ABSTRACT

This is also to say that primitive money is associated with an historically specific type of primitive economy, an economy with a marked incidence of balanced exchange in peripheral social sectors. It is not a phenomenon of simple hunting cultures-if I may be permitted, cultures ofa band level. Neither is primitive money characteristic of the more advanced chiefdoms, where wealth tokens though certainly encountered tend to bear little exchange load. The regions

noted-Melanesia, California, South American tropical forest-are (or were) occupied by societies of an intermediate sort, such as have been called "tribal" (Sahlins, 1961; Service, 1962) or "homogeneous" and "segmented tribes" (Oberg,1955). They are distinguished from band systems not merely for more settled conditions of life--often associated with neolithic versus paleolithic production-but principally for a larger and more complex tribal organization of constituent local groupings. The several local settlements of tribal societies are bound together both by a nexus of kin relations and by cross-cutting social institutions, such as a set of clans. Yet the relatively small settlements are autonomous and self-governing, a feature which in turn distinguishes tribal from chiefdom plans. The local segments of the latter are integrated into larger polities, as divisions and subdivisions, by virtue of principles of rank and a structure of chieftainships and subchieftainships. The tribal plan is purely segmental, the chiefdom pyramidal.