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Lamb auctions on the borders

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

John N. Gray
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Weber could very well have been referring to the England- Scotland borderlands when he characterized the basic relation which ‘transcends the boundaries of neighborhood, kinship, group or tribe’ (Economy and Society, I: 637) as taking one of two forms—war or trade. He also said of the market, as a particular form of the trading relation: ‘It is […] only this physical assemblage which allows the full emergence of the market's most distinctive feature, viz. dickering’ (Economy and Society, I: 635). The lamb auctions which are the focus of this paper do involve a physical assemblage of individuals from different sides of the border who dicker over the value of lambs. But as implied by Weber, this is not just a simple trading relation. It is a meaningful exchange of value in which sheep embody for the Scots a distinctive world and in which the haggling over the price of sheep is about the distancing of this world from the over-whelming social, economic and political power of England. In sum, auctions in the Scottish borders occur at and are partly constitutive of social boundaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , May 1984 , pp. 54 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1984

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