7
Time as Value
Taking the Bull by the Horns

The daily timepiece is the cattle clock, the round of pastoral tasks, and the time of day and the passage of time through a day are to a Nuer primarily the succession of these tasks and their relations to one another.
Edward Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer

If you want to see my life, the lives of my ancestors, the things that they did, look at the row of horns in front of my house. The greatness of the past can be measured there, the size of our feasts and spread of our name.
A Kodi comment

The visitor to any of the great feasting houses in Kodi is immediately confronted with buffalo horns on display. Climbing from the ground level to the first bamboo veranda, the horns serve as steps to the inner sanctum of the cult house. From the open doorway, a "ladder" of horns is visible, stacked vertically along the main house pillar up to the roof. Other horns hang from the ceiling beams in the large interior area used to receive guests and perform divinations, or serve as hooks on which to hang baskets and cloth. The small rafters under the thatched roof have rows of pig's jaws, each one marked by the curl of tusks from a sacrificed animal.

As the visitor is seated and served with betel and glasses of tea or coffee, she may ask the history of these horns and tusks. The host will proudly detail the Origin of each group as his guest admires them: "These horns on the pillar are from a feast we held three years ago, which five hundred people attended. Twenty buffalo were killed, four of them from this house, as well as fifteen pigs. The ones higher up were from the funeral of Wora Rehi, an important man in Bondo Kodi who died fifteen years ago. His mother was from this village, so we claimed the buffalo heads. The tusks hanging near the sacred corner are from the feast held to consecrate this house when it was rebuilt eight years ago."

Each sacrificial event is marked by preserving a remnant of the animal killed. The buffalo horns and pig's tusks are hung in the same part of the house where human scalps were once displayed, the skulls having been hung to dry on the skull tree. The horns and tusks are not mere aids to

memory, ways of "visualizing history" so that it will be retained by the descendants of these ancestors. Nor are they simple trophies, ways of "counting coup" in a competitive game of sacrifice. Their significance in the sacrificial economy is more precise: they show the temporalization of exchange value. The worth of animals in the sacrificial economy is reckoned in relation to their age , the time spent raising them, and the "biographical" investment made by their owner. The horns represent a part of his own life, given an enduring material form and guarded as a family heirloom for generations to come.

The Kodinese give us clues to this process when they say that "the name of a man rides on the horns of his buffalo" or "his reputation is tied to the horn span." Although they recognize the connection between a man's biography and his store of horns, they cannot articulate the full system of rules and strategies that lead them to make these statements. This system emerges only in contrast to the very different assumptions that underlie the market economy, cash transactions, and standards of value, which tie time to money and not to value.

Horns, Tusks, and Value

In the last chapter, we saw that horn length is used to evaluate the age and worth of a buffalo offered for sacrifice at a feast. This worth, however, seemed disproportionate, both to the amount of meat on the animal and to the number of other young animals offered in exchange. The logic of "horn counting" must be explained in greater detail, for in fact it does represent a relatively precise measurement, not only of the age of the animal, but also of its value in terms of an investment in time.

In buffalo, horns begin to grow toward the end of the first year and continue at a fairly even rate for twenty or thirty years. The Kodi term for a yearling does not refer directly to age, but to the newly budding horns: it is "the budding of a bull" (kamboka ghobo ) or, in ritual couplets, hanjoko wu kawallu, hinjalu watu kamba —"just a candlenut bump of horn, one node of cottonseed." A yearling is also referred to as hinjalu mete mata , "one node with black eyes" marking the darkness of eyes that grow paler with age.

Horn size is measured along the right arm. An outsider watching two men bartering the exchange of buffalo or discussing a feast slaughter might assume that they were talking about glove lengths instead of livestock, as their hands keep moving up and down their arms. The index finger is placed at various points between the fingertip and the armpit, usually preceded by an apology in Indonesian ("permisi ") for the indelicacy of

pointing. Common measurements are at the finger joint, the base of the thumb, wrist, mid-forearm, elbow, mid-bicep, and the armpit. When a promised animal is finally presented, the estimated horn length may be verified by stretching the arm along the horns, fingertips resting at the skull and the tip of the horns determining the final measure.

