guyer_wealth and self realization in equatorial africa

Wealth in People and Self-Realization in Equatorial AfricaAuthor(s): Jane I. GuyerReviewed work(s):Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Jun., 1993), pp. 243-265Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2803412 .

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WEALTH IN PEOPLE AND SELF-REALIZATION IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA

JANE I. GUYER

Boston University

The article argues that understanding ofcommodity transactions and their implications for systems can be enriched by bringing together analytical concepts from the Melanesian literature on gifts and commodities, concepts ofpolitical dynamics from the Equatorial African literature, and empirical sources on the development of Equatorial material culture and indigenous currencies over the centuries of the slave and ivory trades. Archival sources on two museum collections, ethnography and history are drawn on to develop an approach to the following characteristics relevant to commodities in non-capitalist economies: a) continuous value registers and their intervals, b) the value of 'labour', concepts of persons and self-realization, and c) the origins, pathways and destinations of things, with special attention to the importance of capture as an origin and inmmobilization/alienation as a destination.

Introduction

Equatorial Africans of the pre-colonial era created a 'wealth in things' that now constitutes one of the great artistic and ethnological treasures of Western museums. The 'bewildering jungle of currencies' (Quiggin 1949: 92) fabricated out of iron, copper, raphia cloth, beads and shells that mediated their exchanges constitutes one of the most complex examples of non-capitalist monies in the world. And their economies, developing and changing along a shifting, centuries-old frontier with developing Western capitalism through the slave, ivory and rubber trades, challenge us to rethink how 'peripheral' to socio-cultural dynamics Bohannan and Dalton's 'peripheral markets' (1962) may have been. And yet the anthropological and historical models of their social systems have focused on 'wealth in people'. Indeed, some version of 'wealth in people' - from the 'lineage mode of production' (Rey 1975) to the non-genealogical, accumulative logic of 'wealth in people' itself - has not only provided an organizing concept for understanding the extraordinary complexity of the regional ethnography, but has achieved the status of a 'gatekeeper' concept (Appadurai 1986a; Strathern 1990; Fardon 1990) for the scholarship on the region. Miers and Kopy- toff (1977) first developed the idea of 'wealth in people' and premier historians of Equatorial Africa have recently endorsed its interpretive power. Joseph Miller writes: 'A wealthy man increased productivity by organizing and controlling people... (by) aggregating human dependants' in a context characterized by 'the centrality of human life.. .but also its fragility' and 'where human dependence was the most efficacious means of increasing production' (1988: 43, 47, 50).

Man (N.S.) 28, 243-265



244 JANE I. GUYER

Likewise, Jan Vansina concludes that 'after centuries of trading, goods still re- tained their value as items for use rather than for exchange. Whenever possible, wealth in goods was still converted into followers' (1990: 251).

This article argues that the idea of 'wealth in people' is powerful but underspecified, in that the systemic dynamic implied is a simple accumulative one: more wives, more children, more clients, more alliances, more patrimony, and so on. Neither the changing constituents of wealth (including both things and people) nor the way in which people were variously valued in relation to each other and to things, has yet been incorporated into the theory, even though there are ethnographic sources from which to work on this problem.1 The article pursues two lines of exploration. The first relates to source material for attempt- ing a systemic understanding of valuation systems no longer in full operation. Museum acquisition records are combined with historical and ethnographic sources in a speculative attempt to interpret the value of things and the attributes of people at the end of the pre-colonial period. The second relates to the conceptual repertoire in anthropology for understanding a non-capitalist currency system. The most recent and most sophisticated literature on exchange is largely based on studies in New Guinea and Melanesia. Scholars of these regions work, albeit sometimes uncomfortably, with a distinction between gift and commodity, and a great deal has been gained by exploiting this contrast to illuminate the cultural underpinnings of gift exchange: the meaning of 'fame', of alienable and inalienable property, authorship and non-recognition, the singular and generic qualities of objects, transactability, the investment of things with histories, value as a transformational process, and the cognitive bases for categorizations (see, for example, Gregory 1982; Leach & Leach 1983; Weiner 1985; Munn 1986; Stra- thern 1988; Thomas 1991; 1992).

There is, however, an incipient disagreement over the relationship between transactional type and systemic dynamics. The ideal type models of both gift and commodity transactions clearly work with the assumption of consonance between transaction type and systemic dynamics:2 between the gift and the gift economy, and commodity exchange and the commodity economy. Appadurai (1986b) questions the necessity of this entailment. He suggests that commodity characteristics are acquired as a phase of transactional pathways, rather than constituting distinctive features of a type of transaction. In taking this processual approach, he implies that the study of regimes of value as systems, and of phases in pathways as transactional moments, are complementary but different levels of analysis, with the pathways constituting the more challenging topic. For him, then, the differences amongst systems may be either differences of kind or of degree. For example, modem industrial capitalism is depicted 'as entailing the most intensely commoditized type of society', a formulation which Appadurai himself notes combines 'the degrees of "commoditization"' and the idea that there are 'myriad other indigenous social forms of commoditization' (1986b: 16, my emphases). The dynamics of the system are not contained within the nature of the transaction, but neither is their relationship theorised in an alternative way.

Responses to Appadurai's position have been appreciative while cautiously critical (Comaroff & Comaroff 19903; Thomas 1991), precisely because it seems to open too widely the space for indeterminacy in the systemic implications of



JANE I. GUYER 245

transactions. Cultural construction is highlighted; political economy remains relatively underspecified. A sophisticated particularism can be pursued under Appadurai's kind of rubric (see, for example, Ferguson 1992). While fully endorsing particularism as a necessary basis for conceptual development (in fact the body of this article is an example), I argue that we still need to envisage the systemic dynamics with respect to transactions that value and build up 'wealth'.

It is worth noting that the idea of rationing with coupons as a third type of exchange dynamic, as was developed largely for Africa by Mary Douglas (1967) and the French neo-Marxist school (Meillassoux 1960; Rey 1975), has hardly been considered in the renewed debate about exchange.4 One possible reason is the great expansion of knowledge about pre-colonial currency history in Africa itself (Hogendorn &Johnson 1986; Iroko 1987; Herbert 1984), which makes the success and stability of the control mechanisms for rationing more of a problem to be explained than a premiss to be claimed. In fact, it may be a combination of the recalcitrance of the old ethnographic sources in the face of new questions, the difficulty of undertaking new field research on long-defunct systems and the impressive enormity of pre-colonial currency change, that have deterred African- ist scholars from plunging more boldly into the gift-commodity debates.5

In the authoritative collection at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, there are at least 120 different shapes and sizes of metal objects that were used as currency in the former Belgian Congo, in addition to the cloth currencies of the Tio, Lele and others, the shell currency (nzimbu) of the Kongo, and all manner of imported cowries, beads, salt and so on (see Martin 1987 on cloth currency; Hilton 1985 on nzimbu; Mahieu 1923 for a summary). By the end of the nineteenth century, along the Zaire River one could purchase charms as well as cassava, dances and songs as well as iron machetes for cutting the forest, and people for sacrifice as well as people's labour. Body decorations, fish-traps, ornamented daggers made in two or more metals, and expertise in administering the poison oracle could all be paid for with 'money'. The currency systems valued all these and more, on an ever widening horizon of possibility repeatedly remarked on by humanist scholars of the region: Binet depicted the Fang as having 'adopted a thousand novelties and search to explore and conquer in all domains' (1972: 14), and Fernandez saw in their religious imaginations a 'spectacle of creative force' (1982: 48). That same creative force produced a renowned wealth in things: Kuba raphia cloth, Fang statuary, Songhai masks, Kota reliquary figures and Mangbetu ivories. Bringing this case, with its dramati- cally different characteristics, into the current comparative analysis of gifts and commodities may provide material for addressing some of the emerging problems in that literature.

