Tavari money honour
In Tavari culture, the term “money honour” (Tavari: hamattišori) refers to a set of cultural practices, rituals, and traditions regarding the exchange of money, and with the conduct of business between people more generally. Many of the traditions associated with money honour are codified as part of the Tavat Avati faith, but observance is quite common among Tavari Akronists as well. While the Tavat Avati was written in the late 13th century and published in 1304, customs very similar to money honour feature in written records across nearly all of Tavari-language history. Historically observed across all social classes and (with regional variations) across the entire Tavari-speaking world, the ubiquitousness of money honour has caused it to become considered by many Tavari people a central, defining part of Tavari identity. During the 17th century wars with Bana, orcish Banian spies were regularly identified by their unfamiliarity with money honour. Historians and sociologists have pointed to money honour as part of the reason why the so-called “Tavari System of doing business”—a euphemistic phrase used to describe the bribery and kickbacks that by the 19th century had become common when conducting business to the point of being generally considered mandatory—became part of the prevailing culture of the country. Money honour remains ubiquitous in Tavari culture in the modern day, but is widely considered to be on the decline among younger generations.
Some of the most well known parts of money honour require that financial transactions take place in public, not private, spaces; that cash be used wherever possible; that neither party impugns the reputation of the other during the transaction; and the observance of various rituals such as bowing in a particular way, maintaining eye contact and holding one’s breath specifically during the precise moment of exchanging the money, and closing out the transaction with a particular prayer. There are often regional variations which mean that the kinds of places where it is allowable to conduct business, or the ritual acts required to be observed, can vary from place to place. For example, among members of the Lines who traditionally lived on King’s Island, it is customary to bow both before and after a financial transaction, while in the west bowing is only considered mandatory at the end, and in Elatana not at all.
Violating the rules of money honour is a serious faux pas in Tavari society, seen as unethical and rude, though in general, those who are not Tavari have less of a social expectation to strictly follow the customs. It is a violation of money honour for a Tavari person to conduct business with another Tavari person on property owned by a non-Tavari, but rules are relaxed if a non-Tavari person is directly involved in the transaction. Differences in cultural understandings around the exchange of money have caused significant conflict in history—in Metradan, early interactions between the Tavari and the native Cescolians went awry when Cescolian ignorance of Tavari customs led to the Tavari taking great offense and, ultimately, using this offense as a justification for violence. In modern Metradan, ethnic Cescolians continue to regard money honour as a foreign tradition imposed upon them by force, and this is a major source of tension between the two groups.
Practices
The first line in the chapter of the Tavat Avati entitled Money Honour is “The exchange of a coin invokes the eyes of the elders. Never commit dishonour in their sight.” As such, the Tavat Avati defines the exchange of money as a religious and spiritual act that requires the strictest level of adherence to ritual and tradition. In the Tavat Avati faith, the spirits of the deceased, called elder spirits, do not leave the world upon death but simply become incorporeal and invisible to the living. However, they are understood to be mostly unconcerned with the affairs of mortals and instead “attending to the business of spirits,” which the Tavat Avati describes as “unknowable.” Elder spirits do not generally pay close attention to the living unless invoked, which in most (but not all) circumstances, the Tavat Avati characterizes as disturbing them and thus discourages it.
Another very influential line in the Tavat Avati says that “Coin must be exchanged in the sight of the payor, the payee, and the ancestors of both.” Because the Tavat Avati states that there are some places that ancestral spirits simply cannot be invoked—bedrooms and “private places” are the most well known, but other such places include property owned by foreigners, under the surface of the Urth, at the peaks of mountains, or on the islands of the Tears of the Moon—money is forbidden to be exchanged in these places. Of the restrictions, that on “private places” is the most relevant; “private places” are defined as any enclosed space whose access is controlled by just one person, which includes offices or cubicles belonging to one person, vehicles, or any room, building, or structure that is not generally open to the public. Who exactly the parties are, and their relationship to each other, is also relevant, because the kinds of spaces that are considered “open” depend on how well the parties are acquainted. If a brother is paying another brother, then they might do so in the family house, because it is a place both have a right to be without having to request permission. For someone paying someone who they do not know and have no prior relationship with, the payee’s entire house would be considered private and it would be improper for the two to conduct business there.
