. Godelier, 1966, p. 143). They thus share the supreme merit, unknown to most "Economic Anthropology," of taking exchange as it is historically presented, not as a natural category explicable by a certain eternal disposition of humanity.
In the total prestations between clan and clan, said Mauss, things are related in some degree as persons and persons in some degree as things. More than irrational, it exaggerates only slightly to say that the process approaches clinical definitions of neurosis: persons are treated as objects; people confuse themselves with the external world. But even beyond the desire to affirm the rationality of exchange, a large section of Anglo-American anthropology has seemed instinctively repelled by the commercialization of persons apparently implied in the Maussian formula.
Nothing could be farther apart than the initial Anglo-Saxon and French responses to this generalized idea of prestation. Here was Mauss decrying the inhumanity of modern abstract distinctions between real and personal law, calling for a return to the archaic relation between men and things, while the Anglo-Saxons could only congratulate the ancestors for having finally liberated men from a debasing confusion with material objects. And especially for thus liberating women. For when Levi-Strauss parleyed the "total prestation" into a grand system of marital exchanges, an interesting number of British and American ethnologists recoiled at once from the idea, refusing for their part to "treat women as commodities. "
Without wanting to decide the issue, not a t least in these terms, I do wonder whether the Anglo-American reaction of distrust was ethnocentric. It seems to presume an eternal separation of the economic, having to do with getting and spending, and besides always a little off-color, from the social sphere of moral relationships. For if it is decided in advance that the world in general is differentiated as is ours in particular, economic relations being one thing and social (kinship) another, than to speak of groups exchanging women does appear an immoral extension of business to marriage and a slander of all those engaged in the traffic. Still, the conclusion forgets the great lesson of "total prestation," both for the study of primitive economics and of marriage.
The primitive order is generalized. A clear differentiation of spheres into social and economic does not there appear. As for marriage, it is not that commercial operations are applied to social relations, but the two were never completely separated in the first place. We must think here in the same way we do now about classificatory kinship: not that the term for "father" is "extended" to father's brother, phrasing that smuggles in the priority of the nuclear family, but rather that we are in the presence of a broad kinship category that knows no such genealogical distinctions. And as for economics, we are similarly in the presence of a generalized organization for which the supposition that kinship is "exogenous" betrays any hope of understanding.
[1]: society without the state. One is tempted to say "uncomplicated by the state" or "incomplicit with it".
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