6
The Development of Trade

Material presented in the last chapter indicates a number of changes in trade in the Jimi-Simbai area. Many of these changes are the indirect consequence of the pattern of colonization of the highlands, which saw a consolidation of colonial authority among central-highlands plume consumers predating the incorporation of the Jimi-Simbai area into the colonial state by twenty years or more. The colonial penetration of New Guinea had a profound impact on the kinds and directions of passage of goods. Changes in patterns of distribution, however, were less dramatic for the organization of Kundagai trade than were changes in the relative contribution of local production to the flow of goods, the rates of flow of goods relative to one another, the exchange value of objects, and the social relationships of partners. The last two factors will be given more detailed consideration in succeeding chapters. In the present chapter I concentrate on an analysis of the historical reshaping and expansion of the Kundagai trade universe and the variable rates of transfer or "turnover" of goods. I conclude with a discussion of the growing dependence of the Kundagai on the central highlands, which has developed with the transformation of traditional trading networks and the uneven intrusion of capitalism into the highlands.

Overview of Change

On purely logical grounds it would be wrong to assume that the organization of trade over roughly sixty years, such as it can be re-

constructed from the memories of a few old men, represents some stable condition. It may well be a reflection of aboriginal trade—that is, exchange unaffected by European or other outside influence, in the form of the kinds of products traded or their directions. But it must be conceded that the European presence, thinly spread in coastal regions from the late nineteenth century, as well as earlier sporadic contacts by Southeast Asians, may have had a very indirect impact, however slight, on Kundagai trade (cf. Hughes 1977). Nonetheless, all trade goods remained indigenous in origin. What is more certain is that trade inventories and patterns were not stable. The archaeological and oral historical evidence from widely scattered parts of the highlands of radical changes in agricultural practices, demography, and ecology suggest important transformations in the social and economic environment in which trade occurred (see e.g., Fell 1987). Just how these changes affected the Maring and their neighbors is not clear.

About 1920, then, remains the cutoff point in our present picture of Mating trade founded on case material. Beyond that date remains conjecture based upon the opinion of informants. While those opinions are generally consistent there is no independent evidence to substantiate them.

As noted in the previous chapter there have been changes in the catalogue of trade items and alterations in the directions of trade in some items. Some of these changes predate European penetration of the highlands in the 1930s and the fairly rapid impact on local production and exchange that resulted, with indirect consequences for the Kundagai. It is particularly noteworthy that the Simbu expanded their use of plumes as valuables and decorations, in terms of species used and quantities desired, in the 1950s (Hide 1981:115 ff).^[1] Since the Kundagai plume trade is significantly directed toward the Simbu and has given a dominant structure to their overall patterns of trade for at least several decades, we may conclude that the whole Kundagai trade sphere had a different structure before this time, in terms of the objects traded, their directions, and exchange rates. Evidence from the Kundagai on this point is largely inferential, but what does seem to be the case is that before shells became widely passed in trade and prestations the inventory of trade and prestation goods was somewhat impoverished.

In fact, it seems reasonable to divide the development of trade in the Jimi-Simbai area into five phases on the basis of the principal goods passed in trade, the major orientations of trade routes, and the relation

between the passage of goods in trade and prestations. These phases were not sharply demarcated but rather merged into one another. The dates given here are thus only approximations.

The earliest phase characterized the period prior to the turn of the century. The major items of trade were Simbai Valley salt and Wum-Tsenga stone axes. Plumes and furs were also used in trade toward axe-makers. Trade was probably rather weakly developed, nonetheless, as axes and salt also were widely redistributed in prestations and filtered into the area from other sources besides those just mentioned. Axes were also manufactured from local, albeit inferior stone. Beside axes, major items of prestations were mainly of local provenance: pigs, nonema- seed necklaces, and necklaces of dog and marsupial teeth. The nexus between trade and major prestations was at this time weak, with the stress on locally produced goods.

The second phase spanned the first three decades of this century. This period saw the development of trade in shells, with dogwhelks and cowries reaching the Kundagai from the north and northwest. Small numbers of kina and greensnail also came in trade, from several directions, but perhaps mainly from the upper-Jimi and Cross-Jimi areas. The salt and axe trade still provided a dominating structure to trade webs oriented across the grain of the country, but the importation of pigs and, toward the end of this phase, shells from the upper Jimi in exchange for plumes grew in importance. Shells largely replaced seed and dog-tooth necklaces in major prestations. Trade thus became increasingly important as a source of valuables for redeployment in prestations, and exchange activities became oriented toward the use of essentially exotic, imported objects.

The next phase extended from the late 1930s or early 1940s to the mid-1960s. Imports of steel tools from the central highlands led to the collapse of the old salt-stone axe trade. In addition, shells, most particularly kina and greensnail, began to flood into the region from the Simbu and Wahgi Valleys, where massive amounts had been introduced by colonial authorities, missionaries, and prospectors who first entered the central highlands in the early 1930s. Pigs also were increasingly imported from the upper Jimi. Trade became firmly oriented along a northwest-southeast axis, with forest products, especially plumes, being sent toward the central highlands in return for shells, steel, and pigs. This pattern became consolidated as the Simbu-Kuma area emerged as a major center for the consumption of plumes and other forest products, providing a dominant focus for a radial and con-

centric network of trade paths linking the center to a widely dispersed periphery. The Jimi-Simbai area was one sector of the peripheral zone.

This phase saw a considerable intensification of trade and of variety of goods traded, especially from the mid-1950s when the colonial presence afforded greater security to traders. Exotic shells, steel, and pigs predominated in major prestations, and the Jimi-Simbai region therefore became dependent upon the central highlands for supplies of these goods. Although the net excess of women sent in marriage from Tsuwenkai to Up-Jimi settlements meant that significant volumes of shells and steel were acquired in prestations, trade assumed considerable importance as another means of accumulating valuables.

The fourth phase, from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, saw the general maintenance of existing patterns of trade, although there was some reduction in the variety of goods traded, with such things as Goura Pigeon plumes, cowries, and dogwhelks all but abandoned. Importantly, however, money was added as a trade item. Initially, money flowed in roughly equal amounts through Tsuwenkai toward and away from the central highlands. From the mid-1970s, however, money was increasingly drawn from relatively impoverished peripheral regions toward the monetarily richer central highlands. However, money was assimilated into the traditional scheme of valuables rather than constituting a price-revealing currency. By this means, Mating trade exhibited considerable resilience to the penetration of capitalist relations of production (Healey 1985a ). This period saw the addition not only of money to the prestation sphere but general inflation as well in most major prestations.

The final phase extends from the late 1970s into the 1980s. The prospects of trade for the future are unclear, but this period might best be characterized as one of incipient collapse. Trade in shells and steel has all but ceased, while pigs are increasingly acquired for money rather than forest products. But the changes in this last phase have been less in patterns of trade than in relative volumes of different goods, and most especially in the social organization of transactions and the rates of exchange. These are issues that I reserve for attention in later chapters.

Within this broad framework of the development of trade over almost one hundred years, further dimensions of change can be explored. The following discussion concentrates on quantified data relating to the period from the mid-1920s.

I have noted an increasing focus on trade directed toward the central

highlands once shells, followed by steel tools, came predominantly from that region. The beginning of this shift in focus chances to correspond roughly with the limits of good case material derived from trade histories.^[2] It is therefore not possible to specify a more precise or quantified impact of this change.

Despite these reservations it remains possible to give some further characterizations of precolonial trade that apply at least as far back as the early 1900s, and possibly even further.

