Where we talk about rings, bracelets, and necklaces in the Pacific – or “Unexpected Travellers pt. 3 – Bronisław Malinowski”

By Juniper

Good day everyone, it is time to set sail again towards the distant islands of the Pacific Ocean!

Waldo keeps on wondering about traveling to far away countries, and every time he sets a new destination on his map, he finds out that someone unexpected but utterly fascinating has been there before!

The man of the day is the father of social anthropology and the biggest supporter ever of participant observation: Bronisław Malinowski.

Soooo, off to the distant shores of Melanesia. This time, Waldo won’t get to the far away Pacific islands from the East, as we did a few weeks ago, but he will travel East from the West.

Direction of movements will be central for the purpose of Waldo’s article, so do not get confused!

Ready? Steady? Go!

Bronisław Malinowski

Let’s set the scene before we start: do you know that friend/relative/colleague of yours who always wants to demonstrate that he is better informed than you on any topic whatsoever? He knows everything, it is useless to try ang argue…and Waldo knows everyone has that person…well, have you ever noticed that sooner or later that conceited person states “I’ve been there”, and so automatically “I know better”?

That is a very common behavior: if you were there, meaning when and where something happened, or if you had a direct link and connection to a specific phenomenon, you must know better. It is very annoying, though, if the person speaking is your auntie, or that stinky colleague, and they talk about the topic of the day, knowing nothing about it, even though they’ve “been there” (or think they have).

But we must ruefully concede that, as an abstract argument, it makes totally sense…why does it make sense though?

It is sensible because we have been raised and educated thinking that being on the field is the better way to observe, study, and learn anything in life: do you want to learn to speak French? Go to France. Do you want to learn how to bake a cheesecake? Go prepare one with someone who’s an expert. Do you want to learn how tomatoes grow? Go plant one.

Humankind hasn’t always considered it the best way to learn: before the 20^th Century it was certainly believed to be much more appropriate to study things from a certain noble distance. How come we ended up having iconic characters, such as Indiana Jones, that are represented as experts because of their practical experience they’ve gained wandering in the mud of their own field?

If this paragraph is entitled to Bronisław Malinowski, the answer will be because of him, of course! Indeed, traditionally we owe it to him, because he was the one who popularized the importance attributed to fieldwork and to participant observation (we’ll explain it soon, do not worry). And how that happened is the center of our story.

Who was he? Bronisław Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist, one of the big names of this discipline. After him, sociology and anthropology changed for good as anthropologists adopted brand new methodologies and techniques for their research.

Why is he our “Unexpected Traveller” of the week? Let’s tell his story.

Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Malinowski was a student of social sciences, living in London and studying to become an anthropologist after being inspired by “The Golden Bough” by James Frazer (another big name in anthropology). He was also very interested in travelling, and, as he was becoming an expert about the Australian Aborigines, in 1914 he took part in an expedition to Papua New Guinea, planning to stay abroad for six months.

While crossing through Australia, the situation got far more complicated for him since WWI broke out. Malinowski was indeed a subject of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and therefore an enemy to the UK, on whose soil he was right then. At risk of internment, he was eventually allowed by British authorities to remain in the Australian region, and in 1915 he moved to Melanesia to conduct researches in the Trobriand Islands, where he stayed till 1918.

In a few years, he collected enough artefacts to fill the halls of the British Museum (the Oceania section is worth the visit!), and enough data to write his masterpiece Argonaut of the Western Pacific. During his stay, our Malinowski lived among the native inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands, observed them, experienced with them their everyday life, as well as the celebrations and rituals, and reported his first-hand experience and reflections in this edge cutting book. This is what we mean when we talk about participant observation.

In particular, he got the chance to study a peculiarform of exchange among the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands that Malinowski himself described as “ritual”, as apparently unconnected to any rule regarding an economic outcome, and that he decided to call kula ring, the “ring of gift exchanges”.

Kula ring

The inhabitants of the Trobriand islands and nearby archipelagos would periodically undertake a difficult and dangerous journey to meet and maintain continuing exchange relationships. The idea is that back then (but also up until today) thousands of individuals from 18 islands communities would build canoes and travel round the islands, exchanging two types of valuables called vay’gua: the soulava, disc necklaces made of red shells, and the mwali, armbands composed by white shells.

Soulava and mwali are not to be imagined as pure jewellery: they could get so big to be impossible to wear…Some soulava are few metres long! And they could not be given away so easily: soulava are to be gifted circling the ring in clockwise direction, whereas the gifting of mwali is supposed to happen while moving counter clockwise.

More than that, artefacts belonging to a category could only be exchanged for objects from the other one: a necklace for an armband, and vice-versa. The vay’gua would then remain on the same island, owned by the same family, for years, but sooner or later, after many kula rings, one could end up receiving as a gift the vay’gua he had given away decades before.

Folkloristic oddity, one would think? Mh. The kula ring has many hidden aspects that could explain the culture of the Trobriand Island populations, and that Malinoski was eager to analyse.

Gift and trade

First of all, the exchange of kula valuables is always accompanied by the trade of other non-ritual items known as gimwali (meaning “barter”). This ritual exchange aimed to reinforce the collaborative relationship that linked people from faraway lands by involving them in economic activities. We talk about money, but we do so because we respect a “sacred” ritual. The vay’gua, Malinowski observed, were a symbolic resource that enabled people to access the market.

In or out

Secondly, one significant aspect of the kula ring is the access to the “ring” itself. Not everyone could set sail on the circle: the terms of participation varied from region to region, but everywhere it was a matter of power. In the Trobriand Islands the right to participate was monopolized by the chiefs, whereas, in less hierarchical areas, one would have to “buy” one’s way into it by participating in various lesser exchanges to prove to have money and be “a generous giver”.

Power and legacy

This giver-receiver relationship is always asymmetrical, indeed: givers have always been higher in status! Therefore, if entering the circle is already challenging, improving one’s status requires social position, resilience, wealth, family history (as old vay’gua are more valuable than new ones), and good public relations abilities, as managers would say today.

This kula system can be viewed not only as reinforcing social relationships, as said before, but also as reinforcing status and authority distinctions. Remember that it is the hereditary chiefs that own the most important and valuable shell compositions , and they are always the ones who take on the responsibility for organizing the future ocean voyages. A very foreseeable result of the dynamic of the kula Ring is the fact that only a few people own the majority of the valuable objects. Doesn’t it look like our world?

The keda

Objects and artefacts are then infused with material and practical implications, but we cannot forget that they are also designed to be ritual elements in the exchange ring. As such, they deserve special treatment by the people of the archipelago, who developed a word, keda, to indicate the journey these objects go through since they enter the kula.

The term keda has also entered their vocabulary to refer to the relationships that connect people and communities involved in the kula, so somehow it refers at the same time to the vay’gua and to the interconnections created among people thanks to the exchange. Thus, a good keda refers to a group of people, living on distant islands, capable of maintaining long lasting exchange associations.

People and objects

During his long stay among the people of the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski had the incredible privilege to observe the link that can exist between man and geography, sacred world and economic needs, and to describe it to us. All this in his white dresses and with a very stiff haircut (have a look at the photos, it all seems to come out from an adventure book).

After him, fieldwork has always been the basis of any ethnographic or anthropological research: goodbye scheduled interviews, welcome everyday interactions. To quote Malinowski himself, the goal of the anthropologist is: