It has often been claimed that money was to be found in much of the African continent before the impact of the European world and the extension of trade made coinage general. When we examine these claims, however, they tend to evaporate or to emerge as tricks of definition. It is an astounding fact that economists have, for decades, been assigning three or four qualities to money when they discuss it with reference to our own society or to those of the medieval and modern world, yet the moment they have gone to ancient history or to the societies and economies studied by anthropologists they have sought the “real” nature of money by allowing only one of these defining characteristics to dominate their definitions.
IV are a pagan people numbering over 800,000 who live in the middle T Benue Valley of northern Nigeria. The basis of their economy is subsistence agriculture; supplemented by an effective network of markets particularly in the southern and central portions of their country. Tiv pride themselves on their farming abilities and their subsistence wealth.Today, however, their ideas of economic exchange and their traditional methods of investment and economic aggrandizement are being undermined by a new economic system which demands different actions, motives and ideas. This article deals with: (I) Tiv ideas of exchange as expressed in their language, (11) some traditional modes of investment and exchange, based on a ranked hierarchy of spheres or categories of exchangeable commodities, and (111) the impact of Western economy on such aspects of subsistence, exchange and investment which Tiv consider in terms of these spheres or categories.Distribution of goods among Tiv falls into two spheres: a "market," on the one hand, and gifts, on the other.The several words best translated "gift" apply-besides the cases which we in the West would recognize as "gift"-to exchange over a long period of time between persons or groups in a more or less permanent relationship. The gift may be a factor designed to strengthen the relationship, or even to create it. There are several Tiv words for "gift," the examination of which would require another article the length of this one. For our purposes, it is primary that any of these "gift" words implies a relationship between the two parties concerned which is of a permanence and warmth not known in a "market," and hence-though "gifts" should be reciprocal over a long period of time-it is bad form overtly to count and compute and haggle over gifts.A "market" is a transaction which in itself calls up no long-term personal relationship, and which is therefore to be exploited to as great a degree as possible. In fact, the presence of a previous relationship makes a "good market" impossible: people do not like to sell to kinsmen since it is bad form to demand as high a price from a kinsman as one might from a stranger. Market behavior and kinship behavior are incompatible in a single relationship; and the individual must give way to one or the other.The word "market" (Kasoa) has several meanings in Tiv. It refers primarily to any transaction which is differentiated from gift exchange (and, as we shall see, from exchange marriage). It is also a meeting of people at a regular place and time for the primary purpose of exchanging food and other items. One's "market" is also an aspect of one's luck (ikbZ)-some people have "good market 60
NTHROPOLOGY, including legal anthropology, is faced with a probleln A that may be unique in social science: in order to present the results of our field research without seriously warping the ideas, we must undertake a second job of research, on the homologous institutions of our own society, and in the scientific disciplines that have investigated those institutions. This paper is an exercise in the anthropological investigation of jurisprudence. It investigates three things: (1) definitions that jurisprudence has used, and the anthropological usefulness of such definitions, (2) the "double institutionalization" of norms and customs that comprises all legal systems, and ( 3 ) some of the problems of the association between legal institutions and certain types of political organization. Legal LanguageIt is likely that more scholarship has gone into defining and explaining the concept of "law" than an). other concept still in central use in the social sciences. Efforts to delimit the subject matter of law-like efforts to define itusually fall into one of several traps that are more easily seen than avoided. The most naive, on the one hand, beg the question and use "law" in what they believe to be its common-sense, dictionary, definition-apparentll-without looking into a dictionary to discover that the word "law" has six entries in Webster's second edition (1953), of which the first alone has thirteen separate meanings, followed by five columns of the word used in combinations. The most sophisticated scholars, on the other hand, have been driven to realize that, in relation to a noetic unity like law, which is not represented by anything except man's ideas about it, definition can mean no more than a set of mnemonics to remind the reader what has been talked about.Three modern studies, two in jurisprudence and one in anthropology, all show a common trend.Hart (1954) concludes that there are three "basic issues": (1) How is law related to order backed by threats? (2) What is the relation between legal obligation and moral obligation? (3) What are rules, and to what extent is law an affair of rules? Stone (1965) sets out seven sets of "attributes usually found associated with the phenomena commonly designated as law": Law is (1) a complex whole, (2) which always includes norms regulating human behavior, (3) that are social norms; (4) the complex whole is "orderl$" and (5) the order is characteristically a coercive order (6) that is institutionalized (7) with a degree of effectiveness sufficient to maintain itself. Pospisil (1958) examines several attributes of the law-the attribute of authority, that of intention of uni- 33
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