11 - Socio-Economic Change and the Role of Traders in the Village (UM)

Summary

THE SPREAD OF THE MARKET PRINCIPLE

Undoubtedly, the village of Kakas by now shows all characteristics of one “in which the market principle is dominant” (Bohannan and Dalton 1968, p. 16): agricultural production is primarily for sale, with subsistence production only as a dependent emergency appendix to market production; factor resources, that is, labour, land, and capital, are subject to market forces; trading in circumstances of landlessness and land shortage, has become an important occupation; and money as the basic medium of exchange makes labour, material inputs, and products commensurable commodities and renders market values comparable (Bohannan and Dalton 1968, p. 11). The spread of commerce has to be considered part of the process of integration into the national and world economy along with its “external” demand for cash crops, the establishment and improvement of the commercially relevant infrastructure for communication, capital, and administration, and the prodigious increase in the amount of imported goods entering the stores and market-places as a result of new tastes and consumption patterns.

Certainly, traders play a key role in the spread of the market principle including the whole system of values which are characteristic of market rationality and which, by no means, is restricted to the market but permeates various other aspects of daily life. This is mainly because money is in some way or other involved in determining social relations. It is not only that trading by now is a commonly respected economic activity, as is indicated by today's unification of external trade and local (food) trade in one market-place as the major economic institution. In former times the exchange of goods was normally carried out within a well-defined system of social relations on a reciprocal basis and commercialized exchange was tolerable only as a “last resort” and then only with external partners to whom there were no social obligations (Bohannan and Dalton 1968, p. 6; Polanyi 1979, pp. 55 f.).