Gudeman - Economy as Ritual

5/3/23 4. Economy as Ritual - Gudeman

IV – Economy as Ritual

One of anthropology’s great discoveries is the existence of ritual economies. They

are very different from high market ones and hardly correspond to our finely honed

rational models. I have spent time exploring them in the field and learning about them by

way of reports. But why should we investigate these economies that do not measure up to

our standards of reasoned and directed action, except to recount their errors? Economy is

presumed to be the site of instrumental practices, sensible connections, and rational

choice. One Nobel Prize laureate in economics has even rejected the idea that ritual

actions can be lasting solutions to the economic problem of provisioning in an uncertain

world (North 2005:15-16). For him, economies filled with ritual must disappear in the

face of more rational ways of securing a livelihood, because economies filled with ritual

have high transaction costs.

My interest in these economies is more than antiquarian. They offer a different

vision of material life and a different perspective on our economic ways. They raise the

question: do we live in a ritualized economy as exemplified by our practices and as set

forth by the high priests of economics? Most theories today suggest that we have shed

our economic rituals of the past due to the rise of modernity and the spread of rational

thought. No one was more influential in developing this view of our secularity than Max

Weber.

In one of his finest essays Weber addressed the relation of science and values to

suggest that science contributes to refined methods of thinking and greater clarity about

the external world and ourselves (1946 [1919].1 But it cannot tell us what values to hold

and serve, although integrity in the social scientist must lead him to explore the meanings

and understandings that others hold, and to inquire into their explanations for those

values. Writing in the early 20th century, Weber was addressing the place of the scientist

in the context of the rise of rationalization and of intellectualization. Weber explored the

sinews and meanings of rationality; displaying its ambiguity of meaning and multiplicity

in practice, he brought our attention to the way rational order is given life through

bureaucracies, and how rational thinking or calculative reason increasingly informs our

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lives through capitalism. As analyst and interpreter of this Western process, Weber

foresaw what this change meant for the place of values and commitment in modern life.

As he remarked, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and

intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’”2 For Weber

disenchantment was closely linked to the spread of scientific thought seen as the belief

that humans can achieve mastery of the world through rational control and calculation.

He primarily explored the consequences of this disenchantment in relation to religion,

and used it to talk about the replacement of gods by impersonal, scientifically understood

forces: bureaucracies replace mystical capacities; rational calculation replaces a belief in

luck.

But Weber’s words often are redolent, sometimes of their opposite meaning.

Science brings clarity but requires commitment to its values. Weber explored the values

in many of the world’s great religions, and in his finest essay, he sought to uncover the

links between the rise of Protestantism (in the form of Lutheranism and Calvinism) and

the explosive shift to saving, investing and the rise of Western capitalism, which was the

exemplar of disenchantment. But Weber did not explore what he might have called,

“enchanted” or ritual economies. Thus, my question: what is a ritual economy? Could

market life be a ritual as much as a rational economy?

Ritual

What is ritual? In the social sciences and humanities, rituals have been variously

defined, extensively analyzed, and differently considered in relation to economy. Before

turning to my use of the word in relation to sociality and economy, let us consider some

of its meanings.

1. By ritual we can mean a personal, repeated action or habit as in a ritual

performed on arising or going to be; some people may have compulsive habits, which

they perform without fail, such as opening a door in a certain way. Some of us, however,

consider habits to be “economical” ways of acting, such as eating the same food at

breakfast or lunch: we do not spend time calculating what to eat: the line between

“compulsive repetition” as ritual and “rational repetition” as economy can be thin.

Which is which?

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2. Ritual can refer to a sequence of actions that we share with others as in a

marriage or death ceremony, or a greeting, such as shaking hands or kissing on both

cheeks.

3. By ritual we may refer to an expressive or symbolic aspect of life, such as

praying to a divinity, pledging allegiance to a nation as in songs or swearing fealty to an

organization. Such rituals are complete acts themselves; they are not causal or

mechanistic practices. A ritual, for example, may have reflexive effects as in a personal,

consoling prayer or consoling or joyous ceremonies with others.

