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Learning from the Tiv: Why a Sustainable

Economy Would have to be Multicentric

Alf Hornborg
Alf Hornborg is a professor in the Human Ecology
Division, Lund University, Sweden.

Abstract
Although careful not to romanticize the premodern
cultures that have traditionally been the central object of
their research, anthropologists might reconsider some classical ethnography in the light of ongoing deliberations on sustainability. Economic anthropology is in a unique position
to achieve a distanced view of modern money and neoliberal
market ideology by contrasting its notions of value and reciprocity with those of premodern, multicentric economies
such as that documented over 50 years ago by Paul
Bohannan among the Tiv of Nigeria. The assumptions of
generalized interchangeability and abstract utility that are
so fundamental to the theory and practice of neoclassical
economics inexorably generate an accelerating destruction
of natural resources and increasingly inequitable global
trade relations. The fundamental principle of any multicentric economy is the acknowledgment of two or more distinct and incommensurable spheres of value. This principle
deserves to be reexamined by economic policy makers seriously committed to improving local control of resources,
sustainability, and equity. The challenge could be expressed
in terms of immunizing local meanings and ecosystems
against the conceptual and physical ravages of global capital. In this article, I discuss some aspects of the rationale of
alternative markets and currencies, emphasizing the peculiarly dissolvent semiotics of general purpose money in a
biosphere organized in terms of hierarchically nested levels
of integration. I also sketch some fundamental considerations
that such alternative economies would have to incorporate

to stand a chance of curbing the dissipative logic of modern

money. [Keywords: alternative economic systems and
currencies, multicentric economic spheres, local production, sustainability, global futures]
Fifty years ago, Paul Bohannan (1955) published a
ten-page article in the American Anthropologist that was
destined to become a classic in economic anthropology.
It was entitled Some Principles of Exchange and
Investment among the Tiv, and was built on 26 months
of fieldwork in northern Nigeria between July 1949 and
January 1953. The Tiv people with whom Bohannan
worked were at that time mainly subsistence farmers
who, in Bohannans words, prided themselves on their
farming abilities and their subsistence wealth.
The traditional Tiv economy, however, is remembered by anthropology students primarily because of
what Bohannan referred to as its multicentric character. Bohannan observed that the Tiv recognized three
separate spheres of exchange that were hierarchically
arranged, so that transactions implying conversions between them were considered morally charged. To convert food into prestige goods, or prestige goods into
women, was considered skilfula measure of success
but to convert in the opposite direction, that is, women
into prestige goods, or prestige goods into food, was
morally reprehensible. Bohannans analysis showed
two things very clearly: first, that it is quite conceivable
to organize the economy according to a moral hierarchy
of values, where all values are not commensurable, and
second, that such morally differentiated economies will
quickly collapse when incorporated into the modern
realm of general-purpose money.
The introduction of modern currency, writes
Bohannan, was hurried by the Administration through
the imposition of a money tax by the end of WWI.

Culture & Agriculture Vol. 29, Issue 2, pp. 6369. ISSN 1048-4876, eISSN 1556-486X. 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All
rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and
Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/cag.2007.29.2.63.

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colonial empire, and constructing models and concepts with which to account for their own success in
accumulating capital. These models and concepts
were obviously not designed to alleviate global inequalities, or problems of sustainability, yet they continue to frame and constrain modern economic
discourse on these issuesto the extent that they are
at all addressed. Anthropologists have the choice of
subscribing to this hegemonic discourse, or to approach it precisely as Bohannan approached the economic categories of the Tivas a cultural system.
There have been several attempts to do this over the
years, notably by Stephen Gudeman (1986), but a lot of
work remains, particularly if we want to say something that sounds relevant to the ongoing deliberations on fair trade.
Let me address the issue head on. Neoliberal economic theory is a reflection of the logic of generalpurpose money. General-purpose money is in itself
basically an idea about the generalized interchangeability of all things. In making products and services
from all over the world commensurable in terms of a
single metric, the 19th-century world economy vastly
increased the opportunities forand the scope of
unequal exchange. In a recent article in the journal
Ecological Economics, I show that, in 1850, by exchanging, on the world market, 1,000 pounds worth of cotton textiles for 1,000 pounds worth of raw cotton
from its colonies, Britain in fact traded 4,092 hours of
British labor for 32,619 hours of overseas labor, and the
use of less than a hectare of British land for the use of
58.6 hectares of land overseas (Hornborg 2006). I am
talking, of course, about the labor and land embodied
in the commodities exchangedthe real material resources that went into their production. The ideologically most significant aspect of the neoliberal economic
worldview that Ricardo helped to consolidate around
this time was precisely to make such real material resources invisible. From now on, there was only utility,
quantifiable in money. That is why economists to this
day are uncomfortable with the concept of unequal
exchange. Market transactions are by definition
equal, if monetary prices are the only metric with
which they are gauged. I would argue that, although
submerged, this is one of the very points of Ricardos
constructions.
In growing increasingly wealthy on the stock exchange, Ricardo could hardly have been expected to
congratulate himself on exploiting suffering slaves
and deteriorating soils in Alabama or India. At this