Generally speaking, under money honour, money can only be exchanged in a place that is normally and regularly open to all involved parties. If two people are conducting business that is private but need to exchange money, they are required to move to a different room to exchange money even if they go back into the private room afterward. The definition of “private place” is often highly specific—for example, especially in eras in which entertaining guests at the home was historically common, the “living room” used for public entertaining would be considered an allowable place to exchange money, but a “family room” used only by the residents of the house for their private recreation would be disallowed. In a regional variation, kitchens were historically considered private in the west but not private in the east. The time of day is also relevant: if a business’ posted operating hours have ended, it becomes disallowable to exchange money on the premises even if the business has not actually completed the act of closing for the day, because the elder spirits cannot be present to witness the exchange beyond the posted hours. As a result, it is well known in the Tavari retail industry that, in the final minutes stores are open, customers will regularly abandon their carts and simply leave them behind out of fear of being unable to pay for them before the posted hours end, which generates significant amounts of work for employees in needing to put back the items. As a way of ameliorating this, it has become common for Tavari businesses to officially declare that “the deceased shall be permitted to shop for one hour after posted closing,” thus granting permission to elder spirits to be present to observe any financial transactions.
One of the most crucial factors of money honour is that it requires that all participants in any transaction take care not to “impugn the reputation” of any others while the transaction is taking place. This is understood to place on all participants a presumption of being honourable and fair, and it is a grave dishonour to even just imply that another party is acting in bad faith. This rule also means that many topics of discussion are taboo during financial transactions, as it would impugn one’s reputation to speak of anything that embarrasses them. It would be a violation of money honour to call someone with whom you are doing business a liar or a cheater, but also to mention anything that might make others think less of them if they heard it—even if there are no others actually in the room during the transaction. As a result, it tends to be a common rule of thumb to simply talk as little as possible while exchanging money. Regionally, silence in conducting business is associated with Tavari Rodoka, and the Native Rodokans themselves—though not necessarily considered bound by the rules of money honour in the same way as the ethnic Tavari because they were statutorily permitted to keep “their ancient customs”—are also known to tend to observe this tradition.
Because the Tavat Avati defines financial business as the exchange of coin, this has significantly influenced the way the Tavari financial system works into the modern day. In particular, in the modern day, adoption of credit cards is remarkably low in the countries of the Tavari Union and Vakani Dalar, and it is still not uncommon for businesses there not to accept any kind of card payment at all. Cash, both historically and in the modern day, is overwhelmingly dominant as a payment method in Tavari society, specifically because of the prevalence of money honour. Credit cards are disdained because the actual “exchange” is not actually conducted at the time and place the card is swiped, but settled days or weeks later when the card issuer settles its accounts and receives payment from the account owner. Debit cards, which unlike credit cards entail the actual transfer of cash funds from one bank account to another at the time the card is swiped, are technically permissible, but are still less common in Tavari society than elsewhere because they appear and function superficially almost identically to credit cards.
Cheques are permissible under money honour, and in fact, their prevalence is commonly referenced—often derisively—as an indicator of how money honour leads to anachronisms in modern Tavari society. Written documents directing one’s bank or treasurer to pay a certain amount of funds to a named individual were not unknown in the time of King Utor I, and the Tavat Avati acknowledges that there are times at which the exchange of coin might be infeasible, saying: “the exchange of bills of exchange shall be considered equivalent to the exchange of coin directly if, by war, plague, weather, or distance, the parties are prevented from meeting face-to-face, or if the weight of the coin would exceed that which can be pulled by an ass, or if it is a festival day, or if any of the parties are expecting the birth of a child.” The Tavat Avati lays out several rules for letters of exchange, including modern cheques, of which the most well known is that couriers who carry them must grant access to the document to any of the parties involved in the transaction or their chiefs at any time. In the modern day, TavariPost still offers a distinct “check mailing” service providing tracking information on the mailpiece free of charge, in order to allow for the mail to be used by observant Avatidari to transact business, and either the mailing or receiving party can, if they choose to do so, travel to whatever postal facility currently has the mailpiece and request to inspect it. (TavariPost reported in 2022 that the number of times this occurs each year is “fewer than 100.”)