The present endeavour is necessarily speculative, because it ought to address more issues than can be explicitly covered in any detail in a single paper: the nature and use of the source material, the relevance of different components of analytical lexicons, empirical differences between Melanesia and Africa, the peri- pherality or centrality of currency use to African social dynamics in what were clearly changing and open, rather than stable and closed, social systems. My strategy here is limited to applying the analytical lexicon we already have in the gift/commodity literature to the 'wealth in people' model and to some new



246 JANE I. GUYER

sources on Equatorial valuation, and to suggesting ways of denoting the relationship between transaction and systemic dynamics in that case. Some more general implications are outlined briefly in the conclusion.

In brief, I argue here that by the end of the nineteenth century in Equatorial Africa currencies mediated a great variety of transactions, and not simply the classic bridewealth and ritual fines of the rationing model. These transactions were not, however, simply to do with acquisition of material or demographic wealth, but to do with valuing people's qualitatively different dimensions, in a process in which the production, capture, ownership, distribution and destruction of 'things' figured in crucial ways. Wealth acquisition as a systemic dynamic was compositional as well as accumulative. The corresponding transactional process was valuation towards the realization of multiplicity. Currencies were, in part, open value receptors, rather than the reductive common denominators of the commodity model.6 In terms taken from the theory of the gift, they valued both things as they embarked on and pursued their 'cultural biographies' (Kopy- toff 1986), and the persons who qualified for 'authorship' or control as well (Strathern 1988). People, like things, were diversely 'singularized' (Kopytoff 1986: 69) rather than ordinally ranked. In short, wealth in people was a regime of quality as well as quantity.

The article is divided into three main sections: on the valuation of things, on the valuation of personal attributes, and on the pathways of circulation and pool- ing, origins and destinations, that connect things and persons. The conceptual additions that I find useful are first introduced in the empirical context and then discussed briefly in more abstract tenns in the final section. Briefly, they include a) 'continuous value register', in addition to 'price' from the capitalist commodity lexicon, and 'rank' from the lexicon of the gift, b) 'realization' in addition to 'accumulation' from the capitalist commodity lexicon, and 'advance' ('pathway', 'biography', 'career') from the gift lexicon,7 and c) 'asset', in addition to 'capital', 'wealth' and 'valuables'. The 'self-realization' of the title, which is central to the entire conceptual elaboration, is a gloss of the Beti-Fang term mfav mot,8 a real person, a person recognized as dimensional in their own singular fashion.

Method

This very large agenda can only be met by simplification, and here I take liberties for which Vansina's (1990) recent monumental synthesis of Equatorial history and anthropology must stand as the justification. He argues that the whole Zaire Basin shares a single culture history. I therefore draw on museum and ethnographic sources from throughout the northwest quadrant, the area he terms 'Between Ocean and Rivers', illustratively rather than systematically with respect to time and place. In fact, not all the items of material culture in the museums can be attributed accurately to 'people' or region, due both to extensive indigenous trade and to Western methods of collection and subsequent sale.9

As a second liberty I push the museum and archival sources as far - and perhaps farther - than they can legitimately be pushed to try to illuminate questions that are otherwise unamenable to empirical exploration. The methodo- logical advantage of looking at the great museum purchases of the first two decades of this century is that they offer descriptive material across an unsurpassed



JANE I. GUYER 247

spectrum of objects by comparison with the ethnographic sources on value, which tend to privilege the more socially salient things: bridewealth and ritual fines, but not harpoons, dog-bells and hair-pieces. The collectors whose sources are used here - Frederick Starr, Van de Weyer, and to a much lesser degree Leo Frobenius and Emile Torday - bought fishing nets, canoes, charms, musical instruments, houseposts, songs, statuary, spears, ear-plugs and ankle rings, and had to purchase cassava to feed their followers and indigenous currencies to pay wages. The collections offer possibly the most comprehensive picture of the exchange economy available for this period, albeit from a highly distinctive vantage point. That vantage point is privileged in the sense that it is one new stage in the long commercial history of the interface of the West and indigenous societies. But it is also problematic in that the forces producing these 'prices' have to be carefully understood before working from the proposition that they did, in some way, reflect indigenous dynamics of valuation.

All historians place a watershed in the political and economic dynamics of Equatorial Africa some time between 1886, when the Congo came under the personal rule of King Leopold of the Belgians, and the 1920s, when the domina- tion of the French side of the river by the grand concessionary companies was nearing its end (see Coquery-Vidrovitch 1972; Mack 1990; Harm-s 1981; M-C. Dupre 1990; Samarin 1989). There were military camps all along the river, still engaged in skirmishes in some places, and not yet engaged with the full-scale revolt that would soon develop over taxation in others. Pressures on the population to pay taxes - in kind first and then in cash - began in the first decade of the century, building up to major confrontations in some places by the second decade. Vansina argues that by the 1920s the old tradition of the Equatorial peoples was essentially dead (1990: 247).

The great museum purchases were made in the midst of this period of apparent transition: the Frobenius collection was made in 1905, primarily for the Ham- burg Museum: the Starr collection was made in 1905-6 and sold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the Lang-Chapin collection was made for the same museum in 1910-14 (see Schildkrout 1988; Schildkrout & Heim 1990); the Torday Collection was made for the British Museum in 1900-9; and there were various other much smaller collections, such as the one referred to below, made by Van de Weyer, a Belgian administrator, for the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren in 1913.

The two collectors' notes I use here refer to experiences buying objects along parts of the same general stretch of the Congo River from the Malebo Pool to beyond the Ubangui confluence. Their records suggest that a vast variety of objects was available and that almost everything one could ask for was amenable to purchase. But the question remains of whether this availability was a function of the political instability. Frederick Starr's diary provides a vivid description of the conditions of life that may have affected willingness to sell. The impression given is of a vague, although perhaps very powerful, climate of fear rather than of active intimidation. He mentions, for example, using the stationed troops as subjects in the collection of dental impressions and anthropometric measure- ments.10 In one village there were discussions of taxes and 'The universal sentiment was for war'.'1 When Starr's 'loose cannon' of an assistant managed to



248 JANE I. GUYER

tell a village 'with agile gesticulation that we were after their teeth...there was much excitement and sudden scattering. We had some difficulty in re-gathering them and making them understand that what we really wanted were fishtraps.'12

Both the refusals and acceptances that Starr describes had, on the other hand, a certain spontaneity that suggests some degree of freedom. Some people did refuse, point blank and with apparent confidence.13 There are many such inci- dents recorded in the diary. Others bargained hard, or tried to hold up transactions. It was not always easy to make a purchase, nor to have to bargain along the trail of the flamboyant, extravagant and imperious Leo Frobenius, about whom Starr complained. But then there were the moments when people apparently sold with either total nonchalance or eagerness. Several times Starr mentions that the people had bought the items in the first place and were quite open about the cost. Van de Weyer's list includes for each item a statement about its origins and 'value', and in the accompanying notes the actual price he paid if it deviated from the customary value. This kind of evidence, and its consonance with the historical ethnography, is used to justify the cautious use of the recorded prices in the present analysis. In the long history of trade on the Zaire River, the conditions of purchase do not seem in themselves to have been directly repressive enough to completely overturn all criteria of indigenous valuation.

