Lamb auctions on the borders

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Abstract
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.

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