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Part I: Bridewealth, Dowry, and Brideprice

Now let me start at the beginning, so part one is bridewealth, dowry, and just plain brideprice. One of the less remarkable arguments in Debt, although, as I say, one of, perhaps one of its more ambitious interventions in anthropological theory (I don’t think anybody noticed this, because it was largely in the footnotes) was a critique of Jack Goody’s famous argument of the opposition between bridewealth and dowry. I would see it as much as an expansion and slight modification of Goody’s argument, rather than in contradiction to it. I’m pretty sure Goody would see it as in contradiction with it. In fact, when people raised similar points, he argued against them, so I seem to be on the other side. Goody’s core argument I think everyone has come to accept, which is about the distinction between bridewealth and dowry. The whole anthropological debate on the subject can actually be traced back to a political question in the 1930s when the League of Nations was holding a series of debates about whether the practice of what was then called brideprice should be banned as a form of slavery: does brideprice actually mean people are selling women?

As one might imagine, anthropologists were called in as expert witnesses and testified. Evans-Pritchard, in particular, entered the argument and made a strong case that even in societies where people actually say things like, ‘Yes, I am buying a wife,’ they don’t really mean it. Such statements are not to be taken literally, because even if payments only move in one direction, as they didn’t necessarily — there’s some places there’s actually payments in both directions; the important thing is that things are moving around; but that would be the case often in Southeast Asia; in Africa, it was often when things move just one way, from the wife-takers to the wife-givers — even so, he argued, there’s no sense of payment, and there were a number of criteria that were listed as why this does not resemble a payment. If you were to buy, say, a cow, one was that both parties continued to have mutual rights and responsibilities, and so did their lineages and clans; another was that if anything was actually being purchased in the case of bridewealth (and this is a period where they actually insisted that we get rid of the word bride-price entirely and substitute bridewealth). If anything was really being purchased, the argument was, it was not the woman, but her fertility, more specifically the right of the wife-taker’s lineage or clan to name any children of the union as their patrilineal descendants. So, in that sense, women in no way resembled slaves, since slaves are by definition entirely detached from their natal love of social relations, whether by capture or a purchase, and of course they don’t have any rights but only responsibilities.

And finally, (this is really the clinching argument for a lot of people), if you’re really buying a wife, then you could sell them, right? In fact, there’s pretty much no case in which someone who obtains a wife by bridewealth can then just arbitrarily pass her on to others for a similar payment. As a result, bridewealth payments were not banned. Anthropologists basically won the argument. The assumption was that bridewealth was not buying a wife through an exchange of gifts meant to create social relations or to transform them, or to establish or renew an alliance between two different groups.

Now Goody’s work in Production and Reproduction and Bridewealth and Dowry takes off from that, and Goody was fascinated in particular by the anomaly of Ethiopia, the fact that when you talk about African systems of kinship and marriage, Ethiopia seems to be the one place where almost all the rules that make Africa different than Eurasia don’t apply. So instead of bridewealth, they do dowry, and they have plough agriculture instead of hoe agriculture. There are any number of different ones I could go into, having to do with cuisine and everything else. But his big point was that it all has to do with technology and population density. It’s actually interesting: it’s a purely materialist argument at root, which has been widely accepted even amongst anthropologists, who generally don’t go for that kind of thing.

What he basically says is that where you have hoe agriculture rather than plough agriculture, you have low population densities, you don’t need heavy-duty technologies to produce crops, and therefore it’s not land but labor that’s at a premium. Bridewealth seems to correspond to those societies, and brideweath — it’s not the fact that one is transferring a property to the wife-takers [sic: givers?] in order to gain a woman. I mean, that is, that does happen, he says, but actually payments can move back and forth in different directions for different reasons. It sets up a nexus, but it’s mainly about the allocation of labor.

The key thing for him is that bridewealth is passed back and forth by the generation above the couple that’s getting married, so it’s actually the lineages or the descent groups, clans, whatever they might be, that they’re part of who are rearranging things together, because in such a situation where land is easy to come by, and where women are doing most of the agricultural work, or either a lion’s share of it or all of it, as they are in many African societies, female labor is really important. And clans basically have a range of options, starting from trying to keep their daughters around, which is a matrilineal option (in fact in such societies where you don’t have a bridewealth custom, you tend to have matriliny) to ones where there’s various forms of bride service, and finally flat-out bridewealth and polygyny, where you’re trying to basically accumulate as many women as possible for your own clan. So essentially these are arrangements made between the elders of various descent groups about the allocation of women’s agricultural labor, he argues.