The value of things: continuous value registers and their intervals

One key phenomenon to understand with respect to commodity transactions (sales against currencies) in non-capitalist economies is the nature and meaning of the value registers. The classic concepts of spheres of exchange (Bohannan 1955) and rationing (Douglas 1967) define conceptual and institutional thresholds. The question is: how do such thresholds relate to the entire value register, especially in systems and at moments of history when a great deal of people's activity lies along the segment of the register where valuation is explicitly incremental? If we think first in terms of continuous value registers, then about the cultural and historical dynamics of the intervals, and finally about how intervals might become thresholds, we can perhaps incorporate both threshold and incremental phe- nomena in the same framework.

Using the museum archives on acquisition, one can ask what the patterns of sale show with respect to categories of object and their exchange values. To begin with, the collectors do not seem to think that items were cheap and they found the bargaining expert. Starr, for example, was outraged when a child tried to take him for a hefty tip.14 Torday suggests that high prices were paid for items (Mack 1990: 67). Both were inclined to blame Frobenius rather than the sellers, which indicates their acceptance that the people were accustomed to holding out for a high price. In fact, all collectors noted that production for sale - of baskets, knives, masks and almost anything - was already an entrenched practice (Mack 1990: 34).15 People immediately responded to collectors by making new items in a manner that suggests the prior existence of production for sale, either in market trade or to a patron (Schildkrout 1990). One gets the sense of easy replacement for many items; artisanship was an active career practised at one level or another by practically everybody.16 As a result, the lists of items do tend to show that a great deal was amenable to sale, and along a single currency scale.



JANE I. GUYER 249

Van de Weyer's list of sixty-eight items purchased is the only one of its kind that I have found, all collected for the same area, namely the Ubangui-Zaire confluence, and all within the same time period by the same person. The items listed come from seven ethnic groups altogether, with Samba, Libinza and Baloie accounting for fifty-five of the items. All are valued in terms of kwa, an iron currency, as well as Belgian francs. Each of the ethnic collections shows a similar set of characteristics: a) a value scale going from one or two kwa up to 150 for the Samba, 300 for the Baloie and 1,000 for the Libinza; b) the dominance of metal items, which figure all across the spectrum of values, suggesting the sheer variety of the blacksmiths' work: harpoons, arrows, war-spears, tools, raw materials for the smith and so on; c) many of either the objects themselves or the bloom came from elsewhere;17 and finally, d) there are old and new currency pieces, all exchangeable against the kwa. In fact, the currency repertoire seemed to be growing and changing around this time, to include brass wires and copper mitakos alongside the older iron kwa, and exchangeable against them. The fungibility of different currency pieces is clear, and also the easy leakage into and out of the commercial nexus; some iron items were literally reforged out of kwa.18

The internal structure of the values is rather surprising. Where the list mentions items of prestige and bridewealth, they tend to fall in the middle of the range rather than at the top. For example: 'Spear "ganza"...trade quite widespread in the villages... (materials imported by Libinza).. .used above all for the sale or purchase of wives.. .50 kwa' (14562). Unfortunately, Van de Weyer does not tell us how many are needed to make a bridewealth, nor what else was needed to make up the entire acceptable bundle, and these, of course, are crucial pieces of information for constructing spheres of exchange versus scales of value. But the note does clearly indicate that bridewealth components were bought and sold.

Individual pieces indicating pride of status were not particularly expensive. A Baloie headrest of imported brass, a 'sign of wealth' (14570), and a Libinza 'knife with chain.. .highly ornamented.. .sign of wealth' (14573) both cost 50 kwa, less than a tool for trimming palm trees (14565) and only 20 kwa more than a tool for carving out a canoe. Even an imported metal hoe for women's farming (14576), and an item of women's clothing tied on under her skirt to give greater ampli- tude (14589), each cost 20 kwa. They fall in the same range as a drum (14515) at 60 mitakos or 60 kwa, and a large knife (14536) at 50 kwa.

Certain inputs of production and trade were much higher in price than the 'prestige' items: a trunk-container for a canoe (14591) and the bellows of the forge (14744) each at 100 kwa; a hammer (probably also an anvil; 14567) for iron working at 300 kwa; and a 200 kg load of iron ore (14526) for over 1,000 mitakos, equivalent to 1,000 kwa. Items for artistic work were also priced high: a mandolin (14560) 'sold in the markets' for 100 kwa.

In a category by themselves were two items associated with chieftaincy. A drum made of iron, 'sometimes sold' and worth 1,000 kwa but bargained down to 500 'with great trouble', was owned only by chiefs (14588). And Van de Weyer managed to purchase for 20 Belgian francs (400 kwa) an item never usually sold, namely, a type of head-dress referred to as 'the height of elegance amongst women' and wom only by the wives of Balobo notables (14590).



250 JANE I. GUYER

At the bottom end of the scale were a pipe at 2 kwa (14572), a bell for a hunting dog at 2 kwa (14539), a tortoise shell mandolin at 3 kwa (14580), clay pots at 5 kwa (14594), a calabash at 6 kwa (14582), and a 'war bonnet' at 10 kwa (14578).

The following can be inferred from this evidence: that for this area of the Ubangui-Zaire confluence a very wide, although not complete, variety of goods had a price, that utilitarian items and tools could command higher prices than decorative or prestige pieces, that self-decoration was accessible well down the social hierarchy, that bridewealth could be built up through market transactions even if the total price was high, and that currencies were exchangeable against one another, and back and forth into objects through the extraordinary skill of the smith.

What then, if anything, was not easily purchasable by the collectors, and therefore possibly categorised differently? Returning to Starr, the most commonly given reason for refusal to sell, where one was given at all, was not that the kind of item fell into a particular moral domain but that the particular piece in question had other liens on it or was inherited, that is, it was imbricated in prestation and debt. A woman would not sell a calabash 'as it is apparently part of the outfit of some club or society'.19 A fly-whisk included feathers that had belonged to a renowned chief, now dead, and the sale would bring shame.20 The owner of an iron rattle-bell 'was immovable. He had received it from his ancestors and must pass it on down'.21 The owner of a knife refused to sell on the grounds that he 'held it in a debt' and was afraid that the debtor would demand 'a fantastic compensation' if he sold it. But it is striking, given that Starr was quite annoyed by such refusals and noted them down, how relatively few cases of liens there seem to be. Once he was quite shocked that his brazen request for a nrtual item was successful, since a group of men were in the process of a ten-day rite that apparently actually used it.22 In sum, liens certainly existed, and they slowed down circulation, if not prevented it entirely, but such liens do not figure very often in the bargaining process.

