Slow Read Book Club: Chapter 4 - Cruelty and Redemption, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

Graeber argues that to refuse an accounting calculation is the basis of our humanity. Or is it?

The Problem with Debt

In this chapter, David Graeber continues disentangling our confusion when we use the all-encompassing term debt to translate our social relations into (financial and accounting) relations (and vice versa). He argues that

…once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions…we’re capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt.

Everything turns into debt relations: societal debts, ancestral debts, and familial debts that seem to have no equivalences and no way to fully pay them back in life or perhaps, only in death. Graeber has observed this with almost all organised religions.

Part of the problem is that debt is directly embodied with money.

Historically, money represented both calculated and credit values (an IOU promise). Inevitably, this dual purpose entangles calculations into human relations. This is where Graeber emphasises that we lose sight of our humanity when we conflate all transactions into debt relations. This is especially horrifying as debt collection entails violence such as slavery, lifetime bondage, imprisonment, and kidnapping of daughters and sons with sexual favours as part of the bargain.

The Moral Equivalence in Debt

A big question that Graeber presents in this chapter is why a debt elicits greater moral weight (and attention) than let’s say the abhorrent condition of slavery. Surprisingly, Graeber presents a compelling argument.

Financial debt creates an imbalance between equals whereas slavery conditions stem from an existing social hierarchy.¹

It is this imbalance that generates an inherent impetus to right a wrong and also to compel a person or institution (including a monarch) to balance the scales. That is, to pay is to become equal again.

Thus, debt cancellations were biblically recorded as a form of rebirth or starting from scratch. No wonder this has religious overtones in which redemption (by a Saviour) is more than a periodic cancellation of any and all debts (monetary and spiritual) but a destruction of accounting relationships.

This imbalance (and its cancellation) has been a challenge to human societies particularly when it comes to the distinction between debt and gift. Can we distinguish between gifts and debt and what does it mean to be indebted?

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What Others Say

This same question is the heart of the anthropological debate on social life. Is social life ultimately about debt relationships? If Graeber is alluding to building new forms of non-accounting-based relationships, what do other anthropologists think about this?

There’s a special issue on Debt in the Social Anthropology journal that discusses some of these key questions right about the time that Graeber’s book was published. I will incorporate some of these works in between chapters and supplement Graeber’s work. Graeber presents strong arguments, but I feel it is not enough to understand some big concepts he presents so far: ritual sacrifice, equality, and debt cancellation. Let’s start with the confusion around debt and gift (gift of life included).

Debt and the Distinctions that Matter

Holly High (2012) takes up the key question here and answers, that debts do not necessarily take over social life in human societies. This was her conclusion (typically by anthropologists) as she reviewed the well-documented practice of potlatch among the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. We’ve met the Kwakiutl and potlatch in Graeber’s description of them as a ranked and hierarchical society. Potlatch² was the quintessential gift-debt practice used to develop early theories about gifts and social relations in anthropology.

Hudson Bay blankets piled high on the left for redistribution or destruction. 1902-1905. Photo by George Hunt. From the American Museum of Natural History Photographic Negative Collection

Potlatch refers to a conspicuous and extravagant gift-giving event for guests and participants as a celebratory commemoration of a life event such as a marriage, new rank status, or construction of a house. It was the apex of the practice by the time Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, documented it in the 1880s. Paradoxically, the practice intensified as the Kwakiutl faced population decimation from 19,000 to 7,650 in 1862. The numbers would further decrease to 2,370 by 1864. Ironically, the social pressures of the period would lead to ever larger feasting, gifting, artwork, and goods destruction as people came to work for wage labour, acquire metal tools for carving, and trade goods.³ As the existential threat loomed, the greater the impetus for wealth redistribution, accumulation, and display became. The event was perceived as too wasteful and ostentatious and banned in 1885.

According to High, Boas (1895) saw a potlatch as an interest-bearing investment of property or loans at 100% interest. The potlatch host would distribute the blankets (formerly animal skins that have since been replaced with Hudson Bay blankets) to other ranking titled nobles. The return gift would be repaid after a year with interest enabling the original host to repay his loans and thereby acquire his potlatch name, perhaps his father’s name, and a seat at his house’s (numayam) feasts. It sounded like a long term debt relationship.