One of the most tangible consequences of the introduction of general-purpose money among the Tiv
was, in fact, the sudden increase in food exports, leaving Tiv elders in the 1950s cursing money itself for
depriving them of their food faster than they are able
to increase production. Obviously, then, the moral
semiotics of moneyin other words, how exchange is
culturally conceivedcan have very significant material implications. After 26 months of fieldwork,
Bohannan was acutely aware of the detrimental impacts of general-purpose money on subsistence security among the Tiv, but concludes the article by
observing that the ethnographer can only look on and
attempt to understand the ideas and motivations,
knowing that the traditional system of ideas will inevitably be smashed in the confrontation with modern
money.
I now leave Bohannans ethnography of the Tiv
and try to address the general question of what anthropology might have to contribute to the ongoing
deliberations on fair trade and free trade. Many of
us would be prepared to say fair trade versus free
trade, but this is a contradiction that still needs to be
demonstrated, at least for the majority of economists
who believe that maximum freedom will lead to maximum fairness. With reference to the title of this session, we need to consider the alternatives and
realities in cross-cultural perspective. And the general theme of the 104th Annual Meeting of the
American Anthropological Association, Washington,
DC, 2005, encouraged us to bring the past into the
present, by reassessing the work of our disciplinary ancestors to reflect on the canon of anthropology for what still resonates as true or useful or
insightful. Processes of globalization, we are told
in the announcement of this meeting, are in part fuelled by neo-liberal economics. Globalization, in its
present form, is clearly not only a blessing. To once
again quote the 2005 meeting announcement, The
world remains marked in the 21st century by war,
genocide, hunger, glaring inequities, ecological vulnerability, and deep social division. If this world
order is indeed in part fuelled by neo-liberal economics, it is incumbent on us as anthropologists to
subject the fundamental tenets of economics to cultural
analysis.
We know that these fundamental tenets of neoliberal economics were conceived by hugely successful
bankers and stockbrokers such as David Ricardo, situated over 150 years ago in the very hub of the British
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energy use or the unevenly distributed consequences

of global warming, butpredictablythey do not
seem to pose a problem for neoliberal economics.
Usually, when I talk to my students and arrive at
this rather pessimistic conclusion on the future of industrial capitalism, there is always someone who asks
me to say something about what could possibly be
done to prevent global economic and ecological collapse. And in those situations I always find myself referring to Paul Bohannan and the multicentric
economy of the Tiv. If our fundamental problem is the
very conjunction of the idea of general-purpose money
and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we need to
take seriously the fact that only one of these conditions
can be transformed through political decisions. We
cannot change the Law of Entropy, but it is entirely
possible to transform the idea and institution of
money. I am not suggesting, of course, that we should
try to reinstate the specific spheres of exchange recognized 50 years ago by the Tiv, but that we could draw
inspiration from the very notion of recognizing a
moral hierarchy of incommensurable values. If the politically enforced introduction of general-purpose
money in northern Nigeria a mere 50 years ago was
able to so completely reorganize the conditions for
sustainable subsistence, it is obvious that similarly
profound changesin another directioncould be
triggered by other kinds of politically enforced transformations of the money system. I am convinced that,
sooner or later, there will be a renaissance for the
multicentric economy.
We are trained as anthropologists and tend to
maintain a healthy distance to social engineering, but
as stewards of a vast collective memory of global cultural experimentation, it could be argued that we have
an obligation to share these alternative ideas and ideologies with nonanthropologists seeking visions of a
sustainable world. Like so many other populations
over the past few centuries, the Tiv have discovered
how their incorporation into a world economy orchestrated by general-purpose money implied loss of local
control, inequitable trade relations, and environmental
degradation. It is no longer as obvious as it seemed
50 years ago that such problems are only the necessary
and temporary side-effects of an inevitably linear path
toward modernization and development
(Ferguson 1999). It may be high time to vindicate those
Tiv elders who clearly perceived how the dismantling
of their economic categories served to pave the way
for external appropriation of their resources.

