Everyone knew that the only thing you can legitimately give in exchange for a woman is another woman. In this case, everyone has to abide by the pretext that a woman will someday be forthcoming. In the meantime, as one ethnographer succinctly puts it, “the debt can never be fully paid.”

In most human economies, money is used first and foremost to arrange marriages. The simplest and probably most common way of doing this was by being presented as what used to be called “brideprice”: a suitor’s family would deliver a certain number of dog teeth, or cowries, or brass rings, or whatever is the local social currency, to a woman’s family, and they would present their daughter as his bride. It’s easy to see why this might be interpreted as buying a woman, and many colonial officials in Africa and Oceania in the early part of the twentieth century did indeed come to that conclusion

Way back in the 1890s, in an article I found in the archives of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, one observer predicted that the current influx of better educated players into the game and the “gradual weeding out of bummers and thugs” would raise the intellectual standard of the game and reduce baseball’s rampant superstitions. It didn’t. I first examined baseball magic in the late 1960s for a term paper; when I returned as an anthropologist decades later to study the culture of baseball, I expected to find less superstition. Unlike in my playing days, most of today’s players have spent a few years in college and therefore, I reasoned, with more education were less apt to be superstitious. It wasn’t true. They are less willing to admit to having “superstitions,” but when asked about their routines and what they do to give themselves luck, they often describe rituals, taboos, and fetishes little different from my teammates in the

Fetishes are charms—usually small objects believed to embody luck that can aid or protect the owner.