As Graeber notes, it's impossible to find happy stories about usurers in most cultures. Those who accumulated power, who manufactured and traded in credit, have generally not been loved. Power and charisma used to be suspect in our own culture. In the egalitarian world of the Tiv, the story prevents anyone from becoming too big for their boots, lest they be forced to cook their children. Although everyone wants to become powerful and attractive, it's a way of curbing a love of too much power. Only the most powerful and charismatic men are susceptible to the flesh debt. But those with the seed of a witch in their hearts are burdened with a flesh debt, doomed to give their family to be served on other witches' tables. Ordinary people simply run screaming from the table. Among the Tiv, it is known that the society of witches recruits by tricking someone into eating human flesh.
He tells, for instance, of the Tiv, residents of rural Nigeria with elaborate rituals of exchange spiked with a dark secret.
In the best anthropological tradition, he helps us reset our everyday ideas by exploring history and other civilizations, then boomeranging back to render our own world strange, and more open to change. I was reminded of my mother's sparring by David Graeber's terrific new book,ĭebt. They may not always involve bangles, but elaborate "no, you shouldn't haves" are a part of everyone's life. It may sound exotic, but this is a commonplace. Its receipt was being acknowledged with gentle blows. The ritualized clash – a pat-a-cake for adults – had been demanded by my aunt for giving us a too-generous gift. I went downstairs to find my mother and aunt gently fighting with their wrists.
One morning, when I was a boy, I woke to the sound of shouting, then giggles and clinking bangles.
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