hornborg learning from the tiv

Learning from the Tiv: Why a SustainableEconomy Would have to be “Multicentric”

Alf Hornborg

Alf Hornborg is a professor in the Human EcologyDivision, Lund University, Sweden.

Abstract

Although careful not to romanticize the premoderncultures that have traditionally been the central object oftheir research, anthropologists might reconsider some classi-cal ethnography in the light of ongoing deliberations on sus-tainability. Economic anthropology is in a unique positionto achieve a distanced view of modern money and neoliberalmarket ideology by contrasting its notions of value and rec-iprocity with those of premodern, “multicentric” economiessuch as that documented over 50 years ago by PaulBohannan among the Tiv of Nigeria. The assumptions ofgeneralized interchangeability and abstract utility that areso fundamental to the theory and practice of neoclassicaleconomics inexorably generate an accelerating destructionof natural resources and increasingly inequitable globaltrade relations. The fundamental principle of any “multi-centric” economy is the acknowledgment of two or more dis-tinct and incommensurable spheres of value. This principledeserves to be reexamined by economic policy makers seri-ously committed to improving local control of resources,sustainability, and equity. The challenge could be expressedin terms of “immunizing” local meanings and ecosystemsagainst the conceptual and physical ravages of global capi-tal. In this article, I discuss some aspects of the rationale ofalternative markets and currencies, emphasizing the pecu-liarly dissolvent semiotics of “general purpose money” in abiosphere organized in terms of hierarchically nested levelsof integration. I also sketch some fundamental considerationsthat such alternative economies would have to incorporate

to stand a chance of curbing the dissipative logic of modernmoney. [Keywords: alternative economic systems andcurrencies, multicentric economic spheres, local pro-duction, sustainability, global futures]

Fifty years ago, Paul Bohannan (1955) published aten-page article in the American Anthropologist that wasdestined to become a classic in economic anthropology.It was entitled “Some Principles of Exchange andInvestment among the Tiv,” and was built on 26 monthsof fieldwork in northern Nigeria between July 1949 andJanuary 1953. The Tiv people with whom Bohannanworked were at that time mainly subsistence farmerswho, in Bohannan’s words, prided “themselves on theirfarming abilities and their subsistence wealth.”

The traditional Tiv economy, however, is remem-bered by anthropology students primarily because ofwhat Bohannan referred to as its “multicentric” charac-ter. Bohannan observed that the Tiv recognized threeseparate “spheres of exchange” that were hierarchicallyarranged, so that transactions implying conversions be-tween them were considered morally charged. To con-vert food into prestige goods, or prestige goods intowomen, was considered skilful—a measure of success—but to convert in the opposite direction, that is, womeninto prestige goods, or prestige goods into food, wasmorally reprehensible. Bohannan’s analysis showedtwo things very clearly: first, that it is quite conceivableto organize the economy according to a moral hierarchyof values, where all values are not commensurable, andsecond, that such morally differentiated economies willquickly collapse when incorporated into the modernrealm of general-purpose money.

The introduction of modern currency, writesBohannan, “was hurried by the Administration” throughthe imposition of a money tax by the end of WWI.

Culture & Agriculture Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 63–69. ISSN 1048-4876, eISSN 1556-486X. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. Allrights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights andPermissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/cag.2007.29.2.63.

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One of the most tangible consequences of the intro-duction of general-purpose money among the Tivwas, in fact, the sudden increase in food exports, leav-ing Tiv elders in the 1950s cursing “money itself” for“depriving them of their food faster than they are ableto increase production.” Obviously, then, the moralsemiotics of money—in other words, how exchange isculturally conceived—can have very significant mate-rial implications. After 26 months of fieldwork,Bohannan was acutely aware of the detrimental im-pacts of general-purpose money on subsistence secu-rity among the Tiv, but concludes the article byobserving that “the ethnographer can only look on andattempt to understand the ideas and motivations,”knowing that the traditional system of ideas will in-evitably be “smashed” in the confrontation with modernmoney.

