III. The Binding Force of Economic Obligations
To enter more deeply into the nature of these binding obligations, let us follow the fishermen to the shore. Let us see what happens with the division of the catch. In most cases only a small proportion of it remains with the villagers. As a rule we should find a number of people from some inland community waiting on the shore. They receive the bundles of fish from the fishermen and carry them home, often many miles away, running so as to arrive while it is still fresh. Here again we should find a system of mutual services and obligations based on a standing arrangement between two village communities. The inland village supplies the fishermen with vegetables: the coastal community repays with fish. This arrangement is primarily an economic one. It has also a ceremonial aspect, for the exchange has to be done according to an elaborate ritual. But there is also the legal side, a system of mutual obligations which forces the fisherman to repay whenever he has received a gift from his inland partner, and vice versa. Neither partner can refuse, neither may stint in his return gift, neither should delay.
What is the motive force behind these obligations? The coastal and inland villages respectively have to reply upon each other for the supply of food. On the coast the natives never have enough vegetable food, while inland the people are always in need of fish. Moreover, custom will have it that on the coast all the big ceremonial displays and distributions of food, which form an extremely important aspect of the public life of these natives, must be made with certain specially large and fine varieties of vegetable food, which grow only on the fertile plains inland. There, on the other hand, the proper substance for a distribution and feast is fish. Thus to all other reasons of value of the respectively rarer food, there is added an artificially, culturally created dependence of the two districts upon one another. So that on the whole each community is very much in need of its partners. If at any time previously these have been guilty of neglect, however, they know that they will be in one way or another severely penalized. Each community has, therefore, a weapon for the enforcement of its rights: reciprocity.
This is not limited to the exchange of fish for vegetables. As a rule, two communities rely upon each other in other forms of trading and other mutual services as well. Thus every chain of reciprocity is made the more binding by being part and parcel of a whole system of mutualities.