ANTHROP/GralInt-Moral Standards and Social Organization

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Moral Standards and Social Organization



What the anthropologist does in the study of moral systems is to examine for particular societies the ideas of right and wrong that are held, and their social circumstances. Consideration of material from some of the more primitive societies, and a contrast of it with Western patterns, will help to bring out some of the basic moral aspects of social action.

A simple way of introducing this subject is to mention a personal experience. It concerns the morality of giving, which has important problems in all human societies.

When I went to the isolated island of Tikopia I was dependent, as every anthropologist is, on the local people for information and for guidance. This they gave, freely in some respects, but with reservation in others, particularly on religious matters. Almost without exception, too, they showed themselves greedy for material goods such as knives, fish-hooks, calico, pipes and tobacco, and adept at many stratagems for obtaining them. In particular, they used the forms of friendship. They made me gifts in order to play upon the sense of obligation thus aroused in me. They lured me to their houses by generous hospitality which it was difficult to refuse, and then paraded their poverty before me. The result of a month or two of this was that I became irritated and weary. My stocks of goods were not unlimited, and I did not wish to exhaust them in this casual doling out to people from whom I got no special anthropological return. I foresaw the time when I would wish to reward people for ethnographic data and help of a scientific kind and I would either have debased my currency or exhausted it. Moreover I came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as friendship or kindliness among these people. Everything they did for me seemed to be in expectation of some return. What was worse, they were apt to ask for such return at the time, or even in advance of their service.

Then I began to reflect. What was this disinterested friendship and kindness which I expected to find? Why, indeed, should these people do many services for me, a perfect stranger, without return? Why should they be content to leave it to me to give them what I wanted rather than express their own ideas upon what they themselves wanted? In our European society how far can we say disinterestedness goes? How far do we use this term for what is really one imponderable item in a whole series of interconnected services and obligations? A Tikopia, like anyone else, will help to pick a person up if he slips to the ground, bring him a drink, or do many other small things without any mention of reciprocation. But many other services which involve him in time and trouble he regards as creating an obligation. This is just what they do themselves. He thinks it right to get a material reward, and right that he should be able to ask for it. Is he wrong in this? Was my moral indignation at his self-seeking justified?

So I revised my procedure. At first I had expected a man to do me a service and wait, until, in my own good time, I made him a freewill gift. Now I abandoned the pretence of disinterested friendliness. When a gift was made to me or a service done, I went at once to my stores, opened them, and made the giver a present roughly commensurate to the value of that received.

But more important than the change in my procedure was the change in my moral attitudes. I was no longer indignant at the behaviour of these calculating savages, to whom friendship seemed to be expressed only in material terms. It was pleasant and simple to adopt their method. If one was content to drop the search for 'pure' or 'genuine' sentiments and accept the fact that to people of another culture, especially when they had not known one long, the most obvious foundation of friendship was material reciprocity, the difficulties disappeared. When the obligation to make a material return was dragged into the light, it did not inhibit the development of sentiments of friendship, but fostered it.

What I have shown of the material elements of friendship in Tikopia is intelligible in a society where no very clear-cut line is drawn between social service and economic service, where there is no sale or even barter of goods, but only borrowing and exchange in friendly or ceremonial form. In European culture we demarcate the sphere of business from that of friendship. The former insists on the rightness of obtaining the best bargain possible, while the latter refuses to treat in terms of bargains at all. Yet there is an intermediate sphere. Business has its social morality. Things are done 'as a favour', there are concepts of 'fair' prices, and sharp practice and profiteering are judged as wrong. On the other hand, friendship does not necessarily ignore the material aspects. 'One good turn deserves another' epitomizes regard for reciprocity which underlies many friendly actions.

(From Elements of Social Organization, by Raymond Firth.)




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