A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1987 (Debrecen, 1988)

Néprajz - Dankó Imre: Extraordinary Forms of Purchase and Acquisition

Imre Dankó EXTRAORDINARY FORMS OF PURCHASE AND ACQUISITION Ethnographic investigation of exchange of goods has become a significant feature of research, for it is the various barter-processes that are most likely to offer the truly reliable information about the motifs and factors in any given civilization. Several questions concerning terminology have been raised and relevant notions have been explained during the past years. As far as the questions of terminology are concerned, the basic issue is that instead of 'barter', 'exchange of goods', formerly used just to describe trading activities following the emergence of market production, has become prevailing as a term with a far broader meaning, including, apart from the exchange of various products, the exchange of services and moneraty compensations as well. In Hungary, the phrase 'javak cseréje' (actually meaning both 'barter' and 'exchange of consumer goods') had been a permanent stumbling block, but the intensive studies in the ethnographic aspects of the issue have resulted in the clearing up of several notions and terms, especially in the field of popular legal traditions and customs. Linguistic research has also greatly contributed to this classification. This paper, too, attempts to explain the terms and different kinds of extraordinary forms of purchase and ways of acquisition in the light of lingual and historico-linguistic approach. Ethnographic studies differentiate between ordinary (general) and extraordinary forms of sale and purchase and ways of acquisition; former research, either ethnographic or of other kind, had been confined to studying the ordinary types, paying, at the same time, less attention to the extraordinary ones, neglecting, ignoring the very fact that they had been well-known from the most ancient times, and had extremely rich traditions. The following forms of ordinary sale and purchase and ways of acquisition have been distinguished by Hungarian ethnographers (Károly Kos, Mihály Sárkány, Béla Gunda, Bertalan Andrásfalvy, Ernő Tárkány Szűcs and Imre Dankó): actual exchange (either as 'mute' or by way of oral communication); sale-and-purchase through a go-between acting in a 'from house/workshop—to market' way; sale and purchase at monthly local fairs as well as seasonal or annual national or international ones, which may,at times, be specialized to offer either textile goods, victuals, industrial or agricultural products. Sale-and-purchase activities at shops, stores, and large-scale markets, too, can be considered as part and parcel of this kind of commerce. The caracteristic feature of these forms of purchase and acquisition is that they are, as a rule, free of interventions of any kind. It is the actual producers that offer their products for sale and it is large-scale or even small-scale sellers that offer goods, piled up before, to the costumers. In both of these procedures a sort of consent seems to have been arrived at by both parties, as far as prices are concerned. Acting under political considerations, authorities may have interfered in order to fix prices thus controling the diverse ways of ordinary exchange of goods. Common sense of justice has never accepted these price regulations and prohibitions, and it is in this way that contraband traficking, profeteering, black marketing and racketeering, together with other forms of extraordinary purchasing and acquisition have come into existence. What makes the actual difference between ordinary ways of purchase and the extraordinary ones is that while the extraordinary ones are independent of any official intervention, the ordinary ones are subject to various pressures of circumstances, which is to explain why it was these issues that jurisprudence and studies in popular ideas on law have given special attention to, so far. A good example is 'stealing'; the target in any stealing case for some time has not been rawmaterial but its 'representative', i.e. money or cheques. In this way, however, even thieves become parts of the ordinary way of purchase and acquisitions. And again, the author refers to the fact that popular legal sense will consider money, financial and whatever material advantage unearned, as unlawful and illegal and the profit obtained in this way as dishonest. This traditional view is properly represented in the evaluation of what is called 'extraordinary' forms of acquisition. This paper presents thirty-six of extraordinary forms of sales and acquisition such as adomány (gift); ajándék (present); angaria, ledol201