Many European observers marveled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog they had dreamed of acquiring. Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams.Let’s list just a few, all drawn from North American material, to give the reader a taste of what might really be going on when people speak of ‘long-distance interaction spheres’ in the human past: But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade.’ Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialties - one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters - to acquire things they cannot produce themselves sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. There is, in fact, a substantial ethnographic literature on how such long-distance exchange operates in societies without markets. Is this ‘trade’? Perhaps, but it would bend to breaking point our ordinary understanding of what that word means. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Island off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) - only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language ( ‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument.
And so on.Īll such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about.
Therefore, there must have been a market. If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed? Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade.’ Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects - very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment - being moved around over enormous distances.