High then reviewed revisionist scholars⁴ who found little evidence from the unpublished works and notes of Franz Boas and George Hunt (Boas’ indigenous co-author) that it related to debt. Some of her findings included:

1. Ranking ceremonies were achieved by the numayam house and not by the sole individual host

2. Gifts given to guests did not incur any interest

3. The size of the gift given to each guest was relative to the size of the total distribution and not to previous gifts received by the host

4. The status of the host comes from the size awarded to him compared to the other guests in the event.

The initial interpretation of the potlatch as debt was untenable because few guests hosted a potlatch and the guests were not necessarily from the same group of attending nobles. Rather, these potlatch were events that demonstrated and recognised the hereditary rights of the guests and the host. Gifts were not calculated from the debt past but given based on a performative present (who is present and how many people are attending).

The feeling at the bottom of the potlatch is one of pride, rather than greed. Occasionally men have tried to accumulate wealth by means of the potlatch and by lending at interest, but the peculiar economic system has always engulfed them, simply because a man can never draw out all his credits and keep the property thus acquired. (Edward Curtis 1970 [1915]: 143)

High says that debt is not the master key to the potlatch.

However, the potlatch itself is an event where exchange and debts could be settled. High cited Edward Curtis et. al. who recorded an observation of a copper sale in which the price was 11,000 blankets. However, there were only 2,000 blankets present during that event. The copper buyer would call on guests to contribute blankets and collect past debts. Blankets would be removed, added, and removed again on the pile until all the credits, debts, and the final price would be settled with the vendor.

It is not that gifts were not debts, but that gifts and debts operate in different realms and also cross over in ceremonies. High calls this a melting pot gift economy when two opposed types intermingle even if they are not necessarily pure to start with. There is then what she refers to as a distinctive and sometimes competing moral reasoning that people combine and differentiate during exchanges.

It is the maintenance of these boundaries that we are examining throughout David Graeber’s work.

Round-Up

Is the refusal of calculation a recovery of our humanity? Yes and no.

In light of the violence wrought by debt payments in the contemporary period, Graeber questions the moral and social reasons that we possess in thinking about debt payments and debt collection.

• How did we end up in this conundrum?

This is because debt relations are embodied in money terms. This conjoined relation ensures that violence is a common outcome of debt relations.

• Despite all the naked violence wrought by debt, why are we still compelled to pay them?

One interesting proposition by Graeber is that debt tips the scales of equality between individuals. Debt skews equal footing, unlike societies or groups that possess a social hierarchy that may make slave relations less abhorrent than debt relations.

• What is the place of debt in social life?

While Graeber may appear to dislike debt and wants it eradicated, transactional and financial debts have always been part of human interactions. The difference is that it is not the only type of relation that is at the core of being human. Interestingly, Holly High showed how a re-evaluation of the potlatch feasts of the Kwakiutl demonstrates that gifts and debts are clearly distinguished and understood. Therefore, participants exercise boundaries on transactions that are exclusively gifts without accrued interest and barter or trade that do require material calculations of value and financial IOUs among themselves.

People do struggle to maintain such distinctions and the moral reasoning underpinning debts and gifts. The diverse cultural outcomes are examples for us to maintain our humanity outside of the totalitarian debt framework.

Catch up on Debt: The First 5,000 Years

1. Rightly or wrongly, social hierarchy is a specific cultural understanding of belonging and exclusion. Here his point is that there was a culturally sanctioned point of difference among people that merited disproportionate treatment and poorer conditions.

2. According to High, there is no word for potlatch in Kwakiutl. This was a combination of Chinook jargon and settlers later enshrined in Canadian law that banned what was seen as the practice. There are distinct events for different gift distribution events. Today the practice remains but with no debt obligations to be called from guests as celebrations are from out-of-pocket expenses. (see Webster’s The Contemporary Potlatch)

3. It was subsequently banned under The Indian Act in 1884 and repealed only in 1951.

4. These scholars include Philip Drucker and Robert F. Heizer’s To Make My Name Good: A Re-Examination of the Southern Kwakiutl Potlatch, Goldman Edward Curtis’ The North American Indian, Volume 10. While Curtis himself was an artist and not an academic, his twenty-volume work was a collective effort from ethnographer and writer William E. Myers, editor Frederick W. Hodge of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and George Hunt the co-author and researcher of Franz Boas.