GIFTS AND COMMODITIES Hau BOOKS Executive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com GIFTS AND COMMODITIES (SECOND EditIon) C. A. Gregory Foreword by Marilyn Strathern New Preface by the Author Hau Books Chicago © 2015 by C. A. Gregory and Hau Books. First Edition © 1982 Academic Press, London. All rights reserved. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9905050-1-3 LCCN: 2014953483 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. For Judy, Polly, and Melanie. Contents Foreword by Marilyn Strathern xi Preface to the first edition xv Preface to the second edition xix Acknowledgments liii Introduction lv PART ONE: CONCEPTS I. THE COmpETING THEOriES 3 Political economy 3 The theory of commodities 3 The theory of gifts 9 Economics 19 The theory of modern goods 19 The theory of traditional goods 22 II. A framEWORK OF ANALYSIS 25 The general relation of production to consumption, distribution, and exchange 26 Marx and Lévi-Strauss on reproduction 26 A simple illustrative example 30 The definition of particular economies 32 viii GIFTS AND COMMODITIES III.FTS GI AND COMMODITIES: CIRCULATION 39 The direct exchange of things 40 The social status of transactors 40 The social status of objects 41 The spatial aspect of exchange 44 The temporal dimension of exchange 46 Value and rank 46 The motivation of transactors 50 The circulation of things 55 Velocity of circulation 55 Roads of gift-debt 57 Production and destruction 59 The circulation of people 62 Work-commodities 62 Work-gifts 62 Women-gifts 63 Classificatory kinship terms and prices 68 Circulation and distribution 69 IV. GIFTS AND COMMODITIES: REPRODUCTION 73 Production of commodities by means of commodities 74 The methods of production 74 The methods of consumption 78 Consumption of gifts by means of gifts 80 The methods of consumption 80 The methods of production 96 Summary 105 V. TRADITIONAL AND MODERN GOODS: A CRITIQUE 107 The conceptual problem 108 The perceptual problem 113 The methodological problem 116 CONTENTS ix PART TWO: THEORY VI. THE TRANSFORMATION OF GIFTS INTO COMMODITIES IN COLONIAL PAPUA NEW GUINEA 121 Theories of change in PNG 121 The emergence of commodity production in PNG 127 The emergence of labor-power as a commodity 127 The emergence of primary commodity production 165 The emergence of land as a commodity 172 VII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF COMMODITIES INTO GIFTS IN COLONIAL PAPUA NEW GUINEA 177 Restricted reproduction in the Sepik District 178 Delayed reproduction in the Highlands 192 The kula gift exchange system of Milne Bay District 209 Gift exchange and capital accumulation in Central District 217 Conclusion 225 Mathematical appendix: A matrix approach to the calculus of kinship relations 229 References 239 Index 259 Foreword I had forgotten that there was still a postcard inside my copy of Gifts and commodities, sent from central India in early 1983 when Chris Gregory was doing fieldwork in Bastar. I must have given him some comments, though I cannot have known at the time quite what an influence his model of exchange relations was going to have on my own work. Writing comments once more, for this second edition, leads me to declare my in- terest in the book and the gratitude I owe its author. But then, again, the astonishment with which I rediscover much that I had forgotten perhaps puts me sufficiently outside that frame to offer some general reflections on what it so creatively accomplishes. While Gifts and commodities has had far-reaching consequences in anthropology, that is not where Gregory began. He was an economist who was drawn, as Eatwell’s preface as original series editor made clear, to what was then a fresh concern with the analytical principles of clas- sical political economy (as opposed to neoclassical economics). If—in the theorizing of relations between production and consumption—these principles allowed a historical specificity to the description of economic systems, Gregory saw that this also entailed a cultural specificity that permitted fine discriminations between (in words of the time) societies on the ground. With this came the illumination that the counterpart Marx had proposed to production and productive consumption, namely consumption and consumptive production, demanded that one think about how people replace themselves. And that is where Gregory made his anthropological turn: What had anthropologists been doing for so xii GIFTS AND COMMODITIES long but analyzing kinship systems, and what were kin terminologies but a classification of people with respect to their replacement of one another? However, the cultural shock of a colonial, and decolonizing, Papua New Guinea had come first. The point is that Gregory had let himself be shocked. He was ob- serving what everyone else was observing about apparently rational