A second type of refusal to sell, however, does relate to the nature of the item. There is explicit reluctance to sell certain 'charms', sometimes referred to as 'fetishes'. For example, a seller had to be given a 'dash' even to open up the six cloth wrappings enclosing potent substances that had been bought at the great expense of sixty pieces of cloth, let alone to sell them.23 Again, the whole set of ethnographic and documentary sources needs exploring to contextualize these transactions. At this point it seems likely that the charms that were purchased may have been new ones made for the purpose, and that older ones were so profoundly linked to personal and political power that the sellers' pnrces were in a totally different range from anything the buyers were willing to consider for objects that would hardly show well in a museum case. Vansina, for example, describes in detail the rise of a new form of political power amongst the Tio, based on the ownership of charms known as nkobi. He writes: 'Only great and wealthy lords could afford important nkobi. The tie with wealth and trade is therefore evident' (1973: 456). I am speculating here, but the historical ethnography does bring into view the other spaces on the indigenous value register that could not - for reasons on both the demand and supply sides - be brought into a



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mutually acceptable market relationship with western prices. In other words, the two value registers in the market - Euro-American and African - were only partially overlapping, even though both were monetised. Ethnographic sources make it clear that there were yet other things which, like the charms, were sold against currency in Equatorial African societies that do not appear on the museum lists at all. Dances and songs could be sold among the Fang (Binet 1972). Eggert (1980: 308) quotes a source from 1913 on the payment in mitakos of general supporters or a surrogate orator by the plaintiff or defendant in court cases. Adultery fines, artistry in preparation of a corpse (Eggert 1980: 309) and administration of the poison oracle could all be paid in currency by the end of the nineteenth century.24

This kind of continuous value register seems to have been widespread in the riverine areas. Harms writes of the entire Zaire trading basin that, with the possible exception of the Tio, people had no spheres of exchange and there was 'no evidence that they ever had' (1981: 166). Imported brass, cloth, political office and ritual positions 'became marketplace items to be purchased by the highest bidder' (Hanns 1981: 191). By the latter half of the nineteenth century, he argues, anything and everything was amenable to purchase with one or another of the zonally specialized currencies. Even Vansina's Tio data are ambiguous. Although he suggests that there were spheres of exchange, the data imply that there was a single register against mitakos but with segments along it that were characterised by wide intervals (1973: 292-3). Even beyond the areas of intense trade along the river, there is evidence that chickens and groundnuts on the one hand and bridewealth on the other could all be included on the same value register. My own interviews with Beti elders in southern Cameroon suggest that the iron-rod currency was transacted against goods on a register that ranged from two or three to several thousand pieces, but with very marked intervals (Guyer 1985; 1986). In short, the possibility of continuous valuation existed in the shared cultural repertoire, and not only in the historical experience of the trading peoples.

There are, however, some societies for which the top denominations of the currency were in such large and carefully formed physical units that they formed spheres of exchange and mediated rationing processes, and may even have constituted singular 'valuables' in the Melanesian sense. Dupre (1982: 135) writes of massive iron anvils used for bridewealth among the Nzabi. The two-metre long spear-heads of the Topoke were likewise used only for marriage payments. There is an important comparative endeavour here: to explore how and where such valuable items and the thresholds of value they materialize emerged in Equatorial history and, conversely, how and where the thresholds within formerly existing spheres of exchange were breached. If, as Vansina suggests (1990: 58), ironwork- ing itself was only diffused into the region by the thirteenth century, then the technical and cultural elaboration that produced such complexity between then and the nineteenth century is nothing short of spectacular.25

The fact that in many societies there were no marked spheres of exchange does not mean, then, that there were never items or people that rose beyond the range covered by the currency value register. Again, the Melanesian work suggests questions to ask: whether and in what form assets (or 'valuables') existed, and



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whether - where they existed - they had the moral quality of inalienability explored by Weiner (1985). In a sense, for example, the non-bridewealth marriage of the favourite daughter of an important leader in southern Cameroon at the end of the nineteenth century might constitute her achievement of the status of valuable: that is, such personal singularity that the currency exchange scale was irrelevant to her valuation, and her liens to her author could never be attenuated (Guyer 1986).26 But without a comparative study of the content and meaning of the 'treasures of the House' (Vansina 1990), we have as yet no clear sense of whether assets/valuables in Equatorial societies were primarily ephemeral collections of dispersable goods for immediate use and display, the strategically acquired and accumulated goods to be transformed into numbers of followers, or finally, inalienable singular objects with their own histories and thereby their own power.

As far as we know, the goods produced and circulated within the context of prestations in Equatorial Africa were not particularly scarce. Nor were they ranked on the strict ordinal scales of kula valuables, nor markedly singular. In many areas they could be acquired through purchase. The value register was such that people could play it: they could choose alternatives for the same value, save kwa (or the local equivalent) for something more expensive, place a kwa value on a variety of items that were producible on a day to day basis with accessible tool kits, and even turn their kwa into something else and perhaps back again if they so wished and could afford to have the blacksmith do it.27 What was singular was the skill needed to play the register.

I suggest here, and build on later, the inference that such continuous value registers, as distinct from the ranking of gift economies and the free market of ideal-type commodity economies, may reflect neither intricately indexed hierarchies nor the freedom of the market, but a multiplicity of control and access mechanisms, at many levels, that makes definitive order - of either the goods, or the people, or the principles of operation - virtually impossible. All control, however apparently effective, was partial, provisional and ephemeral.28 People could move in and out of the value register in new ways: insert new products, convert old ones, save from the bottom and dissipate from the top. The interval gaps had to be maintained by diligent effort against the brilliant manoeuvre by which, to use a musical analogy, a broken chord interval structure was turned into a trill on the semi-tone and vice versa. The conversion of intervals into the qualitative thresholds of spheres of exchange was a major political achievement; the narrowing of value intervals and the dissolution of distinctions was an immi- nent possibility. The thresholds were fragile, in some places manifested in the very small difference between iron items devoted to exchange and those amenable to use. Lengthen the point of an Ntumu spearhead an inch or two and it becomes impracticable and thereby symbolic; shorten it, and it becomes usable. Both types appear in the collections. Add barbs to an Eton spearhead and it becomes a hunting spear; omrit them and it becomes part of the exchange economy (see Guyer 1986). And even with quantifiable currency units, intervals on the scale might be collapsed or lengthened by maintaining the concept of the currency bundle while changing its size.29 The idea that value registers were potentially or actually continuous, characterised by dissoluble thresholds and



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flexible intervals is entirely consonant with philosophically oriented under- standings of these cultures, where 'distinction (can be) transformed into close association' (Fernandez 1982: 109),30 the sculpture has 'the liminal quality of tension' (Fernandez & Fernandez 1975: 743) and performance is 'at the same time as an effort to surpass oneself... also an effort at communion.' (Binet 1972: 116).

Value registers might be seen not only as measures but as cultural and political receptors, that is, as open-ended and internally dynamic criteria for validating and valuing new dimensions and relating them to the old. A continuous value register in a non-capitalist economy may, then, indicate the competitive and constantly innovative process of valorization along multiple routes, rather than step-wise advance along a single ordinal scale or the familiar common denomination of a price system. My sense here, and developed below, is that the wealth in people model is correct in a special sense: that the 'assets', the pools of wealth, in such systems were ultimately the extraordinary people - the named heroes, virtuoso performers and craftsmen, the most deeply concentrated of spiritual adepts - whose self-realisation careers skipped around the value register and then moved beyond its range into the domain of total singularity that, when it applies to people rather than goods, one could term charisma. These were the regional equivalents of the nkanyi that Dupre (1985: 121-133) describes for the Beembe: men with supernatural powers, to one of whom, Mwa Bukulu, is attributed the foundation of an entirely new form of society.

The value of objects and the work that produces them was part of this larger process through which people achieved 'reality', a singular composition of multiple dimensions. If we look at labour in this way, we see not only accumulation through exploitation, underwritten by concepts of differential authorship by status as is emphasised in the lineage mode of production model, but also a whole series of quantitative and qualitative indicators of personal value.