I now leave Bohannan’s ethnography of the Tivand try to address the general question of what an-thropology might have to contribute to the ongoingdeliberations on “fair trade” and “free trade.” Many ofus would be prepared to say “fair trade” versus “freetrade,” but this is a contradiction that still needs to bedemonstrated, at least for the majority of economistswho believe that maximum freedom will lead to max-imum fairness. With reference to the title of this ses-sion, we need to consider the “alternatives andrealities in cross-cultural perspective.” And the gen-eral theme of the 104th Annual Meeting of theAmerican Anthropological Association, Washington,DC, 2005, encouraged us to bring “the past into thepresent,” by reassessing “the work of our discipli-nary ancestors” to “reflect on the canon of anthropol-ogy for what still resonates as true or useful orinsightful.” “Processes of globalization,” we are toldin the announcement of this meeting, are “in part fu-elled by neo-liberal economics.” Globalization, in itspresent form, is clearly not only a blessing. To onceagain quote the 2005 meeting announcement, “Theworld remains marked in the 21st century by war,genocide, hunger, glaring inequities, ecological vul-nerability, and deep social division.” If this worldorder is indeed “in part fuelled by neo-liberal eco-nomics,” it is incumbent on us as anthropologists tosubject the fundamental tenets of economics to culturalanalysis.

We know that these fundamental tenets of neolib-eral economics were conceived by hugely successfulbankers and stockbrokers such as David Ricardo, situ-ated over 150 years ago in the very hub of the British

colonial empire, and constructing models and con-cepts with which to account for their own success inaccumulating capital. These models and conceptswere obviously not designed to alleviate global in-equalities, or problems of sustainability, yet they con-tinue to frame and constrain modern economicdiscourse on these issues—to the extent that they areat all addressed. Anthropologists have the choice ofsubscribing to this hegemonic discourse, or to ap-proach it precisely as Bohannan approached the eco-nomic categories of the Tiv—as a cultural system.There have been several attempts to do this over theyears, notably by Stephen Gudeman (1986), but a lot ofwork remains, particularly if we want to say some-thing that sounds relevant to the ongoing delibera-tions on “fair trade.”

Let me address the issue head on. Neoliberal eco-nomic theory is a reflection of the logic of general-purpose money. General-purpose money is in itselfbasically an idea about the generalized interchange-ability of all things. In making products and servicesfrom all over the world commensurable in terms of asingle metric, the 19th-century world economy vastlyincreased the opportunities for—and the scope of—unequal exchange. In a recent article in the journalEcological Economics, I show that, in 1850, by exchang-ing, on the world market, £1,000 pounds worth of cot-ton textiles for £1,000 pounds worth of raw cottonfrom its colonies, Britain in fact traded 4,092 hours ofBritish labor for 32,619 hours of overseas labor, and theuse of less than a hectare of British land for the use of58.6 hectares of land overseas (Hornborg 2006). I amtalking, of course, about the labor and land “embodied”in the commodities exchanged—the real material re-sources that went into their production. The ideologi-cally most significant aspect of the neoliberal economicworldview that Ricardo helped to consolidate aroundthis time was precisely to make such real material re-sources invisible. From now on, there was only utility,quantifiable in money. That is why economists to thisday are uncomfortable with the concept of “unequalexchange.” Market transactions are by definition“equal,” if monetary prices are the only metric withwhich they are gauged. I would argue that, althoughsubmerged, this is one of the very points of Ricardo’sconstructions.

In growing increasingly wealthy on the stock ex-change, Ricardo could hardly have been expected tocongratulate himself on exploiting suffering slavesand deteriorating soils in Alabama or India. At this

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particular historical moment, looking out at the worldthrough a window in Britain, a man of finance wascompelled to dispel all hesitations about unequal ex-change; to count money value as the one and onlymeasure of substance; to view land, labor, and capitalas mutually substitutable; and to hail free trade asthe very foundation of economic growth. Ricardo’sscience of economics is a cultural construction, asGudeman (1986) observed 20 years ago, but as such itis also profoundly ideological (cf. Hornborg 2005). Topave the way for industrial capitalism, it had to makeunequal exchange of labor and land invisible, by con-ditioning us to think only in terms of money. It had tocreate the illusion that machines (capital) can “substi-tute” for land and labor, rather than acknowledge thatcapital draws on the appropriation of land and laborfrom elsewhere in the world system. And it had tomake us all believe that the invisible hand of free tradeoperates in the best interests of everybody, and thatany attempt to constrain the economy by appeal tomoral principles—as had the Tiv previously—shouldbe dismissed as backwardness and repression.

