ABSTRACT
The starting point of this book was the growing recognition that sharing is more than what the theory of gift exchange suggests. The preceding chapters have tried to put together a more appropriate understanding of what sharing is all about. The final piece in this emerging theory of sharing concerns death. Sharing ends with death. As I shall discuss in a moment, sharing may also be said to begin with death, that is, the recognition of human finitude. To establish that sharing ends with death is not banal. After all, gift giving and market exchanges do not end with the death of the exchange or market partners – or at least are not supposed to end. In fact, this is one of their characteristic features. With regard to market exchanges transfers are not necessarily terminated by death. Doing business with incorporated companies is the preferred way to buy and sell on a market that is ideally unaffected by individual human beings dying or defecting. This is most obvious with regard to credit agreements and debt. Contracts typically include succession in title so that debts are inheritable just as any other “positive” asset. A whole industry surrounding financial collaterals has emerged and over-indebtedness is a common phenomenon in so-called advanced industrial societies. Not only individuals but whole countries and nations are paying off debts over decades and across centuries. Germany finished paying its last war reparations for World War One only in 2010, 92 years after the war was over. Many African states, and Greece more recently, have accumulated debts that have to be repaid long after the death of any individual who was alive when the debts were incurred. The same is true for many municipalities in Europe where town councils have accumulated debts that future generations will have to shoulder and that already severely limit what they can do in the present. This has been a recurring pattern ever since humans switched from foraging to agriculture and from primarily relying on sharing to other modes of transfer. Debts often affect families across generations. This has led to modern forms of slavery whereby children are given as pawns for debts that families are unable to escape in their lifetimes. When Graeber (2011) points out that this has been more or less the pattern for the last five millenia, the anthropological challenge is to think outside the box of these 5,000 years.