particular historical moment, looking out at the world

through a window in Britain, a man of finance was
compelled to dispel all hesitations about unequal exchange; to count money value as the one and only
measure of substance; to view land, labor, and capital
as mutually substitutable; and to hail free trade as
the very foundation of economic growth. Ricardos
science of economics is a cultural construction, as
Gudeman (1986) observed 20 years ago, but as such it
is also profoundly ideological (cf. Hornborg 2005). To
pave the way for industrial capitalism, it had to make
unequal exchange of labor and land invisible, by conditioning us to think only in terms of money. It had to
create the illusion that machines (capital) can substitute for land and labor, rather than acknowledge that
capital draws on the appropriation of land and labor
from elsewhere in the world system. And it had to
make us all believe that the invisible hand of free trade
operates in the best interests of everybody, and that
any attempt to constrain the economy by appeal to
moral principlesas had the Tiv previouslyshould
be dismissed as backwardness and repression.
The idea of general-purpose money is a successful
vehicle of capital accumulation for exactly the same
reason that it isas the Tiv and so many others have
observedthe root of all evil. In todays world, it is
this idea of generalized interchangeability that generates the polarization between economic and technological growth, on the one hand, and economic and
ecological impoverishment, on the other hand. The
simple logic of general-purpose money tends to accelerate processes of resource extraction and consumption by rewarding the transformation of resources into
commodities with ever more resources to transform.
The more cotton textiles that Britain could export in
1850, for example, the more raw cotton it could import
which means that the more slaves could be put to
work, the more soils could be degraded, and so on.
The same logic underlies our economic successes and
global ecological vulnerabilities today: the more industrial products that the United States, Europe, and
Japan can export today, the more resources they will be
able to dissipate tomorrow. Or, in even simpler words:
the more oil we dissipate today, the more oil we will be
able to dissipate tomorrow. This is the simple algorithm of destruction that results from the operation of
general-purpose money in a universe obeying the
Second Law of Thermodynamics (Hornborg 2001).
These are tangible, material problems for those of us
concerned, for example, with global inequalities in
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middle-class students in the North pursuing a sense of

community by joining barter clubs, or impoverished
families in the South resorting to the informal economy to survive. Although their incentives are extremely diverse, their economic strategies converge in
distinguishing the local and personal sphere of exchange as more secure and morally committing than
the global and abstract.
There is a growing literature on community currencies, barter clubs, and other experiments in creating
local spheres of exchange (e.g., Dobson 1993;
Douthwaite 1999), but there have been very few attempts to understand such social projects in terms of
anthropological theory. Gudeman (2001:160161)
briefly mentions these experiments while arguing for a
distinction between market and community, but
does not seriously consider their potential as a way to
alleviate the sociopolitical polarizations and ecological
problems generated by the capitalist world market (cf.
Hornborg 2005). A radical anthropological discussion
of the prospects for a transformation of the idea of
money is Keith Harts Money in an Unequal World
(2001). Hart, whose experiences of development in
Ghana in the 1960s prompted him to coin the expression informal economy (cf. Hart 1992), suggests that
the Internet could be used to make it possible for each
individual to use different kinds of money for transactions within different social networks. The new capacity for electronic information storage would make it
possible to personalize money and credit so as to
record and express the specific transaction history of
each actor. Hart does not pursue this idea to the point
of offering a concrete, practical blueprint for such a
personalized economy, in which we all make our own
money, but he suggests that local currencies such as
Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) and Ithaca
dollars are examples of what the future will bring
(Hart 2001:279285).
Although what Hart proposes is explicitly subsumed under Bohannans category of special-purpose
money, he curiously chooses to dismiss the logic of
spheres of exchange as the preoccupation of Tiv elders and other aristocracy with their rank privileges
(Hart 2001:271272). This is perplexing, as he is later
(Hart 2001:301) very clear about the democratic
advantages of such special currencies:

