One
Banana Leaf Bundles and Skirts:
A Pacific Penelope's Web?

Margaret Jolly

In her review of the significance of cloth in Pacific polities, Annette Weiner has evoked the persona of Penelope, “weaving by day, and unweaving the same fabric by night, in order to halt time” (1986, 108).^[1] This image of a Pacific Penelope halting time was inspired by Weiner's reanalysis of the Trobriand islands. In her monograph (1976), in several subsequent papers (1980, 1982a, 1983a, 1986) and in her shorter text (1988) she conclusively demonstrated that Malinowski and a host of other male observers had failed to see women's central place in Trobriand exchange: that in fixating so totally on men's exchanges of yams in urigubu and of shell valuables in the kula, they had ignored women's exchanges of banana leaf bundles and skirts, most importantly at mortuary distributions. In her reassessment of the relations of the sexes in the Trobriands she portrayed men as controlling events in historical time and space (the social domain) and women as controlling events in ahistorical time and space (the cosmological domain) (1976, 20). This distinction, she later observed, was an attempt to escape the connotations of two separate spheres constituted by terms like private/public or nature/culture (1986, 97).

Rather than eschewing such invidious Western dichotomies her analysis ultimately reinforces them, by articulating them with another—eternal/historical. Such Eurocentric dichotomies typically presume that the private or domestic sphere is outside history (see Jolly and Macintyre 1989) and that women's nature is not only given but eternal. Essentialist elisions in Weiner's work have already been noted (M. Strathern 1981). What is suggested here is the further point that in situating women outside history, Weiner has reproduced Eurocentric notions of an unchanging women's world. But women's worlds in the Pacific, though they may have remained virtually invisible or

hidden to centuries of male observers, have certainly not persisted unchanged.

Exchanges of women's wealth have assumed an inflated and a novel significance since Malinowski's time—not only securing the regeneration of Trobriand persons but ensuring the perpetuity of Trobriand culture in the face of competing values. Perhaps Trobriand women see themselves as defending Trobriand tradition and the value of women against both monetary and male values. Women are, as Weiner has portrayed them, at the core of Trobriand traditions. But such traditions are, I contend, not unselfconscious persistences but self-conscious resistances^[2] to modernity and monetary values. In the Trobriands as elsewhere in Melanesia, modernity and money are practically mediated by and symbolically associated with men.

Time and The Trobriands

The difference between Malinowski's and Weiner's accounts is thus not merely a contrast between an androcentric male observer and a gynocentric female observer,^[3] but a difference amplified by the history between the periods of their observations. The passage in time between the fieldwork of Malinowski and of Weiner marks not only a shift in the historical context of ethnography and in the sexual politics of Europeans looking at Trobriand others, but also a transformation of Trobriand realities.

Weiner herself is not unaware of either anthropological or Trobriand history. At several points in her monograph (1976, xvi–xx, 25–33) and in later essays (e.g., 1980, 271–272, 275–276, 280) she alludes to the historical changes affecting both Trobriand and anthropological culture. But such history is often alluded to in order to deny its consequences—in order to stress constancy rather than change. For instance, Weiner presents a genealogy of Trobriand high-ranking male informants and anthropologists, which links her good friend and valued informant Vanoi (1976, xvii) with the past.

Standing in front of Vanoi's house gave me a sense of both anthropological and Trobriand history. In the ground, ten yards in front of Vanoi's house, lies a stone marker on the grave of Touluwa, who was Malinowski's friend and the man whom Malinowski called the paramount chief of the Trobriands. Not far from this gravesite, another stone marks the grave of Mitakata, successor to Touluwa and Powell's informant in 1950. Mitakata died in 1961, and Vanoi became his heir. (1976, xix)

The rhetorical device that Weiner uses in Women of Value, Men of Renown, namely, heading each section with a quotation from Malinowski, does, as she suggests, highlight their historical relation, but, again, ultimately it stresses the consistency of their ethnographic questions and the constancy of Tro-

briand culture despite the gap in time and interpretation. The same point is made explicitly in a later essay.

What initially astounded me upon my arrival in Kiriwina was the striking similarity between a Kiriwina village in 1971 and Malinowski's descriptions and photographs of the same village in 1922. Although superficially some things had changed (an airstrip, tourists, some Western clothing) everything else was as if nothing was changed. (Weiner 1980, 272)

The introductory notes to this later essay situate the Massim in Melanesian colonial history—cataloging the successive influences of whalers, pearlers and bêche-de-mer traders, gold prospectors, and labor recruiters from the 1850s; Christian missions from 1894; and the controls of government from the establishment of a British colonial administration post at Losuia in 1906 to the Massim's incorporation within the independent state of Papua New Guinea in 1975. However, Weiner asserts that despite more than a century of such contacts there had not been any “major significant changes in the basic structural features of the exchange system” (1980, 276; cf. Macintyre and Young 1982).

“As if nothing was changed”—change is perceived as “superficial,” a patina on the body of Trobriand tradition. And change is seen only in terms of Western imports: clothing, airplanes, tourists. Changes indigenous to the system or diverging from the movement of “Westernization” are not countenanced. Change is not admitted to the core, the “basic structure” of Trobriand culture, manifest in the exchange system, which persists as before. But this excludes the possibility of transformation in the exchange system itself. It has now been conclusively demonstrated that the kula has undergone dramatic historical transformations. It has even been suggested by Macintyre (1983), Irwin (1983), and Berde (1983) that the system witnessed by Malinowski in the Trobriands was a novel integration of Massim regional trade and exchange and that the form it assumed in the period of Malinowski's fieldwork was in part the consequence of European contact. Such exchanges in the kula clearly had ramifications for women's exchanges too. Moreover there is some evidence suggestive of changes internal to sagali, and definitive evidence of changes in the broader context in which these exchanges transpire. This broader context situates traditional elements of Trobriand culture in relation to the ongoing processes of economic and political development (cf. Carrier and Carrier 1987).

