Similar differentiation occurs with very different consequences in relations among friends, neighbors, and kin.[19] Margaret Nelson and Joan Smith’s study of interhousehold exchanges among Coolidge County, Vermont, working-class residents captures some of this variation. Examining economic survival strategies in this rural community, Nelson and Smith found extensive differentiation of the services that neighbors, friends, and kin rendered to each other. Different transactions and media applied to different social relations. One resident couple, Bruce and Nancy Sharp, for instance, reported Bruce’s varied fee schedule for his snowplowing services in the community, which he did as a side business. When he said that his rates varied depending on the time spent on the job, Nancy soon revealed her husband’s more complex tariff schedule. Although Bruce charged an hourly or contracted rate for the town store, he expected only a token, reduced rate from an elderly couple and exclusively in-kind reciprocity from his friends: a six-pack of beer or some Friendly’s ice cream, for example, from his friend Ted. When the interviewers asked if he had expected money from Ted, Bruce was emphatic: “No, not for friends.” His reduced rate for the elderly couple, explained Nancy, was “because they want to pay something. You don’t make a killing on that.” He did it, Bruce explained, “to give me extra soda money, cigarette money.” Nancy again qualified her husband’s answer, adding, “you did it a lot of times as a favor; . .. you just did it to be nice different times. He does one for the apartment house [in return for which] Stuart brought you a load of corn” (Nelson and Smith 1999: 11-12).
Gender differences also figured importantly in the local economy of favors. Women’s provision of goods and services to kin and friends, for instance, were more likely to be treated as giftlike trading or swapping, while men were “allowed” to collect fees, even from friends and relatives. Thus, women referred to their exchanges of babysitting as trading or swapping, never as barter. The same was true with women’s sewing and knitting; they offered these products as gifts, rarely bartering them one for another. One of the study’s respondents, Barbara Lattrell, whose side job involved sewing, explained why she made all her niece’s wedding dresses for free: “That was her wedding present. Many hours of hand sewing” (128).
The system as a whole had an ironic consequence: those for whom the interhousehold exchanges were most valuable actually incurred fewer obligations. Households with higher, more stable income readily took on long-term commitments to barter goods and services; people in lower-income households, however, were reluctant to take on extensive commitments because of the risk that calls for reciprocity would come when they had few resources to offer. For instance, two other respondents, Ellen and Charles Rivers, who had been deeply involved in the community, withdrew after their economic troubles began. When asked, “What do you think people owe their families?” Ellen responded, “I don’t feel I have any obligation to anybody, really. When my sister has her baby in September, yuh she’s watched my kids a lot for me, for no pay or anything. Yes, I will return the favor to her. … But as far as owing anybody anything—no.” The same strategy applied to neighbors and friends: “Both Charles and I feel the same way about this—we don’t really like to owe anybody anything including favors because they can always come back on you in a negative way. So, whenever things are done it’s usually been an exchange for pay” (111-12).
Thus, differentiation occurred at three different levels, among kin and acquaintances, between men and women, and according to income and job stability. Among other things, the differentiation involved a remarkable elaboration not only of transactions, but also of payment media. As in professional-client relations, bartering of goods and services among kin and acquaintances exemplifies the main point of this chapter. On one side, participants unquestionably mingle intimacy and economic transactions; on the other side, however, they do not do so indiscriminately. On the contrary, they make fine differentiations and mark significant boundaries between relations, and within each set, they carefully match transactions and media with those relations.