'Labour' and sef-realisation

There have been numerous debates in the Africanist literature about the value or productivity of African labour, all of them implicitly comparative with other economies (see Thornton 1990). Here, by contrast, the differential value of different work within economies that have continuous value registers is the central issue. Analysis of what constitutes 'work', its relationship to 'authorship', and the plausible cultural and analytical measures for it, is an endeavour that would take me beyond the basic points to be made here. The present section simply estab- lishes some sense of a) the magnitudes of differential labour value imputed within Equatorial economies at the turn of the century, using sources on iron-working as an example; and b) the classifications of people's qualities and activities that define their 'commodity candidacy' (Appadurai 1986b), that is, their eligibility for currency valuation.

Two sources offer a quantitative baseline for the returns made to different workers in iron production. Van de Weyer's list of acquisitions gives a value of 1000 mitakos, equivalent to 1000 kwa, for 200 kg. of iron ore imported by the Libinza to the area where it was collected for the museum. According to Van de Merwe's (1980) experiments, an African smelt of 200 kg. of ore, using about 45



254 JANE I. GUYER

man-days of work, might produce 93 kg. of bloom, an amount adequate to forge 4,500 kwa.31 The margin for labour was then 3.5 times the cost of the ore, a sizable share that offered considerable leeway for differential distribution to the participants.

Tessman's (1913: 243-62) observations of a smelt in Gabon in 1908 help to give precision to these shares. First of all, it is worth noting that the bellows- workers brought their own bellows, which endorses the inference one could draw from Van de Weyer's list that bellows were purchasable and that workers could own one item of the means of production. They also gained some of the output. According to Tessman, a single smelt could produce bloom equivalent in weight to 867 Ntumu spears, of which 287 (33 per cent.) went to the workers, 9 per cent. to the medicine specialist and 58 per cent. to the sponsor (1913: 255). If we apply these proportions to the previous calculation in Van de Weyer's values, the daily 'wage' would be iron sufficient to make about 25 kwa, a sum adequate to buy a whole range of objects, and about half the amount needed for a bridewealth spear. The medical specialist would receive iron sufficient for manufacture of 400 kwa, and the sponsor would keep the remaining bloom, enough to make about 2,000 kwa. In whatever way these approximate figures might be further contextualized, the differentials of value in work according to expertise seem to be very wide indeed, but the baseline is not low relative to potential purchases. Appropriation there certainly was, but the workers' re- muneration in this particular type of work was not at the bottom of the value register.

A minor incident during fieldwork illustrates another aspect of self-realization through valued work. In 1984, when I was interviewing elders about the iron economy in southern Cameroon, one man spontaneously demonstrated the rhythmic movements of the bellows work he had done as a youth. Percussive sound, dance movements and athleticism were combined in a way that expressed beyond the capacity of words the pride a young man might feel from exhibiting strength, stamina and musical talent. At the smelt 'there was joy. And we sang. We sang well' (Watanabe & Eno Belinga 1981: 18). We know from all over the Equatorial region that a bellows-worker had to abstain from sexual intercourse for variable but quite long periods before and during the work. Clearly, there was more than generic brawn to the labour of iron smelting. It is worth entertaining the possibility that there was potential for self-valuation, for partial authorship, in the competitive validation of the work contributions of young men to iron- smelting.

The ironmaster and blacksmith himself had very great stature, as expressed in his symbolic association with chieftaincy in several parts of the region (see de Maret 1985), and with parturition throughout the area (Herbert 1988). It is tangibly expressed in the share of the bloom, at a level far beyond the other participants. To be a blacksmith involved a long and intricate technical and spiritual training, and entailed a specialist's style of life. It is worth pausing here to consider the role of the blacksmith in the entire currency system. If, as several sources seem to indicate (Dupre 1982; Guyer 1986), the amounts of iron in the currency economy were as much if not more than in production, then the smith



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was effectively the mint and the arbiter of fungibility. He was a financial force as well as a skilled artisan.

I do not mean to suggest here that there was no appropriation in the 'lineage mode of production', only that it was partial. It was not only the great figures but everyone who seems to have had the possibility of authorship of something, however small. The continuous value register held out a series of possible steps and leaps towards the achievement of 'reality'. All the detailed ethnographic sources suggest that however well-endowed a man might be in structural terms, becoming mfav mot (in the Beti-Fang terminology) involved a process, a suc- cession of ordeals and achievements, a husbanding and protection of personal power and repeated manifestation of it. Hunting was one of the most important contexts for exercising personal abilities. Koch writes: 'luck (ebet) is something alive, that one carries in oneself without having searched for it, that one can lose easily... (It) can be inherited but it is essentially personal.. .it is predestined to be satisfied in solitude', 'it is courage that confirms a man in his luck' (1968: 15, 16, 19, 48). Other abilities such as rhetoric, dance and military skill were understood in similar terms.

Only certain kinds of activity that we would include under the rubric of 'work', however, were considered to create value, or in Melanesian terms, con- ferred authorship. A slave, according to an oral history quoted by Laburthe-Tolra, collected palm wine, gathered dead wood, built houses and transported the meat from the hunt. As soon as the protagonist of this narrative was freed, the roster of work changed: 'he hunted elephants, cultivated yams, and married Mvele girls' (Laburthe-Tolra 1977: 307, 309). The story is explicit that power 'is not operative except where a man can freely deploy it... the common good demanded that they allow him to become mfaV mot' (1977: 312), by doing work that could be valued.32 Porterage was not valued; yam cultivation was. The Western concept of 'labour' merges the two in ways that mask the interplay of quality and quantity in the cultural and historical dynamic. The kinds of work that created personal 'reality' were culturally delineated; they excluded but also included activities that a western concept of labour does not. '(T)o pray is to make the spirit work, so it is possible to understand that the modes of labour can be multiple and that they do not necessarily require recourse to language nor even to the association of ideas' (Koch 1968: 79). For those who are adept, there is manual and even auditory prayer, all 'work of the spirit'. The relative currency value that could be accorded to work and its products cannot, then, be easily reduced to use value in a utilitarian economy, nor to prices in a pervasive exchange system. They reflect the constant tensions generated by an intrinsically expansive range of things and personal qualities that could contribute to the pursuit of singularity.

These values and classifications were also applied to women. Women could handle currency, although in small amounts and for specific goods. They created dances and songs that realised payments (Binet 1972). One (but only one) woman's crop - groundnuts - was displayed in front of her kitchen before storage, as testimony to her own farming abilities (Guyer 1984), and this was a crop that could be sold against indigenous currency (Tessman 1913). Classifica- tions of wives could be based on their skills as well as on more structural



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characteristics (marriage order, or form of the marital transaction). For example, Ngoa gives the following terms for wives in polygynous marriage among the Beti: the 'creator of her husband's men's house' (the first wife), the favourite, the companion and server of her husband's needs, the water carrier, the bearer of children (with no other qualities to recommend her), and those 'left', 'having no special attribution.. .not even bearer of children!' (1968: 212). Koch adds the ability of a wife to complement her husband's particular 'luck' at the hunt: 'A polygamous man distinguished without hesitation those amongst his wives who completed his luck and those that brought him misfortune' (1968: 19). The triage on the basis of personal qualities could be ruthless. Women considered less valuable could be gambled away and became designated as metut - low status women amenable to being exchanged at a husband's discretion, for example, to settle a debt (Guyer 1986).