Weiner stresses the continuity of Trobriand culture in the context of the politics of the emerging nation of Papua New Guinea. It is clear from Weiner's introduction to her monograph that she was witness to much of the turbulence of Trobriand politics in the 1970s, in particular the struggle between the Kabisawali movement and the Toneni Kamokwita movement. Her main informant Vanoi was himself caught up in this struggle, shifting

his allegiance between the two main camps on several occasions. But this fight over Trobriand tradition and its relation to economic development and tourism is not a part of Weiner's study, being seen primarily as a disturbing threat to her main lines of enquiry (1976, xix–xx; but see Weiner 1982b).^[4] These conflicts deserve to be considered, however, since as Young suggests (1979, 19), tradition itself is at issue.^[5]

The intensity, subtlety, and irony of these debates about tradition is graphically revealed in the film Trobriand Cricket, shot in 1973, at the height of these political struggles. Here we see a unique form of the game played with local rules (e.g., an unrestricted number of players on each side, the hosts must always win). Trobriand cricket is accompanied by chants and dances derived from the ancient rites of war but dealing with eminently modern imports such as airplanes, tourists, and chewing gum. As Weiner observes (1977, 506–507; 1988, 181), this film attests to an extraordinary cultural resilience, “exuberance and pride.” But we see not just persistence but innovation, adaptation, resistance to, and satire of, Western practices and values. Who can forget those extraordinary sequences when the history of Trobriand cricket is recounted, how the game as played by Methodist missionaries was seen as staid and boring, and was reinvented Trobriand style? Who failed to delight in the extraordinary burlesque of a Trobriand man, simulating the obsessive interest of a tourist with binoculars perpetually attached like an ommatophore? The film records a cricket match organized by Kasaipwalova expressly for the film, which was perceived partly as publicity for the concerns of the Kabisawali movement (Weiner 1988, 181). It is aptly subtitled: “An Ingenious Response to Colonialism.” It evokes not just cultural vitality but complicated processes of acceptance, rejection, and transformation of European culture.

The very existence of such debates about tradition suggests that, as with debates about kastom in the Solomons and Vanuatu, it is inappropriate to see tradition as merely a persistence of the past in the preaent: tradition can be a symbol of resistance and even a way of justifying change (see Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Handler and Linnekin 1984; Keesing 1988, 1989a; Linnekin and Poyer 1990). Elsewhere in Melanesia the values of tradition are primarily articulated by male politicians, and “kastom” as political symbol tends to be a male monopoly (see Mera Molisa 1987). In the Trobriands, too, as is evidenced both by the history of the Kabisawali and Toneni Kamokwita movements and the cinematic sequences of Trobriand Cricket, men dominate political talk. But here the value of tradition is overtly associated with women. Weiner has argued that the value accorded women and the centrality of exchanges of women's wealth have safeguarded Trobriand tradition and proved a buffer against colonization. But perhaps rather than just “stability in banana leaves,” what we now witness is their expanded and novel salience, as symbols not just of the constant

regeneration of Trobriand persons, but of the self-conscious regeneration of Trobriand culture in the face of external pressure. In both these processes men and women occupy a different place (cf. Keesing 1985).

Let us start then by comparing Malinowski's and Weiner's analysis of women's place in the Trobriands. We will then look at those banana leaves, the women's wealth to which Weiner directs our gaze, and in particular the salience of women's exchanges in sagali, the mortuary ceremonies. There is no doubt that these bits of ephemeral plant-fiber fluff have been disregarded, both because they seemed such unlikely candidates for wealth objects when compared to durable shell valuables and because they were wealth produced and exchanged by women. But as well as having this previously unseen significance, have they not also assumed a novel significance, a new value as symbols of tradition and the centrality of women to such tradition?^[6]

Woman's Place In The Trobriands: From Malinowski To Weiner—From Sexuality To Reproduction.

Malinowski's portrayal of sex and gender in the Trobriands is dispersed in several parts of his huge Trobriand corpus. But the most developed distillations are to be found in The Sexual Life of Savages, a text that was a selfconscious part of European debates about sexual freedom and repression in the 1920s—debates involving Freud, Russell, and Havelock Ellis, who wrote the Preface to the first edition.^[7] This presents the work as a contribution to the “natural history of sexuality,” a scientific investigation of the erotic life of remote peoples conducted with calm, solemnity, and scholarly precision (Malinowski 1929, vii–xii). There is no doubting the scholarly precision of Malinowski's account of Trobriand erotic life, although calm and solemnity may not have characterized his inner life during fieldwork (see Malinowski 1967; Young 1979). Such precision coupled with the flamboyant title no doubt contributed to the sensational rather than scholarly reception of the book, about which Malinowski grumbled in his Preface to the third edition.

His depictions of the sexual lives of Trobrianders from childhood to adulthood leave little doubt that these were “free and easy,” certainly by the standards of sexual morality in the Europe of his time. Infants' early observations of adult sexuality, the casual inclusion of sexuality in children's games, the elaboration of the arts of physical and magical attraction, and adolescents' premarital preoccupations with lovemaking—no doubt all were shocking and titillating to the audience of his day. Although husbands and wives were supposed to be more circumspect than adolescent lovers (at least in public), the companionate ease and harmony of Trobriand marriage must have exerted an exotic allure to those Europeans whose marriages were characterized by greater formality and tension.

