The Long Memory of Strangers — Letters from the Floor

The English word familiar is now almost entirely an adjective. We speak of a familiar face, a familiar route, a familiar phrase. Its older noun sense has nearly vanished, surviving in the half-comic context of a witch’s cat. The drift is older than English. Latin familiaris, an adjective meaning “of the household” or “private,” derived from familia, which referred not to a blood family in the modern sense but to the whole set of people who lived under one roof, including servants and retainers. A familiar, in earlier English, was an intimate; a friend on a family footing. The adjectival sense came later, by the late fifteenth century: things were familiar because one had seen them often, because they were the property of the daily. To know was to share time with.

This is a strange thing to have lost. The word’s drift describes a kind of impoverishment in our vocabulary for relationship, but it also points to something I think is true and seldom said: that the words we use for knowing each other are, at their root, words about time. Etymonline traces acquainted back through Old French acointer, “to make known,” to Vulgar Latin accognitare, in turn from Latin accognoscere, “to know well.” The shared verb under it all is cognoscere, “to come to know.” None of these are static. They are all verbs of accumulation. Familiarity is the residue of repetition. What we call a relationship, in the strict sense, is an accumulation, and the substrate of accumulation is memory.

This is not a sentimental observation. It is closer to a structural one. Business relationships, the long professional acquaintances of commerce and trade, are, before they are anything else, mutual acts of remembering. Take that substrate away, and what remains is not a relationship but a transaction. The two are routinely confused. They are not the same thing.

Consider the long-distance trade conducted by the islanders of the Massim archipelago, off the southeastern tip of what is now Papua New Guinea, as observed by the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski during his fieldwork there between 1915 and 1918. Malinowski had arrived in the region as a graduate student of the London School of Economics, planning a season of work; the outbreak of the First World War caught him as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Australian-administered territory, and the colonial authorities, after some hesitation, allowed him to continue his fieldwork rather than face internment. He stayed in the Trobriand Islands for roughly two years across several trips, and the book he published in 1922, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, is generally credited with founding the modern method of ethnographic fieldwork.

What he described was a system the islanders called the kula. Across a ring of eighteen island communities spanning hundreds of miles, men sailed in long outrigger canoes to exchange two kinds of ornamental objects: red shell-disc necklaces, called soulava, which moved clockwise around the ring, and white shell armbands, called mwali, which moved counterclockwise. The objects had little practical use. They were not currency. They could not be hoarded; one of the rules of the kula, as Malinowski recorded, was that to keep a valuable too long was a kind of shame. They circulated. Each had a name. Each had a history. To possess a particular necklace, for a season or a year, was to be the temporary keeper of a story.

What made the kula a system rather than a chaos was that each man had specific, named partners on other islands. The relationship was lifelong, and frequently passed from father to son. When you arrived at an island after weeks of sailing, you were not arriving among strangers. You were arriving at the home of a man you had perhaps never met but whose name you knew, whose father or grandfather had perhaps been the kula partner of your father or grandfather, and whose obligations to you were as clear as the obligations of a brother. The exchange (necklace for armband, armband for necklace) was secondary to what was being maintained: a network of relationships that no individual person could have held in mind alone, sustained across hundreds of miles of open ocean by memory and the disciplined repetition of arrival.

A few years after Malinowski’s book appeared, the French sociologist Marcel Mauss published a small essay, Essai sur le don, which has done as much as any single text to shape modern thinking about exchange. Translated as The Gift, it argued that what we mistake for the free giving of presents, in archaic societies and in our own, is in fact a tightly structured system of obligation. To give is to bind the recipient; to receive is to enter into debt; to reciprocate is to honor the debt and restart the cycle. There is no escape by refusal, because refusal is itself a wound. Against the economists of his day, Mauss argued that the pure transaction, exchange with no continuing thread, was a recent invention and a fragile one. What underlay it, and continued to underlie it in practices we no longer recognized as exchange, was the bond. The point of the gift was not to settle accounts. It was to keep the relationship alive.