4. In relation to economy, rituals may assist practices through prayers for help

with a harvest, pleas to cure an illness or animal, or appeals that working with machines

leads to no harm.

5. In relation to economy, a ritual may cost time and riches. For example, as

wealth increases, so may the size of a ritual as a form of display or thanks, as in weddings

and birthdays. As wealth falls, ceremonies may decline.

6. In relation to economy, ritual may be an expression of something else. In

Weber’s account of the Protestant Ethic the believer seeks signs of salvation through

successful economic practices. Economic success is an expression of salvation, and

material practices are an enactment of religious commitment, goodness and potential

selection in the afterlife.

Ritual also can be an expressive domain in which economic struggles and

explanations are played out. The soul can be sold to the devil for riches; spirits may

possess humans who transgress standard practices or are forced into unaccustomed

behaviors.

7. Some might see markets as a ritual because participants must go through a rite

of passage:there are rules of entry and rules of participation. The New York Stock

Exchange is opened each day by the pounding of a gavel, and it is closed by ringing a

bell. Traders take place only during this sacred time, except for after hours trading.

In markets everything is brought to the measuring rod or money, and those who

partake must practice calculative reason. This change of mentality on entering a market is

no less momentous than that required when entering a religious sanctuary. The

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suggestion that entering and leaving a market is a rite of passage may be seen as

blasphemous, but if so, is it sacrilegious of religions or of market economy?

8. Could the process of linking means to ends, and of ends to means, be the

central ritual of market economies! It is not an enchantment in the Weberian sense of a

world made by non rational processes but the opposite. The linking of means to ends, is

the enchantment, the pleasure, and the compulsion in commerce and finance. There is no

reason for it in economy except to accumulate.

I use the word ritual for its social and symbolic meanings. A ritual is a

presentation that refers to something else. It points to an idea or thing other than itself, as

in the Eucharist or the Eight Nights of Hanukah; or it may suggest how life might be, as

in the recitation of the Boy Scout Code of Honor or the Boy Scout uniform that mimics

the clothing of the military.

Rituals have to do with social relationships. They can make and recognize

commitments to others, and sever them, as in rites of passage. Rituals can extend

sociability, as in gestures of friendliness and words of kindness; and they can revivify or

recuperate connections as in annual gatherings or corroborees.

Prosaically, rituals express, reiterate, and sustain social ties. They can do what

sociality does not or cannot achieve, which is to fill gaps in connections and present an

ideal for them. Rituals can hide social ties and personal interests by veiling them, and

sometimes rituals mystify wants and desires by presenting them as what they are not.

These ritual processes frequently are found in relation to economy, especially in the way

social relationships are projected into the market and contractual spaces of commerce and

finance. Ritual, often connected to life in the house and community, may spread into the

anonymous market where it has material effects.

Let us now turn to Hypothesis 4, which has two parts. Only the first part will be

considered in this chapter.

Hypothesis 4:

1 The English translation comes from H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1946); the essay was originally given as a speech at Munich University in 1918 and published in 1919 by Duncker and Humboldt.2 Weber 1946: 155.

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In high relationship, low market economies, rituals create, extend and/or

resolve contradictions in social life. By representing sociality as it should be,

rituals can do what relationships may fail to achieve

Lemma 4a. In high relationship, low market economies, economy may

become a ritual

In low relationship, high market economies, rituals can be a creation or

resurgence of mutuality. They may complement or contradict the

individualistic and rational premises of market economy yet sustain markets

through the florescence of ceremonial life that boosts flows of currency and

commodities. These rituals present sociality as an anchor of market life.

Lemma 4b. In low relationship, high market economies, economy may

become a ritual.