His depiction of Trobriand kinship, property, and power relations further

highlighted this portrait of remote and exotic practices. Trobrianders were not only matrilineal but they denied the role of the father in conception. Malinowski informed his incredulous European audience that Trobrianders saw the fetus as the coming together of maternal blood and of baloma, matrilineal spirit. The father merely “opened the way,” semen was thought to have no generative power, and physical resemblance between father and child was seen as the result of intimate nurture, not biology.^[8] Malinowski recognized that this view of procreation also informed events at the other end of the life cycle: at death the physical and spiritual aspects of the person had to be separated so that the spirit might return to the land of the dead. Women's role in mortuary practices was noted, but not discussed, beyond the observation that widows had to assume an onerous burden in mourning their husbands.

Malinowski here and in several other places described the way in which matriliny attached people to the land. Women, like men, had matrilineally inherited rights in land, but because most went to live with their husbands at marriage, they did not, as their brothers did, live on and work such land. They were, however, entitled to produce from their land—the brother in particular had the responsibility to feed his sister's family by giving yams to her husband. This Malinowski called urigubu,^[9] a prestation that he argued became tribute to a chief: chiefs had claims on yams from affines other than their wife's brother, and since chiefs were often polygynists, their yam-houses were filled from several affinal sources.

In The Sexual Life of Savages Malinowski adjudicated on the position of women in Trobriand society. His earlier view, enunciated in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, was that women, “enjoyed a very independent position, and are exceedingly well treated … and wield a considerable influence” (Malinowski 1922, 37). In The Sexual Life of Savages he qualified this by the claim that they had “rank but not power.” He noted that women were “barred from the exercise of power, land ownership and many other public privileges” (Malinowski 1929, 38), including a voice in deliberations about gardening, hunting, the kula, war, or ceremonies. Moreover, he suggested that even within the family, the “real guardianship” was vested not in a woman but her brother: “a woman continues the line and man represents it” (1929, 24).

Weiner's book, Women of Value, Men of Renown, is of course the product of a sexual politics rather different to that of Malinowski's time. It is a selfconscious product of feminist anthropology, and is indeed an ethnography offering “one of the most compelling reappraisals from a female viewpoint” (M. Strathern 1981, 671). It demonstrates not only the thesis of women's invisibility to male observers but how much this matters in understanding men and the cultural system as a whole. Weiner is not merely adding the study of women to the study of men, but challenging the very basis on which

observation and interpretation proceeds—namely, giving more time and value to male activities, on the premise that they are more central culturally. Because men are the controllers of resources and the embodiments of public authority they do not therefore necessarily represent the core of cultural value.

In Weiner's monograph (1976) the emphasis is on reproduction^[10] rather than sexuality, a shift in emphasis which, in an analysis of another Melanesian society, she suggests is closer to indigenous conceptions (1983b, but see Weiner 1988, chaps. 4 and 5). On several points she concurs with Malinowski's depiction of the patterns of relations between women and men in the system of kinship, property, and politics, but she suggests a different interpretation of ideologies of procreation and growth and of configurations of love and power in the system of matrilineal descent and hereditary rank.

Although the father is not thought to give substance to the fetus, he is seen to contribute to the substance of the growing child by his nurture and love. The father then is not so much a stranger in the Trobriand family, peripheral to the core sibling bond of brother and sister, but a secure member because of the gifts of love, food, and valuables. Children are indebted to their father and to his matrilineage because of these gifts, and these debts entail cycles of exchanges, of both male and female wealth, culminating in the distributions at death (Weiner 1988, 6). Moreover such exchanges are basic to the legitimation of chiefly power—it is not just that chiefs are accorded special privileges by birth right, but these have to be constantly legitimated not just by the flows of shell valuables in the kula or of yams but of banana leaf bundles and skirts in sagali and other contexts.

Thus Weiner ultimately dissents from Malinowski's conclusions about the power of Trobriand women. Although women are excluded from positions of public power—from control over land, from exchanges of yams and kula valuables, from public authority such as those exerted by male chiefs and hamlet managers—she asserts that women ultimately transcend male power because of their control over the cycles of life and death. This power is objectified in the exchanges of women's wealth, exchanges that Malinowski and others overlooked.

Banana Leaves As Women's Wealth

Weiner describes the painstaking process whereby women bleach, treat, and manufacture banana leaves into bundles of skirts, thus converting seemingly inconsequential bits of plant-fiber fluff into “women's wealth.” But these valuables are not only produced solely by women, they are also exchanged by them, and exchanged because of the very value of women in the Trobriands. This derives from Trobriand philosophies of life, death, and regeneration, and the central significance of maternal blood and matrilineal spirit in

procreation and in deconception at death. Weiner demonstrates how the flow of yams, which passes between men in prestigious exchanges, relates to the flow of women's wealth.

A man makes yam gardens, not for himself but to give to other men—in particular his father, elder brother, and mother's brother—and also to women—in particular his daughter and sister. When a woman marries any man, her brothers are bound to supply her, and thus her husband, with yams. When a woman marries a chiefly man, not only her brothers but also father and mother's brother are enjoined to cultivate an annual yam garden for her. Since chiefly men are often polygynous, they receive far more yams than ordinary men and thus have yam-houses that are full, sometimes overflowing with rotting yams. Husbands should, in return, assist their wives to accumulate “women's wealth.” Women use the banana leaves thus accumulated primarily in the context of sagali, the distributions that follow the death of kin of one's own dala. Banana leaves flow to those to whom the deceased was indebted in life—that is, those outside their matrilineage: affines, patrilateral kin, adopted kin, friends. Such prestations of women's wealth free the person from the debts of worldly exchanges, so that the spirit can be regenerated as baloma and return to the spiritual pool of the dala to be reincarnated in another person. Trobriand women secure immortality through their control of the identity of the dala—that is, the matrilineal clan. This power derives not from matriliny per se but from the value Trobrianders give to regeneration. “Beyond the fact of matrilineality, the Trobriand concern with regenesis gives women their primary place of value” (Weiner 1976, 231).