To immunize, as it were, local land and labor

against the ravages of global capital, it may well prove
necessary to insulate them culturally, as resource categories that are not reducible to the universal metric of
general-purpose money. Rather than reversing history,
such a scenario might be perceived as a way of reflexively taking stock of humankinds historical experience of several centuries of globalization. Minimally,
this would mean distinguishingin cultural, moral,
legal, and practical termsbetween those essential
goods and services that are basic to survival, and that
can generally be locally produced and distributed, on
the one hand, and those essential contributions of
modernity (such as computer software and advanced
pharmaceuticals) that require a global division of
labor, on the other hand. Only by reinstating some
kind of moral hierarchy distinguishing such separate
spheres of exchange can the algorithm of destruction
be domesticated. The building-blocks of world society
the communities and ecosystems that we so often
evoke by referring to the localneed to be granted
their own integrity, and a measure of autonomy, to
begin to be able to engage in global trade on terms that
could be called fair. Hundreds of anthropological
case studies from all over the world have shown that
the logic of general-purpose money is not conducive
to such local integrity.
Economic anthropology is thus a repository of empirically and theoretically well-founded arguments for
a critical reconsiderationand reshapingof the institution of money itself. I need not recapitulate the
history of ideas from Marx, Mauss, Polanyi, Dalton,
Bohannan, Godelier, Sahlins, Rappaport, Taussig,
Bloch, Kopytoff, and Gudeman to make this point.
Suffice to say that many anthropologists, in comparing non-modern modes of economic life with those
of capitalist modernity, have discovered both the destructiveness and the cultural arbitrariness of the notion of general-purpose money. In various ways, they
have emphasized the inclination of most people, irrespective of cultural background, to recognize that all
values are not commensurable and interchangeable.
This moral conviction is obvious even where no attempts are made to challenge the idea of generalpurpose money or in other ways reshape the
institutions that govern our economic life, for instance in standard reactions to stories of illegal trade
in human organs. At the same time, people all over the
world have been expressing such convictions through
their material practice of exchange, whether affluent
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these powers should practice, at home, an antimarket

arrangement that they have consistently denied peoples of the South such as the Tiv.
If, in the light of these considerations, we should
wish to follow Hart in crossing the boundary between
anthropological theory and the engineering of radical
social policy, we could begin by asking ourselves, how
might a multicentric modern economy be devised?
A major justification for such a reform would be to replace current agricultural policies with an economic
framework that makes it rational for individual humans to practice sustainable production and consumption. This goal would in turn entail a conscious
encouragement of increasingly localized flows of energy, materials, and nutrients, that is, reducing longdistance transports and making extensive recycling
more feasible than at present.
How could the notion of special-purpose money
encourage individual households to change their behavior in this direction? Let us imagine that they had
recourse to a special currency, issued and distributed
by the statelet us call it couponsthat could only
be employed to purchase organic products of the land
such as food, firewood, compost, animal fodder, and
(untaxed) local labor. The coupons would be distributed to households on an annual basis in proportion to
their size. Households would find it rational to use the
coupons in their purchases of food, and so forth, as it
would liberate parts of their regular money income for
other purposes. The coupons would thus flow from
households to grocery shops and to the farms themselves, depending on the gains to be made by circumventing the shops. Why would shopkeepers and
farmers want to accept coupons in exchange for their
products, rather than conventional money? One answer is that they would be able to use these coupons to
purchase various things from the households that they
would otherwise have to spend regular money on, including (untaxed) labor, used packaging materials,
and compost. Another incentive might be that the state
guarantees shopkeepers and farmers the option of
converting a share of the coupons earned to regular
cash, closing the circuit through which they circulate.
All three categories of actorshouseholds, shopkeepers, and farmerswould also participate in the circulation of ordinary money, for instance in purchasing
equipment and services from what I here loosely refer
to as industry (i.e., enterprise not based on local
products of the land and the state). Their supply of ordinary money would be secured by a mix of wages

their transactions will somehow be sucked off to

an anonymous center of accumulation.
Harts book is refreshingly outspoken in its criticism
of state capitalism, but its recipes for alleviating the
problems are contradictory. The argument is entrenched
in the same kind of technological optimism that prevented Marx from facing the implications of his own
conclusion that the machines in themselves are manifestations of unequal exchange (Hornborg 2001). Hart
makes a point of distinguishing markets from capitalism, criticizing the latter as inherently exploitative but
suggesting that markets are a problem only when
some people have inordinately more money than others. He does not, however, specify how his scheme of
multiple currencies might curb such uneven accumulation of money, for instance through investments in
technology. Although he observes that uneven mechanization is fundamental to accumulation, he suggests that to conflate the Marxian concept of capital
(as money) with machines is to mystify the social relations involved (Hart 2001:84). I would counter that the
real mystification is to not recognize technologies as
manifestations of social relations (of exchange).
An important merit with Harts book, however, is
that it shows very convincingly how dominant modern powers such as the United States and the
European Union, behind all the neoliberal discourse
on free trade, practice a very unfree trade policy,
particularly as regards agricultural produce. The
recognition or conviction that all things are not freely
interchangeable, it seems, is as fundamental to nationstates as to individual market actors. This fact could
potentially have surprising and far-reaching implications for current deliberations on free trade. Rather
than continue to let their agricultural subsidies contradict their neoliberal discourse, an interesting option
for these nation-states might be to openly concede
that the land (or landscape) within their territories can
legitimately be regarded as the base of a special
sphere of exchange that is exemptand needs to be
protectedfrom free, global competition. Land and its
products is not a kind of capitalist commodity like
any other. It has not been difficult for the United States
and the European Union to come up with good arguments for preserving their countrysidessocially and
ecologicallyrather than let them succumb to competition from economically more efficient producers,
whether the latters efficiency derives from lower
labor costs or other advantages. It is thus ironic that
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community, within comfortable commuting distance

