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198 c h a p t e r 9 Value Toward the end of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) there is a passage in which Malinowski summarizes his study of the Trobriand kula with words that I take as the epigraph for Burning Money: Thus, in several aspects, the Kula presents to us a new type of phenomenon, lying on the borderland between the commercial and the ceremonial and expressing a complex and interesting attitude of mind. But though it is novel, it can hardly be unique. For we can scarcely imagine that a social phenomenon so deeply connected with fundamental layers of human nature, should only be a sport and a freak, found in one spot of the earth alone. Once we have found this new type of ethnographic fact, we may hope that similar or kindred ones will be found elsewhere. (Malinowski 1984:513–514) No less than kula, burning money is a novel ethnographic fact, a “type of phenomenon, lying on the borderland between the commercial and the ceremonial ” and “deeply connected with fundamental levels of human nature.” Malinowski might have added that what is for us “a borderland” is for Trobrianders a prototype. The paper money custom is a large network of industrial and commercial enterprise that produces money and things for the purpose of undertaking commerce with the spirits. But the commerce with the spirits is conducted according to ceremonial giving. This “ceremonial commerce” sublates the two aspects of human nature that Chinese otherwise relate to one another by telling them apart. The one that seeks profit (lì) motivates ordinary persons to nickel-and-dime each other. The other, which cultivates giving, sacrifice, value 199 and etiquette (lĭ), motivates people to give themselves to others. The lĭ of etiquette makes ordinary persons who are merely human (rén meaning “human”) into humane persons (rén written with the graph for “human” compounded with the graph for “two”) by making the body ever more mindful of its obligations to others over and against the profit to be derived. This begins with parents. As the Reverend Arthur Smith (1894:185) bluntly observed on the basis of a popular Chinese proverb: “Neither parents nor children are under any illusions upon this subject. ‘If you have no children to foul the bed, you will have no one to burn paper at the grave.’ Each generation pays the debt which is exacted of it by the generation which preceded it, and in turn requires from the generation which comes after, full payment to the uttermost farthing.” In some elemental sense, the money-burning custom turns the ordinary means of trade into the ceremonial means of showing one’s piety (xiào) and, hence, humanity (rén). Behavior that is motivated by ritual, ceremony, and etiquette is of course pure artifice, which is the thing about becoming human(e) that Chinese cherish, but which also opens complicated and vexing questions about the originality, authenticity and deception insinuated in artifice, a discussion that, based on my reading, pervades the Confucian classic Book of Rites as much as it does the everyday language of politeness (Stafford 2000:104). The money burning custom in important ways allows plebes to act as patricians. If the object of kula was fame (Munn 1986) and the principal object of burning money in commerce with the spirits is filial piety, the quest of the Kwakiutl potlatch, another prestation ceremony, was yet another quest for immortality. In potlatch, as described originally by Franz Boas and George Hunt (Boas 1897:341–357), men bestowed vast stores of property on other men or destroyed their own stores in a frenzied gathering that attracted an assembly of spirits and gods: “It is not only in order to display power, wealth and lack of self-interest that slaves are put to death, precious oils burnt, copper objects cast into the sea, and even houses of princes set on fire. It is also in order to sacrifice to the spirits and the gods, indistinguishable from their living embodiments, who bear their titles and are their initiates and allies” (Mauss 1990:16). With some obvious and not-so-obvious differences, Chinese still do this, albeit with paper replicas. It is possible that ancient China passed through a phase that was similar to the Kwakiutl potlatch (Cooper 1982), although the question of how this ancient potlatch might have been connected with the much later money burning custom—for example, as an evolutionary homologue or cultural...

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