Now dowry is completely different, because it’s not just a reverse — that dowry is that it’s the woman’s family that’s providing the wealth (again sometimes that’s not even the case). What’s really going on with dowry, he says, is that dowry is premature inheritance, and when you have plough agriculture, that’s usually because you have very high population densities, land is at a premium, and there’s various strategies to bring land together. Thus while bridewealth societies tend to be exogamous, dowry societies tend to be endogamous. You tend to marry within the group. You tend to try to form marriage alliances which will keep property together, and women are not nearly as important as the dominant labor force in agriculture, which means that in many ways they’re seen more as a mouth to feed, he argues, than as the core of your agricultural labor force. So as a result, daughters typically had to be provided with some kind of resources when married off, either land of their own or something else that would take the burden of supporting her away from the husband’s family.

There are a lot of cases which are intermediary. I actually was in a society like that when I did my own fieldwork. In Madagascar, for example, they had both bridewealth and dowry, and in fact it came to the same thing. The husband’s parents would pay a sum of money — it’s called the vodiondry, or rump of a sheep; it actually was a sum of money — to the bride’s family, and then the bride’s parents would immediately use that money to buy furniture, bedding, pots and pans, and other necessities for the new household, which they would then give to the bride. For Goody, this would just be a form of indirect dowry. The point is that the money ends up in a conjugal fund for the newly married couple. So that’s the broad argument, which, since this isn’t an audience of anthropologists, I thought I’d go over it, and I can’t assume that people know the details.

Where the argument hits the shoals, I think, is in its treatment of social class, or really its non-treatment of social class. Stanley Tambiah, who co-wrote one of the key original texts, Bridewealth and Dowry, with Goody in 1973, very soon began to raise objections to certain aspects of this based on his own detailed knowledge of the South Asian ethnography, where he pointed out that there’s a lot of urban societies in Eurasia, or rural societies which are part of larger urban civilizations, where you have dowry at the top of the social ladder and something that looks a lot like bridewealth on the bottom.

As he points out, the magnificent seclusion of upper caste women in India, who often have to be provided with astronomical dowries to keep them kept in the style to which they were accustomed, was only made possible by the industrious labor of lower caste women, who necessarily had to have completely different marriage arrangements. Here’s a quote from Tambiah:

It should be appreciated, as Goody failed to do in Production and Reproduction, that high caste male freedom from menial labor and the conspicuous removal of high caste females from public view are only possible [sic: possible only] because the system of rural production is predicated on the … availability and exploitation of the low caste agricultural labor, both male and female. Moreover, women of these lower orders enjoy much greater freedom of movement outside their homes; bridewealth rather than dowry payments are exacted on their marriages, thus accenting the greater economic value of their labor, and divorce, separation, and remarriage, including remarriage of widows, is frequently open to them. (Tambiah 1989 425)

So in some ways they are more free. In most other ways they are more oppressed.

Goody actually rejected this argument, insisting that what seemed to be bridewealth here wasn’t really bridewealth — it was actually indirect dowry. It ultimately ends up in the conjugal fund of the family in question, and there’s a heated debate about this, but I think actually Tambiah doesn’t really go far enough, because at times, anyway, within these what he calls lower order circles, transactions really did come quite close to simply buying and selling women, and sometimes it actually did. There was buying and selling of women, because slavery was practiced. In fact, these were precisely the women who would otherwise be most likely to become sex workers, debt peons, or wage laborers, that is, who are subject to being commoditized in other ways.

This allowed members of the elite to denounce the poor for buying and selling off their daughters and justified ever-greater sequestering of upper caste women, who of course had to be protected from any possible association with such lowly practices. And what Tombiah is alluding to here (although as I say, he doesn’t take it as far as he might) is a pattern that can be observed in almost all the great Eurasian civilizations. There’s a double push and pull of a commoditization on the bottom and greater seclusion on the top. The greatest detailed evidence we have for marriage transactions from anywhere is from Bronze Age Mesopotamia, starting in Sumer, going on through old Babylonian material, where in the earliest texts, there seems to have been something like what I observed in Madagascar, a gift by the groom’s family to the bride’s, which is ostensibly bridewealth, was actually used to provide for a lavish wedding feast and for silver jewelry, which the bride would then wear. So basically she would show up at the wedding dressed in money, and she would have this as her fund in case of emergencies, or if she wanted investment capital for business ventures, she just used that. As the example implies, in this early period, women had a great deal of economic and social autonomy.