The idea of general-purpose money is a successfulvehicle of capital accumulation for exactly the samereason that it is—as the Tiv and so many others haveobserved—“the root of all evil.” In today’s world, it isthis idea of generalized interchangeability that gener-ates the polarization between economic and techno-logical growth, on the one hand, and economic andecological impoverishment, on the other hand. Thesimple logic of general-purpose money tends to accel-erate processes of resource extraction and consump-tion by rewarding the transformation of resources intocommodities with ever more resources to transform.The more cotton textiles that Britain could export in1850, for example, the more raw cotton it could import—which means that the more slaves could be put towork, the more soils could be degraded, and so on.The same logic underlies our economic successes andglobal ecological vulnerabilities today: the more in-dustrial products that the United States, Europe, andJapan can export today, the more resources they will beable to dissipate tomorrow. Or, in even simpler words:the more oil we dissipate today, the more oil we will beable to dissipate tomorrow. This is the simple algo-rithm of destruction that results from the operation ofgeneral-purpose money in a universe obeying theSecond Law of Thermodynamics (Hornborg 2001).These are tangible, material problems for those of usconcerned, for example, with global inequalities in

energy use or the unevenly distributed consequencesof global warming, but—predictably—they do notseem to pose a problem for neoliberal economics.

Usually, when I talk to my students and arrive atthis rather pessimistic conclusion on the future of in-dustrial capitalism, there is always someone who asksme to say something about what could possibly bedone to prevent global economic and ecological col-lapse. And in those situations I always find myself re-ferring to Paul Bohannan and the “multicentric”economy of the Tiv. If our fundamental problem is thevery conjunction of the idea of general-purpose moneyand the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we need totake seriously the fact that only one of these conditionscan be transformed through political decisions. Wecannot change the Law of Entropy, but it is entirelypossible to transform the idea and institution ofmoney. I am not suggesting, of course, that we shouldtry to reinstate the specific spheres of exchange recog-nized 50 years ago by the Tiv, but that we could drawinspiration from the very notion of recognizing amoral hierarchy of incommensurable values. If the po-litically enforced introduction of general-purposemoney in northern Nigeria a mere 50 years ago wasable to so completely reorganize the conditions forsustainable subsistence, it is obvious that similarlyprofound changes—in another direction—could betriggered by other kinds of politically enforced trans-formations of the money system. I am convinced that,sooner or later, there will be a renaissance for the“multicentric” economy.

We are trained as anthropologists and tend tomaintain a healthy distance to social engineering, butas stewards of a vast collective memory of global cul-tural experimentation, it could be argued that we havean obligation to share these alternative ideas and ide-ologies with nonanthropologists seeking visions of asustainable world. Like so many other populationsover the past few centuries, the Tiv have discoveredhow their incorporation into a world economy orches-trated by general-purpose money implied loss of localcontrol, inequitable trade relations, and environmentaldegradation. It is no longer as obvious as it seemed50 years ago that such problems are only the necessaryand temporary side-effects of an inevitably linear pathtoward “modernization” and “development”(Ferguson 1999). It may be high time to vindicate thoseTiv elders who clearly perceived how the dismantlingof their economic categories served to pave the wayfor external appropriation of their resources.