If we knew more about the distinctions amongst men at levels below charismatic leadership, we would probably understand the intersection of personal singularity and continuous value registers better. The dancer, the medical specialist, the story-teller, the wrestler, the gambler, the dreamer like Mwa Bukulu (Dupre 1985), the creator of the Tio nkobi box charms, the consummate hunter, the religious specialist who simply concentrated in 'laborious immobility' (Koch 1968: 78): all these 'careers' could be pursued and their products valued in currency terms. Valued work was a means of endorsing personhood, validating a dimension of reality, singularizing the producer. The legitimate reproductive powers of the quantitative 'wealth in people' model emanated from the right to 'authorship' and the work of impregnation, in exactly the same cultural sense as described here for other labours. Parenthood is a special case of a general phenomenon. At the bottom was the zeze mot, the empty person, one-dimensional man, a nobody who authored nothing.

It is here that the logic of dispensability and the link to the Atlantic trade needs to be noted, both in terms of persons and objects. As Miller (1977) writes in another context, a human being could fail to be a person. The qualitative valuation of people's work and capacities, manifest in part in currency values, produced at one and the same time the vast efflorescence of material and artistic culture at the top, as represented in the museum collections and the musical repertoire, and almost complete dispensability at the bottom, represented in people sloughed off into slavery or, if female, as the equivalent of metut. In between, and in relation to both, one infers the varied struggles of people to value themselves in some publicly demonstrable way.

The origins and destinations of things

Taking all conditions into consideration, the museum and historical-ethnographic records indicate that Equatorial African societies were unusually profoundly commercialized at the beginning of colonial rule. Working from these data and the comparisons and contrasts with Melanesia to the possible systemic logics, I suggest that the development of currency in Equatorial Africa may be associated with the relatively great importance of capture as a source, and destruction or immobilization as destinations; that is, with what Gregory (1982) terms 'alienation'. In accordance with the principle of self-realization, the assets



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were not things at all, but the singular persons who harnessed sources and controlled fates. The cultural process of alienation that the Melanesianists define as essential to commodity systems was therefore clearly manifest, and as Gregory points out, this can promote a dynamic of growth rather than simple circulation. Alienation, he writes, is 'the only way of accumulating assets without accumulating liabilities' (1982: 61). Where Equatorial systems differed from a classic commodity economy was not in the concept of alienation underlying individual transactions but in the absence of a systemic link between alienation, valuation and the accumulation of capital in material form. As suggested briefly above, 'realization' was not quantitatively accumulative so much as it was qualitatively dimensional, and the object was persons, not fetishised commodities or currencies. There was a growth dynamic in these systems, but it was not capitalist. What, then, in more detail, were some of the characteristic forces in this system?

Alienation was probably not a foreign idea introduced with the Atlantic trade, because it seems so varied in its manifestations and corresponds to acquisition by capture as well as by sale. By the nineteenth century the importance of varied kinds of alienation is compellingly presented in the historical sources: the alienation of enslavement, the pervasiveness of sales, and large-scale funerary destruction (Vansina 1973; Martin 1987: 6; Dupre 1985). Extant throughout the entire western part of the Equatorial region was the practice of accumulating cloth, some of which was destroyed at the funeral. Brass rods were placed in graves or destroyed at the ceremony, in some cases as an explicit replacement for the sacrifice of a slave (Eggert 1980: 309).

Alongside destruction was also an elaborate system of wealth immobilization, through the literal reshaping of the currency into another form. Where brass rods constituted currency, they could be stored in the converted form of the heavy collars worn by wives, daughters and favourite female slaves. In a case quoted by Harms for 1877, one chief s womenfolk were wearing 633 kg. of brass, made out of about six-and-a-half thousand brass rods. Collars ranging in weight from 10- 13 kilos, and anklets of 6 kilos were thought of as wealth in convertible form (1981: 191-2). Copper that was probably imported was used to decorate the Kota reliquary figures (Perrois 1986: 32). Iron currencies, too, could be stored and/or converted. Many, it was said, were destined for the smith. Van de Weyer writes that a certain kind of spear was 'fabricated by the blacksmiths of the region by means of kwa', and a 'knife for palm trees was fabricated here from kwa'.33

Capture, the acquisitive form of alienation, was more important in all these economies than our image of 'production' can encompass. Hunting was a culturally highly developed occupation (Koch 1968) and, as Vansina (1990) forcefully demonstrates, political hierarchies were most clearly symbolically marked by the distribution chains for the most highly valued spoils of the hunt. Leopards, vipers and, during the era of the Atlantic trade, ivories, were systematically channelled upwards in the power structures. In some areas wives were often captured as well as being acquired by prestationary exchange: 'we made war in order to have wealth, to have wives and slaves' (Laburthe-Tolra 1977: 744). The very idea of power in the Beti-Fang area involved the acquisition of the magical force of another person through warfare (Laburthe-Tolra 1977: 786), that is, through capture.



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A fuller understanding of commodity pathways would require that we follow out more precisely the traces from the differential origins of goods in production and capture, through to their differential destinations in the endless round of debt creation on the one hand, and the full stop of alienation (immobilization, sale and destruction) on the other. Were these two separate pathways, one originating in production and tracing a circular or spiral path of exchange or slow growth, the other originating in capture and tracing a linear path of incremental gain? Or were there more complex cross-overs? The evidence suggests the latter. Certainly production and prestation could both be fed by purchase. There was clearly very significant investment of currency in future production: the iron ore and the canoe trunk valued on van de Weyer's list, the canoes purchased by the Bobangi. Specialist producers were conduits for wealth generation and circulation just as their goods were also destined for alienation (see also Samarin 1989).

It seems that here one could carry Vansina's (1990) linguistic project much further, as he himself is doing, and trace out, in particular, the links between terms that might give a sense of pathways within economies and receptors between them. The terminologies for a 'commercial' economic life - catching, getting, holding, demonstrating, selling and so on - have not yet been fully mined as if they were as richly inflected a vocabulary as for the attributes of persons and objects in a gift economy. In southern Cameroon Beti-speaking areas, the current verb for 'earning' or 'taking' (bi) carries implications of capture; and one of the terms for spending (ndamna) carries implications of destruction. The current referents of linguistic terms are only very approximate and possibly misleading guides to the full cultural and historical matrix of pre-colonial commoditization, but careful linguistic analysis does offer one piece of the larger reconstructive project.

In the absence of such detailed linguistic analysis, I suggest that where people were the assets, where there were multiple points of control, where capture and sale provided a growth dynamic, and where self-realization was the goal, the competitive process was about gaining access to the value registers, and narrowing or broadening their intervals. The value register was by its nature open to improvisation with respect to thresholds and intervals, just as it was open to additions and subtractions of things eligible to be valued. In Equatorial Africa purchase, prestation, immobilization and destruction of wealth existed side by side, involved the same physical items and were thereby constantly at play one with the other, rather than firmnly insulated by the barriers of moral spheres. In the 'ideal type' of this system, no barriers would exist at all to prevent the ambitious man from working brilliantly from one mode to another in pursuit of political prominence. Entrenched political leadership might have an interest in maintaining thresholds and wide intervals in value registers, while competitors might strive to dissolve and reduce them, or better yet to introduce totally new elements. Only under specific political conditions was the volatility contained enough to produce spheres of exchange in the classic sense.

One could speculate finally, following Harms (1981), that sudden waves of incoming wealth of the kind characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might tend to favour strategies of immobilization and destruction on the part of the powerful, while slow and steady income might favour



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prestation. Leaders could keep others more firmly in their places during unpre- cedented surges, if value-conferring goods could be removed from the system or very substantially slowed down in their velocity of circulation. Predictability of wealth acquisition, in contrast, may have favoured the more difficult, diplomatic and risky process of debt creation.34 If this seems a plausible inference, it would help to contextualise the alacrity of sales to museum purchasers. Sales may not have stemmed from a new or desperate demoralisation but rather from the inten- sification of the ordinary dynamics of response to unpredictable surges in 'imports'.