This, according to Weiner, is not a biological fact but a cultural value given to woman, and the value is amplified through the exchange of objects, since “the controls which women exert at the two ends of the life cycle—both at birth and at death rituals … are given greater significance through the objectification of their power into wealth objects: skirts and bundles” (1976, 227).

Although stone ax blades (male wealth) and yams (conjoint male and female wealth) represent some measure of regeneration, it is women's wealth that secures regenesis.

Weiner sees male control as confined to objects and persons within a present social time and space, and as perpetuating individual rather than collective identity. Thus, “male valuables made from shell and stone, the least perishable artifacts in the Trobriand corpus of exchange objects, carry a man's name only as long as he can demonstrate his power over other men” (1976, 232). Land, kula valuables, ax blades, decorations, names—all such property requires calculated control by men in order not to be lost. Women's wealth may be far more ephemeral physically, but women's identity by contrast is not transient or contingent. Women do not rely on such temporal political strategies since they have control over the continuity of life and

death: bundles of leaves and skirts may perish but human life goes on. Although women participate in both the social and the cosmic realms, the temporal and the eternal, men cannot enter the “ahistorical domain of women” (1976, 231). Weiner thus sees Trobriand women as eclipsing the power of men and the male domain of exchange.

But this opposition between ahistorical and immortal versus historical and ephemeral is not only a contrast of Trobriand women's and men's worlds but simultaneously a contrast of Trobriand and Western worlds.^[11] Trobriand society is seen to give a different value to things and human persons. “Trobriand exchange objects, unlike Western money, cannot be detached from the human experience of regeneration and immortality” (1976, 231), whereas in Western society, “free from the processes of the life cycle, objects become depersonalized and a shift occurs in the relations between persons and things” (1976, 235).^[12]

Weiner's account is thus animated by a double opposition—between the worlds of Trobriand women and men, and between the worlds of Trobriand values and Western values. Through the articulation of both these values Weiner develops a moral critique of Western society on the basis of the Trobriands. But there is also a real historical link between men and money in the Trobriands. Although the Trobriands may be distinctive if not unique in the range of gender relations found in Melanesia (but see Macintyre 1986), in one sense the Trobriands is like everywhere else in Melanesia—namely, the introductions of European goods, cash, and commodity values are mediated and indeed monopolized by men (cf. Gewertz 1983; A. Strathern 1979; Sexton 1982, 1986).

Reinterpreting Joshua's Message

In conversation with Weiner, Trobrianders constantly stressed the value of women's wealth by comparing it to money or by expressing the value of specific bundles in monetary terms. On her first day in Kiriwina women had told Weiner that “Nununiga (banana leaf bundles) are just like your money” (1986, 109, cf. 1986, 99 and Thomas [this volume], commenting on Kahn). At several points specific cash equivalents were suggested to her, for example, that the bundles accumulated for sagali are worth “hundreds of dollars” (1986, 98) or that in 1976 five bundles of banana leaves were equivalent to one stick of tobacco or 1.3 cents. There is much evidence that banana leaf bundles and skirts have become increasingly exchangeable for an expanding range of goods—not only for indigenous items such as betel nuts, coconuts, fresh fish, and shells, but also tobacco, biscuits, chewing gum, and balloons. Weiner notes that in the one hundred years of contact the value of women's wealth relative to such things has increased, that women are commanding more and more for their wealth. “The greater the opportunities for men to

command any kind of wealth, the greater becomes the number of baskets of women's wealth that ‘wealthy women’ command” (1980, 276). Moreover, she observes that since it is often younger men who have more access to cash and commodities, it is often their young wives who are very heavily involved in the amassing and distribution of women's wealth.

In “Stability in Banana Leaves” Weiner quotes from a conversation with Joshua, a highly educated young man who had returned from college and employment elsewhere in Papua New Guinea to work at the hospital in Kiriwina. While they were driving together they observed a sagali, and although he commented approvingly on her knowledge about women's wealth, he also lamented: “We have to get those women to stop throwing their wealth, because they take our money. If the women would stop needing so many baskets of wealth … then men would have plenty of money to pay for other things” (1980, 274). Weiner was patently shocked by this and attributed it to the fact that “Joshua had been away too long and had learned to think in Western capitalist terms” (1980, 274). Though she admits that women's wealth is a drain on the flow of other kinds of goods, she contends that it is a “buffer to Western economic intrusions,” a buffer that underwrites the power of both men and women.

This is probably true, but what Weiner fails to address is the question of why European goods and cash are classified as “male” wealth. This classification appears to reflect both male control of such wealth and the symbolic gendering of goods. Is this because, as in the rest of Melanesia, men have been the mediators of the commodity economy? From the barter associated with the first navigators, through labor migration to sandalwood depots, mines, and plantations, to patterns of contemporary wage labor, cashcropping, and touristic development, the intrusions of European goods and values have typically been through men.

Although the economic integration of the Trobriands with the cash economy has always been distinctly peripheral, it is men who have always effected such integration. Trobriand men were not much engaged in the early forms of labor migration in the Massim region, unlike those from islands such as Goodenough, where the numbers of men recruited in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a high percentage of all men (see Young 1983). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the main economic links were with whalers, pearlers, and bêche-de-mer traders, involving the exchange of food and local crafts for steel tools, cloth, tobacco, and other European goods. Such exchanges appear to have been a male monopoly. At the time of Malinowski's fieldwork such exchanges expanded to include locally resident missionaries, Australian colonial officials, and traders operating local stores. During Weiner's fieldwork the main source of cash was the sale of carvings to tourists, and she makes it clear that carving was a male craft and money earned through selling carvings entered internal

exchanges through men. Since the collapse of the tourist boom of the early 1970s, the main source of cash is no longer the sale of carvings to tourists but remittances from those working elsewhere. Although increasing numbers of women are migrating to work in Port Moresby and other regional centers, men still constitute the majority of migrant workers and thus remain the major source of cash and commodities in the Kiriwina community.

