Inalienable Possessions This page intentionally left blank Inalienable Possessions The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving Annette B. Weiner UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford This book is a print-on-demand volume. It is manufac- tured using toner in place of ink. Type and images may he less sharp than the same material seen in traditionally printed University of California Press editions. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press Oxford, England Copyright © 1992 by The Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weiner, Annette B., 1933- Inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping-while-giving / Annette B. Weiner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-07603H5 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-520-07604-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Ceremonial exchange—Oceania. 2. Women—Oceania— Economic conditions. 3. Women—Oceania—Social conditions. 4. Economic anthropology—Oceania—Methodology. I. Tide. GN662.W45 1992 305.42'0995—dc20 91–3580 CIP The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 ®> Contents ILLUSTRATIONS vii PREFACE ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Inalienable Possessions: The Forgotten Dimension 23 Chapter 2 Reconfiguring Exchange Theory: The Maori Hau 44 Chapter 3 The Sibling Incest Taboo: Polynesian Cloth and Reproduction 66 Chapter 4 The Defeat of Hierarchy: Cosmological Authentication in Australia and New Guinea Bones and Stones 98 Chapter 5 Kula: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving 131 V vi CONTENTS Afterword: The Challenge of Inalienable Possessions 149 NOTES 157 BIBLIOGRAPHY 197 INDEX 219 Illustrations Figures 1. A Trobriand kula canoe prow 2. Kula armshells 3. A Kwakiutl "chieftainess" 4. A Tongan marriage distribution 5. Nineteenth-century Maori woman in her cloak 6. A Maori woman weaving 7. Three elite Maori women 8. A sacred Maori adze 9. An Ojibwa woman in mourning 10. A Trobriand yam harvest 11. The funeral of a Hawaiian queen 12. A portrait of a young Hawaiian princess 13. An ancient Hawaiian feather kahili 14. A Samoan woman distributing fine mats 15. Samoan women presenting fine mats 16. Samoan women plaiting fine mats 17. A Trobriand woman with banana-leaf bundles 18. A Trobriand mortuary distribution 19. A Warlpiri woman's Dreaming ceremony 20. A Pintupi hair-string spindle 21. A Melpa woman in dancing attire vii viii ILLUSTRATIONS 22. A Melpa woman with her net bags 23. Trobriand women distributing skirts 24. Kula necklaces Map Map of the major Oceania peoples discussed in the text 20-21 Preface This book is an experiment in a new kind of ethno- graphic interpretation regarding those critical and perennial problems centered on the norm of reciprocity, the incest taboo, and women's roles in reproduction. The universality of the norm of reciprocity and the incest taboo long have been common parlance in anthropological discourse. Yet the assumptions that underwrite these problem areas were developed a long time ago without recognition of the meaning of women's labor in cloth production or of women's political control over significant reproductive areas of cultural life. In those instances when women did appear in anthropology's most widely acclaimed ex- change or kinship theories, they usually were described either as se- ducers of men or as wives sequestered around the domestic hearth kept busy as the reproducers and nurturers of children. In either case, they were considered peripheral to the theoretical loci of power that resided in men's affairs. Human and cultural reproduction, however, are sources of power for women as well as men. Since power is always surrounded by con- tradiction and ambiguity, it must be carefully located in each particular ethnographic case to document how power gives scope but also limits political authority. For example, the rules of behavior that people ap- pear to be following in reciprocal gift exchange or sister exchange are actually surface phenomena constructed out of a deeper social priority that can never solve but only approximate the central issue of social life: keeping-while-giving. How to keep some things out of circulation in ix x PREFACE the face of all the pressures to give things to others is the unheralded source of social praxis. The theoretical thrust of this book is the development of a theory of exchange that follows the paradox of keeping-while-giving into die social and political relations between women and men with foremost attention to their involvement in human and cultural reproduction. The traditional social theories that simply segregate women and men into respective domestic and political spheres and that view men's produc- tion as the foundation for political hierarchy are no longer tenable. When women are analytically relegated to the sidelines of history or politics, the emergent view is ethnographically shallow and theoretically distorted. Whereas major controversies over the