Gifting

There is a bit of inspiration here from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, in the chapter called Some Food We Could not Eat, where he writes about the circular motion of gifts, quoting an example described by Bronislaw Malinowski of the ceremonial exchange of the Massim peoples who occupy the South Sea islands near the eastern tip of New Guinea.

It is called the Kula. Two ceremonial gifts lie at the heart of the Kula exchange: armshells and necklaces. They circulate throughout the islands, passing from household to household.

The presence of one of these gifts in a man’s house enables him ‘to draw a great deal of renown, to exhibit the article, to tell how he obtained it, and to plan to whom he is going to give it. And all this forms one of the favourite subjects of tribal conversation and gossip…’ (pp12-13)

The Kula gifts ….move continually around a wide ring of islands in the Massim archipelago. Each travels in a circle: the red shell necklaces (considered to be ‘male’ and worn by women) move clockwise and the armshells (‘female’ and worn by men) move counter-clockwise. A person who participates in the Kula has gift partners in neighbouring tribes. If we imagine him facing the centre of the circle with partners on his left and right, he will be receiving armshells from his partner to the left and giving them to the man on the right. The necklaces flow the other way. Of course, these objects are not actually passed hand to hand: they are carried by canoe from island to island in journeys that require great preparation and cover hundreds of miles.

The two Kula gifts are exchanged for each other. If a man brings me a necklace, I may give him in return some armshells of equivalent value. I may do this right away, or I may wait as long as a year (though if I wait that long I will give him a few smaller gifts in the interim to show my good faith). As a rule it takes between two and ten years for each article in the Kula to make a full round of the islands. (p13)