Chapter 7 (Part 2) Honor and Degradation, Debt The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Violence has marked the honour of men across most of human history. This is made possible by linking women, debt/money, and dignity.
Dear Reader,
We’re going down the rabbit hole of David’s case-ticles, a listing of different cases as a discussion of his ideas and arguments on honour. Do not get lost in it. It is pretty much disjointed. He has gone off tangent once again and I will try to make sense and thread the connections between them.
Today, we see a timeline of how honour evolved from a human economy perspective (human are not commodities) to one where humans become part of the market. The connection is rather tenuous but it is a start.
I am lucky that it is the end of this week’s heatwave. I can’t imagine how hot where you may be!
Stay cool,
Melanie
Honour in the human economy
Graeber traces the origin of financialised honour using Early Medieval Irish legal laws. Rather than a criminal code, these legal laws are civil codes enacted to compensate for the honour price (lóg n-enech) or the price of the face of the victim. Interestingly, this is where the term face value came from as Charles-Edwards (1978) translated the Welsh term.1 This means that the status of the victim was just as important as the offence committed against him.
The law statutes in Early Medieval Ireland (400 - 100 AD) were littered with measures of value against social status. I use the term value because there is not a single form of standardised currency or a market in the texts as mentioned by Graeber. This means that one of the uses of social money was as a measure of honour and its loss.
Social money was distinguished from other currencies used for trading occurring on the coast where cattle and slaves were sold. It is commonly used as
gifts
fees to judges, craftsmen, doctors, poets, etc.
feudal payments between lords and client
Graeber noted that there was little price tagged to basic commodities. It appears that rather than purchasing, these items were exchanged. Skills are traded for goods and vice versa. This sounds like a clunky system where a market would simplify the process.
However, when it comes to honour compensation, the law codes (commonly ascribed as the Brehon Law) provided for every conceivable instance including damages against verbal insults by poets. Honour was highly quantified and distinguished according to a person’s rank.
insult against a sacred being (king, bishop, master poet) requires 7 cumal or slave girls
insult against an ordinary person equals 21 milk cows or 21 ounces of silver
The codes get even more detailed when it comes to physical damages. A cut on the cheek requires:
a king receives one cow + value in grains of wheat
a farmer receives one cow + value in oats
a smallholder receives one cow + value in peas
What does this all mean? In a human economy, social money was used to put a price on human dignity. Money was understood as a filler for the loss and gain of human dignity. It is an arithmetic of dignity with the power to extract and restore it.
The fate of women and commodification
The next logical step in the story is to answer the question: what happens with honour in a market economy? That was my question, but I was scrambling for answers but could’nt find them directly. Instead, Graeber goes off tangent in the next section marked Mesopotamia, by focusing on the fate of women.
Why were women used as the measure of value in Medieval Ireland?
How did women come to be pawns of honour?
Or more importantly, why did the practice of trading women came to proliferate across different human societies?
So far, the answers are not clear in the first section but we have previously discussed them and the answers are similar. He develops this extensively in his successive book The Dawn of Everything.
What do we know?
Graeber offers several possibilities and scenarios about the transformation of women into chattels:
the acquisition of debt
presence of slavery - a class of people separated from kin and context and were simply commodities themselves
double purpose of money - the same money used in bridewealth and dowry exchanges and gifts are used to pay financial loans
importance of war (not discussed)
rise of the state (not discussed)
Previously, we saw among the Tiv and Lele how people existed in a human economy and how they were transformed through violence. How about honour?
What is the link with honour?
Graeber wants to understand how debt came to be inextricably linked to honour. Therefore, he wants to investigate how honour evolved.
Early Medieval Ireland
There does not seem to be any insight into the Early Medieval law codes but perhaps more studies of the archaeological record could illuminate the context.
What we do know is that by the time the codes were written,
there was vestiges of the slavery practice
Though early medieval Ireland had a human economy, they still measured compensation around the cumal, one slave girl. Even if the Irish slave trading ended in 600 AD, the measurement of the cumal would linger as an honour price.2
a woman’s dignity were priced lower than men
The law stipulates her dignity as
half or 50% of her nearest male relative
if she was wronged, her price was paid to the male relative and not to her
if she has was sexually prolifigate, her honour was decreased to zero and she did not have any dignity price to demand in the first place
A woman’s honour by this time has been attached to the males closest to her and priced accordingly.
Mesopotamia
How is this different in an economy where women are openly traded? How does it affect honour?