Mauss anchored this argument, famously, in a paragraph from Elsdon Best’s 1909 essay Forest Lore of the Maori, a passage Best had translated from a letter written to him by Tāmati Ranapiri, an elder of Ngāti Raukawa at Ōtaki, on New Zealand’s North Island, sometime in the years around 1900. Ranapiri described a concept he called hau: the spirit of a thing, which travels with it. To receive a gift was to receive part of the giver’s hau, and hau retained without return could make a person sick. Mauss read this as a general theory of obligation. Subsequent Māori scholars have argued, with some justice, that he overgeneralized; the concept is richer and more specific than his rendering allows. What does not require argument is that something is being described that we recognize even in unfamiliar form. It is the structure of the friendship that has lapsed, the cousin who has not heard from you in too long, the client who used to call. Something accumulates and must be discharged. The technology for discharging it varies. The condition does not.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, in the country stores of rural America, the local proprietor was the keeper of his community’s commercial memory. He extended credit on the basis of personal knowledge: which farms had had a hard year, which sons were reliable and which were not, who had buried a parent, whose wife was sick. He kept a ledger, often a heavy bound volume with marbled endpapers, and the ledger was at once an accounting record and an aide-memoire. The historian Diane E. Wenger has studied the papers of Samuel Rex, a storekeeper in Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, whose business between 1790 and 1807 produced some forty-four surviving daybooks, three ledgers, and a network of correspondents that included more than a hundred Philadelphia merchants. The ledgers are not just rows of figures. They are documents of a man who knew, in detail, the lives of the people who walked through his door. Thomas D. Clark’s Pills, Petticoats, and Plows, a classic 1944 study of the postbellum Southern country store, makes a similar case at the level of the whole region: the storekeeper was the credit infrastructure of the rural South, and the credit ran, when it ran well, on memory.

In the cities, the practice took different forms. By the 1880s, the Victorian calling-card system had reached a kind of baroque maturity. To call upon a household was to leave a card. To leave a card with a corner folded indicated, depending on the corner, a social call, a visit of congratulation, a visit of condolence, or the giver’s imminent departure from town. The cards accumulated in a tray in the entry hall, and the lady of the house, or her secretary, kept a separate book in which calls were recorded and obligations of return calculated. Mark Twain, in The Gilded Age, warns his Washington protagonist to “get the corners right,” lest she “unintentionally condole with a friend on a wedding or congratulate her upon a funeral.” It was a paper system for managing the ledger of acquaintance.

The 1885 etiquette manual Our Deportment, compiled by John H. Young and published in Cincinnati, is one of dozens of such guides that proliferated in the late nineteenth century, and it captures the seriousness with which the system was understood by its practitioners. “To the unrefined or unbred,” Young wrote, “the visiting card is but a trifling and insignificant bit of paper.” To the cultivated, it carried what he called “subtle and unmistakable intelligence.” Texture, engraving, even the hour of leaving: all of it placed the visitor in some specific position before manner, conversation, or face had been able to explain him. Emily Post, four decades later, would observe drily that “more visiting cards are bent or dog-eared than are left flat.”

These were, in their different ways, technologies of memory. They allowed commerce, and the social life that commerce required and produced, to extend further than a single mind could remember. Without them, the limit of a person’s commercial life would have been the limit of the people he could keep in his head. With them, the limit was effectively the limit of the records he could keep, which is to say much larger but not infinite.

It would be easy, from here, to write a piece in the familiar declension mode: a lament for an age of long ledgers and silver trays, an indictment of the contemporary loss of personal knowledge in commerce. I will not write that piece, because I do not believe its premises. The ledger and the calling card were technologies of memory for societies in which the memory of strangers was a chronic problem. They worked, when they worked, for reasons that had less to do with the technology than with the underlying commitment of the people using them to the long view of their relationships. The technology served the disposition. It did not produce it.

What is striking, from the vantage of the present, is not that the old technologies are gone. They are not gone, exactly. The equivalents are everywhere, in different form. What is striking is that the underlying problem they were invented to solve has not changed. We are still, at every scale of commerce above the merely local, in the business of remembering strangers. A great many things that present themselves as innovations in business culture are in fact innovations in the technology of memory: a new way to keep track of people and the obligations between them. This is not a recent problem. It is the founding problem of commerce. It is, in some sense, the problem that produces commerce. Two people who see each other every day do not need a ledger.

The question is what we want our technologies of memory to be for. Samuel Rex’s ledger encoded a community. The kula encoded a system of long-distance trust that no individual could have sustained alone. The calling card encoded a society’s sense of who owed what to whom. None of these were neutral. Each of them produced a kind of life. The question is always: what kind of life is this technology producing? What does it allow us to remember, and what does it allow us to forget? The answers vary across centuries and continents, and the variation is, in a sense, the whole of cultural history.

In the collection of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, there is a small card, about an inch and a half by three, with a black border perhaps a quarter of an inch wide. It reads, in plain script: Mr. & Mrs. F. Abbott, Natick, Mass. It is dated by the archive to roughly 1886. The black border is a mourning edge, used by widows and the recently bereaved to signal, before words, the state in which they came calling. Who Mr. and Mrs. Abbott were, I do not know. What I know is what the card says, which is that someone close to them had died, and that they were still going about the work of being in their social world: arriving at front doors, leaving the card, signaling the loss and the obligation simultaneously, asking by their visit to be remembered as still here.

That is what the memory of strangers has always been for, in the conduct of relationships. Not nostalgia. Not sentiment. The discipline of remembering what should not be forgotten, and of arranging matters, even by something as small as a bordered card, so that the people who matter to us will not forget, either. The technologies vary. The condition is permanent. We are all of us, in our different ways, in the business of leaving cards.

Further Reading