Thus, through different periods and in different ways it is men who have consistently engaged in commodity exchanges. This asymmetrical engagement of men and women has not been without internal consequences. There is, I suggest, a tendency for male and female interests in the exchange system to diverge,^[13] because of their differential engagement in the cash economy. Whereas in the precolonial and early colonial period, male and female wealth objects and realms of exchange might be reckoned to be different but complementary and mutually supportive, in the contemporary situation there is both difference and competition between the exchange interests of women and men (despite Weiner's claims that they are mutually supportive). How else can we explain Joshua's complaint that women are throwing their wealth and diverting “male” money from other purposes? How else can we interpret women's trenchant insistence that their wealth is as valuable as money? Men clearly have a choice about dividing their time between internal indigenous exchanges and external commodity transactions. According to Weiner, some Trobrianders warned that “men spent too much time carving, resulting in smaller yam harvests” (1988, 23). Given the ultimate links between yam exchanges and the flows of women's wealth, this diminution of yam harvests must have had an impact on women's exchanges too. Women's productive and exchange orientations are not similarly divided, being focused on the cultivation of crops and the manufacture of banana leaf bundles and an array of superb skirts.

It is significant that women still choose to wear these skirts—they are not just wealth objects used in ceremonial display but items of daily attire. The various styles of dress mark the social situation of women—young girls wear short red miniskirts, older married women wear longer skirts, an influential woman who is a central figure in a sagali wears an exceptionally long and flowing skirt, a woman after childbirth wears a long flowing cape also made from banana leaf fibers, and a woman in mourning wears an undyed banana fiber skirt reaching to her ankles (and the widow of the deceased a mat cloaking her body). By contrast, only a few older men routinely wear the white pandanus penis covering. Although young men usually don this for ceremonies, they routinely choose to wear shorts, trousers, or sarongs made of brightly colored cloth. Thus the differing orientations of women and men to traditional and introduced elements of Trobriand culture are signaled in the very clothes they wear.

Transformations in the Kula

The changing historical significance of sagali and women's wealth needs to be related to the changing significance of that preeminently male domain of exchange, the kula. A number of ethnographers have reanalyzed the kula in historical terms, both in the light of prehistorical evidence of exchange in the region and in the light of transformations consequent on European colonization. From the viewpoint both of prehistory and of recent colonial history, the kula as described by Malinowski emerges as an institution unique to a particular time and place rather than a manifestation of unchanging Massim culture.

Prehistorical research suggests that the kula has developed only in the last five hundred years or so, out of rather different earlier exchange systems. Although shell valuables have a longer antiquity in the region, dating back to about 2000 BP, the development of the kula seems to have been a more recent phenomenon, associated with the specialization of craft industries such as pottery. Moreover, the precise ringlike character of exchanges of armlets for necklaces which Malinowski describes seems only to be true of this northern corner of the network and not for the southern islands such as Tubetube and Koyagaugau. In the southern islands at least, many more items entered the kula—pigs, greenstone ax blades, wooden platters, lime gourds, and spatulas—and overseas exchanges of such valuables were intimately linked to internal exchanges—rites at marriage and death, and purchases of land, canoes or magic.

Furthermore, it has been claimed that Malinowski overemphasized both the inconvertibility of kula valuables and their separation from internal exchanges in Kiriwina itself. This is obvious from his failure to discuss a central concept, found today throughout the Massim, that of kitoma (kitoum, kitomwa in the languages further south). This concept refers to the idea that the valuables, rather than circulating endlessly and being detached from persons, move from states of being encumbered by debts to states of being debt-free. When a valuable is unencumbered it becomes the kitoma of the person holding it, and in this state may pass into internal exchanges such as those at marriage and death. Campbell has argued, from the vantage point of Vakuta, that shell valuables can be fed into the internal exchange system “thereby securing other wealth in the form of yams, magic, land and women” (Campbell 1983, 204). In the past, kitoma valuables were used expressly for compensation payments due for injury and death sustained in warfare (Macintyre 1983, 143). It may be that this concept and this process of articulation between external and internal exchanges has itself become more developed since Malinowski's fieldwork (see Keesing n.d.). Whether this was always the case or is another instance of historical change, it means that nowadays

the kula cannot be dissociated from these internal exchanges of men and women's wealth.

Not only does overseas exchange seem to be much more articulated with internal exchanges than Malinowski presumed, but it also appears that European penetration and pacification was a precondition for the emergence of the kula system as Malinowski perceived it. This historical reinterpretation has been developed by Macintyre in the following way:

Throughout his analysis of kula Malinowski assumes an historical depth of the institution. The inheritance of the kula valuables, the value of wealth items being viewed as cumulative over time, and the permanence of the circulation along time-honoured paths are essential features of Malinowski's kula. It is my contention that such incessant circulation could only occur after pacification. The kula as closed circuit is a modern institution. (1983, 132)

Macintyre suggests that the preeminence of kula (kune in the southern islands) exchange as a form of political alliance was possible only after the colonial authorities abolished war, making peaceful interactions possible over a much wider area and stabilizing exchange paths.