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To “immunize,” as it were, local land and laboragainst the ravages of global capital, it may well provenecessary to insulate them culturally, as resource cate-gories that are not reducible to the universal metric ofgeneral-purpose money. Rather than reversing history,such a scenario might be perceived as a way of reflex-ively taking stock of humankind’s historical experi-ence of several centuries of globalization. Minimally,this would mean distinguishing—in cultural, moral,legal, and practical terms—between those essentialgoods and services that are basic to survival, and thatcan generally be locally produced and distributed, onthe one hand, and those essential contributions ofmodernity (such as computer software and advancedpharmaceuticals) that require a global division oflabor, on the other hand. Only by reinstating somekind of moral hierarchy distinguishing such separatespheres of exchange can the algorithm of destructionbe domesticated. The building-blocks of world society—the communities and ecosystems that we so oftenevoke by referring to the “local”—need to be grantedtheir own integrity, and a measure of autonomy, tobegin to be able to engage in global trade on terms thatcould be called “fair.” Hundreds of anthropologicalcase studies from all over the world have shown thatthe logic of general-purpose money is not conduciveto such local integrity.

Economic anthropology is thus a repository of em-pirically and theoretically well-founded arguments fora critical reconsideration—and reshaping—of the in-stitution of money itself. I need not recapitulate thehistory of ideas from Marx, Mauss, Polanyi, Dalton,Bohannan, Godelier, Sahlins, Rappaport, Taussig,Bloch, Kopytoff, and Gudeman to make this point.Suffice to say that many anthropologists, in compar-ing “non-modern” modes of economic life with thoseof capitalist modernity, have discovered both the de-structiveness and the cultural arbitrariness of the no-tion of general-purpose money. In various ways, theyhave emphasized the inclination of most people, irre-spective of cultural background, to recognize that allvalues are not commensurable and interchangeable.This moral conviction is obvious even where no at-tempts are made to challenge the idea of general-purpose money or in other ways reshape theinstitutions that govern our economic life, for in-stance in standard reactions to stories of illegal tradein human organs. At the same time, people all over theworld have been expressing such convictions throughtheir material practice of exchange, whether affluent

middle-class students in the North pursuing a sense ofcommunity by joining barter clubs, or impoverishedfamilies in the South resorting to the “informal econ-omy” to survive. Although their incentives are ex-tremely diverse, their economic strategies converge indistinguishing the local and personal sphere of ex-change as more secure and morally committing thanthe global and abstract.

There is a growing literature on community cur-rencies, barter clubs, and other experiments in creatinglocal spheres of exchange (e.g., Dobson 1993;Douthwaite 1999), but there have been very few at-tempts to understand such social projects in terms ofanthropological theory. Gudeman (2001:160–161)briefly mentions these experiments while arguing for adistinction between “market” and “community,” butdoes not seriously consider their potential as a way toalleviate the sociopolitical polarizations and ecologicalproblems generated by the capitalist world market (cf.Hornborg 2005). A radical anthropological discussionof the prospects for a transformation of the idea ofmoney is Keith Hart’s Money in an Unequal World(2001). Hart, whose experiences of “development” inGhana in the 1960s prompted him to coin the expres-sion “informal economy” (cf. Hart 1992), suggests thatthe Internet could be used to make it possible for eachindividual to use different kinds of money for transac-tions within different social networks. The new capac-ity for electronic information storage would make itpossible to “personalize” money and credit so as torecord and express the specific transaction history ofeach actor. Hart does not pursue this idea to the pointof offering a concrete, practical blueprint for such apersonalized economy, in which we all “make our ownmoney,” but he suggests that local currencies such asLocal Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) and “Ithacadollars” are examples of what the future will bring(Hart 2001:279–285).

Although what Hart proposes is explicitly sub-sumed under Bohannan’s category of “special-purposemoney,” he curiously chooses to dismiss “the logic ofspheres of exchange” as the preoccupation of Tiv eld-ers and other “aristocracy” with their rank privileges(Hart 2001:271–272). This is perplexing, as he is later(Hart 2001:301) very clear about the democratic advantages of such special currencies:

They can give communities or networks of indi-viduals a means of organizing some of their activ-ities independently, without fear that the value of

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their transactions will somehow be sucked off toan anonymous center of accumulation.