Before the early 1950s the geographic range of Kundagai traders seems to have remained roughly constant. Tsuwenkai was situated toward the southeast corner of this range. Traditionally the Kundagai rarely traveled further upstream in the Jimi than Kompiai and Kupeng, although occasional visits were made to Kwima and even beyond in the company of friends and relatives from these Up-Jimi settlements. The great majority of transactions from this period were with partners in Kompiai—a large settlement with correspondingly extensive connections Up- and Cross-Jimi. Upstream, the Kundagai trading range extended no more than about fourteen kilometers,^[3] a fairly easy day's walk over narrow trails. By contrast the Kauwatyi of Kompiai trading range upstream extended some twenty-five kilometers to Kol in the upper Jimi, though it is unlikely that they often made the journey. By virtue of their well-established trading links with the Kauwatyi, the Kundagai were therefore indirectly linked to an extensive trading area. They could leave trade items with Kauwatyi friends to pass on upriver or deal directly with upriver visitors to Kompiai and other settlements, most of whom were Tugumenga from Kwima, Yomban from Togban, or Manga from Kwiop. In turn, of course, the Kauwatyi and others were indirectly linked to larger trading networks through their own trading partners.

Prior to contact direct links with Cross-Jimi people were few. The Tsuwenkai Kundagai occasionally accompanied Bokapai or Cenda friends to Wum in search of stone axes, and rather more often they journeyed to Rinyimp across the Jimi from Bokapai. The greatest distance covered in a single transaction before contact that I learned of was about 25 kilometers, when a Kundagai exchanged a cassowary for a kina with a man from Por (Cross-Jimi). This transaction, however, occurred when both men attended a konj kaiko in Koinambe. In the lower Simbai, few Kundagai journeyed further than Nimbra, ten to twelve kilometers away. One man, who lived as a child in Nimbra for a number of years, went as far as Pogaikump several times to trade

with classificatory kinsmen there, but this is only some fifteen kilometers from Tsuwenkai.

Up-Simbai the Kundagai traveled as far as Simbai about twenty-two kilometers away, and beyond to the Kinenj and Asai. Probably the greatest distance traveled was Down-Jimi, occasionally to Waim some twenty-five to thirty kilometers away. Networks of trade therefore extended furthest toward the periphery.

Although the Tsuwenkai Kundagai were not major enemies of the Ambrakwi, trade between the two populations was rare. Trade between the Kundagai and the Tsembaga ceased after the outbreak of hostilities in the 1920s. The cessation of other forms of previously established exchange relations, and taboos on commensality and sharing the products of enemy territory, effectively prevented any form of nonhostile contact. Trade has only recently been revived with the Tsembaga, though with little effort to seek out trading partners. The relatively short distances traveled Up- and Cross-Jimi can probably be attributed in large part to fear of attack in those regions. The Kundagai say that a stranger in those parts was in danger of being killed as a known or suspected ally of an enemy group. For this reason, they say, a stranger engaged in trade was not often asked his clan cluster affiliation, for if this information were known someone might be tempted to kill him if he were found to be a member of an enemy clan cluster, or of a group standing in the major-enemy category to allies. There was, then, an etiquette of anonymity in trade, adopted to preserve peace so as to avoid the possibility of disrupting trade. Ancestral spirits of enemy groups were not so easily avoided, however, and many men feared exposing themselves to mystical attack.

Although the Kundagai traveled much greater distances among the Kalam than among the Maring, they say that this also involved dangers. Generally the Kundagai maintained friendly relations with the Kalam. Informants could cite only one war with any Kalam group, which occurred before my oldest informants in 1974 were born. Since then the Kundagai have aided Kalam in feuds and, because of this and kinship ties with Kalam groups, they were at times in danger of revenge attacks as members or relatives of feuding parties.

Hughes (1977) notes that there was a regional gradient of fear of sorcery attack from strangers from high to low country. He suggests that this fear was a major constraint on the frequency and distance traders were prepared to penetrate into lower-lying areas. Although such fears probably limited the distance Narak traders traveled into the

Maring area, the Kundagai did not admit to fear of the sorcery or witchcraft of Kalam in the lower Jimi. Possibly this was because the Kundagai themselves considered (and still consider) themselves to be subject to a high incidence of witchcraft attacks from fellow Kundagai and allies.

The lower Jimi was apparently first visited by Europeans in 1930 or 1931. In 1933 Leahy and Taylor visited the Jimi between the Ganz and Tsau Rivers (Hughes 1977; Leahy, in press). European intrusions into the Jimi appear to have had no effect on intercommunity relations until the early 1950s, when several government patrols were mounted from Minj to investigate reports of unrest (Vayda 1971). At about this time trade histories suggest an increase in trading activities (see below), almost certainly stimulated by the peace-making government presence in the upper-Jimi. In the early 1950s the Kundagai met with traders from as far Up-Jimi as Kelunga and with men from Kauwil across the Jimi (both over twenty kilometers away).

In 1956 Tabibuga Patrol Post was established, the Tsuwenkai Kundagai contacted for the first time, and the government-imposed peace in the Jimi consolidated. Almost immediately traders from Karap and Kol seeking plumes were contacted fairly regularly.

Since the early 1960s the then Highlands Labour Scheme influenced the extension of Kundagai trading networks, as well as opening up new and distant source areas for plumes. On coastal plantations the Kundagai befriend men of Up-Jimi and Simbai communities with the direct result that some agree to establish trade partnerships on their return home. Such friends can now be called on to provide hospitality while a man is traveling. Having learned Tok Pisin on the coast, younger men are able to converse with Narak, Kandawo, Kuma, Melpa, and other people with whom communication was formerly difficult. Most Kundagai are bilingual, but only in Maring and Kalam.

The number of settlements and the total population with which the Kundagai have maintained most-frequent trading links have increased greatly since contact (see app. 4). Prior to contact regular trade linked the Kundagai to about twenty-five settlements with an estimated population of around 9,000. Since the 1950s the figures have risen to about thirty-nine settlements and a population of about 16,500. The total population of settlements recorded in trade histories as ever providing trading partners prior to contact was around 1.2,000 in thirty-nine settlements. Since contact trade has been expanded to tap a population of

about 25,000 in at least sixty-four settlements (excluding distant places in the Wahgi and coast).

There has been little growth of trade between Tsuwenkai and the Simbai. Contacts with new settlements have been mainly with those lying toward the center. Most of these contacts have been initiated by people of these areas pushing ever further afield. The Kundagai only infrequently have extended their travels far up and across the Jimi, although they do now occasionally journey to distant Down-Jimi and Trans-Simbai places.

Ultimate plume consumers can increase their supply of plumes by seeking out new supply areas. A consequence may be that primary and intermediate suppliers of plumes are not impelled to increase hunting, so that local bird populations may be cushioned from possible overexploitation. Although the upper and middle Jimi was no doubt a major source for plumes used by the center, the extension of trading relations does not constitute the addition of new supply areas as such. These areas were already integrated into the trade networks. But by increasing the distances traveled traders obtain plumes from closer to primary suppliers or send them further toward the center. Although traders therefore now reduce the number of links in chains leading to each settlement, they also maintain relations with more nearby settlements that traditionally provided or imported plumes. Thus, the Kundagai now deal directly with visiting Simbu plume consumers and middle-Wahgi pig traders but still maintain strong links with the Kauwatyi. Just as Up- and Cross-Jimi people living closer to the center have extended their trading relations to Tsuwenkai and more distant areas, so the Kundagai have extended their relations toward the periphery. Kundagai now visit settlements in the Kaironk and Asai Valleys formerly beyond their range. These contacts have usually been initiated by the Kundagai themselves.

It would appear, therefore, that the initiative to open up new trading networks with more distant communities has come from the direction of the center. As their demand for plumes has increased, or, at the least, their ability to satisfy more easily an already high demand has increased, the initiative to extend trading relations spread to nearby intermediate suppliers and consumers of plumes, in this case, in the upper Jimi. They in turn passed on the initiative to more peripheral suppliers and consumers such as the Kundagai. But as the distance from ultimate consumers increases the motivation or ability to initiate new trading re-

lations diminishes, so that the Kundagai have added few new source areas for their own plume imports. The Kundagai have extended their trade chains toward the periphery over shorter distances than have more centrally located communities in the upper Jimi. For instance, the Kundagai would be capable of journeying to Aiome in the Ramu lowlands within about two days to seek plumes, but to my knowledge they have not done so.