Moreover, as Macintyre and others have demonstrated, there were profound economic changes in the kula as a result of the introduction of the steel ax and other European goods. Many wealth items disappeared from the kula or became very restricted in their circulation, such as greenstone ax blades, lime spatulas and gourds, and wooden platters. Local craft production declined with the introduction of European substitutes and this must have had an effect on the flow of such artifacts in the kula. There was an inflationary spiral in the value of shell valuables, but simultaneously there was also a process of democratization of access to kula valuables. European control radically reduced the power of the guyan, those high-ranking men who had dominated exchange, trade, and warfare in and between Massim communities.

It may be argued, as Weiner has done (1980), that such historical transformations affected only the domain of male prestige economy and did not affect women's exchanges. But if, as Macintyre and others have argued, overseas exchanges were intimately related to internal exchanges, and if, as Weiner herself suggests, the male and female exchange systems were intimately linked, then exchanges of women's wealth cannot have been completely insulated from such processes. Indeed, although Weiner sees women's exchanges as a buffer to colonization, it would seem that this buffer has at least absorbed the ramified impact of changes to the male prestige economy. For instance, she argues that the system of chiefly power is intimately related to the production and circulation of yams by men, which in turn is related intimately to women's exchanges of wealth. So, changes in the relative power of high-ranking men, and the loss of their monopoly over kula

valuables, would logically have some effects on the patterns of women's exchanges too. The spiraling value of women's wealth, like the spiraling value of kula valuables, may be attributable to its articulation to commodity exchanges. Finally, insofar as women's wealth is measurable and convertible into cash and a range of commodities, it must be seen as related to the cash economy.

So, in the Trobriands as in the rest of Melanesia, indigenous exchange systems have become articulated with commodity exchange. What is distinctive is that in the Trobriands there is and was a sphere of exchange controlled by women, and a sphere of women's exchange which is seen as crucial to perpetuating Trobriand tradition. The particular character is clear if we compare it to similar processes in the Highlands region of Papua New Guinea. Here also gift and commodity exchanges are related, but the gendering of these exchanges is different from the Massim.

Gendering Gifts and Commodities in the Highlands and the Massim

Throughout Melanesia we witness a complicated process, not just of competition between the values of the commodity and the gift, but of mutual accommodation, integration, and substitution (see Gregory 1982; M. Strathern 1988; Carrier and Carrier 1989). Elsewhere this relation is between exchange commodities and gifts, which are both under male control. What is distinctive about the Trobriand situation is that as well as gift exchanges classified as male, such as the kula and yam exchanges, there were exchanges of women's wealth. The negotiation of values between the gift and the commodity takes on a different significance if this is perceived not just as the substitution of one kind of male wealth for another but the relation of introduced male wealth to indigenous male and female wealth (see Gewertz 1983).^[14]

The special character of the Trobriand situation is clear if we briefly compare it with the situation described in parts of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The Highlands region differs markedly from the Trobriands because Highlands women are producers and rarely if ever transactors (though Feil [1978] has argued otherwise for the Enga). Let us take the ethnographic case that has been the most intensively described and analyzed, that of Mount Hagen, where Marilyn Strathern early pointed to the crucial distinction between women as primarily producers of sweet potatoes and pigs and men as transactors of pigs and shell valuables.^[15]

What concerns us here is how the increasing importance of cash, commodities, and monetary values has affected the exclusively male domain of ceremonial exchange in the Hagen area, the moka. Andrew Strathern (1979) argues that there has been a profound alteration in the strategic relations of

women and men as producers and transactors. He suggests that even though women's productive contribution to exchange goods was obscured by men in the indigenous system, women could exert some influence over the directions and uses of such goods because of moral claims deriving from their role as producers (directly in the case of pigs and indirectly in the case of shells; cf. M. Strathern 1972). Such claims are less likely to be acknowledged with the new valuables—cash, trucks, and beer—which are increasingly substituted for pigs and shells in the exchange system.

Most of these new valuables derive from coffee cultivation. Women do most of the work of clearing, planting, weeding, harvesting, drying, and porterage of beans, but men claim ownership of the produce on the grounds that they own both the land and the trees. Although women “produce” both cash and commodities through intensive work in coffee cultivation, they do not exert influence over exchanges of such goods. Indeed, Andrew Strathern suggests that men have an interest in denying women's productive contributions to their transactions. For example, in Hagen today a man may use cash to purchase a pig from another household rather than use a pig his wife has reared, seemingly to demonstrate that even pigs can be procured independently of women. However, Strathern contends (1979, 544) this is a double obfuscation: the pig has clearly been raised by a woman, even if not the purchaser's wife, and the cash used for the purchase is likely to have come from coffee production by his wife.

It is in the context of such new relations of production and transaction, and of the particular control men exert over cash as commodity and as gift, that the congeries of women's movements called wok meri have arisen in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. These are widespread in the Chimbu and Chuave regions, though importantly not in the Hagen area. Sexton (1982, 1986) suggests that they derive from women's perceptions of a deterioration in their situation and protests about the economic profligacy of men in ceremonial exchange, drinking and gambling. The women's work performed by such groups is expressly about money—saving, lending, exchange. Though clearly innovative in this way, they employ traditional models for women's association derived from kinship or affinal relations.^[16] Groups relate as mothers and daughters or as wife-givers and wife-takers, and idioms of growth and reproduction are applied to the cash itself. Although there is a strong element of protest against men involved, there is also a degree of cooperation from them. Perhaps male endorsement of such projects for saving and exchange derives from the fact that the small amounts of cash generated by these groups often find their way back into the circuits of male ceremonial exchange. Sexton suggests (1984) that despite this convergence with male strategies these groups are profoundly important in generating a sense of women's autonomous interest and efficacy.