Cree SpiritsThe Cree (as they have been named in English and French) consist of a number of

related language groups in Canada (plus a few in the United States). Many aspects of

their way of life have changed over the years beginning with the impact of explorers,

continuing with the arrival of European settlers and fur traders, succeeded by growing

state control, and followed most recently by the building of a hydro-electric project in

their hunting areas of Quebec. The Cree have been resilient in adapting to change while

continuing a vigor of their own. Many have left their original forest locations, but others

have sustained their “forest way of life” in the northern areas. The James Bay and the

Mistassini Cree, who have been studied by a number of ethnographers, present one

example of a ritual economy, for their practices point to their connections with spirits in

the animal world. Successful economy represent the connection between people and the

material world. Economy is a ritual about sociability that brings wellbeing.

Traditionally, the Cree alternated their material life by the

season. In the summer they resided in communities near markets

developed by Europeans and their descendants; in these months

they could earn wages. In the winter they left to trap and hunt in the

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northern forest. This winter economy, which was organized through

families living in houses, provided the Cree with both a livelihood

and identity, and it took them into a different world. The winter way

of life was not completely separate from the market, because many

Cree trapped animals partly for sale. But this material economy

offered a sense of wellbeing, and it provided the basis for Cree

resistance to intrusions, such as the hydro-electric project in

Quebec.

Among the Cree, land and forest were never permanently

owned; rather, the steward or “tallyman” of a Cree community

managed and allocated use rights to households within the group so

they could lay traplines and hunt animals in a community’s area.

Other hunters retained the right to pass through an allocated

territory and to use its resources to maintain themselves when in

transit but not to hunt. The tallymen also ensured that proper hunting

practices were maintained.

In the Cree world most things including humans, the humanly

made, and animals have a spirit. Successful hunting reflects the

relation between hunter and an animal’s spirit; hunting becomes a

ritual, and a sign of a relation.Cree hunters do not try to control

animals but to establish a relationship with their spirits. According to

the Cree, hunters do not capture an animal; the animals either offer

themselves to hunters or remain hidden.Good hunting techniques

are necessary, but success depends on the relation between animal

spirit and hunter. During the hunt, a hunter performs rituals to

persuade the animals into a relationship. When an animal is taken,

the hunter owes respect and gratitude to its spirit, and at that

moment rituals are also performed.These expressions of respect

vary. In most all cases a hunter does not boast about his success,

and he has to use the catch in a thrifty manner in order not to waste

any of the animal’s remains, which would affront its spirit. Bones and

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parts of animals are displayed on platforms, while animal fat may be

smeared on the walls of the winter house. Animal skulls are hung in

trees; and hunters sit around the carcass of a black bear and smoke

a pipe in respect.

The material practice of hunting is not viewed as a causal or

instrumental act nor a taking from nature but a give-and-take

between animal spirits and humans. Captured animals are gifts from

spirits that are shared with humans who offer their respect as part of

the ongoing relationship. This spiritual connection between hunter

and animals constitutes the vitality and the energy, or the current, of

the economy.

This perspective and practice makes the forest a place of

repose for Cree. People reside there to regain balance in their

spiritual and physical health. By returning to the forest, Cree find a

sense of calmness and equilibrium in their social ties. Misbehaving

youth are sometimes sent to live alone in the forest in order to

recover and mend their ways

The spiritual connection to the forest and animals that lies at the

base of Cree economy and identity has much to do with the vigor with

which they resisted the market and political influences that threatened

their way of life over the years. Their economy is practiced for its own

sake as to secure material wealth.

Iban RiceThe Cree economy ritual sustains their connection to their natural world. But

sometimes economy reproduces or expresses social tensions in an attempt to overcome

them. Each house of the Iban strives to be autarkic but cannot be so: for the Iban self-

sufficience is represented by a distinct strain of rice that serves as the economic basis of

each house. This ritual economy does what sociality cannot achieve, but the economic

solution is never a finality, for the problem of keeping house independence and continuity

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is continually reproduced by the social order of the house itself. The economic ritual of

continuity is a mystification of the social problem.