In twelve months during 1973-1974, eleven trading expeditions visited Tsuwenkai. Each party had two or more members, but the two largest only had five. Most expeditions were from eastern-Jimi Maring groups, but there were also two from Simbu and one from Karap. Some parties traveled extensively in the Jimi and Simbai. One group of Simbu flew into Aiome in the Ramu Valley by light aircraft and worked their way through the upper Simbai and Kinenj before reaching Tsuwenkai. They went on to Koinambe where they planned to charter a plane back to Kerowagi. Nearly all traders sought plumes or cassowaries, bringing pigs and money to give in return. Only six of the parties had any trading success in Tsuwenkai. The Kundagai declined to offer any plumes to several of the earlier visitors because they were accumulating them for a dance in Kwima later in the year. Many plumes were offered to the two Karap traders who refused them, saying that they were of inferior quality.

During the same period the Kundagai mounted only two major expeditions. In one, four men took plumes and furs to Koriom. They were absent for six days and returned with pigs, shells, and money. The second expedition, of two men, visited the Kaironk Valley in search of plumes. Many more men visited kinsmen and affines alone in the upper Simbai and lower Jimi to acquire plumes by trade or loan for use in a ceremony in Kwima (which was later indefinitely postponed). Besides these travels primarily organized with trade in mind, a great deal of trade occurred in the context of visits to or from Tsuwenkai focused on other events: ceremonial exchanges, dances, visits to sick kinsmen, and so forth.

In the late 1970s a bridge was completed below Kwima linking the north bank of the Jimi to a dry-weather road through Tabibuga government station to the Wahgi Valley. Middle-Wahgi pig traders were quick to avail themselves of the opportunities to truck large animals into the Maring area. Generally, these traders demand money rather than plumes in exchange for their pigs.

Kundagai trade with regions closer to the periphery has increased in

intensity since the mid-1950s, and greater numbers of plumes have been exported Up- and Cross-Jimi. The effect has been to increase the number of plumes exported toward the center. There appears to have been no appreciable attendant increase in hunting in Kundagai land to supply the increasing flow of plumes (see chap. 3), which has therefore been funded mainly by increasing import from more peripheral communities. Table 34 shows the increased importance of imports of locally procurable species in funding the volume of plumes exported by the Kundagai. Only locally occurring species are listed, since it is only for these that increased imports in addition to local hunting can increase exports. To increase exports of nonlocal species, imports must be increased correspondingly, for growth of stocks by other means, such as gifts, is of only minor importance, although some species are hunted in coastal areas by contract laborers.

Tsuwenkai occupies a favored place in the plume trade in that several highly valued species are abundant in local forests, so that the Kundagai were a significant source of new plumes added to the trade flow, at least until the later 1970s, when hunting declined. This is demonstrated by excess of exports over imports of plumes (i.e., excluding figures for cassowaries): a ratio of 5.1 exports to 1 imported set prior to the mid-1950s, dropping to between 1.5 and 1.6 to 1 after contact. Although of greater incidence from the 1970s, prestations have never been a significant means for the transfer of plumes. Hunting was formerly the major means of sustaining exports of plumes from Tsuwenkai. With an initially steady, then declining, hunting rate since contact, the capacity of the Kundagai to increase the flow of plumes sent toward the central highlands derives largely from expanded imports. In other words, there is a greater flow in trade through rather than from Tsuwenkai (cf. also table 30).

As table 34 shows, in all but two species, imports prior to contact contributed less significantly to the number of exports than since then. Because hunting rates of all species have remained relatively constant till at least 1974, exports per unit of time must have increased in volume and therefore in rate since contact. (The figures in the table suggest this, but export totals for pre- and postcontact are based on different sample sizes of traders, must represent different proportions of unknown total numbers of plumes traded, and refer to different time intervals. Hence, one cannot argue directly from the export figures for an increase in the volume or rate of export since 1956.)

Not only has the volume of imports increased, but the number of

links through which plumes travel is often reduced. For instance, a Lesser Bird of Paradise plume from Waim in the lower Jimi may be transferred to Tsuwenkai and then Kol in only two transactions, whereas in the past four or more exchanges were usually necessary to move the same distance. By reducing the number of transactions to cover a certain distance, the time of the movement is usually reduced also. Fewer men are liable to retain an item for personal use before sending it on. By extending trade chains from each settlement, so reducing the number of links, plumes can be transferred more rapidly along trade chains. Loss through damage or age can therefore be reduced, permitting an increased supply of plumes reaching ultimate consumers.

I have indicated important changes in the catalogue of goods passed over time, with some items, such as greensnail shells and money being added to the trade flow, with others, such as stone axes, abandoned. But even for goods such as pigs and most plumes that have been traded for extended periods of time, their numerical importance as trade items may have varied. Table 35 shows the incidence of trade in particular items for different time periods, expressed as a proportion of all transactions conducted in each period. The table aggregates figures for imports and exports; if these were listed separately the proportions of transactions involving particular items would frequently show considerable variation between imports and exports. For example, pigs were involved in 24.5 percent of all transactions affecting the import of goods before 1956 and 12.3 percent of transactions by which goods were exported. The magnitude of variation between imports and exports of particular goods has been indicated in the previous chapter.

Nearly all of the goods mentioned in trade histories fall into one of the eighteen separate items specified in the table; very few fall into the more general "Other" categories listed.

The incidence of trade involving money must actually have been somewhat higher since postcontact up to 1974, as it was only used in the latter half of this period. The declining incidence of money in trade in the late 1970s was probably more marked than indicated. The reasons for this will be discussed later. What is noteworthy is that money is the most commonly used trade item and is used in just over one-third of all transactions.

Pigs have clearly become more important objects of trade over time, with the late 1970s being a time of particularly heavy pig trade. Shells and steel tools, however, showed a considerable decline in the incidence

of trade, although it is noteworthy that levels of trade in greensnail shell did not slacken appreciably until the 1980s.

The incidence of forest products in trade has diminished, but not dramatically. Assessment of change in the incidence of trade in marsupial skins and fur is hampered by the lack of clearly dated transactions before 1974. Cassowaries have long been traded in small numbers and, discounting the lack of records for 1974-1978, seem to have remained of comparable importance in the overall flow of goods. Plumes have diminished in importance from being involved in almost half of all transactions before contact to just under one-third in the 1980s. The long period of stability from 1956 to the late 1970s is noteworthy, however. The decline in the incidence of plumes in trade was not general. A number of species are of marginally greater significance as trade objects now than they were in the past, notably the highly valued Astrapia and Black Sicklebill. Indeed, the overall decline in the inci-

dence of plumes in trade is attributable to the markedly diminished trade in the two most valuable nonlocal species, the Vulturine Parrot and the Lesser Bird of Paradise. Informants in 1985 remarked that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find traders Up- and Cross-Jimi prepared to accept plumes in trade. This applied particularly to the feathers of the Vulturine Parrot.

The data provided here suggest that changes in the incidence of trade, in particular goods as a proportion of the total flow, have not been particularly sudden or dramatic over the last five or six decades. This, however, gives no indication of changes in the volume or rates or velocities of trade in different goods and periods.

Intensification of Trade

I have indicated that trade intensified around the date of first contact in the Jimi. This intensification took the form of increased rates of trade, both in terms of the average frequency of transactions an individual may conduct and in the volumes of goods transferred. Intensification of trade can therefore be assessed in two ways: by looking at how trading rates of individuals have changed since contact and by looking at changing rates of transfer of particular items of trade. Ideally, analysis should compare rates of trade over a series of equal time periods. Although many of the transactions recorded in Kundagai trade histories could be assigned to five-year intervals, others before 1974 could only be ascribed to the broad categories of before and after effective contact with the colonial government. Approximately 20 percent of all transactions up to 1973 could not even be assigned to these two periods with certainty. Despite these difficulties, a comparison of trading rates by age of traders does suggest an intensification of personal trading rates since the mid-1950s.