Over time, however, and this is one of the remarkable things about the middle-eastern texts, as time goes on, that autonomy and freedom of women to take part in public or even private life — this continually declines. That freedom is steadily eroded. Wealthy women were sequestered, even veiled. The poorest women really were actually simply bought and sold. Now one thing that I argue in the book is that in societies that don’t have commercial markets, but merely social currencies, as I call them, it’s really only physical violence, war if you include slave raids, that can act as a kind of wedge that dislodges women, sometimes also children, from the webs of debt and mutual responsibilities in which they’re typically embedded, allowing what Levi-Strauss famously called “the exchange of women,” that turned into something that actually did resemble commodity exchange (Pateman 111).

In societies that do have commercial markets, monetary debt, which of course is backed up ultimately by the threat of force, can have the same effect. Certainly that appears to be what happened in the case of Sumer, and Mesopotamia more generally, where at first there would have been no question of a man whose family had paid the traditional sum in grain and silver to acquire a wife, then being able to transfer her to someone else. So you could say as they did in the Bridewealth argument, he wasn’t actually buying a wife, because he couldn’t sell her. However, all of that changed the moment he took out a loan, since in the event of default, you could lose your wife. In fact, the normal practice was: first they go for your fields and vineyards, if you have those; then they go for your flocks; after that, if you have children, and ultimately one’s spouse who were taken away as sureties.

Now that, of course, means assigning a monetary value to human beings, which in turn was made conceptually easier by the existence of chattel slavery, which wasn’t demographically that important, but I think it was conceptually very important at that time. So what I suggested in the book was that this threat of alienating human beings from their families and communities set off a series of other changes which had disastrous consequences for the freedom of Mesopotamian women more generally.

First of all, using family members as surety for loans gradually became a precedent for other forms of commoditization. Stol, for instance, remarks, as quoted, “In Nuzi, the bride price was paid in domestic animals and silver amounting to a total value of forty shekels of silver. There is some evidence that it was equal to the price of a slave girl” (Stol 126). So you’re actually paying the same thing in brideprice as you would if you’re just buying someone.

Now this confluence is not surprising, since in that same city we have evidence of rich men paying cut-rate brideprice to impoverished families to acquire a daughter, who they could then adopt. So you pay the same price to adopt a daughter, who you can then use pretty much as you like: as a concubine, nursemaid, servant, or simply marry her to one of your slaves. Another quote:

The poorer the girl’s parents, the more marriage resembles a real sale. Marriage arrangements in a city like Nuzi indeed look like sales due to the poverty of the girl’s parents, and giving a dowry there was a luxury of the wealthy (Ibid.).

So not only is it dowry and brideprice, dowry for the rich and brideprice for the poor; it’s actually the brideprice and not bridewealth. In other cities, adopted daughters (‘adopted’ in quotes here), were employed in industrial pursuits, or set to work as prostitutes, to provide an income for their adopters in retirement. Daughters who were sold or taken as debt sureties were often sexually exploited, became temple prostitutes or commercial sex workers. This in turn set off a kind of puritanical reaction, as men began to judge one another’s honor by their ability to safeguard the sexual purity of their womenfolk and protect them from being taken away like this. Virginity is never actually mentioned in the early texts, so it becomes an issue steadily in the midst of all of this. Bridewealth, even among wealthier families, by the old Babylonian period, came to be referred to as the price of a virgin, and this was increasingly meant literally, because illegal deflowering of a virgin came to be considered a property crime against her father. You could pay an equivalent fine for compensation. Marriage came to be referred to as taking possession of a woman, the same word one would use for the seizure of goods.

This tendency to commoditize the bodies and services of poor women led to the sequestering even of rich women, who largely lost the ability to separate even from abusive husbands. By the late Bronze Age, they would often not go out unveiled. I mean there were never laws saying they had to go veiled. There are actually laws saying that poor women or prostitutes couldn’t wear veils. Nonetheless, there was a clear dynamic whereby the commoditization of some women led to increasing sequestering of others. I think that almost all the great Eurasian civilizations witnessed a similar dynamic between roughly 2500 and 1500 BC and 1500 AD. The class war between men was essentially fought out over the bodies of women. The daughters of both rich and poor continually lost ground as a result.