In the late 1940s the Iban of Borneo, which is now known as Sarawak, were

studied by the New Zealand born anthropologist, Derek Freeman.3 Freeman later became

well known for his controversy with Margaret Mead, in which he sought to refute her

findings from Samoa about the sexual experiences of young women. I never met

Freeman, but clearly he was feisty, dogged, and clever; many in the profession did not

appreciate his posthumous attack on a public idol, who had brought positive attention to

anthropology, but he made a case that her information was faulty, even if he overstated

his position. Far less known in anthropology, not to mention a wider audience, is his

earlier, sober and superb study of the Iban. In writing at once perceptive, contextual and

lucid he told about their agricultural practices and social order. The conditions of his

fieldwork were not easy and the report was not a study of economy, but Freeman

provided sufficient detail to allow a rethinking of his account. The Iban present a model

of a ritual economy in which plants are treated as human, and humans do with them what

they would like to do but cannot in their lives! For the Iban the ritual of economy makes

sociality.

The Iban raise rice for their daily sustenance. Through their

ritual handling of the crop they construct an economy in which self-

sufficiency, independence, and autarky are enacted, even while they

engage in commercial exchanges outside their independent units.

Iban self-sufficiency is expressed through a single strain of rice that

must be raised and reproduced each year to provide vitality for all

other material activities. In representing self-sufficiency as the core of

their economy, the Iban are responding to a social organization that

says otherwise, which is the key to grasping their practices, for what

the Iban “say” through their economic practices is not what they do

with their house life. Iban agricultural economy, carried out in

meticulous detail, contradicts what happens in everyday existence. In

3 See Freeman 1958, 1970[1955]. I discussed this material in Gudeman 2001, 2008.

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this respect, Iban economy is a ritual about something else and a

mystification of what they actually do. Yet, even if Iban do not model

their economy as an input-output matrix, designed to maximize

output or to lower risk, it has been effective over long periods of time.

The necessity to which it answers is not that of enacting and

displaying rational man and his choices but of continuing a current of

human sociality that keeps them together.

The Iban live in household groups that are formed around

nuclear families consisting of parents, children and a few married

offspring. Each house is termed a bilek. The word refers to both the

physical house and the people in it. These family units are situated in

larger community units or longhouses, which are structures raised on

stilts and arranged in a series of adjacent houses or bileks. Despite

abutting one another, each bilek is economically independent and

strives to last in perpetuity. A bilek, say the Iban, should never end;

its worst fate would be if all its members died. Thus, one child, male

or female, must remain in the bilek, and he or she should marry and

have children to keep it going in perpetuity.

When a young member of a bilek marries, the couple initially

joins the husband’s or the wife’s group. When a second member

marries and brings a spouse to the bilek, the combination of two

married siblings living in one house with a parental couple proves to

be unstable, and one pair – usually the junior one – leaves and

establishes a new house. The remaining sibling or a later one stays

to ensure the bilek’s continuity. Leaving a bilek, either to marry into

another bilek or to form a new one is stressful. Tensions between two

married pairs in a house lead to secession, but leaving means

severing ties to a natal home and its ritual food. At that moment of

separation, bilek identity and bilek connections are broken.

Iban economy re-presents these stressful social acts of

formation and division as unity and continuity. The material economy

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of the Iban provides them with sustenance and a presentation of the

house as autarkic, as well as an unbroken endeavor from the past to

the future. The Iban do with their economy what they cannot do

socially; it is a ritual model of what cannot be attained in social life.

yet Iban live both as reality.

Everything circles about rice as if it were a continuing human

group. Iban consider rice to be human and scarcely eat the strain on

which they most depend! This uneaten strain is known as the

“foundation” rice. Despite its material and social importance, the Iban

do not produce it in ever-greater quantities. Given that they do not

eat or produce much of it, why do they grow it?

According to the Iban, rice has human features. Like humans,

rice has illnesses, which resemble human ones and have human

names: rice may have a headache, warts or a cold. Rice that is

growing and spreading is also compared to families that grow; rice

even has the power to increase after being harvested and while

stored in bins underneath a bilek.

Both rice and humans have a soul, which is known as

semengat. (This word might even be translated as “vital principle,” a

general idea about the current of life.) At death, the human soul

becomes dew, which rises in the fields and soaks into the rice that a

house has planted and eats. The soul of rice also may roam like

young men who may spend a year or more wandering elsewhere.