One reason that cheques have become and remained popular is because of how they are signed. Traditionally, the Tavari used name seals to stamp the crest of their Line and the crest of their own individual household (only Chiefs, Delegates to the Diet, and Knights are granted personal crests) to sign documents, which remains the case in official contexts like banking. The placing of Line and family crests on the document is said to be very pleasing to the elder spirits, and the perceived luxuriousness or quality of one’s name seal is said to reflect on the family, as both grant elder spirits the opportunity to be boastful or take pride in the conduct of their descendants. Additionally, cheques always list the name of the bank account holder, and it is customary in Tavari society to have one’s name listed prominently and in an embellished manner on cheques as this also pleases the elder spirits’ sense of pride. The receipts which are stamped after credit or debit card transactions do not offer this same opportunity, and especially because receipts are generally seen as ephemeral records that are quickly discarded as trash, this is another part of why they see low usage among Tavari people.
There are also ritual actions that money honour dictates should be performed. Most prominently is bowing, particularly with the hands at the side. Bowing is common in many contexts in Tavari society, including in greeting, in apologizing, in praying, or when observing a birth or a death. In these contexts, however, bowing is always done with the hands elsewhere—only in transacting business are the hands left at the sides when bowing. A common social faux pas committed by foreigners in Tavaris is bowing this way at other occasions such as when saying hello, which can have an offensive connotation of only greeting someone because one wants money from them. (In a proper Tavari hello, the right hand is clasped on the center of the chest; when saying goodbye, it is the left hand.) During the precise moment that the money or cheque is handed by one participant to the other, direct eye contact is to be maintained, and both parties are (if able) to hold their breath. The precise reason for this is unknown; eye contact seems to have long been a common social expectation all across Tavari society when the Tavat Avati was written, but the rule of holding one’s breath may have been invented by King Utor I, who anecdotally is recorded as having suffered from halitosis. Regional variations in these ritual actions is quite common, especially in the number and placement of the bows, which is a well known difference between eastern and western Tavari customs. Other variations include the Nandrat region’s preference for shaking hands over bowing, or the Ranat region’s custom, well known among Tavari and still commonly followed, of keeping a coffee bean in one’s pocket or on one’s person when transacting business. In Racatrazi, feathers have a similar role as Ranat’s coffee bean, though it is not as universal.
History
The Tavat Avati was authored by King Utor I over the course of his life and first published in 1304, shortly after he became King of All Tavaris. Utor’s stated intention was to write down and codify all the cultural practices, rituals, histories, and folklore that “are commonly held by and universal among the Tavari people,” though in many cases he made alterations according to his own personal beliefs and philosophies. The Tavat Avati speaks of “the Four Honours,” which Utor defined as “the most crucially important behaviours to uphold in order to ensure the approval of the Elders,” with Elders here meaning one’s ancestors (not to be confused with the Elders of the Church of Akrona). These are war honour (maintaining honourable conduct in combat), line honour (maintaining honourable conduct with members of one’s Tavari Line), elder honour (maintaining honourable conduct in religious contexts, i.e. with the spirits of one’s deceased ancestors), and money honour.
Much of what the Tavat Avati says about money honour appears to be directly influenced by the peculiar traditions of the court of the Chiefs of Nuvo, which were spread to those of other chiefs as Line Nuvo gradually expanded its dominance during the Tavari Wars of Unification (c. 1150-1304). During that era, correspondence between Chiefs who had recently come under the suzerainty of Line Nuvo frequently commented on how the Silver Court’s standards of expected behaviour were, in their words, “odd,” “bizarrely mystical,” and “without rational explanation.” For this and other reasons, the Chiefs of Line Nuvo came to be regarded as quite superstitious, a reputation that became all the more entrenched after the publication of the Tavat Avati. However, many other Chiefs had quite similar traditions, and modern historians tend to agree that Line Nuvo’s only major difference in this regard was its explicit codification—that is, writing down and formalizing—of their rituals around exchanging money, with most of the actual traditions being substantially similar to those of other Tavari chiefs.