and irrational behavior—these were serious topics then. Indeed it is sobering to think back on how many (neoclassical) economists, and in their own way anthropologists, were struggling with the apparent perplexities of development, motivation, and the way people invested their energies. Gregory’s questions were different. It went over my head at the time, but Gifts and commodities in effect offered a brilliant way out of a conceptual impasse widespread among colleagues (myself included). His model, ac- counting, as good models should, for interaction between sets of rela- tions as they impinge upon one another, might have been demonstrated in Papua New Guinea but it tackled a conceptualization generally the bane of much midcentury thinking on the matter. This was the endless adjudication of “social change” as though it were a matter of balancing “change and continuity” or identifying signs of “tradition and moder- nity.” It is not irrelevant that the only other challenger was a burgeoning Marxist anthropology. What Gregory did is encapsulated in Chapters VI and VII, on the transformation of gifts into commodities, and of commodities into gifts. These transformations did not just hinge on a very particular moment in history, they defined it. In fact Gregory gives a wonderful account of the ripple effect of such a moment as it was recreated across different regions over time, as similar conditions came repeatedly into being. The moment was a point at which produce and labor could be (not all were) treated by Papua New Guineans as commodities while the land crucial to clan survival was not. If the clan-based system, in Gregory’s words, subsidized commodity production through replacing (reproducing) pro- duce and labor, money and other commodities in turn helped replace the basis of the clan as identified through the exploits of its “members.” These were especially, although not exclusively, male members, and in many areas of Melanesia the exploits were those which had long been described as “gift exchange.” FOREWORD xiii A political economy perspective dealt with the covarying elements of what (in the vocabulary of social science) were called systems. Given that commodity transactions were also known as exchanges, gift ex- change seemed a self-evident counterpart. Much of the early part of the book is concerned with spelling out the implications of bringing “gifts”’ and “commodities” into systematic relation. But a hallmark of Gregory’s approach is that what springs from ethnography also returns to ethnography. Concepts and their theoretical framing are here a means to description, a clearing ground, not themselves an end. While the sys- tematization (and attendant generalization) is exactly that, what endures of Gregory’s work are its extraordinary insights, both into the specifi- cities of social life in preindependence Papua New Guinea, and of its history since colonization, and into the ethnographic preoccupations of anthropologists within and beyond that country. Exchange mechanisms involving (group) alliance, marriage prescriptions and preferences, givers and receivers, forms of reciprocity, indigenous models, and the like, were all in the air. The present-day reader will find that this book gives an unexpected route into such preoccupations. That one might add to them other preoccupations, and in the language of Melanesianists of the day this would have included sexual antagonism, and even perhaps “persons” and “things,” would be in the spirit of Gregory’s sense of the way in which theoretical frameworks occupy certain niches and then exceed or extend them. The Preface to this second edition is exhilarating in this respect. It takes us forward. The recent adventures of gifts and commodities offer a history of anthropology in microcosm, and I say anthropology, rather than economic anthropology, for the latter never completely encom- passed the scope of Gregory’s address. In a nutshell, what he lays out are conditions for the selfreplacement of anthropological inquiry, as the continuing and radical empirical endeavor he envisages, insofar as such replacement must always be at once a matter of changeful modeling and of changing circumstances of study. Hau Books is to be congratulated for seeing the future that this book will surely have for its new readers, including readers anew. Marilyn Strathern Cambridge, August 2014 Preface to the first edition While all the systematic research for this book was carried out in Cambridge over the period 1976 to 1981, the initial stimulus for the research derives from the casual empirical observations I made during a period of residence in Papua New Guinea (PNG) from 1973 to 1975. Although I was based in Port Moresby I traveled widely throughout the country and was able to observe the workings of the indigenous economy at first hand.