they could have obtained or produced for themselves.
Most trade in traditional small-scale societies was short-range trade between neighboring groups, because intermittent warfare made it dangerous for people to make trading trips that passed through several different populations. Even Siassi long-distance canoe traders were careful to land only at villages where they had established trading relationships. If they got blown off course or dismasted and made a forced landing on a coast where they lacked such relationships, they were likely to be killed as trespassers, and to have their goods seized, by villagers who didn’t care about being nice and encouraging future visits.
Traditional trade differed in several respects from our modern equivalent method for acquiring goods from others, namely, by cash purchases at stores. For example, it would be unthinkable today for a customer buying a car at a new-car lot to drive off without paying anything or signing a contract, leaving the car salesman just to trust that at some time in the future the customer would decide to give him a gift of equal value. But that surprising modus operandi is common in traditional societies. However, a few features of traditional trade would be familiar to modern shoppers, especially the high proportion of our purchases devoted to functionally useless or unnecessarily expensive status symbols, such as jewelry and designer clothes. Hence let’s begin by picturing what traditional outsiders soon after first contact found strange in our market cash economy. Some just-contacted New Guinea Highlanders were flown out to New Guinea coastal towns for an experience in culture shock. What must those Highlanders have thought as they learned how our market economy operates?
Market economies
The first surprise for the Highlanders would have been to discover that our overwhelmingly prevalent method of acquiring an item is not by barter, but by paying for it with money (Plate 33). Unlike most items exchanged in traditional trade, money has no intrinsic value, nor is it considered a beautiful luxury item like our jewelry or a Siassi trade bowl, serving either to be exchanged or to be kept and admired and conferring status. Money’s sole use is to be spent and converted into other things. Also unlike a Siassi trade bowl, which any resident of certain villages possessing the necessary skill is permitted to carve, money is issued only by a government: if a First World citizen possessing the necessary skill plus a printing press attempts to exercise that skill by issuing money himself, he will be imprisoned as a counterfeiter.
The former traditional method of barter, in which two people exchange one desired object for another object face-to-face without the intermediary step of paying cash to a third party, now operates less frequently in modern societies. Conversely, some traditional societies used objects of arbitrary value in a way that sometimes approached our use of money. Examples included the use of gold-lipped pearl shells by New Britain’s Kaulong people, and of large stone disks by the inhabitants of Yap Island in Micronesia. New Guinea Highlanders used cowrie shells, and people in Vitiaz Strait used carved wooden bowls, as exchange items, including to pay part of a bride- price at a fixed rate: so-and-so-many shells or bowls, plus other goods, for one bride. But those objects still differed from money in that they were used to pay only for certain things (not to be wasted on sweet potatoes for lunch), and that they were also attractive luxury items to be kept and shown off. Unlike New Guinea Highlanders, Americans with $100 bills keep them hidden in a wallet until they are to be spent, and don’t strut around with a line of banknotes strung on a necklace around their neck for all to see.
A second feature of our market economy that would surprise many traditional peoples is that our process of buying something is conceived explicitly as an exchange, in which the buyer’s handing-over of something else (usually money) is considered a payment, not a reciprocal gift. Almost always, the buyer either pays at the time of acquisition, or at least agrees on a price if the payment will be made later or in installments. If the seller does agree to wait until later for part or all of the payment, as in the case of many new-car purchases, the payment is still a specified obligation, not a subsequent reciprocal gift at the buyer’s discretion. Contrast this procedure with the imaginary case of a car salesman “giving” a customer a car and expecting an unspecified future gift: we’d consider such a transaction absurd. But we’ll see that that’s exactly how trade does proceed in many traditional societies.
A third feature is that most of our market transactions take place between the buyer and a specialist professional middleman (“salesman”) in a specialist professional facility (“store”), rather than between the buyer and the ultimate supplier near the house of either one. A simpler model operating at the lowest level of our economic hierarchy consists of one-off direct transactions whereby a seller advertises his wares (by a sign in front of his house, a newspaper ad, or an eBay notice) and sells his house or car directly to a buyer who has scanned ads. Conversely, a complex model at the highest level of our economic hierarchy consists of sales from governments to governments, such as contracts between governments for oil deliveries, or weapon sales by First World countries to other countries.
While our market transactions do assume these varied forms, in all forms the buyer and the seller usually have little or no on-going personal relationship beyond the transaction. They may never have seen or dealt with each other before, they may never deal with each other again, and they care mainly about the items that change hands (the purchased goods and the money), not about their relationship. Even in cases where the buyer and the seller repeatedly carry out transactions with each other, as in the case of a shopper who visits the farmers’ market stall of some particular farmer every week, the transaction is primary, and the relationship is secondary. We shall see that this basic fact of market economies, which readers of this book take for granted, often does not apply to traditional small-scale societies, where the parties aren’t professional sellers or buyers, the relationship between the two parties is on-going, and they may consider the exchanged items to be of negligible significance compared to the personal relationship that the exchange serves to strengthen.
A fourth feature of market economies is related to that third feature: most professional markets operate either constantly or else regularly and often. Typically, a store is open daily except Sundays, while a farmers’ market operates weekly (e.g., on Wednesday mornings). In contrast, much traditional small-scale trade brings parties together infrequently, often just once a year or even once every several years.
The next-to-last feature of markets constitutes a similarity to rather than a difference from trading by traditional small-scale societies. In both cases the objects traded cover a spectrum from materially essential (“necessities”) to materially useless (“luxuries”). At one extreme are objects that facilitate or are indispensible for surviving, such as food, warm clothing, and tools and machines. At the opposite extreme are objects irrelevant to survival but prized as luxuries, as decorations, for entertainment, or for conferring status, such as jewelry and television sets. In the gray middle ground lie objects that are materially useful, but that are available either as minimum-cost low-prestige functional items or as expensive high-prestige items with the same function. For instance, a $10 synthetic tote bag and a $2,000 leather Gucci tote bag are equally suitable for toting, but the latter confers status and the former doesn’t. This example already hints that we shouldn’t dismiss materially “useless” luxury items as useless: the status that they confer may bring huge material benefits, such as business opportunities or the wooing of prospective trophy wives and husbands. This same spectrum of “usefulness” already existed in the earliest trade that can be documented archaeologically: Cro-Magnons tens of thousands of years ago traded obsidian spear points necessary for hunting meat, shells and amber useful purely for decoration, and beautiful finely finished spear points of translucent quartz. The Cro-Magnons presumably no more dreamed of using their quartz spear points in hunting and thereby risking breaking them than we would use our best Gucci tote bag to carry home our fish purchase dripping with redolent fish oil from the seafood market.
The remaining feature of modern markets is one that is often duplicated by traditional trade, but that traditional societies in other cases replace with a behavior that has little precedent among us moderns. We buy something mainly just because we want the thing purchased (rather than to cement a personal relationship with the seller), and we buy it from someone who complements us economically and can sell us something to which we don’t have access or that we don’t know how to make. For instance, ordinary non-farming consumers don’t have access to apples of their own: they have to buy apples from apple farmers or from grocery stores. Apple farmers in turn buy medical and legal services from physicians and lawyers who possess medical and legal knowledge lacking to apple farmers. No apple farmer would sell apples to and buy apples from other apple farmers merely to maintain the goodwill of other apple farmers. We shall see that traditional small-scale societies, like modern consumers and suppliers, often do trade objects to which one party has access and the other doesn’t (e.g., a type of stone available only locally), and they trade objects that one party knows how to make but the other doesn’t (e.g.,