Table 36 gives some indication of how annual trading rates vary with age. It is based on the total of trade transactions conducted by the fifty-six men whose trade histories were collected in 1973-1974. The table aggregates traders by five-year age groups into three categories. Few males engage in trade until about fifteen years old, or did so in the past. Some men continue to trade well into old age; the oldest Tsuwenkai male, a frail man of over seventy, was still trading with visitors to the settlement in 1974. Others withdraw from trade as age and ill health sap their energies or as trade partners elsewhere die. Because a man trades less often as he ages, average rates for older age groups will

be biased toward lower overall rates. The figures must therefore be interpreted in the light of differential influences on age groups. Notwithstanding the difficulty of dating many transactions to pre- and post-1956, in general, the older a man is the more opportunity he has had to trade prior to contact and, bearing in mind the effects of age, the less opportunity since then. Men aged under thirty-five (category A in the table) had conducted all their trade since contact, whereas men aged thirty-five to fifty (category B) spent no more than half their trading lives before 1956—the younger men progressively less than this proportion. Only men aged over fifty (category C) spent more than half their trading lives before 1956.

Men who were aged in their early twenties at the time of contact (in the thirty-five to forty age group in table 36) show the highest average

annual trading rates. These men, in their prime at the time of data collection, maintained a high involvement in trade since contact. The most vigorous Tsuwenkai trader, with over 200 transactions to his credit, at an annual rate of 9.4, falls into this group.

Two clear inferences can be drawn from this table. First, the longer a man's trading career extends before contact the lower his overall rate of trade. This indicates that rates of trade have increased since around the date of first contact, a conclusion supported by the opinions of older men who noted that their own trading activities intensified after contact. They explained this by saying that it was only since then that desirable items became available, making trade worthwhile. Prior to contact all that could be obtained in exchange for local products were "worthless" cowries, stone axes, and tasteless native salt. Undoubtedly they are evaluating older trade goods in the light of present views of the superiority of steel, kina, and greensnail. Younger men point out that their fathers obviously did value older goods just as highly as they do contemporary goods now, but that their opportunities for trade were fewer partly because many exotic goods were scarcer, and also because endemic warfare restricted movements.

The second inference is that rates of trade increase up to the age of about forty. Young men are yet to establish relationships with potential partners through their own and their siblings' marriages and through demonstrated competence as traders and producers of trade goods by pig breeding and hunting. There is a sharp disjunction between trading rates up to age fifty and after them. Lower rates in older age groups (category C) are a combination of increasing age (a postcontact effect) and precontact circumstances that inhibited more vigorous trade.

Warfare clearly had a depressant effect on both hunting and travel for trade and other reasons. The occurrence of war among the Maring was regulated to roughly eight- to twelve-year intervals by the ritual cycle that imposed inhibitions on warfare until spirits and allies had been rewarded in konj kaiko ceremonies for their assistance. Even when ritually promulgated truces were in place, major enemies occasionally mounted small raids into one anothers' territories. The risk of such attacks inhibited hunting in more remote stretches of forest, thus depressing the production of valuables for trade. Perhaps more significantly, a traveler was in danger of attack, either from major enemies or from allies of his enemies. Men visiting allies on the same valley flank had to pass surreptitiously through the forested upper or lower regions of enemy territory or make safer but long detours through more

neutral territory. Even if they avoided physical attack they were in danger of mystical harm from spirits inhabiting enemy territory.

The government-imposed peace in the mid-1950s was very quickly accepted throughout the Jimi, with only a few minor exceptions. From the establishment of the permanent government presence in the Jimi with the formation of Tabibuga Patrol Post in 1956, the Maring and others, including upper-Jimi Kuma-speakers, began traveling openly and more widely. Although fear of physical attack seems to have lifted almost immediately, there is still seen to be a lingering if diminished risk of attack from enemy spirits and witches. This, coupled with continuing taboos on eating food grown in enemy territory or cooked over enemy fires, continues to inhibit direct trade with men of enemy populations.

With the data on hand, however, it is not possible to suggest the relative weight of the effects of postcontact aging and precontact hostilities in accounting for lower rates of trade among older men. The figures in table 36, nonetheless, lend broad support to the hypothesis that the government presence stimulated increasing rates of trade in the Jimi-Simbai region.

Rates of trade since 1974 have not intensified further and, indeed, seem to have declined somewhat. In the four years 1974 to 1978 a sample of twenty-four men conducted 223 transactions, or 2.3 per man per year. For the six-and-a-half years between early 1979 and mid-1985, a sample of fifteen men conducted 209 transactions, or 2.1 per man per year. The range of variation in rates by age group is moderate but shows no clear pattern, other than lower rates for older age groups. These post-1974 rates are only marginally higher than the aggregate rate to 1974, but less than rates for traders who in 1974 had spent more than half their trading lives since contact. Since the rates for the period to 1974 are depressed by lower precontact trade, the post-1974 rates may actually reflect a diminishing rate of trade in more recent years. What is noteworthy, however, is that representatives of the middle-age group in 1974 (category B in table 36), who had the highest rates of trade, continued to maintain the highest rates in succeeding periods.

Increasing trade rates and the extension of links to new communities is the work of individuals. It is therefore appropriate to discuss here factors contributing to individuals' variations from the average trading rates maintained by their age groups as a whole.^[4] I confine my discussion to the early 1970s for which my trade data are richest.

The Kundagai refer to a particularly vigorous trader as munggoi rigima yu pok wok lendo yu , "valuables exchange man he-goes he-comes makes-thus man," or more briefly as munggoi rigima lendo yu or munggoi rigima yu . In other contexts the last term can mean a formal trade partner or friend, or simply a trader whether or not he has a formalized relationship with another. Informants identified five or six vigorous traders in Tsuwenkai, though they omitted another man aged about thirty who has conducted many more transactions than the average for his age group. Since no one keeps records of their transactions, there is no easy way of comparing performance in trade. Nonetheless, some men make proud public statements about their long trading experience and are accordingly labeled as "vigorous traders" by others, but there is no particular status attached to trading ability itself.

A man who seldom trades may be labeled rukunemp yu munggoi namp lendo yu , "nothing/rubbish man valuables he-does-not makes-thus man," or more simply as munggoi namp lendo yu or rukunemp yu . Informants declined to identify such persons in Tsuwenkai, even though one or two men are outstanding in their almost total lack of involvement in trade.

Both the most active and least active traders in all age groups over twenty years are in some ways atypical of their peers. The twelve Tsuwenkai big-men fall into all age groups from thirty-five to seventy-five. The two tep yu ("Talk men") are the sole representatives of the forty-five to fifty and seventy to seventy-five year age groups, and both are considered to be vigorous traders by themselves and others (see table 36).

Mengr yu ("Shell Men") fall into age groups between fifty and sixty-five years. Of the five mengr yu who are not also other types of big-men four have conducted more transactions than the average for their age groups. This is consistent with such big-men achieving their status through energy and strength. Similar qualifies are required by the trader if he is to hunt to fund his trading activities and journey to other settlements in search of trade.

The last category of big-men, bamp kunda yu ("Fight Magic Men"), fall into the thirty-five to forty, forty to forty-five, sixty to sixty-five, and sixty-five to seventy year age groups. Only two men in the last two groups have participated significantly in ritual and sorcery associated with warfare. The oldest bamp kunda yu is the only member of his age group and has an annual trading rate below the average of all age groups combined. The remaining three men have conducted fewer

transactions than the average for their age group. One, aged forty to forty-five, accounts for his own lack of trade by frequent illness and the fact that one of his most valuable trading partners in Nembena-kump died many years ago so that he has lost contact with plume providers Up-Simbai.

There appears, then, to be a tendency for big-men who achieve status by virtue of physical strength and political acumen to engage in more trade than fellow age-group members. There is no such tendency for big-men accorded status because of ritual and magical knowledge. Indeed, it seems that they may be less likely to engage in trade. I am not aware of any personal taboos assumed by bamp kunda yu that might inhibit them from trading. Perhaps such men are more otherworldly than most.

All those considered to be big-men before the cessation of warfare were classed as mengr yu and were especially marked by the enemy for killing. Several big-men explained that this added threat to their lives inhibited them from traveling widely prior to contact and consequently that they had less opportunity to trade.

