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This chapter characterizes Oceanic exchange regimes in terms of a continuum. It is suggested that there are a number of broadly parallel axes of difference along which very diverse exchange systems can be ranged. At one end are forms of exchange that typically transact like against like, that deploy quantity rather than qualitative rank difference, that often are based on food rather than valuables and are also articulated with brideservice rather than bridewealth.
These systems are also typically localized rather than regionally extensive, they exist within societies which are not economically specialized, they are characterized by intense and unstable competition, and values are generally non-convertible, that is, life and valuables circulate in distinct spheres and cannot be written off against one another. This regime of non-convertibility is epitomized by the Marquesas in Polynesia and many Austronesian and non-Austronesian New Guinea societies. The exchange regimes characterized by convertibility, regional differentiation, the use of valuables and categorically hierarchical relations are epitomized by Fiji.
While such a schematic analysis requires many qualifications, the broad continuum is important for the colonial histories in which indigenous systems are caught up. In general, “non-conversion” regimes are less able to exploit and incorporate the new possibilities for external and internal exchange that contacts with traders, missions, and the like, enable. Although there is a brief period of political efflorescence in the early nineteenth century in eastern Polynesia, the pattern is one of political decline, that contrasts sharply with the continuing dynamism of “value conversion” systems such as Fiji.
Elaborate exchange systems have always been conspicuous features of Austronesian societies, and travellers’ accounts frequently feature extended descriptions of activities described as trading or feasting. Even in relatively casual or shallow descriptions, it is often apparent that the practices witnessed were not merely economic transactions or ceremonies in a narrow sense, but events linked with kinship economies, with social reproduction as well as utilitarian traffic, that were often also evidently arenas for political competition. Twentieth-century anthropology, particularly with respect to Oceania, extended these observations to a dramatic extent and made them the basis for fundamental theories of “the gift” and of reciprocity: while Marcel Mauss’s work was crucial theoretically and heavily dependent upon Pacific cases, Malinowski’s account of “the kula” became an ethnographic classic.
In some ways, however, the very prominence of these studies hindered an extended comparative understanding of Oceanic exchange. Malinowski’s texts, used again and again in teaching general anthropology courses, were decontextualized from the region that they dealt with and instead taken to illustrate general theses concerning reciprocity; “the Kula Ring” was paradoxically considered a unique system, yet also one that revealed fundamental aspects of human sociality, at least in its non-modern forms. Even a recent theorist can observe that the kula is “one of the most extraordinary phenomena for which anthropologists have been called upon to account” (Miller 1987:60). Discussion of this kind overlooked the extent to which the kula was articulated with other exchange systems along the northern coast of New Guinea and around southeast Papua, and the fact that certain other systems in the region, which also featured shell valuables, involved similar transactions, even though the exchange-paths did not constitute a circle. Paradoxically, also, most research on the kula has dealt with its manifestations in ethnographic localities and raised questions concerned with the representations of value, mortuary exchange, and other topics, within those sites, without actually attempting to grasp the regional properties of the system or its dynamics at that supra-local level.
This chapter does not review the anthropological literature on exchange in Oceania, or interpretations of the kula specifically (but see Specht and White 1978; Leach and Leach 1983; Macintyre and Young 1983; Gardner and Modjeska 1985; Keesing 1990; Thomas 1991). It instead attempts, in a very provisional way, to address the comparative agenda that seems to have been marginalized by the focused character of ethnographic research. I suggest some principles that could form the basis of a typology of Oceanic exchange systems, not with the intention of producing any static classification, but rather to suggest how significant differences in exchange made a difference at the level of political dynamics, that is, the capacities of particular social forms to expand, to generate stable relations of dominance and to be reproduced over long periods of time. These points are illustrated through reference to the indigenous systems, in so far as they can be reconstructed on the basis of ethnohistoric evidence from the contact period, in the western Solomon Islands, Fiji, and eastern Polynesia. It would not be adequate, of course, if such a discussion, based on evidence concerning societies undergoing transformation attendant upon European contact, was restricted to postulates concerning an imagined pre-contact order; it is more satisfactory, and quite feasible, to use this information to postulate processes (rather than states) and to examine the differing ways in which particular forms of indigenous exchange were able to accommodate or respond to engagement with European trade. Indeed, the significance of discriminating among the variety of indigenous systems might be seen to arise from the better understanding they afford of the various histories of contact and colonialism.