After Tavari unification, adherence to money honour was initially something only truly expected of the Chiefs in their dealings with the King and the national government. However, as Chiefs gradually adopted the customs in their own courts—sometimes more out of a desire to gain the favor of the Nuvos than out of any particular religious devotion to the Tavat Avati—eventually the customs spread through the Chiefs to their own business partners, who spread it further, and so on until the customs had become ubiquitous among all social classes by the 16th century. The entire Tavat Avati faith was spread in this same manner, from the elites down to the common people, and it has always been the case that people of the more privileged social classes adhered more closely to the text of the Tavat Avati, while common or working class people tended to adhere more to their own peculiar regional customs, while still generally observing the spirit of the Tavat Avati’s written rules.
Money honour was particularly spread through Tavari colonialism, due in large part to the fact that a significant portion of Tavari colonialism was undertaken explicitly as a business enterprise and thereby done by people who tended to frequently conduct financial transactions. Even the Church of Akrona, which conducted much of its settlement activity as a religious exercise of proselytization, still tended to observe money honour in its official dealings; Matron Ilara Lendreaž was known to react with anger when Rodokans came to her office at her temple with payments for her instead of her preferred location, the publicly accessible entry foyer of the Church’s administrative building in Lantaž. While officially, people who are not Tavari have lessened expectations of following money honour, functionally throughout history, Tavari people did place the expectation upon the indigenous peoples of places they colonized to conduct business in the Tavari way, either by preferentially choosing to do business with those that did learn and adopt Tavari business customs or by responding with belligerence and cruelty toward indigenous people who failed to observe money honour. This was most evident in Metradan, where differences between Tavari and Cescolians over the exchange of money led to outright violence.
When the Tavari first began to settle in the Lower Zanzaria region of Cescolia, beginning around 1650, it was done under the auspices of formal agreements enacted between private Tavari merchants and by agents of the Church of Akrona, which outlined that the Tavari would be permitted to erect settlements in Zanzaria provided they did the work of draining swamps and clearing land in areas that Cescolians had not yet settled. These “treaty towns” were to be open to Tavari and Cescolians, but the agreements permitted the Tavari to impose their own laws on land they owned to the extent that they did not interfere with Cescolian law—a qualification that the Tavari tended to neglect. The Tavari very quickly began to treat the treaty towns as outright Tavari territory, where Tavari customs like money honour were mandatory and expected. There are multiple recorded instances of Cescolians being evicted from homes that they themselves built in treaty towns after “impugning the honor” of Tavari authorities who came to collect property taxes, a tactic that very often allowed Tavari settlers to move into the now empty homes, while the Cescolians were expected to move elsewhere. Failing to observe customs of money honour was also used as justification for seizing all kinds of property from Cescolians, especially expensive capital goods like cattle, horses, vehicles and farm equipment.
Tavari seizure of Cescolian property over money honour disputes frequently led to interpersonal conflicts between individuals but on several occasions caused violence that spread and broke out into major conflagrations, and was one of many impetuses in the First Tavari-Cescolian War (1738-1742), in which the Tavari dropped all pretense of being present in Cescolia with permission and openly spoke of conquering and annexing Cescolia. Between the First and Second Tavari-Cescolian Wars, a period from 1742 until 1822, vast portions of what were prior and are today southern Cescolia were annexed by Tavaris, and in these regions, customs like money honour were forcefully imposed on the conquered population, often deliberately with the expectation that they would refuse to observe the customs, thus “permitting” the Tavari to take negative action toward them. In this way, money honour became a tactic of oppression and subjugation, and it is still remembered this way by Cescolians in Metradan in the modern day.