to their urban offices. She has braved the heat and rain
and mosquitoes for days on end to deliver those ten
liters of blueberries for the $30 they will fetch. The
buyers deposit them in their freezer, but when one of
their teenagers shifts the plug for another electrical
appliance, she forgets to reconnect the freezer, and the
contents are ruined. When reprimanded by her parents, she retorts that there is no reason to quarrel over
mere material things . . . The contemporary disarticulation of consumption from the resource flows
and inputs of human labor that sustain them keeps
economy and moralitythings and personseffectively apart. Such commodity fetishism rests on the
invisibility of production. Its implications can sometimes protrude clearly in rural economies where this
disarticulation is not always guaranteed. A relocalization of a subsistence sphere of exchange might thus
increase our ability to grasp the social and ecological
consequences of our consumption, and to reintroduce
morality into economic life.

and subsidies, as is currently the case, and the solidity

of the state by taxation.
In which ways would such a bicentric economy
encourage sustainable production and consumption?
(1) It would quickly reduce demand for long-distance
imports of agricultural produce, thus also reducing
transports and the concomitant energy use and carbon
dioxide emissions. (2) It would encourage local recycling of nutrients and packaging materials, reducing
waste, the use of energy and materials, and eutrophication of water. (3) It would encourage less capitalintensive, more labor-based agriculture, again reducing
resource use and environmental damage. (4) It would
reduce entrepreneurial incentives to control and exploit distant landscapes for agricultural export production, alleviating the marginalization of local
populations from the land worldwide. (5) It would reduce waste of food such as surplus production and
losses in transport. (6) It would encourage the production of healthier and fresher food, with fewer preservatives. (7) It would encourage a more complex pattern
of global land use, increasing biodiversity in areas
now used for industrial monocultures as well as in
areas marginalized from agricultural production. (8) It
would increase local self-sufficiency in products and
services essential to survival, reducing vulnerability to
crisis. (9) It would encourage a resurrection of community, reducing social marginalization and improving health. (10) It would ultimately reduce the
currently escalating costs of the social, medical, and
ecological problems associated with our present pattern of organizing the global economy. (11) It would
make it possible for individual consumers to grasp the
extent of their societal and ecological agency and to
assume responsibility for it.
No doubt there are plenty of potential problems
with this scheme. Readers have probably already envisaged several of the standard objections that I encounter among my students when I present this
thought experiment. My response would be that these
problems can hardly be more difficult to handle than
the ones we are presently facing.
To make more tangible the connections between
ecology, economy, community, and morality indicated
in the final point in the list above, let me conclude
with a fictional anecdote from a rural setting anywhere in the northern hemisphere. A local, unemployed woman in her fifties struggles to improve her
modest income by selling blueberries to the affluent,
middle-class professionals who have settled in her
Culture & Agriculture

References Cited
Bohannan, Paul
1955 Some Principles of Exchange and Investment among
the Tiv. American Anthropologist 57(1):6070.
Dobson, Ross V. G.
1993 Bringing the Economy Home from the Market.
Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Douthwaite, Richard
1999 The Ecology of Money. Totnes Devon: Green
BooksSchumacher Society.
Ferguson, James
1999 Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of
Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Gudeman, Stephen
1986 Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of
Livelihood. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
2001 The Anthropology of Economy: Community, Market
and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hart, Keith
1992 Market and State after the Cold War: The Informal
Economy Reconsidered. In Contesting Markets:
Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice.
R. Dilley, ed. Pp. 214227. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
2001 Money in an Unequal World. New York: Texere.

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S. Lfving ed. Pp. 6380. Uppsala, Sweden:

Collegium for Development Studies, Uppsala
University.
2006 Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial
Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and
Environmental Load Displacement. Ecological
Economics 59(1):7481.

Hornborg, Alf
2001 The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of
Economy, Technology, and Environment. Lanham,
MD: AltaMira.
2005 Resisting the Black Hole of Neoclassical Formalism
in Economic Anthropology: A Polemic. In Peopled
Economies: Conversations with Stephen Gudeman.

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