Hart’s book is refreshingly outspoken in its criticismof “state capitalism,” but its recipes for alleviating theproblems are contradictory. The argument is entrenchedin the same kind of technological optimism that pre-vented Marx from facing the implications of his ownconclusion that the machines in themselves are mani-festations of unequal exchange (Hornborg 2001). Hartmakes a point of distinguishing markets from capital-ism, criticizing the latter as inherently exploitative butsuggesting that markets are a problem only whensome people have inordinately more money than oth-ers. He does not, however, specify how his scheme ofmultiple currencies might curb such uneven accumu-lation of money, for instance through investments intechnology. Although he observes that uneven mecha-nization is fundamental to accumulation, he sug-gests that to conflate the Marxian concept of capital(as money) with machines is to mystify the social rela-tions involved (Hart 2001:84). I would counter that thereal mystification is to not recognize technologies asmanifestations of social relations (of exchange).

An important merit with Hart’s book, however, isthat it shows very convincingly how dominant mod-ern powers such as the United States and theEuropean Union, behind all the neoliberal discourseon “free trade,” practice a very “unfree” trade policy,particularly as regards agricultural produce. Therecognition or conviction that all things are not freelyinterchangeable, it seems, is as fundamental to nation-states as to individual market actors. This fact couldpotentially have surprising and far-reaching implica-tions for current deliberations on free trade. Ratherthan continue to let their agricultural subsidies contra-dict their neoliberal discourse, an interesting optionfor these nation-states might be to openly concedethat the land (or landscape) within their territories canlegitimately be regarded as the base of a special“sphere of exchange” that is exempt—and needs to beprotected—from free, global competition. Land and itsproducts is not a kind of capitalist commodity likeany other. It has not been difficult for the United Statesand the European Union to come up with good argu-ments for preserving their countrysides—socially andecologically—rather than let them succumb to compe-tition from economically more “efficient” producers,whether the latter’s “efficiency” derives from lowerlabor costs or other advantages. It is thus ironic that

these powers should practice, at home, an antimarketarrangement that they have consistently denied peo-ples of the South such as the Tiv.

If, in the light of these considerations, we shouldwish to follow Hart in crossing the boundary betweenanthropological theory and the engineering of radicalsocial policy, we could begin by asking ourselves, howmight a “multicentric” modern economy be devised?A major justification for such a reform would be to re-place current agricultural policies with an economicframework that makes it rational for individual hu-mans to practice sustainable production and con-sumption. This goal would in turn entail a consciousencouragement of increasingly localized flows of en-ergy, materials, and nutrients, that is, reducing long-distance transports and making extensive recyclingmore feasible than at present.

How could the notion of “special-purpose money”encourage individual households to change their be-havior in this direction? Let us imagine that they hadrecourse to a special currency, issued and distributedby the state—let us call it “coupons”—that could onlybe employed to purchase organic products of the landsuch as food, firewood, compost, animal fodder, and(untaxed) local labor. The coupons would be distrib-uted to households on an annual basis in proportion totheir size. Households would find it rational to use thecoupons in their purchases of food, and so forth, as itwould liberate parts of their regular money income forother purposes. The coupons would thus flow fromhouseholds to grocery shops and to the farms them-selves, depending on the gains to be made by circum-venting the shops. Why would shopkeepers andfarmers want to accept coupons in exchange for theirproducts, rather than conventional money? One an-swer is that they would be able to use these coupons topurchase various things from the households that theywould otherwise have to spend regular money on, in-cluding (untaxed) labor, used packaging materials,and compost. Another incentive might be that the stateguarantees shopkeepers and farmers the option ofconverting a share of the coupons earned to regularcash, closing the circuit through which they circulate.All three categories of actors—households, shopkeep-ers, and farmers—would also participate in the circu-lation of ordinary money, for instance in purchasingequipment and services from what I here loosely referto as “industry” (i.e., enterprise not based on localproducts of the land and the state). Their supply of or-dinary money would be secured by a mix of wages

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and subsidies, as is currently the case, and the solidityof the state by taxation.

