Observations about Piot's ethnography of Kabre

For discussion, in class, take a look at the following statements (by me) about several examples I thought were interesting:

• Piot says that in Kabre society, gifts obligate and indebt people to each other. He suspects that people were trying to gain some mastery over him as an outsider (Piot 1999, 54).
• I was really interested in one ikpanture relationship described by Piot, because it showed that this kind of friendship is not simply two people who like each other. He cites a story told by an informant, a man named Kabaru, who gained an ikpanture from a conflict. Kabaru got into a fight with someone, and then to make amends, this person bought him a beer. So Kabaru eventually became a partner with whom he could ask favors (Piot 1999, 57).
• Piot describes how he himself developed his own relationships with his neighbors in Kabre, and says that giving and receiving gifts was a way to communicate with people around him and develop a sense that he actually belonged to the community (Piot 1999, 54).
• Piot describes two examples in which a market seller has an ikpanture relationship with some of her customers. If a customer is short of money, the seller might still let him pay later or get a beer for free, because they are also ikpanture. One example of this is descirbed by Kabaru (Piot 1999, 57) and it comes up in a later discussion of a debt between a seller and a powerful man (Piot 1999, 63).

Think about how each statement illustrates life in Kabre society.

Don't focus on what they say about Kabre life, but how (and how well) they expose and clarify one part of Kabre life.

What are the differences in how each illustrates Kabre society? What is good or bad about each as examples?

Piot, Charles. 1999. “Exchange: Hierarchies of Value in an Economy of Desire.” In Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa, 52-75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.