VIII. The Principle of Give and Take Pervading Ttribal Life
In the foregoing we have seen a series of pictures from native life, illustrating the legal aspect of the marriage relationship, of co-operation in a fishing team, of food barter between inland and coastal villages, of certain ceremonial duties of mourning. These examples were adduced with some detail, in order to bring out clearly the concrete working of what appears to me to be the real mechanism of law, social and psychological constraint, the actual forces, motives, and reasons which make men keep to their obligations. If space permitted it would be easy to bring these isolated instances into a coherent picture and to show that in all social relations and in all the various domains of tribal life, exactly the same legal mechanism can be traced, that it places the binding obligations in a special category and sets them apart from other types of customary rules. A rapid though comprehensive survey will have to suffice.
To take the economic transactions first: barter of goods and services is carried on mostly within a standing partnership, or is associated with definite social ties or coupled with a mutuality in non-economic matters. Most if not all economic acts are found to belong to some chain of reciprocal gifts and countergifts, which in the long run balance, benefiting both sides equally.
I have already given an account of the economic conditions in N. W. Melanesia, in The Primitive Economics of the Trobriand Islanders („Economic Journal”, 1921) and in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1923. Chapter vi of that volume deals with matters here discussed, i. e. the forms of economic exchange. My ideas about primitive law were not mature at that time, and the facts are presented there without any reference to the present argument — their testimony only the more telling because of that. When, however, I describe a category of offerings as ’Pure Gifts’ and place under this heading the gifts of husband to wife and of father to children, I am obviously committing a mistake. I have fallen then, in fact, into the error exposed above, of tearing the act out of its context, of not taking a sufficiently long view of the chain of transactions. In the same paragraph I have supplied, however, an implicit rectification of my mistake in stating that „a gift given by the father to his son is said [by the natives] to be a repayment for the man’s relationship to the mother” (p. 179). I have also pointed out there that the ’free gifts’ to the wife are also based on the same idea. But the really correct account of the conditions — correct both from the legal and from the economic point of view — would have been to embrace the whole system of gifts, duties, and mutual benefits exchanged between the husband on one hand, wife, children, and wife’s brother on the other. It would be found then in native ideas that the system is based on a very complex give and take, and that in the long run the mutual services balance.7
The real reason why all these economic obligations are normally kept, and kept very scrupulously, is that failure to comply places a man in an intolerable position, while slackness in fulfilment covers him with opprobrium. The man who would persistently disobey the rulings of law in his economic dealings would soon find himself outside the social and economic order — and he is perfectly well aware of it. Test cases are supplied nowadays, when a number of natives through laziness, eccentricity, or a non-conforming spirit of enterprise, have chosen to ignore the obligations of their status and have become automatically outcasts and hangers-on to some white man or other.
The honourable citizen is bound to carry out his duties, though his submission is not due to any instinct or intuitive impulse or mysterious ’group-sentiment’, but to the detailed and elaborate working of a system, in which every act has its own place and must be performed without fail. Though no native, however intelligent, can formulate this state of affairs in a general abstract manner, or present it as a sociological theory, yet every one is well aware of its existence and in each concrete case he can foresee the consequences.
In magical and religious ceremonies almost every act, besides its primary purposes and effects, is also regarded as an obligation between groups and individuals, and here also there comes sooner or later an equivalent repayment or counter-service, stipulated by custom. Magic in its most important forms is a public institution in which the communal magician, who as a rule holds his office by inheritance, has to officiate on behalf of the whole group. Such is the case in the magic of gardens, fishing, war, weather, and canoe-building. As necessity arises, at the proper season, or in certain circumstances he is under an obligation to perform his magic, to keep the taboos, and at times also to control the whole enterprise. For this he is repaid by small offerings, immediately given, and often incorporated into the ritual proceedings. But the real reward lies in the prestige, power, and privileges which his position confers upon him.8 In cases of minor or occasional magic, such as love charms, curative rites, sorcery, magic of toothache and of pig-welfare, when it is performed on behalf of another, it has to be paid for substantially and the relation between client and professional is based on a contract defined by custom. From the point of view of our present argument, we have to register the fact that all the acts of communal magic are obligatory upon the performer, and that the obligation to carry them out goes with the status of communal magician, which is hereditary in most cases and always is a position of power and privilege. A man may relinquish his position and hand it over to the next in succession, but once he accepts it, he has to carry on the work incumbent, and the community has to give him in return all his dues.
As to the acts which usually would be regarded as religious rather than magical — ceremonies at birth or marriage, rites of death and mourning, the worship of ghosts, spirits, or mythical personages — they also have a legal side clearly exemplified in the case of mortuary performances, described above. Every important act of a religious nature is conceived as a moral obligation towards the object, the ghost, spirit, or power worshipped; it also satisfies some emotional craving of the performer; but besides all this it has also as a matter of fact its place in some social scheme, it is regarded by some third person or persons as due to them, watched and then repaid or returned in kind. When, for example, at the annual return of the departed ghosts to their village you give an offering to the spirit of a dead relative, you satisfy his feelings, and no doubt also his spiritual appetite, which feeds on the spiritual substance of the meal; you probably also express your own sentiment towards the beloved dead. But there is also a social obligation involved: after the dishes have been exposed for some time and the spirit has finished with his spiritual share, the rest, none the worse it appears for ordinary consumption after its spiritual abstraction, is given to a friend or relation-in-law still alive, who then returns a similar gift later on.9 I can recall to my mind not one single act of a religious nature without some such sociological by-play more or less directly associated with the main religious function of the act. Its importance lies in the fact that it makes the act a social obligation, besides its being a religious duty.
I could still continue with the survey of some other phases of tribal life and discuss more fully the legal aspect of domestic relations, already exemplified above, or enter into the reciprocities of the big enterprises, and so on. But it must have become clear now that the detailed illustrations previously given are not exceptional isolated cases, but representative instances of what obtains in every walk of native life.