The most active traders in their age groups are all men renowned for their physical energy. Those who remain bachelors longer than their age mates seem to be particularly vigorous traders (though in all but one case, they are yet too young to have earned themselves the description of munggoi rigima lendo yu ). The most active of all Tsuwenkai traders, with 211 remembered transactions to his credit (aged thirty-five to forty) remained a bachelor well into his thirties.

In age groups below about thirty years the least-active traders tend to be those who have spent long periods away from home: at school, or working for the mission, or on repeated periods of contract labor on coastal plantations. Such absences are both a product and consequence of acculturation and disenchantment with traditional life, a point that some made themselves.

Over the age of about thirty, less-active traders attributed the brevity of their trade histories to recurrent ill health or the pressure of local government duties for office-bearers. In addition, one man aged about thirty to thirty-five is considered to be a yu plim , "madman," and is not trusted to conduct trade competently. Another middle-aged man is widely feared as a witch, and it is probably for this reason that few people wish to trade with him.

Trading rates vary not only according to a man's health and energy but also in relation to social activities. In times of hostilities trading was

less frequent, as the Kundagai themselves state, because of fear of ambush by enemy raiders. As ceremonies approach, trade increases as dancers acquire decorations that they can later dispose of in trade. Much of the trade that occurred during fieldwork was undoubtedly stimulated by my presence as a source of cash, but also by a desire to acquire plumes for ceremonies. A major ritual and dance in connection with preparations for the Tugumenga konj kaiko was planned for 1974. Before the occasion was postponed many Kundagai acquired plumes by gift, loan, and trade.

Ceremonies now occur more frequently than in the recent past. Although what will probably be the last of the Maring konj kaiko is in preparation in the 1980s, these prolonged ritual cycles and attendant dances are being replaced by pati (TP and Maring for "party") organized by several men, where people gather to dance and buy cooked pork specially prepared by sponsors. Dances at Christmas hosted by the mission and government, and to celebrate the opening of community buildings or roads, add to the occasions for which plumes are required. Immediately preceding and following a major dance, trade increases as men acquire and dispose of plumes. The added number of occasions for dances has therefore increased the rate of flow of plumes directed toward ultimate plume consumers, and of exchange goods toward primary plume suppliers.

Increasing rates of trade by age groups, together with greater contact with more distant people, should have resulted in the more rapid movement of forest products toward central-highlands consumers, and a more rapid movement of steel tools, shells, and pigs in the reverse direction.

Intensification of trade is more dearly evident if the focus of analysis is on objects, rather than the agents of trade; that is, where one considers the velocity of goods in passage or the number of times they move in a unit of time. Table 37 compares the velocity of trade for different periods expressed as the mean number of transactions per year in which selected major goods were traded. The table shows a weighted index of trading velocities for different periods in an attempt to provide a standardized measurement. This is necessary since the time periods compared are of unequal duration (see the note to the table), as are the number of active traders in each period.

The number of transactions listed in the table involving exotic and forest goods should be equal. They are not for two reasons. First, a very few transactions involve reciprocal movements of exotic goods or for-

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

est products. For example, I have a few records of pigs exchanged for shells, or axes for shells. Second, and more importantly, a variety of less commonly traded objects, and all transactions involving money, have been excluded.

The table confirms the inference drawn from table 36: that the colonial period saw an intensification of trading activities but that this increase in rates of trade was not sustained into recent times in all categories of goods. Furthermore, increases in the velocity of turnover of items has not been uniform across the range of goods, nor have factors of change in velocities of imports and exports been equal for the same item. These variations require some explanation.

Bird plumes are the most important trade good over time, in terms of the number of transactions in which they are involved and therefore in terms of annual trading rates. Pigs, moving almost exclusively in the reverse direction, are next in importance. These are the only two goods that have been imported into the 1980s at annual velocities in excess of precontact rates and that show only a marginally lower rate of export.

Imports of plumes have increased by larger factors than exports, confirming the conclusion that increasing rates of export of plumes since contact were achieved by greater imports rather than local hunting (chaps. 3 and 5).

Factors of increase in the rates of import and export of pigs were about equal in the period 1956-1974 at about five times the precontact rates. Since then, rates of export have fallen below rates of import. In the 1980s the rate of pig exports fell marginally below precontact rates, indicating greater accumulation of pigs within Tsuwenkai in this period.

The most dramatic variations in rates of trade are found in respect to shells and steel tools. The passage of steel tools through Tsuwenkai shows only a small factor of increase in annual rates of trade to 1974 but a considerable decline below precontact levels thereafter, especially for imports.

Imports of shells increased threefold and exports by almost twofold to 1974. Up to this date less shells were exported from Tsuwenkai, at diminished annual rates, than were imported. This indicates local accumulation or redistribution by means other than trade, as has been argued in preceding chapters. Although this was clearly the case for steel tools in the same period, differences between annual rates of import and export to 1974 are greater for shells, suggesting that they were involved in a much greater diversion from passage in trade. Since 1974

annual rates of import and export of shells have fallen below pre-1956 rates. But the greater rates of export indicate dispersion of shell stocks accumulated in trade in previous years.

Changing rates of trade involving money must now be considered. Although money has recently emerged as the item most commonly involved in trade (table 35), the actual annual rate of transactions involving money has declined appreciably. In the period from 1966 (when money was first used in trade) to 1974, money passed in trade at the rate of 76.1 transactions per annum. In 1974-1978 the rate dropped to 17.3, and rose slightly to 22.3 transactions per year in 1979-1985. Annual rates of export of money have always exceeded rates of import, but by a greater margin in recent times: in 1966-1974 imports of money ran at 30.5 transactions per annum against export rates of 45.6 transactions. In 1979-1985 the annual rates of trade had declined to 6.6 imports to 15.7 exports. Although the rate of trade involving money has declined considerably, I have already shown in chapter 5 that the patterns of cash flow changed markedly, while the average amount passed in each transaction also increased considerably, especially where money was exported from Tsuwenkai. Notwithstanding the decreasing rate of trade in money, the actual amounts of cash being drained out of village stocks had actually risen very considerably.

The overall picture of changes in trading rates is one of a roughly threefold increase since contact up to the mid-1970s across the range of items traded (sec. C of table 37). Thereafter there has been a general decline in annual trading rates to levels marginally below precontact levels. The continuing levels of intensified rates of trade in pigs and most forest products offset considerable declines in trade in shells and steel tools. Nonetheless, a return to a regime of annual trading rates on balance not much different from precontact rates should not be taken to mean that in the longer timeframe little has changed. In fact, there have been profound alterations in the place of the Kundagai in the wider complex of trading relations that connect them to the central highlands. These have involved increasingly dependent relations on the central highlands compounded by a massive drain of cash reserves in trade.

The Peripheralization of the Kundagai

The patterns of trade that emerged in the 1930s and persist to the present were founded upon the complementarity and mutual depen-

dence of centrally located plume consumers and peripherally dispersed plume suppliers. In the Jimi-Simbai region these peripheral communities were also consumers of shells, steel tools, and pigs which were withdrawn from the trade flow for redeployment in prestations. At the other end of trade webs, plumes and other forest products were similarly withdrawn from trade for use in decorations on ceremonial occasions and as objects of various prestations, notably bridewealth.

From the time of the first exploratory patrols into the central highlands in 1933, Europeans introduced ever-increasing volumes of shells into local economies, in exchange for produce, labor, and land (Hughes 1978; Leahy, in press). These shells included small cowries, dogwhelks, cut and uncut pearlshells (kina), besides lesser quantifies of others, such as bailer shells and greensnail—the latter seemingly never greatly favored by central highlanders. In the first two decades after contact the Sinasina Simbu accumulated large stocks of shells, especially kina. As elsewhere in the highlands, abundant supplies of shells led to inflation in prestations (Hide 1981:115 ff.; cf. Strathern 1971). From the early 1960s, however, the use of shells in Sinasina prestations diminished, and by the early 1970s Hide found shells largely absent from prestations and valuables stores (Hide 1981). Further westward, shells persisted in Simbu transactions, with the Naregu Simbu including up to thirty in kina in bridewealth into the late 1960s (Brown 1972: 91). Westward again, Heaney's (1982) data on Kuma bridewealth indicate the continuing use of kina until the late 1960s with a sharp decline thereafter. These Simbu and Kuma data suggest that large supplies of shells were available in the central highlands until at least the late 1960s. The rapid decline in the inclusion of shells in prestations indicates that large quantifies of shells were available for deployment beyond the more limited geographic range of affinal and matrilateral ties. The use of steel tools in Sinasina and Kuma bridewealth payments follows a similar though less dramatic pattern to shells (Hide 1981:131 ff.; Heaney 1982: 228).

