Examples of indirect gift exchanges between cultures?

December 20, 2016 11:13 AM

I'm looking for examples, descriptions, anthropological terminology, etc. of non-physical contact exchange of gifts between two cultures. One example is the, bucket drop, where missionaries in Ecuador would drop and retrieve a bucket on a rope from an airplane circling above settlements of the Huaorani; the bucket would contain gifts for the Huaorani, who would put in their own gifts for the missionaries.

Does anyone know of any other examples of something similar? I'm more interested in real-life examples, but fictional are good too (one fictional example is in Hal Clement's IceWorld).

posted by ShooBoo to Society & Culture (10 answers total)

A fictional example - kind of - is the exchange of first matter/material and then messages between parallel universes in Asimov's The Gods Themselves.
posted by Occula at 11:32 AM on December 20, 2016

... I meant, kind of an example, not a kind-of-fictional example. It is a fictional example!
posted by Occula at 11:34 AM on December 20, 2016

Are you looking specifically for gift exchanges between cultures who have never had any contact? Canada and Denmark leave each other bottles of liquor in their squabble over Hans Island.
posted by Prunesquallor at 11:42 AM on December 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

In Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward, the humans start sending the aliens (who live and evolve much faster) information; by the time they've finished sending the basics, the aliens have evolved past that and start sending advanced information back.
posted by The otter lady at 12:16 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

I seem to recall interactions like that in "The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders", in which the British left items on shore in an attempt to entice the islanders to trade, but I don't have it on hand right now.

"Debt: The First 5000 Years" talks about how rare barter actually is, compared to the role it plays in stories we tell about the development of money, so examples might be harder to find than you hope.
posted by clawsoon at 1:19 PM on December 20, 2016

There have been attempts to give gifts to the
Sentinelese, although they were not always warmly received.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 2:07 PM on December 20, 2016

Kenyan Masai people gave the New Yorkers cows after 9/11.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:09 PM on December 20, 2016

Best answer: This is known as silent trade, a key concept of modern anthropology first formulated by J.G. Frazer in his famous questionnaire 'On the Customs, Beliefs and Languages of Savages':

Have they the custom of "the silent trade"? That is, do they barter goods with other tribes or with Europeans without personal contact, each side depositing its wares in certain spots and carrying away the wares of the other side without speaking or meeting?

One of Frazer's disciples, P.J. Hamilton Grierson, published an entire book on this topic, The Silent Trade: A Contribution to the Early History of Human Intercourse (1903).

However, the whole concept of silent trade has been called into question by recent scholars who see it as reflecting a European 'origin myth' of money, in which gift exchange and barter gradually evolve into trade and market economy. As Nicholas Thomas writes in Entangled Objects (1991):

I have in my mind an unusually clear, but socially decontextualized, image of barter. I suppose I acquired this through elementary social studies, perhaps even at primary school. The scene takes place at an oasis, on a river bank, or near some sort of border. I see the people who have traveled to this spot giving some object in exchange for some very different object: pottery jugs for fabric, for instance. Because the local people do not have money, they equate quantities; several pairs of sandals are worth one jug. Money is thus implicit in its absence.

Thomas argues that this is essentially a creation of Western colonialism, and that native peoples (he is writing specifically about the natives of Fiji and other Pacific islands) only started to treat it as a reciprocal exchange (barter or gift) once they had been taught to think in these terms by Europeans.
posted by verstegan at 3:04 PM on December 20, 2016 [7 favorites]

My suggestion of "The Land of Naked People" is a rabbit trail. I checked it last night, and what I was remembering was a British officer who left gifts on the islands a couple of times. It did not lead to exchange, despite his hopes, and most of the other colonial interactions recounted in the book were violent/exploitative/destructive.
posted by clawsoon at 7:14 AM on December 21, 2016

I just came across a reference to this in Herodotus, in a description of Carthaginian trade with Africans. The author quoting the passage called it "dumb barter", and a Google for that term brings up lots of additional references.

The natives, when they see the smoke, come down to the shore,and, laying out to view so much gold as they think the worth of the wares, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians upon this come ashore and look. If they think the gold enough, they take it and go their way; but if it does not seem to them sufficient, they go aboard ship once more, and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to their gold, till the Carthaginians are content. Neither party deals unfairly by the other: for they themselves never touch the gold till it comes up to the worth of their goods, nor do the natives ever carry off the goods till the gold is taken away.

The author does note that the Carthaginians were liable to make up stories about their trading practices in order to throw potential competitors off the trail, so apply the usual grain of salt.
posted by clawsoon at 8:57 AM on January 23, 2017