Journeys by the young are expected and represent a threat to the

continuity of a bilek. If the soul of rice roams, however, it ruins the

crop, which is a disaster for bilek continuity. Thus, rice is specially

treated and precautions are taken so that the soul of rice does not

leave the field. When Iban are harvesting they take care not to upset

the soul of the rice, which might take offense and flee; and market

crops are never planted near household rice, as they might give

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affront to the growing crop. Young men can do what rice cannot; rice

is ritually made to do, what cannot be done with young men.

Not all rice is the same. Every bilek raises several strains, but

one strain is the “root” or foundation rice. This head strain is termed

the padi pun just as each bilek has a “root” leader or pun bilek. The

foundation rice is the current of the bilek; like the bilek, it must never

end. Each foundation rice has a special name, distinctive visual

features, an origin story, and prohibitions that surround it. The Iban

do not subsist on this rice, however; it is planted and harvested but

only cautiously eaten. Around the foundation strain are planted a

number of subsidiary, sacred strains; and around these rice strains

are sown ordinary strains, which are consumed and sometimes sold.

The fertility of all the rice depends on the health of the foundation rice

or padi pun, just as the bilek house depends on its leader or pun bilek

for direction. Through the head rice the Iban communicate with the

rice spirits, and it is considered to be “the lords of all” (Freeman

1970:154). The root rice is planted in the center of the field, and is

planted first and harvested last. The subsidiary sacred strains are

then planted, and subsequently the ordinary, fast growing seeds are

sown outside them. If any of the rice in the field becomes diseased, it

is treated through rituals performed at the center on the foundation

rice.

The layout of the rice field reflects the Iban house that is

centered on a leader who continues even while the house divides.

When a married pair leave the group (after residing in either his or

her family’s bilek), they take with them one of the auxiliary sacred

strains that surrounds and has absorbed powers of the foundation

strain. It becomes the root strain for the new bilek just as the

offspring who leaves the bilek and takes the strain becomes the new

head. The layout of a field, with the head rice at the center,

surrounded by subsidiary sacred strains, and then by ordinary rice,

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projects how the group will divide, while each root strain embodies

the ritual strength, solidarity, and current of successful bileks from the

past.

Through the foundation strain, this ritual economy represents

the autarky or self-sufficiency that the human group can never attain.

Bileks grow, bring in new members, divide, and lose most of their

members. In contrast, the foundation rice is never traded for other

rice or anything else; it is not lent or fed to people from outside the

bilek; and it is never mixed with the other rice strains in the bilek, all

of which are consumed in the house. Each year, part of the

foundation rice is carefully preserved for seeding in the following

cycle, but only a small amount of this seed is planted, the rest is

hoarded, and the bilek group eats its reserve parsimoniously. Iban

say that if the foundation strain left the bilek in exchange or

consumption, its vitality or life principle that was accumulated over

the years through rituals would be dissipated. Not being able to

reproduce the base rice would be even worse, for this rice is the bilek

whose continuity it must assure.

In contrast to the foundation rice, the other strains are eaten

and may be traded; excess supplies are exchanged for Chinese jars

and brass gongs, which are displayed at the house. They represent

the power of the root rice that has brought fertility to the strains that

surround it. An accumulation and display of these market items

shows the continuity and success of the house and of the one item

that is never traded or let loose – its foundation crop.

Iban have a ritual economy. They depend on rice, and the root

rice is the source of food for the house but is hardly consumed. Much

thought and energy is expended on this item that is scarcely used,

because it is the source of vitality in material and social life. Iban

economy is a ritual that keeps social life going and whose feature of

self-sufficiency represents what the house group cannot achieve.

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Iban economy transforms house dependence on others through

marriage into the image of autarky. Iban economy turns house

sociality into what it cannot achieve: self-sufficiency. Iban ritual

economy contradicts the social life on which it is based.