The practice of using horns and tusks to indicate value of some sort is quite widespread. In other areas of Indonesia where buffalo sacrifice is highly developed, such as Toradja, the display of the horns is also commonplace (Volkman 1985)· In the "pig-loving" areas of Melanesia, where prestige exchanges center on that animal, a similar cultural significance is given to pig's tusks. Special "tusker" boars are created by invulsing the upper canines and allowing the lower ones to grow unimpeded, so that the animal's tusks form a perfect circle (Jolly 1984).^[1] Sumbanese perform a related operation on gelded buffalo (mandopo ), whose horns subsequently make the most impressive house decorations. After gelding, a buffalo's horns grow so long they may threaten to pierce the skull; hence, the horns of a gelded yearling are heated and forcefully twisted away from the head to form a large arc like that of long-horned cattle. The Sumbanese, who find aesthetic pleasure in contemplating an impressive spread of horns, boast that after this operation some animals' horns grow all the way to the ground, forcing them to walk about with permanently bowed heads. Indeed, many older gelded animals cannot be taken to pasture and must be hand-fed with grass at the back of the house.

Gelded buffalo form a special category in Kodi sacrifices. Although the most prestigious gift is an older bull, the distinctive mandopo may be preferred when the donor wants his gift to be singular and unforgettable. In theory, a very long-horned buffalo can be reciprocated only by another rnandopo . Horn length used as a criterion of value in buffalo is paralleled by tusk length used to determine the value of pigs.

[1] The particular value of the tusker is variable in Melanesia. In Malekula, Vanuatu, value "resides not so much in the flesh of the animal as in its tusks" as "most boars sacrificed are so old and scrawny as to be inedible" (Jolly 1984, 85). Once the tusks are separated from the animal, however, they lose their value. In South Pentecost, the tusks are kept as ritual mementos of the glory of past grade-taking rituals; and in the Massim area they circulate as kula valuables and are mystified as "snakes' teeth" (Jolly 1984). Although the tusks are believed to have magical and mystical powers, the animals that grow them are clearly incapacitated; the tusker becomes unable to scavenge on its own and must be hand-fed. In Malekula, long-tusked pigs are the prize possessions of men, while other pigs are tended by women.

A young man dances as he leads a long-horned buffalo, around twenty-five
years old, onto the slaughter field at a large-scale feast. The gift of the buffalo
fulfills an affinal obligation from a wife-taker. 1984. Photograph by the author.

From Livestock to Pigs: Equivalences and Conversions

The small, dark, and somewhat swaybacked pigs raised on Kodi are part of a race that has been on the island for several hundred years. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Dutch introduced a race of fatter, white pigs, known as "foreign pigs" (wawi jawa ), which now are interbred with indigenous ones. The females are raised as breed animals, while the males are destined for exchange and eventual sacrifice. Boars begin to produce tusks when they are a little over a year old, but these are not of impressive dimension until the animal is at least three or four years old. When the tusks reach the length of half a man's finger, the animal becomes appropriate for prestige exchanges. Until then, a pig's value is markedly less than that of a buffalo or horse, and it is assimilated with chickens in the category of "food animals." As one person put it, "Without tusks, a pig is just good to eat. But once the tusks have grown, he is also good to trade or to sacrifice."

The emergence of tusks also establishes a form of equivalence between calves and pigs that is important in determining the appropriate size of counterpayments. On ritual occasions where a wife-taker comes bringing a buffalo of six or seven years—that is, with horns just past the wrist— his gift should be matched by a long-tusked pig and two quality textiles, a man's loincloth and a woman's sarung. It is the age of the animals that forms the basis for the evaluation of comparable value.