Observance of money honour took on a new kind of cultural significance beginning in the 19th century. By this time, money honour had been universal among Tavari for centuries, and historians and other scholars note that money honour seemed to become even more culturally important at this time because, after the 1793 abolition of the hereditary Chiefs of each line, the end of what were essentially feudalism, and the advent of limited, constitutional monarchy, money honour was seen as one social institution that had not changed when nearly everything else had. The abolition of the Chiefs also saw the former chiefs transition essentially into businesspeople and oligarchs as they personally inherited massive portfolios of land and property that had historically been considered collectively owned by their entire Line. Now even more involved in, and dependent on, business dealings to make their livings, strict adherence to money honour exploded in popularity, to the point where at several occasions in the early decades of the 19th century, the Tavari National Diet considered legislation to codify it as statute law (such legislation never actually passed.)
Sociologists have theorized that money honour was especially popular in this newly capitalistic era because of the conditions of trust it imposes on participants in financial transactions. The prohibition of impugning reputations and the requirement that good faith be assumed meant that participants in business transactions could trust that conducting such business would be relatively easy from an interpersonal perspective as it would be largely guaranteed to follow certain predictable, non-controversial expectations. However, because of this, the cultural understanding of what constituted a “business transaction,” and therefore what caused the rules of money honour to apply, began to expand—if more things were “business,” then that meant that good faith and trust could be presumed in more and more circumstances. Because the Tavat Avati defines business as circumstances where money is exchanged, it became common to exchange money—often just insignificant amounts like a single coin—in order to make any interaction “business” and thus to permit the imposition of money honour in the interaction.
This change was often one-sided, imposed by elites on those with less institutional power in order to advantage elites who sought protection from accusations of fraud when, in reality, they were in fact acting in bad faith in order to save money. For example, employers began to charge a fee—even a simply nominal fee, like a single našdat—for employees to discuss labor grievances, ostensibly because of “administrative costs.” By imposing that fee, once paid, the employee could not actually accuse the employer of violating labor rules without impugning that employer’s honor. Violations of money honour, while never against Tavari law, were often prohibited by labor contracts because it was considered “grievous disrespect,” a term of Tavari law similar to modern standards prohibiting “hostile workplace environments.” Businesses of all kinds began to charge small fees for any number of services that previously had been free of charge; this practice expanded into a wider tradition of paying gratuities to those who provide any kind of service. This even expanded outside the traditional “business” world into private lives: in the 19th century it was not unusual for a houseguest to be asked to pay for their meal when invited to someone’s home for dinner or a party. As did money honour itself, this expansion in its application spread gradually from the upper echelons of society to the lower, as succeeding groups who became obligated to follow the new traditions (and thus pay increased financial costs) in turn obligated those with whom they interacted to follow them in their dealings (and recoup costs.)
The expansion in money honour was not unnoticed or unlamented by the Tavari public. Throughout the 19th century, publications frequently complained of how so much cost more than it once did. “We have sidelined one monarchy, that of Line Nuvo, but simply replaced it with another, that of Line Našdat, whose rule seems far more absolute and far less inclined to tolerate dissent,” complained one Nuvrenon News editorial in 1837. Fees for labor grievances and other workplace-related money honour controversies did fade away prior to the end of the century after an uptick in labor riots and a decrease in labor participation that threatened Tavari industrial productivity. Charging houseguests for meals became unthinkable during the lean years of the Great War and the subsequent global economic depression, though the practice of paying gratuities for services rendered remained until it was abolished and made a crime in the finance ethics reforms of the 1980s under Bežra Išdašt Tovrenar. However, even with the most excessive changes not sticking, the new, prevailing custom where the rules of business were to apply in as broad a social context as possible did not entirely vanish, and that custom is identified as a major reason why Tavari elites in the private and public sectors began to find it so easy, and treat it as expected, to exchange bribes and kickbacks—the so-called “Tavari System of doing business.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, it seemed at first as though the Tavari System had fallen out of favor and a new economic paradigm based more on public welfare would take root, but entrenched business interests quickly regained dominance in the Tavari political system after the country’s reindustrialization led to a rapid boom in living standards. Briefly, it was popular to speak of a “New Tavari System” that ostensibly cared more for the well-being of the common people, though this term did not last as it became evident that public opinion no longer actually tolerated such explicit notions of culturally accepted bribery even if business elites preferred to continue them in practice. The Tavari System is widely considered to have ended in Tavaris in particular in the 1980s due to a concerted political effort to encourage new ethical standards, though Metradan, Racatrazi, and even Vakani Dalar (which became independent in 1793) continue to deal with endemic corruption in their economies.