Such a comparison brings into focus both the commonalities and the dif-

ferences in the Trobriand case. Trobriand women have not had to forge new groups of association, since women as members of a dala have a strong sense of shared interest and efficacy. Trobriand women have not suffered, as their Highlands counterparts have, such deleterious consequences from rapid colonization and economic development based on cash-cropping and male labor migration. There are both ecological and historical differences which explain why cash-cropping is, by contrast, of minimal importance and why most cash comes into Trobriand communities from the proceeds of selling crafts to tourists and from the remittances of migrant workers.

But also crucial appears to be the way in which the gender relations of western and central Highlands systems meshed with those of the colonizing culture (see Jolly 1987). The gender relations of the Trobriands were not, as Weiner has stressed, amenable to easy integration. This is not just a matter of an exotic matrilineal system, at odds with the notions of sexuality and procreation, kinship, and property prevalent in the West. The difference resides also in the way in which the values of persons and things were articulated. In the Trobriand case all objects of economic transaction and exchange were more deeply imbedded in the human relations of kinship. All exchange goods—shell valuables, ax blades, and yams, as well as banana leaf bundles—carried messages about kinship and reproduction.^[17] But in Kiriwina, according to Weiner, only a certain class of these could secure regenesis: banana leaves, the wealth of women. The valuables exchanged in the Highlands, though they were also loaded with meanings derived from human reproduction, were not associated with a culture that accorded women a central place either in biological or social reproduction. Moreover, as Marilyn Strathern (1988) has shown, Hagen male ceremonial exchange is seen to eclipse the values of kinship rather than being eclipsed by kinship, as in the Trobriands.^[18]

In part, such differences in indigenous relations help to account for the divergent impact of cash and commodities in the Highlands and the Trobriands. Although their experience of these processes has been very different, the women of the Trobriands have not completely escaped the influence of the association between monetary and male values. Highlands women have perforce to try to get some control over money, while Trobriand women perhaps can counter its influence by consolidating the association of women with banana leaves, matriliny, and tradition. But in both cases we must not be misled by the character of the objects themselves. Money can be a gift as well as a commodity, and banana leaves can be a symbol of women's resistance as well as of women's persistence.

We have been inclined to ignore or underestimate the historical changes in Pacific societies, especially insofar as these changes bear on women. The tendency within anthropology to dehistoricize and essentialize the other is arguably greater when dealing with small, isolated island cultures than in

dealing with great literate civilizations such as India. But perhaps my argument about the political and historical significance of women's weaving in the Trobriands can best be underlined by making a provocative comparison far beyond the region. In the fight of Indian nationalists against British hegemony, Gandhi, Naidu, and others used powerful images of mother India, derived from the Hindu mythology of Sita (Forbes 1979; Kishwar 1985; Aylett 1988). In the struggle for independence, the political significance of the family and of household production were celebrated through the symbol of the spinning wheel. The women who spun and wove and whose families wore clothing made only from homespun cloth were thereby opposing the effects of British manufacture, the imports of cheap cloth from the mills of Manchester and Birmingham. The historical and political messages of banana leaf skirts are not the same as homespun saris. But women's weaving in India and the Pacific signals not just stability and persistence but also change and resistance to European goods^[19] and a world where cloth is a symbol of human regeneration and not a mere commodity. In evoking mythic women, the politicized imagery of the Indian goddess Sita, devoted wife and mother deployed against the British, may be more appropriate than that faithful wife of Greek myth, Penelope, devotedly “weaving by day and unweaving the same fabric by night in order to stop time—to neither bury her husband, marry a suitor, nor change the politics of the land” (Weiner 1982a, 240).

Epilogue.

When we look at women's worlds in remote parts of Melanesia, our general tendencies as anthropologists to exoticize and eternalize are amplified in a remarkable way. This is not to deny the pervasive character of this in all Western discourse about others, and indeed discourse about those others of literate civilizations such as India, China, and the Middle East. As Said's Orientalism has so persuasively argued, even contending civilizations with a self-conscious history have been reduced to silent, inarticulate passivity by Orientalist texts emanating from Europe. The Orient is constructed as the opposite of the Occident, essentialized as unchanging, passive, and closed: she cannot speak for herself but must be spoken for.

In similar vein, Fabian (1983) suggests that anthropology is predicated on a radical separation between Us and Them, a separation that conflates the coordinates of space and time. Other cultures are seen as spatially remote, as distant from a center that centers on us. But even when we are there, when we have “penetrated” those remote regions, we may deny copresence in shared historical time. “Their” culture may be eternalized through textual fictions such as the ethnographic present, or may be seen as before, in terms of an evolutionary narrative leading to a present inhabited by us.

In looking at non-Western women such tendencies to exoticize and eternalize are even greater. Even in writings about Europe and America, women have often been located outside history, not participating in the public political events that are seen as constitutive of historical process. Instead, they are portrayed as inhabiting a world that is contained and unchanging, the “family” or the “domestic sphere.” This view of women in European history has of course been challenged and changed by feminist scholarship (e.g., Tilly and Scott 1978; Davidoff and Hall 1987), but such views seem even more strongly entrenched in studies of non-Western women. Consider a recent example from another part of Melanesia.

In his review of the history of anthropological writings on Tanna (southern Vanuatu), a review that is expressly critical of decades of homocentric writings—from Speiser, Humphreys, and Guiart to Lindstom—Ron Adams (1987, 14) says:

anthropologists—like missionaries and government officials before them—have been consistently used to present to the outside world a homocentric construction of reality, in terms of which outsiders have perceived and related to the Tannese. While the Tannese have shown themselves to be amenable to intensive investigation of virtually every aspect of the domain, the female sphere has remained hidden—and intact.