Dobuan AutarkyDuring the 1920s, which were the early days of anthropology, Reo Fortune,

traveled to the island of Dobu, which is located off the coast of New Guinea, where he

carried out an extensive field study. Fortune also made a significant contribution to

mathematics (known as The Fortunate Number), and when I knew him much later he

would tell me again and again that I should take up physics. After his Dobu research

Fortune worked in New Guinea with Margaret Mead, who was his wife. But he is best

known for his Dobu study, because on this small, relatively isolated island, the young

anthropologist encountered a society in which lines of yams were treated as human, and

humans were dependent on the keeping the yam lines self-sufficient or autarkic. Was

everything back to front?

On Dobu, yams are the staple, but they provide more than

sustenance. In the Dobuan world, yams are beings, like humans, and

they give birth to children, like mothers. Without a garden of yams

one is nothing, even despised: with yams to raise and to eat, a

Dobuan has a social place, even if it is always in jeopardy because

anyone’s yams can be lost or stolen by others. Connecting people

over time and in space, yams are the current of Dobuan sociality. But

this society is built on an unresolved dialectic. Households raise

yams, and yams make up the material economy of Dobu, but yam

lines do not hold this group together. On Dobu, the house economy

and the larger community by which the yams are transmitted do not

fit together. Not only do the two parts of economy diverge, they are at

odds.

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Before going further, I admit to simplification. The Dobuans

participate in the famed kula exchange that takes place between

islands in the Southern Pacific. Bronislaw Malinowski, who carried

out his research in the Trobriand Islands,had studied and described

it.4 As Malinowski presented the kula, it was all absorbing for the

Trobrianders, but Fortune, whose work was published in 1932, some

years after Malinowski’s, offered a different picture of Dobuan life.

For these people gardening is more important than participation in

the kula. As Fortune saw it, kula exchange meant the exchange of

ornamental wear – armbands and necklaces; the kula was a

noneconomic institution, impelled by the love of external exchange.

Even so, during the kula exchanges of high valuables, Dobuans

bartered some of their useful items such as sago, face paint, and

teeth paint for pottery and adze blades. Dobu was not isolated, and

the Dobuans did more than raise and eat yams, but yams were the

center of their economy. As Fortune expressed it, “gardening is the

supreme occupation.”

Dobuans reckon their important relationships through

matrilines, which are termed, ”mother’s milk.” These groups trace

their connections through lines of females but they include both the

women and the men who are direct descendants of lineage females.

Women pass on the affiliation, men do not. At each generation,

however, men are part of a matrilineage and have considerable

power within it. Through the matrilines house and garden land, name,

status, trees, canoes, fishing nets, adzes, valuables, personal

property and above all yams are inherited, although men sometimes

pass some of this material goods, except for yams, to their offspring

outside their matriline.

The social order also depends on establishing a house within

a matrilineal community. A house consists of husband, wife and their

4 Malinowski 192

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children. In effect, the house group is a short matriline (consisting of

mother and children) plus an in-marrying spouse.

So far, so good, but this arrangement sets up an irresolvable

problem. The basic social unit is the short matriline consisting of a

sister, her children, and her brother who has a degree of authority

over them within the matrilineage.This is the property owning group.

The group that works the holding, however, is the house consisting of

a mother, father and children.

A tension is established between the matrilineal family of

brother, sister and her children, and the nuclear family of husband,

wife, and children. Both are important, but in different ways. Through

the matrilineage material wealth is inherited; through the house

material activities are carried out. To provide descendants for the

matriline, males from outside the lineage are needed, just as a

lineage brother will father children through a mother outside his

matriline. Genders are pulled in two directions. Males are pulled

toward their sisters and their offspring who are their closest

relatives,inheritors, and successors; and they are pulled toward their

spouses and their own children who are in a different lineage.

Females are pulled toward their brothers from whom their children

inherit and who have authority over them, and they are pulled toward

their spouses with whom they make a house with her children. Here

lies the dilemma: how can each set of ties be maintained in light of

the other? The inner social cell is the short matrilineal group

consisting of mother, brother and her children, but it cannot

reproduce without a male from outside; in reverse, the inner

economic cell of the house must provide a male to another group just

as it receives.

