Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (1922)

If there is no gwara (mortuary taboo) upon the Sinaketan’s arrival on an uvalaku, a big ceremonial welcome takes place. They arrange themselves in a line, and the toli’uvalaku tries to appeal to the ambition of the natives on the shore. At the sound of the conch, the partner on the shore will wade through the water and offer the toli’uvalaku the first gift. After this, others wade toward the canoe to give gifts to their trading partners.

After this, the canoes disperse to the hamlets of the toliwagas’ main partner. Here the “real Kula begins,” where gifts are given. Etiquette “requires that the gift should be given in an off-hand, abrupt, almost angry manner and received with nonchalance or distain” (273). However, if a vaygu’a is given from a chief to a commoner, the commoner receives it with some appreciation. Some givers “attempt to enhance the apparent value of the gift” (273) by appearing unhappy to give it away.

Vaga (opening gift) must be “given spontaneously,” without “enforcement of any duty in giving it” (273). On the receiving end, it requires “more wooing or soliciting than the yotile,” or return gift, which is “given under pressure of a certain obligation” (274). If you are owed a yotile and your partner has a suitable vaygu’a, it is expected that he will give it to you. On minor Kulas, valuables are sometimes carried, but only if they are yotile. Vaga are never taken overseas. Solicitory gifts, kaributu and pokala, will only be accepted if the partner intends to give the vaygu’a. If the partner does not have a yotile, a basi will be expected in its place.

The Kula valuables exchanged as a pair are thought of as a marriage, with the armshells as female and necklaces as male. If a partner doesn’t think they are equivalent, he will say that they do not va’i, or marry.

The mwali, when traded, are often accompanied by doga, circular boars’ tusks. These used to be more important in the Kula but are increasingly moving outside the Kula district to mainland New Guinea, where they are more valued. Sometimes other shell articles, like katudababile, are “exported from Sinaketa to Dobu as Kula gifts” (277), functioning as armshells, but they never complete the Kula ring.

We return to the “concrete proceedings of the Kula” (279). The toliwaga has likely received several necklaces but expects still more valuables. He must keep a taboo not to eat local food. Toliwaga may pretend to be sick to entice valuables and pity. If this doesn’t work, he’ll try “enmeshing magic” to make the man “amenable to persuasion” (279).

Alongside Kula, ordinary exchange takes place. Trade occurs between “visitors and local natives, who are not their partners but who must belong to the community with whom the Kula is made” (280). The visitor “enters into a threefold relation with the Dobuan natives” (281). With his partner, he exchanges “general gifts on the basis of free give and take” (281). Then he trades with the non-partner locals. Last is “the stranger with whom an indirect exchange is carried on through the intermediation of the local men” (281), who exchange goods on their behalf.

After visiting friends and special sites in Dobu, the fleet begins its return without ceremony. They receive talo’i of food, betel, and occasionally other items and sail north.

The return journey follows the same route and makes the same stops as the journey to Dobu did. On the way back they collect obsidian, pumice stone, red ochre, and fine sand used in manufacturing. Two particularly important events take place: fishing for spondylus shells (kaloma) in Sanaroa lagoon and the “show and tell” of Kula yield on the beach.

The next morning the fleet starts on the expedition that will last a few days. When they reach the vatu (coral outcrop) of the baloma (spirits), they begin diving for shells. There are no individual rights to coral outcrops; they are all fished by a community, though communities may claim territory over a certain patch of reef.

Two sub-clans have the “office of magician” for kalomia fishing. In March or April the magician orders preparations to begin. He performs various rites, among them rites to “attract the reef” and bring the shells closer. Spondylus is a shell “the size and shape of a hollowed-out half of a pear” (287). To process it, it is rubbed against sandstone to remove the inside and outside, leaving the red middle section. This is sanded into a disk, and a hole is drilled through the middle. The diving and manufacturing are done by men, but women do the polishing. The disks are then threaded onto a stick, and this “cylindrical roll is rubbed round and round on the flat sandstone, until its form becomes perfectly symmetrical” (288).

The process of making a kitadabibile (necklace of large beads) goes roughly as follows. Let’s say a man from inland Kiriwina wants a katudabile. He requests a fisherman to dive for him, and the fisherman returns with a big basket of shells. While the fisherman breaks the spines off the shells over several days, the inlander prepares food for him. Later, during the harvest, the fisherman would fill up the yam house as he receives more payment in yams. Often the manufacture of kutadababile (necklace of large beads) is done by a man for his wife’s maternal kinsmen, who in return pay him in food and later fill up his yam house. However, this payment is in practice just the annual filling up of the yam house required by Trobriand custom.

We return to the Sinaketan fleet. They revisit Tewara and Gumasila and stop at Muwa, where they conduct the tanarere, “a comparison and display of the valuables” (289). When they near their village, each canoe “blows its conch shell, a blast for each valuable” they have acquired (289). A large party welcomes the canoes.

This chapter outlines the Dobuans’ journey to Sinaketa six months after the Sinaketan voyage. Because the headman of a Dobuan village had a pig with curved tusks, he decided to arrange an uvalaku expedition where the pig was eaten and “its tusks turned into ornaments” (290). Large-scale preparations began a month later. This included making sago, a starchy food made by pounding a palm and lightly processing it.

The main Dobuan fleet launched in late March and went to Sarubwoyna, “where they held a ceremonial distribution of food” (293). They had a slow stretch sailing past Sanaroa and Tewara. Malinowski meanwhile waited to meet up with the fleet in the Amphletts. In Sinaketa, as the arrival date approached, excitement grew, news traveling fast about the progress of the party. To keep track of all the movement about this expedition, Malinowski provides a chart of dates, including prep stages, sailing, arrival, and the return journey (294). It shows that the whole process lasts from October 1917 to April 1918. Following a visit from Kuyawan canoes, the “canoes of the main village of Gumasila sailed off to the Trobriands” a couple days ahead of the fleet. Canoes then are launched and loaded with sago and other cargo and depart, then make a “preliminary halt” on Giyasila beach.

The next morning Malinowski goes to Nabwageta, where the party is preparing canoes for departure while performing the magic of the sacred bundle. They intended to meet the Dobuans on their way to Kiriwina. The day after, Malinowski embarks with two boys the island of Domdom, but this fails, and they end up on an island south of Domdom where Dobuans are camping. Malinowski is excited to meet them and remarks that it brings home “vividly the inter-tribal character of this institution, which unites in one common and strongly emotional interest so many scattered communities” (297). They learn that canoes are anchored “on the outlying deserted islands of the Amphletts, waiting for the rest of the fleet to arrive” (297).

The following day the Dobuan fleet arrives, and the Nabwageta canoes join them. Since the Kula is directed toward the Trobriands, there is no Kula done between these two groups. In preparation for the event, Malinowski tries to understand what is to come, explaining that the sociologist must know the “underlying rules and the fundamental ideas of an occurrence, especially if big masses of natives are concerned in it” at risk of “important events” of being lost in “irrelevant and accidental movements of the crowd” (299). Knowing what to look for ahead of time helps.

Finally, the fleet arrives to Sinaketa. The toli’uvalaku makes a short speech to the gathered crowd, and his main trading partner brings a pair of armshells to his canoe and pronounces it vaga. The Dobuans stay in Sinaketa for three days, and a conch shell blast marks each Kula exchange. As in the first exchange in Dobu, trade occurs as well, but never between Kula partners. Finally, the Dobuans sail away “without any ceremony or farewell speeches” (303). On the journey home, they halt for fishing and conduct the tanarere (competitive display of yield).