Adams's bad joke about a female perspective as a “bird's-eye view” (1987, 14) and the language of observation as “penetration” of an intact women's world seem curiously at odds with the expressed critical aim of revealing the homocentric premises of anthropology. But apart from this troubling paradox, it is an extraordinary presumption to claim that because women's worlds are not open to the gaze of the European (male) observer, then they are closed and unchanging. To suggest a view of the timeless situation of Tannese women on the basis of twentieth-century ethnography is a very problematic exercise. In this part of southern Vanuatu, there were dramatic transformations wrought in the lives of women by the combined but contradictory effects of sandalwood and bêche-de-mer trading, Protestant missionary activity and the rival British and French colonial influences dating from the middle of the nineteenth century. The documents associated with each of these colonial agents are rich in descriptions of women's lives, and in the case of missionary reports are full of messages about transformations (or “improvements”) of their situation. Such colonial projects were often in tension: for traders and labor recruiters women were potential laborers and sexual partners, while missionaries strove to keep women away from plantation labor and interracial liaisons (which they labeled prostitution), in order that they might devote themselves more thoroughly to making good Christian homes. Such colonial projects were only ever partially realized, but there have been crucial changes in the patterns of women's work, in the

character of households and families (Jolly and Macintyre 1989) and most spectacularly in the cessation of practices such as widow strangulation and female infanticide. Even where there has been patent persistence—as for instance in the perpetuation of male kava drinking, which women cannot drink or witness being prepared—this is in the face of decades of attempts to ban it, or at least transform its exclusivist masculine character. Again, apparent persistence may be resistance to colonial intervention.

As in the Trobriand case, women and men are differently situated in relation to tradition or kastom, as lived practice and conscious construct. This raises a nest of associated problems about conscious and unconscious aspects of tradition, about the reifications involved in constructs of tradition (cf. Thomas, this volume) and about the gendered character of tradition.

In the burgeoning literature on tradition there has been an unfortunate tendency to distinguish an authentic, unselfconscious, lived culture from a less authentic, self-conscious construct of tradition. While not denying that traditionalism draws selectively on elements of precolonial culture which then stand for the totality, I think it is important not to stress unduly the self-consciousness and novelty in this process. The very notion of invention, central to the formulations of Hobsbawm and Ranger's (1983) early influential text obscures the unselfconscious aspects and the generality of such processes in the construction of identity and ethnicity.

Although earlier writing on tradition in island Melanesia (esp. Keesing and Tonkinson 1982, which, incidentally, predates Hobsbawm and Ranger) did not draw an invidious distinction between custom and tradition (but see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, 2), it did perhaps distinguish too strongly between tradition as lived practice and tradition as political construct. Thus, in my earlier paper on the kastom communities of South Pentecost I distinguished sharply between those who adhered to kastom as a way of life and those who used it as a rhetorical construct in political debates about nationalism and secessionism. This was no doubt unduly influenced by the strenuous political ideologies that were promulgated by kastom communities, which distinguished their way of life as authentically ancestral, in contradistinction to those of “skin deep” kastom adherents, Christian politicians who in fact followed the ways of skul. Attempts at revival of lost practices by Christian or skul communities were similarly treated with derision and contempt.

But tradition is both lived practice and ideological construct in rural villages and in the national parliament. Moreover, kastom is similar in both contexts in important ways. First, as an ideology of past-present relations it tends to eternalize, to gloss over changes—to cover ruptures and discontinuities with an idea of primordial place and space: immobile, eternal black stone, in the imagery of Grace Mera Molisa, a ni-Vanuatu poet. In this indigenous construct there is a denial of historical transformation, a dehistoricizing or eternalizing just as powerful as what we have isolated in European

thinking about Melanesian societies. In my own ethnographic work, I was eventually forced to recognize a complicity between indigenous constructions and my own, ahistorical analytical fictions. Similarly, in the Trobriand case I have considered here there is no doubt complicity between the indigenous eternalism of Trobriand views of life as regenerative cycle and Weiner's representation of them in her theory of social reproduction. In such an intimate dialogue, it feels unseemly to tear the interlocutors apart.

But we do need to recognize the power of the representation of tradition, both by Pacific peoples and by anthropologists (Keesing 1989b ). In both the Solomon Islands and in Vanuatu, the right to codify tradition and perpetuate it is still primarily a male prerogative. This male power to define and control has been seen by Grace Mera Molisa (1983) as being expressly asserted against women. And yet, as Keesing (1985) has shown for Kwaio kastom adherents, women do not necessarily see themselves as excluded from conscious deliberation about tradition. They do not merely practice custom in unselfconscious ways in remote rural spaces but may themselves be strongly and consciously committed to its perpetuation, even where outsiders may perceive this as perpetuating their own domination.

Such conscious celebration of tradition is, I contend, especially possible for Trobriand women, for here “tradition” gives to them a value and a power greater than in most other parts of Melanesia. This power is in part a consequence of their indigenous situation, in part the result of the particular limits of exogenous influences. But it is a power emerging from the relation between the interior world of the Trobriands and the exterior world in which it is situated.

And in construing this relation between interior and exterior worlds, the power of the anthropologist in representing tradition is patent. We have often elided the histories of Pacific peoples in a way that conformed not only to Western stereotypes about isolated and timeless others but suited our disciplinary interests. But in attending to history—in stressing discontinuity rather the continuity, resistance rather than persistence, self-conscious creation rather than unselfconscious reproduction—it is imperative that we do not thereby suggest that Pacific peoples engaged in projects of historical transformation are thereby less themselves, are inauthentic because they are becoming “like us” This would be to believe our own eternalist fictions about the essence of their culture, and another equally powerful fiction, that change can only mean that local culture becomes more like that imaginary metropolis of the West.

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