In which ways would such a “bicentric” economyencourage sustainable production and consumption?(1) It would quickly reduce demand for long-distanceimports of agricultural produce, thus also reducingtransports and the concomitant energy use and carbondioxide emissions. (2) It would encourage local recy-cling of nutrients and packaging materials, reducingwaste, the use of energy and materials, and eutroph-ication of water. (3) It would encourage less capital-intensive, more labor-based agriculture, again reducingresource use and environmental damage. (4) It wouldreduce entrepreneurial incentives to control and ex-ploit distant landscapes for agricultural export pro-duction, alleviating the marginalization of localpopulations from the land worldwide. (5) It would re-duce waste of food such as surplus production andlosses in transport. (6) It would encourage the produc-tion of healthier and fresher food, with fewer preserv-atives. (7) It would encourage a more complex patternof global land use, increasing biodiversity in areasnow used for industrial monocultures as well as inareas marginalized from agricultural production. (8) Itwould increase local self-sufficiency in products andservices essential to survival, reducing vulnerability tocrisis. (9) It would encourage a resurrection of com-munity, reducing social marginalization and improv-ing health. (10) It would ultimately reduce thecurrently escalating costs of the social, medical, andecological problems associated with our present pat-tern of organizing the global economy. (11) It wouldmake it possible for individual consumers to grasp theextent of their societal and ecological agency and toassume responsibility for it.

No doubt there are plenty of potential problemswith this scheme. Readers have probably already en-visaged several of the standard objections that I en-counter among my students when I present thisthought experiment. My response would be that theseproblems can hardly be more difficult to handle thanthe ones we are presently facing.

To make more tangible the connections betweenecology, economy, community, and morality indicatedin the final point in the list above, let me concludewith a fictional anecdote from a rural setting any-where in the northern hemisphere. A local, unem-ployed woman in her fifties struggles to improve hermodest income by selling blueberries to the affluent,middle-class professionals who have settled in her

community, within comfortable commuting distanceto their urban offices. She has braved the heat and rainand mosquitoes for days on end to deliver those tenliters of blueberries for the $30 they will fetch. Thebuyers deposit them in their freezer, but when one oftheir teenagers shifts the plug for another electricalappliance, she forgets to reconnect the freezer, and thecontents are ruined. When reprimanded by her par-ents, she retorts that there is no reason to quarrel over“mere material things . . . ” The contemporary disar-ticulation of consumption from the resource flowsand inputs of human labor that sustain them keepseconomy and morality—things and persons—effec-tively apart. Such commodity fetishism rests on theinvisibility of production. Its implications can some-times protrude clearly in rural economies where thisdisarticulation is not always guaranteed. A relocaliza-tion of a “subsistence sphere of exchange” might thusincrease our ability to grasp the social and ecologicalconsequences of our consumption, and to reintroducemorality into economic life.

References Cited

Bohannan, Paul1955 Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among

the Tiv. American Anthropologist 57(1):60–70.

Dobson, Ross V. G.1993 Bringing the Economy Home from the Market.

Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Douthwaite, Richard1999 The Ecology of Money. Totnes Devon: Green

Books–Schumacher Society.

Ferguson, James1999 Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of

Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Gudeman, Stephen1986 Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of

Livelihood. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.2001 The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market

and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hart, Keith1992 Market and State after the Cold War: The Informal

Economy Reconsidered. In Contesting Markets:Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice. R. Dilley, ed. Pp. 214–227. Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press.

2001 Money in an Unequal World. New York: Texere.

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Hornborg, Alf2001 The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of

Economy, Technology, and Environment. Lanham,MD: AltaMira.

2005 Resisting the Black Hole of Neoclassical Formalismin Economic Anthropology: A Polemic. In PeopledEconomies: Conversations with Stephen Gudeman.

S. Löfving ed. Pp. 63–80. Uppsala, Sweden:Collegium for Development Studies, UppsalaUniversity.

2006 Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The IndustrialRevolution as Time-Space Appropriation andEnvironmental Load Displacement. EcologicalEconomics 59(1):74–81.

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hornborg learning from the tiv

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