To take just one well-documented example, Chinese legends recorded in Guanzi and elsewhere (I don’t know how to pronounce that) report that coin money was first invented by benevolent emperors to redeem poor children who had been sold or taken away as debt pledges by the rich during times of famine (Rickett 397). So such practices existed. Predatory lending, breakup of families, was seen as a social issue, and the state was seen as taking an interest in fighting it. In fact, while the landed classes provided their daughters with dowries, brideprice here too continued to be practiced by the poor. And it overlaps so strongly with slavery that state bureaucrats who periodically tried to ban both, along with debt peonage, could hardly be blamed for concluding that all three were basically the same thing. One of the interesting things about Chinese slavery, and this was even more true of Korean slavery — in Korea in certain periods, they passed laws that men could not be enslaved; only women could be enslaved. In China, they never went quite that far, but very often — but it was typical that slavery was seen as something that happens to women and not to men.

Now it’s interesting, if you look across Eurasia in what I call the long Axial Age, chattel slavery was extremely common. Over the course of the Middle Ages, it’s largely eliminated, at least as a factor in production, and it’s transformed (you could say) into serfdom in the Christian West, restricted largely to household slavery in the Middle East or military slavery, debt peonage and other forms of caste domination in South Asia, and in China, it’s largely restricted to women. This is partly due to the peculiar nature of the Chinese patrilineal system, whereby men were actually members of a lineage and ultimately belong to their ancestors, and “women belong to the men,” as James Watson put it, or to the household, which was dominated by the men (Watson 222).

It was therefore considered increasingly unacceptable to sell sons as slaves, even in cases of extreme debt or poverty, but perfectly acceptable to sell daughters, or even in some places, wives, on the event of the death of their husbands. So you could sell a son to be adopted, but you had to make sure they ended up in a relatively advantageous situation. But there are actually markets in daughters, in many times and places, at which the daughters could be bought, pretty much for whatever you want — daughter, slave, concubine, wife, or prostitute — depending on the buyer’s whim. “It was not impossible,” says James Watson, “for a girl to be purchased as a daughter in infancy, exploited like a slave during adolescence, and married off to one of her buyer’s own sons in adulthood” (Watson 224).

As I say, there was constant attempts by the government to suppress this kind of thing, as indeed there still is, because there’s periodic scandals about the sort of things which still break out about the sale of girls, often when they are quite young. They seem to especially correspond to those periods where commercial life could be said to be most flourishing, particularly the Song and Ming dynasties, which were also the periods where women’s status and women’s freedom generally are seen as declining. Something like that dynamic — on the one hand, commoditization of the poor in this very literal sense of poor women, and seclusion, in reaction to that, of richer ones — seems to be happening almost everywhere.

Commercial debt plays a key role in effecting that. Most of these people were ultimately sold because of the need to pay debts. While for the landed classes, marriage became unsurprisingly largely about control of land, for the laboring classes it remained largely about the control of labor and women’s labor, in particular. Commercial debt played a key role in effecting the transition between older marriage arrangements, which largely had to do with renegotiating relations between social groups, and the incipient commoditization of labor.

Now considering the way the debate began in the League of Nations, the debate about whether bridewealth should be considered a form of slavery and made illegal in European colonial dependencies, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that anthropologists have tended to be a little bit squeamish about following such matters through to their logical conclusions, as evidenced by Goody’s largely holding back from dealing with marriage arrangements among the Eurasian poor at all. He has this huge fat book, and there’s almost nothing about lower caste people in India, or poor people in Mesopotamia. It’s almost all elite examples.

It’s largely been Marxist and feminist anthropologists who have been willing to explore such territory systematically. In fact, one could very easily make the case that it’s one reason kinship has sort of disappeared as the primary object of anthropology, and I’ve always felt that this is a bit of a scandal. It used to be, thirty, forty years ago, if there’s this special thing that anthropologists have, it’s kinship. We can do these diagrams that no one else can understand. It’s sort of our equivalent of equations for economists. It’s our thing, our special knowledge. It’s like anthropology threw that away. If you talk to the average person trained in anthropology nowadays with a PhD, they probably never had a kinship course. If you talk about matrilateral prescriptive marriage customs, they just don’t know what you’re talking about. So how did that happen?

I think that the answer to that is that starting in the ‘70s and ‘80s, feminists made a very strong case that you can’t talk about this stuff anymore without taking into consideration power and domination, sexism, compulsory heterosexuality, and that whole series of issues that hadn’t really been discussed, that these are really power systems and systems of exploitation. So the result was that most male anthropologists just said, ‘Okay, we won’t talk about them at all anymore. You girls can go talk about them.’ As a result, it’s sort of faded away, rather embarrassingly in my opinion. So debt is the wedge which allows social relations to be turned, essentially commoditized, and particularly women’s labor.

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