meaning and writing of eth- nography have arisen in the last decade, little attention has been given to how anthropologists must reinterpret the received ethnographic data that form the basis of the established social theories. The problem is not simply about the ethnographic enterprise but concerns the theoret- ical concepts rooted in Western history that legitimate the assumptions the ethnographer takes into the field. The other voices that need to be heard are not only local assistants' explanations but those distant and compelling theoretical voices that assume, for example, that inquiries about gifts given are sufficient if they extend to the gifts returned. Because ethnographic interpretations are subtly framed by these theoretical premises, any comparative analysis faces particular prob- lems. Often the data on gender are meager and comparisons from one society to another cannot be made by simply listing similar social rules or analytical oppositions to prove one's point. The undertaking here involves exploring many different productive and reproductive contexts within any one society while giving as much attention to the sibling roles of women and men as kinship theory has given to their roles as spouses. Searching for the kinds of possessions that people try to keep out of circulation is far more theoretically meaningful than assuming that exchange simply involves the reciprocity of gift giving. Such in- terpretive efforts also demand close attention to women's production, even when they are as seemingly ephemeral and valueless as banana-leaf bundles, human-hair strings, faded cloth pieces, or old plaited mats. To chart these new theoretical directions, I draw on a selected number of societies in Oceania that bridge the traditional culture areas of Australia, Melanesia and Polynesia. Comparing such ethnographi- cally diverse societies enables me to show how the same paradoxical PREFACE xi concerns of keeping-while-giving mirror similar cultural configurations even when the solutions and the relevant levels of political hierarchy are vastly different from one part of Oceania to another. Although my reinterpretations of ethnographic data are limited to Oceania, the tra- ditional concepts surrounding the norm of reciprocity and the incest taboo are rooted in Western cultural constructions. These constructions have long histories even more knotty than the nineteenth-century clas- sifications that opposed the "primitive world" to "civilization." The conclusions I reach show that keeping-while-giving is not just peculiar to Oceania, but has been an important part of Western economics since the time of ancient Greece. As a generic concept, reciprocal exchanges are only the pawns on the chessboard of culture preserving inalienable possessions and fending off attempts by others to claim them. This ap- proach changes the way we theorize about kinship and politics by cen- tering women and reproduction into the heart of the political process where they ethnographically belong. This book gestated for ten years, benefiting from my continuing Trobriand fieldwork from 1971-1991. From my very first visit, I be- came perplexed by how Trobriand women came to devise such an elaborate technology for making wealth out of dried banana leaves. At the same time, I pondered the question that many other anthropolo- gists had raised since Bronislaw Malinowski's 1915 seminal Trobriand fieldwork—Why do Trobrianders have a ranking system of chieftaincy when such a system occurs nowhere else in the area? Did Malinowski cast a Trobriand "paramount chief" so much in the image of a Poly- nesian ruler that Trobriand leadership seemed significantly different from the politics of Melanesian big men? These questions of hierarchy and origins, however, became even more complicated as they led me into controversies about gender. Although I discovered that Trobriand women made their own wealth that directly affected men's wealth, the response of some of my feminist colleagues was to emphasize that Trobriand women were definitely not chiefs—proof again that, univer- sally, women are always associated with the lesser-valued side of social life. However, this singular opposition left no room for explanations of why women's banana-leaf wealth leveled men's wealth, including chiefs', nor why women had high status, a fact that even Malinowski, although he ignored women's wealth, consistently pointed out. What finally turned these problems to a social arena beyond the Trobriands was my decision to inquire further into Marcel Mauss's no- tation in the opening pages of The Gift to Samoan fine mats as "femi- xii PREFACE nine property." Interested in finding a point of comparison, I spent four months in Western Samoa, studying the circulation of fine mats. Once I had recognized that banana-leaf bundles and skirts were not a Tro- briand anomaly but a particular kind of cloth, then not only Sanioan fine mats but the worldwide history of cloth wealth took on significant theoretical importance.