Prevalence
In the modern day, money day is still widely observed across nearly all groups in Tavari society, but the degree to which they do can vary. For example, it is common for younger people to do things like bow when exchanging money with those older than them, but to do away with that and other rituals when exchanging money with their own peers. Money honour, for many young people, has become something only observed in otherwise formal contexts, but not in informal ones like inside one’s own household or with one’s friends. In comparison to, for example, the years immediately following the Great War, it is now less common to bow to the cashier when paying for groceries at the store or to the waiter when paying at a restaurant. However, some contexts still see wide adherence among all age groups, often depending on the perceived formality or gravity of the financial transaction—the Tavari Association of Real Estate Professionals published a study in 2020 indicating that 95% of homebuyers bowed when purchasing their home, with car dealers, medical billing agents, lawyers, and university financial aid professionals also reporting similar rates. Conversely, the Royal Rodokan Coffee Company has reported that fewer than 25% of customers bow to their baristas.
Anecdotally, many Tavari tend to consider money honour to be more prevalent in rural areas, areas with more older people, or areas where adherence to the Tavat Avati faith is highest—that is to say, in areas that are more culturally conservative. A 2015 Ranzalar Media Research poll asking the question “Is money honour important to you?” showed the highest positive response rates in areas associated with support for the right-wing political party The Liberals, especially Nandrat Province outside of the City of Nandrat and in the inland south, and among supporters of the far-right Tavari National Party like Motai Province and the area around Good Harbor and Lansai. However, in apparent contradiction of these results, the area with the most “yes” responses as a proportion of total responses was actually the city of Nuvrenon, a left-wing stronghold as the country’s largest urban area, where 85% of respondents answered yes.
Outside of Tavaris, money honour is observed in Metradan but is extraordinarily controversial in the region of the Metradani north now commonly known as Zampanea, where ethnic Cescolians are the majority. It is not uncommon to see signs on Cescolian businesses that explicitly state “This business does not observe, condone, or permit the imposition of money honour.” Cescolian cashiers and bank tellers may sometimes even wear sunglasses specifically to prevent Tavari customers from making eye contact. While Metradani law mandates cash as legal tender for the payment of debts, it has become common for Cescolian businesses to refuse to accept cash; northern Metradan has the highest rate of credit card acceptance of any jurisdiction in any country where the Tavari language is spoken. Cescolian businesses will often also refuse to accept name seals as valid signatures, which has led to name seals seeing less use in Metradan in favor of handwritten signatures.
In Vakani Dalar, money honour is most prevalent in New Tavaris, where it sees similar rates of adherence as Tavaris. It is less common but not unusual in Vonatan, but Xoigovoi has a similar attitude as northern Metradan, where the imposition of money honour is seen as a relic of Tavari imperialism and strongly resisted as oppression.
In Racatrazi, “money honour” as such has faded from common usage as the proportion of ethnic Tavari residents has shrunk in the decades since independence, but the Racatrazi Cartels all observe a common “honour code” that is fundamentally similar to, and directly inspired by, Tavari money honour in many respects. For example, it is considered mandatory among members of cartels to always exchange money in the sight of witnesses, though there is no religious connotation. Members of cartels also always shake hands as a sign of indicating the following interaction should be considered “business” and therefore can be expected not to involve violence or intimidation; violations of this norm have resulted in multiple turf wars.