who did survive it also would likely be even more committed to the tribe. Modern communities like fraternities at colleges, law firms, research universities, or the military have their own rites of passage, differing from tribal initiation ceremonies only in the degree of physical or mental pain they inflict.
A key role of the community is supporting education, even in modern schooling systems. As Chicago Nobel laureate economist James Heckman emphasizes, a child’s attitudes toward learning, as well as her future health, are shaped in the critical preschool years where the family and community matter far more than the formal education system. Moreover, even after children enter the formal schooling system, the community determines whether they make use of it to the fullest extent. Whether children are given the time, encouragement, and the support to do homework depends on the environment at home and the attitude of their friends toward academic effort.
Linkages between the school and the community are also important. Parents will be more eager to monitor and support teaching if they feel they can influence how the school is run—many successful schools draw on parents to staff school boards, to support extracurricular programs, and to provide funds for equipment that is not accounted for in the normal budget. Communities help the young outside schools, whether it is through preschool learning, summer jobs, or watching out for, and counseling, teenagers who might stray. Equally, teachers, coming from the community, can work to build alternative local social supports for students whose families are broken. Schools are also an important focal point for parents to build friendships, as they are drawn together in a common endeavor.
The community shapes the views of its members about one another, so as to encourage mutual support. The elderly are a store of knowledge and have experiences and wisdom that can be very important in guiding the community. Nevertheless, in environments where reproductive capabilities matter enormously or much of the work is physically taxing, the elderly may be seen as a dispensable burden. To give the elderly an incentive to share their wisdom, even while protecting their position, the socialization process often inculcates respect for age. In modern South Indian Brahmin marriages and coming-of-age ceremonies, the elderly have an important position as they guide the young on the specific rituals to be followed. The young signal their acceptance of the natural order by repeatedly prostrating themselves before anyone older, asking for their blessings. Rank or position in the outside world is immaterial in determining who prostrates themselves before whom—all that matters is age. More generally, communities may allocate authority and power in ways that have nothing to do with economic capability, but help keep the community together.
Creating Binding Social Relationships
In close-knit communities, few transactions are explicit exchanges of broadly equal values. We ply dinner guests with food and wine with no concern of when they will reciprocate. As ties get weaker in the community, more reciprocity is expected, but usually in such a way that the original gesture is never fully reciprocated so as to “close the account.”
American anthropologist Laura Bohannan spent years working with the Tiv people of Northern Nigeria. When she arrived to study the community, she was inundated with gifts by the very poor villagers—a common experience for guests in traditional societies. Not wanting to appear rude, she accepted them but was eventually taught the appropriate etiquette by the headman’s wife, who told her to “stop wandering aimlessly about the countryside and start calling to return the gifts” she had received. Bohannon concluded:
“What had been given must be returned, and at the appropriate time—in most cases, within two market weeks. For more valuable gifts, like livestock, one should wait until the giver is in sudden need and then offer financial aid. In the absence of banks, large presents of this sort are one way of saving. . . . I couldn’t remember [who gave what]; I didn’t think anyone could. But they did, and I watched with amazed admiration as Udama [the headman’s wife] dispensed handfuls of okra, the odd tenth-penny and other bits in an endless circle of gifts in which no one ever handed over the precise value of the object last received but in which, over months, the total exchange was never more than a penny in anyone’s favor.” 6
Gifts among the Tiv, as in most societies, serve to strengthen social bonds. That a gift is not returned in exact and equal measure prevents gift exchange from becoming a market transaction. Indeed, the very point is that nothing is demanded in return by the giver—social ties are built only when the giver seemingly forgets the gift as soon as it is given. Yet someone who only receives and never gives is quickly ostracized, hence the advice to return the gifts. Relationships are built not just by offering gifts but also by offering services. As Bohannan sat with neighbors assisting a woman’s childbirth, she reflected:
“I also remembered that my great-grandmother had her first child alone with her husband on the frontier; in her diary, she had longed for another woman then. . . . More generally, though, I could see that where we multiplied specialists and services, these people multiplied personal relationship . . .”
In small communities where there are few specialists to provide services, neighbors fill in the gaps. For example, in Amish communities in rural Pennsylvania, everyone comes together in “barn raisings” to build a barn for someone in the community. It is as much a community celebration as collective work. Such events broaden the areas of interaction and help deepen relationships within the community. Indeed, every transaction within a community, whether economic or not, is just the most recent link in a set of cross-linked block chains which stretch back into the past, and likely will well into the future.
The ties within a community enable it to act as a support of last resort. When all is lost, we can always return to our family or village, where we will be helped because of who we are rather than what we can pay or what we have accomplished. A study finds that 20 percent of households within a caste group in India in 1999 sent or received transfers of money.7 The transfers amounted to between 20 and 40 percent of the receiving household’s annual income. Each sending household sent between 5 to 7 percent of its annual income, implying a number of them combined to help a household that had major contingencies like illness or marriage. Even with modern sources of social insurance such as unemployment benefits and pensions, the community is critical in filling holes that are left by the formal government and market systems.
Facilitating Transactions
Communities facilitate internal trading by monitoring behavior and ostracizing defaulters, cutting them off from further transactions and community support.8 Some embed differential treatment of insiders and outsiders into their norms. Anthropologist Douglas Oliver observed that to the Siuai of Solomon Islands, mankind consists of relatives and strangers. “Transactions with relatives ought to be carried out in a spirit devoid of commerciality.” With few exceptions, however, “persons who live far away are not relatives and can only be enemies . . . One interacts with them only to buy and sell—utilizing hard bargaining and deceit to make as much profit from such transactions as possible.”9 With such an attitude, it would take a particularly confident outsider to contemplate trading with the Siuai, ensuring outside trades would be few and far between. But that may be the point! Parochial as the attitude may seem, it fortifies the community by strengthening within-community trade and limiting opportunities for members to stray outside.
Encouraging Favors and Resolving Conflicts
Bonds between community members are obviously stronger if they grow up together, undergo common socialization processes and rites of passage, and share common values and traditions. However, bonds can also build between members of a community in a more modern setting where they come together only in adulthood. Indeed, despite having access to a modern legal system, neighbors may rely on community norms to resolve potential conflict because it is cheaper.
Robert Ellikson, a legal scholar at Yale University, studied ranchers in Shasta County in Northern California and found that their community had developed a variety of unwritten norms to deal with various frictions. For example, cattle from one ranch might