The Jimi and other peripheral regions, already connected to the central highlands by trading networks, became the destination of excess stocks of shells and steel. Central highlanders offloaded devalued shells in exchange for forest products.

Bird plumes have long been important components of Simbu and Kuma prestations, especially bridewealth (Brown 1972; Hide 1981; Heaney 1982; Reay 1959). Significant changes in the kinds and quantities of plumes occurred in the first decades after contact. In both the

Simbu and middle-Wahgi area the Raggiana Bird of Paradise had initially been favored. This species was locally available in fallow growth, including casuarina thickets about homesteads. It was also traded in from more heavily forested areas to the south (Healey 1980). Subsequently, the long, black tailfeathers of Princess Stephanie's Astrapia and of the Black and Brown Sicklebills became most favored. These are birds of the mid- to high-altitude forest. The small patches of relict forest in the Simbu and Kuma heartland were unable to satisfy the increasing demand for plumes. Consequently trading for plumes with more heavily forested peripheral areas, including the Jimi and Simbai, intensified. The change from locally available red plumes to exotic black plumes occurred in the 1950s among the Kuma (Heaney 1982) and the mid-1960s among the Sinasina (Hide 1981). The accumulation of black plumes occurred in a context of the increasing cash wealth of the Wahgi relative to more peripheral areas. Up to the mid-1970s the number of Astrapia skins increased at almost the same rate as increases in the cash component of Kuma bridewealth (Heaney 1982: 230). The display and exchange of Astrapia plumes thus signaled superior access to and control of cash that central-Wahgi people enjoyed.

Importantly, the growing stress on exotic plumes in the central highlands overlaps the period of accumulation of shells in the Jimi. Furthermore, the replacement of red by black plumes progressed from west to east, whereas the earlier growth of shells and steel stocks and their subsequent decline progressed from east to west. The Jimi emerged as a significant source of black plumes, besides others, and a destination of shells and steel.

Needless to say, not all black plumes were necessarily acquired in exchange for shells and steel; indeed many were exchanged for pigs and more recently money, with shells and steel being given for less valuable plumes. The great variety of plumes and other valuables of comparable exchange values allowed considerable scope for substitution of other goods in different sectors of the trade network and at different times.

The importance of black plumes in the central highlands, however, has its limits. Heaney (1982: 230) remarks that from about 1975 Astrapia plumes were no longer demanded in bridewealth by Wahgi people. Marie Reay (pers. comm.) has kindly provided the following information on Kuma plume use that augments Heaney's material. The change from red to black plumes was sudden and almost complete, although Vulturine Parrot feathers remained important. (Parenthetically, I would suggest that the continuing popularity of this bird lies in its

combining both favored colors. Further, as a lowland and hill-forest bird it is entirely an exotic import, unlike long black-tailed birds of paradise, which could be hunted by at least some Kuma. More than any other favored species, then, Vulturine Parrot feathers were a signal of command over wealth in trade goods, including cash, necessary for their acquisition.) By the mid-1980s Kuma plume use had fallen off considerably. Reay attributes this to a number of factors. First, everyone now has suitcases in which plumes are carefully stored. This has reduced wastage. Second, the number of plumes used in bridewealth has been much reduced. Previously, bridewealth presentations included large plaques mounted on poles, covered with money and other valuables. Numerous plumes were attached around the edges of the plaques. Recently, the Kuma have adopted the Simbu practice of "money trees"—tall bamboo poles to which money is attached. These leave no space for plumes. The only feathers included in bridewealth are the dozen or so black-tailed plumes used to decorate the bride. Finally, fundamentalist missions have had a wide influence in suppressing pig festivals. They have done this by branding them as satanic and also by persuading people to keep fewer pigs so that they do not have the capacity to hold a festival. Consequently festivals and accompanying performances by massed decorated dancers are much less frequent. The impact of these three factors has been to greatly reduce the occasions on which plumes are required and thus the number of fresh plumes needed. These changes in central-highlands circumstances help account for the greatly diminished interest in plumes by central-highlands traders visiting the Jimi in the 1980s.

As the number of plumes included in Simbu and Kuma prestations increased, so did quantities of shells and steel in Maring prestations. Inflation and changes in the composition of prestations among the Simbu, Kuma, and Maring were complementary. Around the time that shells and steel were dropping out of favor in the central highlands, they became increasingly important in Maring prestations. There have, however, been limits to the supply of these goods, beyond the control of the Maring, for as plumes became finally eclipsed by cash as bridewealth components among the Kuma, so use of shells and steel declined in Maring prestations.

When European explorers first penetrated the central highlands in 1933 they found shells to be scarce and of poor quality. They immediately saw the possibility of gaining allies and purchasing labor, food, and other services cheaply in exchange for shells. One of the re-

current problems of Jim Leahy's first exploratory patrol through the Simbu Valley to Mount Hagen was maintaining adequate supplies of shells from the coast (Leahy, in press). The practice of using shells rather than money was continued by the growing European population of colonial officials, missionaries, planters, and adventurers. As local economies were flooded with shells, the Simbu, Kuma, Melpa, and others were able to convert them, via trade, into valuable plumes that replaced devalued shells in prestations. Central highlanders were thus able to take advantage of the locally falling value of shells as objects of prestation by passing them on in trade to such areas as the Jimi, where they retained high local value. The history of early contact in the highlands consolidated the Jimi-central highlands trade networks to the perceived advantage of transactors in both areas. The Jimi and Simbai remained unvisited by Europeans, beyond a few brief forays, and totally uncontrolled for two decades after the rapid penetration of the Simbu and Wahgi Valleys. By the time colonial authority was extended to the Jimi the practice of distributing shells had been largely discontinued. This was primarily because of difficulties in maintaining high levels of supply after changes in the pearling industry, the main source of shells for distribution in the highlands (Hughes 1978). From the 1950s the supply of shells reaching the highlands was thus reduced to a trickle. Instead of paying for labor and produce in shells, Europeans working in the Jimi in the 1950s and early 1960s used salt as well as minor valuables such as beads. European contact did very little to alter the relative impoverishment of the Jimi in shells. Jimi people thus became structurally dependent upon their wealthier, centrally located neighbors for goods that had already become critical components of prestations.

With devaluation of shells in central-highlands exchange there was little incentive to retain large numbers, which were increasingly passed north to the Jimi in return for plumes. It would seem that by the late 1970s supplies of shells in the Jimi were no longer being augmented sufficiently by imports from the central highlands. This was reflected in the rather rapidly declining numbers passed in prestations. By the late 1970s shells and steel were being replaced by money in eastern-Jimi Maring prestations (Neil Maclean, pers. comm.), and by the early 1980s among the western Maring. According to my Kundagai informants, shells simply became hard to acquire in either trade or prestations.

By virtue of its earlier colonization, its large populations, benign cli-

mate, and extensive areas of relatively gentle terrain, the central highlands experienced economic development programs at an earlier stage than peripheral regions such as the Jimi. In particular, the introduction of the Highland Labour Scheme and of smallholder coffee growing led to the accumulation of new forms of wealth and increasing differentials in access to valuable resources between the central and fringing highlands. Some of this wealth was used in trade with the Jimi, especially as money from the mid-1960s. This signaled yet greater demand for forest products. As we have seen, however, the flow of money was by no means one way, and as the cash supply in the Jimi improved the amount of money channeled toward the central highlands in trade grew considerably.

