A Note To The Granddaughters on Corporations, Debt, Monks, and Anthropology -- Nothing About The Bakken

A Note To The Granddaughters

I normally don't do this, quote from a book that I am reading and enjoying, but the spirit moved me, and so here it is.

I continue to read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. This is a well-researched book of debt from an anthropologist's point of view.

So, from his chapter on the Middle Ages:

That was the entire point. By doing so, Buddhism, unlike Islam, produced something very much like what we now call "corporations" -- entities that, through a charming legal fiction, we imagine to be persons, just like human beings, but immortal, never having to go through all the human untidiness of marriage, reproduction, infirmity, and death. To put it in properly Medieval terms, corporations are very much like angels.

Legally, our notion of the corporation is very much a product of the European High Middle Ages. The legal idea of a corporation as a "fictive person" (persona ficta) -- a person who, as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, "is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural person of whom he is composed" -- was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 AD, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries -- as also to universities, churches, municipalities, and guilds.

The idea of the corporation as an angelic being is not mine ....

All this is worth emphasizing because while we are used to assuming that there's something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic creatures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it. They are the most peculiarly European addition to that endless proliferation of metaphysical entities so characteristic of the Middle Ages --as well as the most enduring.

They have, of course, changed a great deal over time.....The ones that came closest were, perhaps unsurprising, monastic orders -- above all, the Cistercians -- whose monasteries became something like the Chinese Buddhist ones, surrounded by mills and smithies, practicing rationalized commercial agriculture with a workforce of "lay brothers" who were effectively wage laborers, spinning and exporting wool....

There are a number of reasons I am enjoying the book, and a specific reason why I chose this passage to quote, I suppose.

First, when I was in eighth grade, or thereabouts, age 14 or so, I suppose, I wanted to be an anthropologist, though I did not know specifically that "word." I just knew the subject area I wanted to study. A friend of my father heard that and gave me my first real adult book to read: The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey.  (The first real adult book that I recall reading at about the same time was a hardback copy of a very different kind of book: it was called something like INA, with the "INA" embedded in "ImagINAtion." It may have been about the Insurance Company of North America. I forget. Be that as it may, I digress.

I first wanted to be an anthropologist, but did not know the correct word, so I said I wanted to be an archaeologist. (Until my dad asked me how much money archaeologists make.)

Fast forward thirty or forty or fifty years, and I find myself traipsing over the English, and more specifically, the Yorkshire countryside. I was enamored with everything English, or more specifically, everything Yorkish, then. Even the ubiquitous Land Rover. Serenity and beauty could be found on the grounds of the old abbeys and monasteries. With a friend, I visited many, and re-visited many more. For some odd reason, the Cistercian monasteries stood out; I remember them best. Perhaps it was because I had recently read The Seven Storey Mountain by a Cistercian monk,  Thomas Merton, whose prayer I had memorized. I learned later he had some skeletons in his closet, or at least one skeleton, but that did not diminish my enthusiasm for the Cistercian story.

It was a joy to find an "anecdote" taking me back to those halcyon days in David Graeber's book on debt. Who would have thought.

Maybe more, later.