The ethnographic and historical records no longer support a view of the peoples of the forest as the obedient and orderly followers of managerial elders to whom accrued all items of wealth. Nor were they the canny manipulators of a restricted corpus of singular objects, arranged in fairly accepted ordinal series. Nor, of course, were they commodity producers and consumers. Material accumulation and ordinal advance were minor cultural themes. The cultivation of singularity in people, the rapid convertibility of anything into anything else, the existence of specialist production and exchange over long distances, and the value accorded to novelty, all suggest systems for which capture was one important mode through which power could be achieved and potentially augmented in a theoretically limitless series of ways. The multiple dimensions of the value accorded to persons - manifest in the sheer breadth of techniques for the cultivation of personal beauty, strength, skill and general worth - are intrinsic to any understanding of the dynamics of the wealth in people model. They cannot be understood in demographic or materialist terms alone, as a form of accumulation. This latter view leaves two unsolved puzzles: how so many were sold and some were sacrificed if acquiring people was the purpose of the whole endeavour, and why a population that valued people above all else produced such an extraordinary proliferation of material and artistic treasures.

Conclusion

The Equatorial African sources provide the empirical challenge for developing a more discriminating conceptual repertoire for the specific originalities of differing 'commodity' systems. The museum collections and archives provide some new sources to make some headway on the larger anthropological problem of stu- dying past 'commoditization' under present limitations of source material. And the fine distinctions made in the study of the 'gift' provide some of the analytical concepts and empirical contrasts to bring to analysis. By bringing the challenge, the sources and the concepts together, it becomes clear that the dichotomous opposition between gift and commodity - inspirational as it has been - will not suffice for a larger comparative endeavour (see also Tambiah 1986). Equatorial history suggests that parts of the gift lexicon and parts of the commodity lexicon are both relevant: in particular, the concepts of authorship, singularity and pathway from the former, and alienability and currency from the latter. The apparent convergence demands that new concepts be used for certain empirical phe- nomena, to avoid evoking one or the other established model too powerfully and in a manner too prejudicial to appreciation of originality. These concepts include 'continuous value register', to indicate a scale for which its morphology as an



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open-ended and flexibly-intervalled receptor is more salient than its functional capacity for incremental measurement and value computations. It avoids recourse to 'price' from the capitalist lexicon and 'rank' from the gift lexicon. The term 'asset' is used throughout the text to refer to anything (human, abstract or inani- mate) that is accorded a powerful multiplicity of meanings and applications. This avoids referring to 'capital' from the capitalist lexicon, 'valuable' from the gift lexicon and 'wealth' from a general descriptive lexicon. Finally, the concept of 'realization' is used to indicate the formal recognition of an essentially open- ended multiplicity accruing to singular assets. This concept is basically a translation of Equatorial terms: as Fernandez and Fernandez write of Fang reliquary figures: they 'embody a variety of contrasting qualities, some potential and some actual... (they) emphasize balance' (1975: 743). But analytically it provides a term to refer to any systemic process whereby multiplicity, in synergy, produces not additive processes but a multiplier effect on power.

For comparative purposes, then, the critical attributes are less the distinctive contrastive features of transaction types than the powers implicit in them: the capacity of commodities to become separated from their origins (alienability), the power of valuables to evoke time and space (historicity - see Munn 1986 on this point), the power of singularity. The Equatorial analysis suggests that these powers did not combine into mutually exclusive, completely contrastive systems. If the vision is expanded beyond Melanesian and European economic cultures, other combinations seem possible and other powers need to be added. The powers of authorship, inalienability and realization through historicity create the dynamics of the gift. The powers of alienability, contract law and the realization - through cultural and political processes - of certain specific 'things' as financial leverage in an ever-elaborating credit structure define the parameters of capitalism. The powers of alienability, authorship and the realization of multiple personal attributes combine to create the dynamics of wealth in people. If analysis is carried out in terms of the contingent rather than the necessary entailment of powers, then one can put aside a too tight, too typological, mutual implication between transaction and system without being forced to replace it by a purely ethnographic approach to the transaction-system entailment in a theoretically infinite diversity of systems.

Equatorial peoples used currencies and their cultures contained the possibility of what we term alienation. But the difference between their own dynamics and those of the capitalist circuits into which their objects were inserted can be highlighted by tracing out the contrasting values and pathways from the initial sale. Femandez and Femandez note of Fang reliquary figures that 'Fang easily parted with them for a consideration'. This is because '(i)n contrast to the [ancestral] skulls [in the basket under the figures] the carvings were not particularly meaningful in themselves' (1975: 742, my insertions). Writing of Kota re- liquaries, Herbert notes that 'If the carved reliquary was lost, the basket could function unimpaired' (1980: 3). And in fact, neither Fang nor Kota reliquary figures were made after the early decades of this century. 'They have completely disappeared from Mahongwe (Kota) religious life' (Herbert 1980). It was the glorious, named ancestors in their baskets who constituted the fundamental realized value of the total reliquary figure. In capitalist circuits, the Fang



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and Kota figures - alone, without baskets - have become assets in our own complex realization process. They circulate through sale, accruing value through the cultural and financial processes whereby art has become an investment asset in the twentieth century. With a value accorded in part through expert opinion about the condition of the piece, in part through comparison with other singular pieces of the same kind, and in part through its history of former owners (the 'provenance'), a 'Superb Fang Reliquary Figure' was sold at Christie's in 1992 for $55O,000.35 Both the first and the last transactions were in a sense commodity sales, mediated by currency. In the face of such diverging implications one could abandon the concept of commodity altogether with respect to Equatorial transactions. But this would be at variance with analytical needs. The term 'commodity' is already very commonly used in much of the literature on non- capitalist economies, past and present, and the processual approach advocated by Appadurai (1986b) uses the term in an eclectic fashion. By embracing this expansive meaning of commodity, we can focus attention on the contingent cultural and political process by which, in both capitalist and non-capitalist economies, some things and some people may be realized as assets.

NOTES

This article is based on research carried out under the Boston University African Studies Cen- ter Project entitled 'African Expressions of the Colonial Experience' (funded by the National En- dowment for the Humanities.) I had the good fortune to be able to complete it during a fellow- ship year in the Department of Anthropology, The Smithsonian Institution. I am indebted for their generous help to Mile Huguette Van Geluwe of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and to Professor Enid Schildkrout of the American Museum of Natural His- tory, who pointed out the Starr diaries and shared her own copy with me. Colleagues at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, in particular Christraud Geary, provided references and other information. The authorities of the museum at Tervuren have given their per- mission for the use of the archival sources, as has the Curator of Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library where the Starr Papers are housed.

Some of the material has been presented in a paper entitled "'Peripheral markets" and the purchase of museum collections in early colonial Equatorial Africa', which was given at the American Anthropological Association Meetings, Chicago 1991, in the session entitled 'Bohan- nan's spheres of exchange - contemporary views', chaired by Charles Piot. I am grateful to all participants in that session and to those in a seminar given at the Department of Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University, for their comments on that version. Achille Mbembe and Ashraf Ghani have made particular contributions. Sara Berry encouraged me to take on the debates about productivity in African economic history. Jan Vansina has generously made his incom- parable knowledge of Equatorial Africa available to me at several junctures. The present text has benefited greatly from critiques by Enid Schildkrout, Sandra Bames and two anonymous re- viewers and the editor of Man.