The principle sources of cash for Jimi people have long been labor migration and coffee production. Recently, alluvial gold works have shown some promising returns. Both coffee production and labor migration began in the mid-1960s. Wage labor is the major source of cash inflow to Tsuwenkai. There are relatively few opportunities for employment within the valley, although by 1985 a few young men with secondary school or vocational education held clerical and service jobs with the mission. Most younger men have spent at least one two-year work contract on a coastal plantation. This work remains highly desirable among most Kundagai, even after the abolition (in the early 1970s) of the Highland Labour Scheme, which ensured basic subsistence, a savings plan, and repatriation at the expiration of the contract. Besides the increased basic rural wage a big attraction of such work, especially for young unmarried men, is the opportunity to savor new experiences and escape the dull round of village life. Older men often seek to accumulate money for a bridewealth payment or to establish a trade store. The amount of cash brought home has always been variable. To 1974 the average amount brought home at the termination of eleven contracts was K93 (range: K44 to K196). In 1978 men were bringing home K300 to K800, and in 1985 up to K3,000, but it was also not uncommon for men to return with nothing at all. These savings are usually quickly redistributed in Tsuwenkai and beyond in small gifts to kinsmen, in major prestations, the purchase of trade and luxury goods, and in gambling.

Coffee is the only source of outside cash available to most residents. Nearly all men have at least one small coffee grove planted in an abandoned garden or homestead site. Coffee was first planted in the early 1960s from seedlings obtained by trade and gift from Up-Jimi kinsmen.

Planting was not widespread until a decade later, but most plots suffer from inadequate care. Some indication of minor involvement in cash cropping is suggested by the annual income from sale of parchment coffee. Up to 1974 annual income averaged from K6 to K7 per grower. In 1978 the average income had risen to K30 per annum as later plantings came into production and the crisis in the Brazilian coffee industry pushed up prices. By 1985 the mean income per grower had slumped to K12 per annum.^[5] This fall in earnings was largely due to most men's disenchantment with the productivity of coffee. Many men complained of fluctuating but generally low prices given by dealers in Tabibuga and itinerant coffee buyers at the roadhead near Kwima. They remarked that the tedium of hand processing small batches of coffee berries and carrying heavy bags over arduous foottrails were considerable disincentives to production. Nonetheless, men generally allowed their wives to pick and dry coffee and sell the beans. Any earnings were regarded as the property of the women, who generally spent it on clothing or luxury foods, such as rice and tinned meat or fish.

The only other local venture of any significance for the inflow of cash from beyond the community is alluvial gold works. A single team of goldworkers operated in Tsuwenkai for most of the 1970s, but with very little success. In 1981, with assistance from the mission, several other teams were formed, under the direction of a registered bosboi who purchased a prospector's license and insurance coverage for his workers. Teams vary in size from two to six men. Goldworking is an intermittent enterprise, partly because of the difficulties of organizing cooperative labor on an extended basis. By 1985 few teams had earned more than about K2,000, and much of that had been redistributed in gifts and major prestations. When I enquired why teams did not devote more time to goldworking or why more teams were not formed, men stressed the backbreaking labor involved in heaving heavy boulders and shoveling gravel. The technology of goldworking is simple: a few shovels, pans, homemade sluice boxes, poles for levers, and swimming goggles to aid searching streambeds. A saleable quantity of small grains of gold is won at an enormous cost of time and labor. The perceived sheer intensity of labor involved dissuades many men from serious involvement in gold works.

The occasional sale of butchered and cooked pig to fellow residents in konj maket (pig markets) is an important means of redistributing money, mainly within the settlement. No one breeds pigs with the express aim of butchering them for sale, but of the sixty-six pigs killed in

Tsuwenkai in 1973-1974 part or all of twenty were cooked and sold by fourteen men. Only eleven of these pigs had been killed specially for sale, most of the rest had been killed for raiding gardens. Each pig brought an average of K18 (range K6 for only a portion of the carcass to K32 for a whole medium-sized pig). Undoubtedly such pork markets were encouraged by my own presence as purchaser and source of money for other buyers. The potential for konj maket to be exploited systematically by individuals as a source of cash is severely limited by the relatively low fertility of local pigs and the need to reserve stock for prestations.

When I entered the field in 1973 there were no trade stores in Tsuwenkai, although two were established within a few months. A year later five stores had been built and another was being planned. Four of these stores were in operation periodically, though their stocks usually ran out within a few days. Supplies of tinned meat and fish, rice, soap, biscuits, tobacco, and paper were bought from the Koinambe mission store and others in Tabibuga and Simbai Patrol Post. Stocks were carried by shareholders in the stores and their female kin, and sometimes by male relatives. Carriers who were not also shareholders were repaid with a small feast given by two of the store-holding groups. Each store was established by cash contributions of from three to six men, either close affines or cognates sharing a man's house. Only one store purchased a license to operate, shareholders for other stores preferring to have a trial period of operation before investing in a license. No store-holders kept written records. Only one store, established early in 1974, made a profit in the first months of operation: its major organizer claimed a profit of only K15.70 in five months. Partners in this store had already bought the roofing iron required under Council by-law, and their only outstanding expense was K6 for a license. Other stores were working at a loss or their operators' mental accounting was confused.

Four of the original five stores survived through to late 1978 and two until 1985, mainly by going into long periods of inactivity. They all had checkered fortunes, as shareholders withdrew their contributions in the course of personal disputes or when in need of money, or when principal shareholders and custodians of the till lost store money in gambling games. Customers chose which store to patronize in terms of convenient location and the range and price of the merchandise. One of the reasons several stores can survive in a small community is that

they are actually in operation for only brief periods, which seldom coincide with cycles of other stores, and hence are not in direct competition for customers.

In the late 1970s many Tsuwenkai residents contributed to the establishment of a joint coffee-buying and trade-store enterprise run by a Kinimbong Kundagai big-man. The store provided the largest selection of wares in the vicinity, trucking supplies in from Simbai Patrol Post. Tsuwenkai Kundagai were proud of their association with this store, which was more a symbol of Tsuwenkai and Kinimbong solidarity than a source of income; no one received any return for their initial contribution to the establishment of the store. Within a few years the venture failed, allegedly with outstanding debts to contributors of tens of thousands of Kina.

It is hard to assess levels of income and expenditure in the present context. Although it is fairly easy to collect data on wages and income from the sale of cash crops and other commodities, there are also large and significant flows of cash in prestations and gambling. The first redistributes cash in a structured form within and beyond the settlement, the latter in an essentially erratic if, in the long run, balanced manner. The card game laki has gained a growing following, especially among younger men who are the principal medium for the introduction of wealth into the Jimi from wage labor. Since most serious gambling for high stakes is confined to sessions between members of different settlements, gambling is an important means of effecting a nondirectional or random redistribution of money between local groups.^[6] Although large sums of money may be transferred in prestations or gambling, the amounts received by individuals tend to be relatively small.

The data on sources of cash indicate that individual cash incomes are generally low and erratic. Expenditure, however, is also low. For a modest outlay the Kundagai man is able to clothe himself and his family, provide them with occasional treats of tinned meat, fish, and rice, and purchase basic kitchen utensils. Even in 1985, nonetheless, the Kundagai had not become structurally dependent on manufactured items for survival, beyond axes and knives. Self-sufficiency was still the hallmark of the subsistence economy. Such things as kerosene lamps, blankets, and radios, considered essential basic equipment in many other parts of Papua New Guinea, were highly desirable but not owned by every household. By 1985 clothing was about the only commodity that was deemed essential and had to be purchased, although small

children still went naked and some older people still dressed entirely in traditional styles. In terms of everyday survival, then, there was limited demand for money. Nonetheless, store-bought food became increasingly appropriate for certain ceremonial feasts, such as funeral celebrations. More significantly, money has become a mandatory component of most prestations and is needed to pay Council head-tax.

Although individuals may gain periodic large sums of money through wage labor, prestations, or other sources, there are, as yet, no permanently wealthy individuals in Tsuwenkai. The inevitability of economic inequality in rural communities of the Third World which Polly Hill (1986) claims as virtually a universal phenomenon has not emerged as a principle dividing Tsuwenkai into rich and poor sectors. Obligations to redistribute prestations received, to contribute to others, as well as purchases at local trade stores and gambling losses all serve to reduce an individual's savings and ensure a constant circulation of cash.

