"Learning from the Tiv" and the "Myth of Barter"

In anthropology 101 today we discussed Alf Hornborg's "Learning from the Tiv." A big part of that paper is a critique of the idea of general purpose money. General purpose money allows anything to be convertible to anything else, which according to Hornborg conceals unequal exchanges.

During discussion, the idea of money being an efficient solution to the inefficiencies of barter came up. This is often described as the problem of the "double coincidence of wants"--if I've got extra onions and want tomatoes, you've got to want onions and have tomatoes.

I've got fish, you got grain?

While we will return to this idea on Monday, I wanted to point interested readers to a post about one part of David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 years. In it, he describes the "Myth of Barter." Here's a link to a brief blog post about the idea,which includes link to a longer post where the ideas are explored further.