Resource Coordination in Ancient Cultures
Context
Will Ruddick:
"The study of resource coordination in ancient cultures often centers around themes of colonization, power structures, and hierarchies, eclipsing interest in understanding the harmonious social dynamics that previously existed. Pioneers like Marcel Mauss (2016/1950) observed communities supporting each other without apparent reciprocity or monetary exchange, a phenomenon that he memorably labeled “gift economies.” The term has had the unfortunate effect of implying that these cultures were astonishingly altruistic and self-sacrificial, and somehow abnormal. Yet, as I have observed at GrE, through accounts from living elders, traditional cultures that thrive without money or markets have utilized myriad resource coordination and exchange systems such as calendars, ledgers, indirect reciprocity, accounting, debt systems and resource pooling."
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Typology
Will Ruddick:
"Formalizing Ancient Mutual Service Practices
When analyzing how and why some of these vouchers were excelling while others were not, GrE found the successful groups practicing Mweria, an indigenous practice of the Mijikenda tribes on the coast of Kenya. Generally, the terms like Mweria or Nyoluoro refer to a tradition of mutual services as well as a collective noun for people. In many languages, the collective nouns for a ‘group’ of humans appear to be the names of types of mutual service groups.
These ancient mutual service practices exist across the globe, as described by Wang (2014), and are known in academia as Rotating Labor Associations (ROLAs). They are primarily a means of gathering commitments for resources (good and services) of the community and fairly exchanging them, but have the effect, as well, of building social cohesion and sharing skills. They coincided with seasonal transitions and many aspects of life such as education, cooking, weddings, and funerals. Typically, one person or family gives commitments of support to others and, in return, draws on the commitments of others to meet their own needs such as farming, building houses and grain stores, and teaching their children.
As GrE began to understand the dynamics of Mweria, we began to discover other names for these ancient traditions elsewhere. We found voucher-using groups among the Luo tribe near Lake Victories with a similar tradition of Nyoluoro, and the Kamba and Kikuyu in Central Kenya who used a similar system called Mwethia and Gobato, among many others. They seemed to be everywhere, in all indigenous communities and languages we could find within Kenya and our partners in other countries.
In the Kwale-based communities that GrE has been learning from, these practices disappeared and/or transitioned around the time of colonization, according to Chibwara (2023). "Duruma people started working for money rather than for each other," said a village elder.
"The last Mweria I saw was in 2003, when I was 17. It's amazing to see the practice coming back!"
Soon after 1901 the British forced the Kenyan population into hut-taxation, a regressive tax imposed on households regardless of their income, levied as part of a wage slavery, an alternative to chattel slavery that began with the earlier Arabic colonizers. Consequently, the long-standing tradition of mutual service began to disappear. A local saying speaks to how people viewed the new system of hut taxation: “Those who would lose their traditions become slaves.”
Many of these traditional ROLAs became or were replaced by so-called ROSCAs, Rotating Savings and Credit Associations. These systems were also known as Village Savings and Loan Associations, Savings and Internal Lending Cooperative, or more commonly in East Africa, Chama or Merry-Go-Round. Instead of pooling commitments of goods and services among each other, people started to pool their (often very limited) national currency. While the ROLA traditions helped them build homes and entire farms, the pooling of cash served as a peer-supported savings mechanism. Each person would, for example, contribute ~100 Kenyan Shillings (~$1 USD) weekly to a different member of the group.
In recent years, the GrE team realized that many groups were starting to pool their vouchers, much as a ROSCA pools holdings of the national currency. At each meeting, the group would give a member an allotment of vouchers (i.e., commitments for resources), and then spend them during the week, either in synchronous group activities like collectively building a grain store or asynchronously by “spending” voucher-commitments individually. Instead of pooling scarce cash, group members were pooling a group commitment, via a group voucher – one that members could create themselves through the GrE’s Sarafu Network. The shared value no longer needed to revolve around Kenyan Shillings.
The pooling of the group voucher more than doubled the number of community farms and houses developed yearly from GrE’ previous work. This promoted ‘market days’, periodic events where sellers directly interacted with buyers, as opportunities for people to use their vouchers to buy and sell goods and services individually, in a classic market sense (i.e., exchange without pooling). However, once ROLA-like pooling traditions were combined with vouchers for commitment-pooling, GrE saw a remarkable surge of social benefits: increased skill sharing, a greater sense of group purpose, social cohesion, and trust, greater individual participation in governance decisions, increased environmental restoration work, and more infrastructure construction. GrE also saw an aggregate increase in people’s financial assets such as savings of Kenyan Shillings, reduced debt, and more mutual commitments being made among group members. According to Njoroge (2023), the impact from these GrE programs has been overwhelmingly positive. Nearly 100 groups are practicing 1,637 voucher-based ROLA traditions as of December 2023. Over 30 houses have been built, and over 139 farms developed and improved in 2023. While before the ROLA traditions, utilizing vouchers for markets alone GrE didn’t see any large asset development but rather increases to exchanges."
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