Rethinking the Tiv

I keep coming back to thinking about Ant 101's discussion of "Learning from the Tiv." Here's some random thoughts that have popped into my head over the weekend.

I think another way to think of Hornborg's argument is to conceive of local subsistence resources as a kind of social actor in a local community.  We interact with other social beings in variable, non-universal ways.  In other words, we don't treat all other humans in our lives in the same ways. When humans enter into social relationships with other humans, a myriad of specific rights, obligations and expectations emerge.  You have to act toward your siblings differently than toward your parents or friends or coworkers.

Hornborg's suggestion for special-purpose, local money would force communities to have a specific social relationship with essential community resources and treat them accordingly.  Groups would engage in different social relationships with the land than they would with commodities produced for distribution on the global economy.  Ipads would have to be distributed and importantly, consumed, differently than subsistence resources from folks' own backyards.
I don't know if this helps any of your thinking, but it does for me.