1 Vansina (1990) does include changes in the material goods constituting 'patrimony' as a powerful factor in the growth of the Equatorial Tradition, and his own historical ethnography reveals how varied these goods could be. It is not their existence but their variety that is not yet incorporated into the model.

2 Even when both kinds of system are described as coexisting and feeding into one another, they are still analytically treated as systemic types (Gregory 1982).

3 Comaroff & Comaroff argue in a footnote that Appadurai treats 'all goods as though they were objects of gift exchange.. .neglect(ing) the mechanisms through which (surplus) value is generated, appropriated, and naturalized' (1990: 211). The parenthetical caution in their use of the concept of surplus value - which Marx applied primarily to capitalist economies - reveals the



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unsolved conceptual difficulties of allowing the concept of commodity alone to wander outside the theory of capitalism.

4 A fourth model currently being developed is for barter (Humphrey & Hugh-Jones 1992). 5 See, however, Ferguson 1985; 1988; 1992, and Comaroff & Comaroff 1990, for Africanist

engagement with this literature. 6 The idea that currency is always a simplifier and reducer is an old and persistent one (Bohan-

nan 1955; 1959) that underlies questions about 'the morality of exchange' (Parry & Bloch 1989). 7 The Massim term keda, meaning 'pathway' and applying to the geographical tracings of the

kula, has been imported into commodity studies by Appadurai (1986b) and used to effect by Fer- guson (1992). It is often somewhat ambiguous in the study of people and things which of the two the concept applies to, especially when the indigenous distinctions between them are not the same as ours. Since the same literature often uses 'career' or 'biography' (Kopytoff 1986) to refer to the agents of the pathways, and since 'objects of gift exchange were ordinally related rather than cardinally related' (Gregory 1982: 23), I substitute the concept of 'advance' to apply to the cumulative process.

8 Different sources spell these words slightly differently, partly due to dialect variations in pro- nunciation.

9 I have never done field research in the area from which the museum collections were made, although southem Cameroon, where I have worked on indigenous currencies, does fall within this quadrant of Vansina's (1990) Equatorial African Tradition.

10 University of Chicago, Starr Papers, Box 10, Notebook 8: 37. 'We have measured 299 sol- diers and eighteen villages during the week'.

11 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 3:57. 12 UC. Starr Papers, Notebook 2:41. 13 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 6:55. 'What I did not get was apparently for immediate use: it

was a calabash rattle... I made every effort to secure it in vain.' 14 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 2: 26. 15 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 5: 2 notes, for example, that there were 'regular prices' for

Bampende masks. 16 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 5:29. People brought 'beautiful new figures which they had

prepared with much care.. .We were all day refusing nice new fetiches.' 17 For example, the list notes: 'The river village of the smiths is Bongemie. It is the main site

on the river where people do metalwork.', 'Brass wires, introduced by the Libinza, are used as indigenous currency ...' (14527); 'War spears.. .used to be traded in the past ...' (14542-6). The numbers in brackets refer to the acquisition number of items.

18 Van de Weyer notes that certain spears were 'made by the blacksmiths of the area out of kwa' (14548) and that brass wires were also used 'for making manillas for women and men' (14527).

19 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 2: 38. 20 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 2: 39. 21 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 10:24. 22 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 7:16. 23 UC, Starr Papers, Notebook 2:40. 24 Copper and iron were mined and produced within Equatorial Africa, but an unknown

amount of currency material was also imported from Europe as a kind of 'counterfeit' indigenous currency. As far as I know, the metallurgical analysis and the historical research has not been done that would give any sense of the relative importance of the two sources, although we do know that 'Brass rods...poured into the country in a steady stream for the last thirty years (to 1913)' (quoted in Eggert 1980: 320). At least some of the famous African hoe blanks were made in Birmingham (Marion Johnson, personal communication).

25 Vansina (1990) suggests the increasing importance over several centuries of what he terms patrimony', 'treasure', 'warchest', but the goods that made up this treasure do not enter into his analysis. It is difficult to avoid the inference, one that Vansina himself implies, that technical bril- liance, 'knowledge', and people's skills at innovation were a decisive factor in this history (see also Harms 1981).

26 The term for bridewealth, mevek, glosses as a public valuation.



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27 My own research in southem Cameroon suggests that there was nothing to prevent iron objects from being transformed into currency, although it was more commonly mentioned that iron could be transacted in a raw form, as either bloom or mbitna, wom out pieces of tool.

28 In his ethnography of the Beti, Laburthe-Tolra consistently expresses these qualities; 'the social pre-eminence of some over others can only be charismatic. It is on the basis of his excep- tional personality that a big chief can regroup, for a certain time and a precise objective, a volun- tary consensus' (1977:840). This is perhaps a kind of ordered anarchy: as Binet (1972: 11) puts it, 'conquest without chiefs, migration without guides. The anarchy, in fact, is striking'.

29 I have argued that the Beti numerical concept of ntet (100), which comes from the currency system, actually referred to a bundle rather than a hundred. A value could be stable at a certain number of mintet over long periods, while there may have been rapid historical changes in the actual number making up a bundle. This is a common attribute of West and Equatorial African concepts of account. Stability is maintained by fictional units and standard equivalencies, while the material value of transactions might vary widely.

30 The full passage reads: 'the village so at odds with the forest was yet constructed out of it, and to that extent the distinction between these two realms was transformed into close association' (1982: 109).

31 Mlle Van Geluwe had six kwa weighed; they averaged 21 grams each. 32 A remarkable comment on the importance of classifications of work by value is made by

Mandala with respect to the Mang'anja of Malawi, but could well apply in Equatorial Africa too: Ca social junior was neither a human being nor a member of the community... akapolo (slaves) were also nonlaborers within the critical branches of the nonagricultural sector, particularly salt and iron production.' (1990: 29, 34).

33 Archives of the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, Van de Weyer notes. 34 One cannot, however, be over-mechanistic in projecting responses. The physical composi-

tion of wealth influences its potential pathways. I am indebted, as in the past, to Michael Gesel- lowitz for technical consultation about the malleability of different metals.

35 I am indebted to Christraud Geary of the National Museum of African Art in Washington for finding this example. It comes from the Christie's (New York) catalogue entitled 'Important Tribal Art and Antiquities from the Collection of William McCarty-Cooper', May 19th 1992, and refers to item #134, page 7071.

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Richesse en personnes et realisation de soi en Afrique equatoriale

Resume L'article affirmne que la comprehension des echanges de biens marchands et de ce qu'ils impliquent pour le fonctionnement systemique peut etre enrichie par une approche associant, d'une part, les concepts analytiques melanesiens concernant les dons et les biens d'6change ainsi que les concepts contenus dans les ouvrages consacres A l'etude des dynamiques politiques en Afrique 6quatoriale, et, d'autre part, les donnees empiriques concemant l'evolution de la culture mat6rielle en Afrique equatoriale et des monnaies indigenes, evolution qui serait due A plusieurs siecles de commerce de l'ivoire et de trafic d'esclaves. Les archives museographiques portant sur deux collections, l'ethno- graphie et l'histoire, contribuent a former une approche permettant de definir les biens marchands dans les economies non-capitalistes, et de mettre en relief les elements suivants : (a) les registres de valeur continue et leurs intervalles; (b) la valeur du 'travail' et les concepts de personne et de realisation de soi; (c) les origines, routes et destinations des objets, en portant une attention toute particuliere 'a la capture comme point d'origine, et 'a l'immobilisation/ alienation comme point de destination.

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