Since 1974 trade has increasingly become a context in which Kundagai cash earnings by other means are continually dissipated, so preventing the accumulation of money. The growing use of money in trade has contributed to the maintenance of the Jimi as a relatively peripheral, underdeveloped region compared to the central highlands. Until the early 1970s money flowed in roughly equal amounts in either direction. Since then most money has passed toward the central highlands, often directly to Kuma visitors, with cash inflow via trade falling far short of outflow. Inflation in the number of pigs in Maring prestations, coupled with a rise in their rates of exchange in trade (see chap. 7) has transformed central highlands-Jimi trade relations from an earlier complementarity to the dependence of the periphery on the center for access to critical resources necessary for the maintenance of social relations locally. Jimi people depended upon central highlanders for exotic valubles and more recently for supplies of pigs above the capacity of local levels of production. Although central highlanders acquired forest products from the Jimi, they were not reciprocally dependent on the Jimi for such goods since they could seek them out elsewhere on the highland fringe.

In the 1980s this growing dependence of the Jimi on a local center has become further consolidated with the decline of the trade in bird plumes. In 1985 the Kundagai remarked that it was increasingly difficult to find exchange partners Up- or Cross-Jimi who were prepared to accept plumes in trade. It was becoming common for traders from the

upper Jimi and the Wahgi to demand only money in exchange for the pigs they brought. Given their continuing high demand for pigs to fund inflated prestations, the Kundagai express little option but to acquiesce to these demands for cash. The effect, however, is to drain the Jimi of its slender cash reserves, foster the accumulation of greater wealth in the central highlands, and thus contribute to the widening gap in the command of strategic resources between the central highlands and an underdeveloped periphery.

As a consequence of historical circumstances, compounded by geographic isolation that hampers local development projects, the Jimi has emerged as a region that central highlanders can exploit as a source of cash. This exploitation has occurred in the context of long-established traditional exchange systems. Relative to the Jimi the central highlands have enjoyed a long period of economic development of cash cropping and various entrepreneurial ventures, serviced by a more highly developed administrative and commercial infrastructure. Despite limitations on further development and the peasantization of the central highlands (cf. Howlett 1973), the region nonetheless appropriates surplus product, in the form of money, from the Jimi. The decline of trade in forest products and exotic shells and steel has resulted in a much simplified flow of goods. At the time of the greatest development of trade, a considerable variety of goods passed in both dominant directions. This allowed traders the opportunity to substitute a range of different goods of equivalent value. Further, given that forest goods gave a dominant structure to the trade networks and that production by hunting was under the ultimate control of individuals, Jimi traders were cushioned against exploitative extraction of surplus production.^[7] By the mid-1980s, the contraction of trade to focus on the exchange of pigs for inflated sums of money meant that Kundagai traders, needing pigs to use in prestations to maintain or extend social relations, were forced to engage in cash-earning activities. They were already engaged in such activities to fund prestations and purchase desirable manufactured items, but this added burden on cash reserves involved increasing engagement in production geared to the national and international capitalist economy. The Kundagai secured their precarious position in an expanded political-economic universe primarily as petty producers of low-grade coffee and as unskilled plantation labor. Engagement in the "modern" cash sector of the national capitalist economy became a necessary precondition for maintenance of traditionally oriented trad-

ing networks, and those networks themselves a precondition for the maintenance of the traditional social order through the practice of prestations.

Conclusion

The trading network within which the Kundagai are enmeshed has become significantly transformed with the intrusion of the cash economy. Signs of collapse in the traditional organization of trade have, nonetheless, taken several decades to appear. Against the present decline, therefore, must be set a period of the vigorous persistence of a precapitalist trading network, and it is to this period that I turn my attention now.

The resilience, even expansion, of much New Guinea inland trade, as exemplified by the area under discussion, is in marked contrast to the fate of indigenous, precolonial trade in many parts of the world. In much of Africa, for example, a money economy weakened traditional, nonmonetized systems of exchange to the point of their collapse (see e.g., Bohannan 1959 on the Tiv; cf. Godelier 1972: 45). In providing a general medium of exchange, money brings distinct modes of exchange into connection: sumptuary or gift objects become commodities, available for purchase by those who have money, instead of for acquisition by those holding the appropriate social status. Money, therefore, may do more than threaten traditional trading systems; it may subvert the whole social and political organization, as many ethnographies have attested.

I would suggest that the trade networks dealt with here, and others in New Guinea, resisted such degenerative processes because money, like other exotic goods (mainly shells and steel), was incorporated into exchange catalogues not as a currency but as a valuable. Thus money maintains the same essential characteristics as any other valuable and may be passed along with other objects, or against them, without revealing a "price," or universal expression of value, an issue dealt with in the next chapter. As will become evident in the next two chapters, trade is not a means of generating and accumulating profit. It is, on the one hand, a means of acquiring goods for redeployment in prestations of social reproduction and, on the other hand, a powerful force in the integration of the individual into an expanded social order. Further, as I have argued elsewhere (Healey 1985a ), prestations themselves are patterned on equivalence rather than competitive or incremental princi-

ples. There is therefore an absence of expansionary pressure on prestations which might be sustained by the proliferation of "financial" strategies (Strathern 1969) of diversifying and expanding prestations. To the extent that wealth passed in prestations tends to become dispersed generally rather than concentrated in the hands of wealthy big-men, the development of competitive exchange is further inhibited. In turn, given the functional connection between the passage of goods in prestations and trade, there is also limited effective strain toward the intensification of production and trade.

In this context the currency potential of money is not realized in trade because there is no tendency in this direction. Trade did not become monetized because it was not a means of accumulating profit, so that the special capacity of money-as-currency to act as a store of value was denied. As a consequence, the essentially traditional organization of trade as a means of social integration and the acquisition of valuables to sustain prestations remained intact. This organization was, in fact, consolidated by the transformation of earlier patterns of trade following the introduction of new forms and sources of wealth, assimilated into existing schemes of valuables, and by the extension of colonial authority into the highlands. Notably in this regard, wage labor and other forms of outside income became incorporated into local processes of social reproduction. The cash accumulated by these pursuits is ultimately the basis of the major inflow of pigs to Tsuwenkai. Aside from the dissipation of cash in the purchase of petty consumer goods at stores, the great bulk of cash income is rapidly transformed in Maring praxis from a currency into a valuable through deployment in prestations, or by conversions in trade into pigs which in turn are passed in prestations. In this scheme, local markets and gambling serve a redistributive function (among others) rather than being symptomatic of a supposed increasing commercialization of social relations.^[8] In the process of turning money directly or indirectly to account in prestations as a valuable, Maring cultural classifications of money dominate over those prevailing in the wider monetary economy, thereby inhibiting the disintegrative, transformative impact of the encapsulating political-economic order.

A further conclusion follows from this argument: that it would be wrong to regard hunting for trade as "petty commodity production" and to analyze the peripheral place of Kundagai trade in a capitalist mode of production. Certainly the Kundagai are petty producers of low-grade coffee and constitute a pool of cheap unskilled labor periph-

erally connected to the national and world economy. However, although I have argued that production of forest goods for trade has implications for the flow of cash by means other than trade (by cushioning the Kundagai against added pressure on their limited cash reserves), the point is that even though trade and prestations use money, these two modes of exchange are separate or disconnected from the externally oriented commercial transactions in which the Kundagai are caught up. Trade may therefore proceed independently of the penetration of modern capitalism, as long as money is not used as a currency in that sphere (cf. Healey 1985a ).

As the preceding pages have indicated, however, there are limits to the resilience of trade to transformative pressures. Through the decline in acceptability of plumes in exchange for pigs, the Kundagai have had to employ money in a greater proportion of all transactions. In many. instances their trading partners have ceased using money in indivisible quantities and have bargained vigorously over the exchange value of goods. The trade in pigs has thus become monetized. Nonetheless, to the extent that the Kundagai still produce plumes for trade and endeavor to exchange forest products for pigs, there is evidence for continuing resistance to the further monetization of trade and the threats it poses to the viability of exchange relations.