Image Making in Byzantium, Sasanian Persia and the Early Muslim World by Anthony Cutler;

Author:Anthony Cutler;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Gifts and Gift Exchange in Economic History and Theory

The behavior of Sinbad and those whom he served is a perfect example of the classical economic doctrine that the motive to produce things is the desire to exchange them for other goods and that this supply in and of itself creates demand and thereby stimulates further exchange. But Say’s law, as this nineteenth-century notion is now called, is hardly useful to our investigation in that it is based upon the belief (still essential in Marx’s thinking) that the value of something is the reason for its exchange146 rather than that it is this exchange that stamps an object with value. The validity of this counterproposition, first set out to my knowledge by Georg Simmel,147 is supported by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s remarks about the amount of silk that he encountered on his diplomatic mission: a luxury elsewhere, in China it was so plentiful that “[i]f it were not for the merchants [trading it] it would have no value.”148 The Arab traveler was, of course, observing the movement of commodities in a field of activity that today would be described as economic, a viewpoint that seems to set them apart from the transfer of goods—bracelets, necklaces, and, above all, armshells—that for Malinowski and, after him, Mauss and a host of other anthropologists, constituted the kula of the Western Pacific. This trade Mauss described as “carried on in a noble fashion, apparently in a disinterested and modest way. It is distinguished carefully from the mere economic exchange of useful goods.”149 Its “nobility” is said to derive from the ethical climate in which it circulated, a system that institutionalized the obligation to give, to receive, and, after a decent interval, to reciprocate the initial gift, all the while ignoring, as befitted “primitive” or “archaic” societies, its monetary value.

The question now is the extent to which this model is applicable to the gifts that moved within and especially between the economies that are the subject of this paper. It is not enough to disown its relevance to Muslim or Byzantine societies on the ground that their economies were neither primitive nor archaic. Even if the texts (and especially the Greek texts) at our disposal present what Pierre Bourdieu called “sincere fictions,” making it difficult for us to see the economy that they inhabited “as an economy, i.e., as a system governed by the laws of interested calculation, competition, or exploitation,”150 much of the evidence discussed above not only allows us to reject the notion that gifts represent disinterested activity, but, upon analysis, requires that we recognize the calcula-tive dimension of so-called noncommercial exchange. The extent to which the early medieval economy was monetized151 is immaterial to this understanding; Grierson’s argument that gifts (and theft) were the principal means by which precious goods were distributed still makes it easier to grasp, first, the reason why at least Muslim chronicles and treatises put so much emphasis on presents and, second, why, in both these and their Byzantine equivalents, gold and silver coin figures so often in accounts of such transfers.

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