The dilemma of establishing a house while maintaining lineage

ties cannot be fully resolved, for where should the house be located –

near the mother’s matrilineal community or near the father’s lineage?

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If a matrilineage keeps to itself, it cannot reproduce, and if it allows its

members to live elsewhere, it does not persist.

Dobuans have devised a part solution: each family maintains

two houses and alternates between them. One year a family of

mother, father and children lives in the community of the mother and

her matrilineal brothers, while the husband is separated from his

matrilineal community; the next year the family lives in the community

of the male and his matrilineal sisters, while the wife is separated

from hers. The solution is not perfect, because it means that a

matrilineal community always contains outsider husbands who are

not members of the community lineage. More important, the basic

social unit of Dobu, consisting of a mother, her offspring and her

brother, is never fully kept together; either the uncle is nearby when

the family resides in his community and the father is absent from his

matrilineage, or the uncle is absent when the father resides – as an

uncle - in his matrilineal village. Throughout these momentous

transitions the house economy stays together at the expense of one

or the other matrilines that are the communal units of society.

This solution of alternating residence offers an uneasy

compromise, and the underlying tension reverberates through

Dobuan society and everyday life. For example, there is tension,

competition, and sorcery between people who are living in the same

village but who are not members of its lineage. Males residing in their

wife’s village are termed “boundary men” and are viewed with

suspicion. Suspected of being sorcerers, they feel at risk as well.

If the Dobuan dilemma remains unresolved in social life, it is

ritually resolved in material life. From a market or standard economy

perspective, everything is topsy-turvy on Dobu. The material

economy of yams is a re-presentation and a mystification of social

relationships instead of being the foundation on which social life is

built. Economy becomes a social statement.

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Each matrilineage has a line of yam seed, and seed yams are

secured and inherited only within the matrilineage, from brother and

sister to her offspring. According to Dobuans, only this yam seed will

produce for the members of the matrilineage who possess it,

because the yams need the associated lineage incantations in order

to grow, and these spells are held secretly and passed within the

matrilineage. For the same reason, members of a matrilineage are

not able to grow yams that are not of their matrilineal seed. In fact,

say the Dobuans, wild yams, over which spells are not performed,

cannot reproduce. Reo Fortune, the intrepid ethnographer, even

offered free yam seed (and money) to Dobuans for planting in their

gardens, but his offer was refused.

According to Dobuans, yams have ears, by which they

respond to incantations of growth; but yam lines do not increase in

number. A large garden appears for a different reason: yams walk

about at night, and through spells men may steal them as they stroll.

Just as men try to steal wives through spells, so they try to steal

yams by verbal persuasion. Seducing women and seducing yams

bring prestige, bearing witness to control of magical powers. Between

men of different matrilines there is intense competition to woo yams

in this perceived no growth situation.

Husband and wife raise yams together in a garden but keep

their seed apart. (No one else should enter their garden or their

house) for fear of their spells.) Husband and wife each help provide

for their house family and their harvests are deposited in the house

yam bin, but they are stored separately. The two yam lines are

earmarked in cooking as well, and a partner does not eat the yams of

a spouse, although both strains are fed to their children.

Every year a part of the harvest must be saved as seed for the

next year, and if a seed strain is depleted the owner is at grave risk.

He or she may be able to obtain the appropriate seed from matrilineal

28 January 2010 17


kin but usually not. If a yam line is lost, so is the matriline, because it

cannot feed its chldren and its members will not be able to marry as

no one will pair with them for fear of losig their own lines by having to

feed too many others. The destitute person becomes a beggar or

fisherman, which are despised occupations.

Thus, Dobuan yam lines are like human matrilineages, with

the exception that they do not need to mix with other lines to

reproduce. Yams are complete lineages without need of outsiders.