Graeber looked into the changes on bridewealth and dowry practices using the tablets from Nuzi, Mesopotamia (1350 BC). Nuzi is remarkable for its ordinariness. It lies on a settlement hill and excavations have revealed over seven thousand tablets documenting ordinary social and economic transactions of this urban and suburban complex.
Bridewealth and dowry practices are good indicators to assess the change in the status of women and the understanding of money. Based on our previous discussion, we know that a human society does not see women as commodities or that these are purchases. If it was a purchase, then one technically could sell them off.
However, when did the purchase of women occur? How?
At Nuzi, the brideprice would undergo a transformation as the value
approaches the equivalent of the price of a slave girl - a combination of domestic animals and 40 shekels of silver
cutting the rates of bride price by rich men to adopt or acquire the women as maids, concubines or wives of slaves
These led to the degradation of brideprice as an institution.
Furthermore, the interchangeability of people with money was exacerbated when men entered into debt.
A loan requires the wife and children to become guarantees. If he defaults on a loan, they will be taken away just like other chattels
Men could also hire out family members to work in rich households, farm, or cloth workshops that is really an advance payment for a loan
The precursor for the degradation of women’s status did indeed require a mindset shift with the presence of slavery and debt. Honour became embroiled not just with dignity but with money.
Sumeria
South of Mesopotamia, Sumeria, we also see how bridewealth transformed.3
first, the bride payment was a food gift given by the father to the bride to be used for her wedding
then, payments were split between the father of the bride (in silver) and for expenses to the wedding; wealthier women were able to retain silver jewelry for themselves of similar value
the silver payment called terhatum (the price of a virgin) became closer to payments as piercing virginity is classed as a property crime against the father because it would reduce the bride payments
the language would shift in marriage in property terms, aka ‘taking possession’ that would lock in women as property of their husbands
From early Sumerian texts (3000 to 3500 BC) to the Bronze Age by about 1200 BC, women have disappeared in public life. What used to be commonplace to see women as traders, scribes, public officials and doctors would gradually (or suddenly?) in a span of a thousand years lose their standing and become ‘wards of their husbands.’
What does this all mean for honour?
Graeber wants to interrogate the relationship between debt and honour to understand the moral underpinings and why people are compelled to fulfill them. He does this by using the example in Early Medieval Ireland where dignity and honour is quantified and compensated for loss. There is a sense that dignity can be parsed and calculated according to different goods despite the absence of any markets or a single currency. In this case, social money was supporting the return of rank and status to men.
Graeber argues that honour in a market economy transforms people into commodities and becomes part of the exchange. I define a market economy here as simply a context in which commodities can be purchased using a predominant currency of value. Social money can double as that currency of value.
This is the clincher. The double uses of social currency as gifts but also currency for commodities may lead to a mindset shift that eventually conflates people as commodities. Debt, as Graeber argues, becomes the linchpin in this transformation. Once debt enters the picture, women in particular, inevitably become pawns.
Now the degredation of the position of women historically directly informs the definition of honour. Women, as property, becomes one of the measures in which the dignity of men is calculated. Its defense and recovery usually involves violence. It is ironically the second definition of honour.
Round-Up
Previously, we understand that honour has a dark relationship with violence. In this post Graeber develops a timeline on how the concept of honour transformed with some precursors
quantifying human dignity enshrined in the early medieval Irish law codes
transformation of the brideprice and dowry institutions into
debt system using women and children as guarantees of payment
Somehow, if we are looking into origins of patriarchy or oppression of women, we will not find it in this entry just yet.
What we do know is that in both a human economy and a market economy, a woman’s honour
has already been linked to a man’s honour
is already devalued compared to a male
The time after the Neolithic period has shown the loss of status of women for various reasons including the rise of warrior societies. This is discussed in The Dawn of Everything.
The connection between honour and debt is again marked by violence. At this point, why is someone compelled to pay a debt despite the horrible violence it brings is only partially answered now.
Read the previous post
In Jan Erik Rekdal’s 2017 article on the value of the face, he explains in footnote 6 that Charles-Edwards translated the term wynebwerth, with wyneb (face) as honour but not status. Rekdal points out though that honour is intimately tied to status therefore wynebwerth or ‘face value’ is determined by status. In his article, he discusses how public shame destroys status, hence requires compensation.
B.T. Newberg 2017 identifies cumal (coo-WUL) as having the equivalent of 34 acres of land and 3 cattle.
Marten Stol’s 1995 article discusses further a women’s married life in Mesopotamia
Melanie- Property, honor, rights, women, and wealth---Great topics and I love the way you tie their relations together. Learned a lot here. Hope you're well this week? Cheers, -Thalia