They are seeded, cultivated, harvested, eaten and preserved, as if

they were autarkic lines. On Dobu, economy is not abstracted or

separated from social life: it is not an impersonal machine nor a

strictly material act, because yams need incantations from humans to

grow. The yam garden is a ritual site as if it were the solution to a

social problem the Dobuans created but cannot accept. In Dobuan

economy everything is in reverse: If in high market economies we

sometimes mystify economic relationships as if they were friendly

and mutual, Dobuans mystify their deepest social tension as if it

could be resolved through their economy and an autarkic current of

yams.

I am not suggesting that Dobuans eat only yams or that

gardening, while deemed by them to be the most important work, is

the whole of their material life. Dobuans exchange valuables in kula

transactions with neighboring islands, and they barter for specific

objects. But the focus is inward on the independent matrilineage,

which is impossible to sustain, except in the imagination modeled as

an autarkic yam economy. Yams are the vital current for Dobuans,

and Dobuan economy is a ritual that says something about their most

profound social problem but never resolves it.

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Economy Talks

These ritual economies are focused on the house and community spaces of

material, and they are connected to trade and commerce. In contemporary discussions,

the idea of markets is linked to the notion of freedom. According to this view, with

increased exchange and specialization, choice broadens, and people have a better

opportunity to optimize their preferences. But is this vision of freedom all that we mean

by the term and is market choice its only measure?

Ritual economies also exhibit freedom by displaying that economies are

fashioned in many ways and serve many purposes: each could have been different.

With them economy begins with sociality. It does and says something about the

connections of people to the past, future, environment, divinity or spirits, and

others. The “bottom line” is not profit but social issues, such as continuity, identity,

relationships, well-being, and contradictions.

The examples can be multiplied, for narratives explaining connections,

establishing identity, and assuring continuity are widely found. A productive resource

may be seen as a gift from God or from the devil that is shared. It can be viewed as a gift

of nature taken on the basis of first come, first serve or secured by the labor used to

improve it. A current of vitality can be viewed as a gift from ancestors or from parents.5

Economists sometimes tax me to produce a theory that can be verified or falsified, or to

produce a deductive argument. Instead, I observe that ritual economies are widely found

and that the geographic and cultural diversity of these examples constitutes a form of

persuasion, as are deductive and mathematical models in the world of high markets.

Ritual economies are built in many ways, which present a contrast to our idea of

inert things and ideas. In high market economies, we control lifeless ores, air, earth,

machines, and other substances used in production and distribution. In ritual economies,

people seem to be controlled by forces from which the modern mentality has liberated us.

But does this liberation come at a cost? Have high market severed the currents that place

them in a heritage, the material world, and sociality? Others understand that ancestors or

5 See Gudeman (2001, 2008). For southern Belize, see (Wilk 1991); for Borneo, see Helliwell 1995; Janowski (1995); for a Greek mountain community, see Du Boulay (1974); for Serbia, see Filifer 1995. For a survey of the “spiritual commons,” see (McWilliam 2009:167).

28 January 2010 19


spirits were or were not favorable, or that luck and fortune did or did not bring a good

result. From as high market perspective, these are rationalizations or stories about human

failings that people tell themselves. But consider how our view about their stories appears

to them: is our understanding of ritual economies a rationalization for our economy in

which connections to others and the environment are not recognized? One implication of

an economy that does not connect itself to animate gods and spirits, or to a human spirit,

is a loss of humility, and of a sense and acceptance of uncertainty. When we claim that

“information” reduces “risk,” we place ourselves in an objective position that recognizes

few bounds to human reason.

Was Weber too pessimistic in pointing to a loss of ritual or disenchantment as

characteristic of our age? Could it be that high market economies are rituals rather than

luminous expressions of self-interested, calculated choice? Even if they do not have

currents that unite them, they are buffeted by currents of sociality in various forms, from

the affection for goods and their exchange, to mimicry of others in consumption and

investing, to cycles of do-it-yourself in cooking and home improvements, to alternative

experiments in material life, to national and international laws that place boundaries on

markets. We do not know how far these currents will proceed, but they are part of

economy’s perpetual dialectic of mutuality and market.

28 January 2010 20

Gudeman - Economy as Ritual

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Transcript of Gudeman - Economy as Ritual