The problem of value determination is complicated by the separation of pigs and buffalo according to gender categories. On Sumba, the routine care and feeding of livestock is entrusted to men, while that of pigs is entrusted to women. This practice follows an extremely widespread pattern, which brings together aspects of African cattle complexes and Melanesian pig complexes. In an article comparing patterns of inequality, political competition, and political subordination in Africa and the Pacific, Andrew Strathern (1972, 130-31) argued that key determining factors were the diverse demands of tending different animals and the sexual division of labor. Pigs, for example, are domesticated by small household units, not in large corporate corrals. Pigs are sources of food only after death, when they offer up their flesh, whereas most pastoralists also "eat their animals alive" by draining them of blood and milk. Pigs reproduce prolifically and quickly exhaust available resources; livestock, by contrast, are free to roam to greener pastures and so require a less regular cycle of slaughter.

The Sumbanese economy, however, combines pig and chicken keeping

with stock raising in a way that assimilates both systems: all animals— pigs, chickens, buffalo, and horses—are owned on a household basis, even though the larger ones may be housed in a communal corral. The blood or milk from buffalo is not drunk, and in Kodi the animals are rarely used in agriculture because there are so few wet-rice fields. Livestock, rather, are raised for sacrifice and exchange. The hot, dry climate with its fresh sea breezes is particularly suited to promote the fertility of buffalo, which produce one calf a year in this region, but often only one every other year in wetter inland areas. This still cannot compare with pigs, which produce litters of five to six piglets. Even so, heat and periodic water shortages are harder on pigs than on buffalo. Pigs do not sweat, so they cannot reduce their body temperature without access to mud. A buffalo can survive the long march to a distant feast, but a pig, carried on a litter under a cloth banner, may die of heat prostration on the way. Cattle rustlers and disease have long endangered livestock, but unfavorable climatic conditions make the pig population as vulnerable to death and destruction as the buffalo herd.

Both pigs and buffalo are raised for exchange and increase in value as they grow older. Both are exchanged against more purely economic commodities and against the values of human life that we summarize under the notion of kinship. Both are prized for their "mediative capacities," in that they serve to mark and organize the relations between groups and between men and women. In ceremonial contexts, many of the cultural tensions inherent in the notions of male and female are represented by the buffalo and pig.

In bridewealth payments, funeral sacrifices, and feasting contributions, pigs and buffalo are matched against each other as complementary gifts. The symbolic femininity of the pig and the masculinity of the buffalo are balanced in a requirement that they offer equivalent, but not identical, values. The baseline determination of value comes from the age of the animals, as measured by the length of tusks and horns. Since buffalo can be considerably older than pigs, the gift of a pig is usually "completed" by the additional gift of one or two textiles.

Although it would be unthinkable to exchange a buffalo calf for a piglet, once the pig has grown tusks (and been fattened to impressive dimensions) it can be exchanged for large livestock. No exact equivalence in years is reckoned, but informants do cite the relative ages of animals when they compare them:

I had been raising that pig since my first child was born. He is now nine. Someone offered me a calf for him. But the calf was just a

yearling. My pig had tusks as long as this extended finger. It was clear that it was worth more than a knuckle length [of buffalo horns]. I said no, it had to be a bull with horns as long as your hand. [How old is that?] It had to be an animal of equal value, at least seven years old. When they came back with a buffalo whose horns matched the side of my hand, I accepted, and gave them a cloth to seal the deal.

Bridewealth equivalents are always figured by the wife-givers, who reserve the right to judge the value of the livestock they receive from prospective wife-takers. The counterprestation for a bridewealth of ten "tails" is conventionally two pigs of equivalent value, one given live and one killed for the guests. The two pigs must have tusks that "match" the age of the buffalo received and are presented along with a pair of men's and women's textiles.

Equivalences can also involve several younger buffalo and horses given to secure a single large older animal appropriate for a feast:

My mother's brother sponsored a feast in Wei Lyabba. He asked me to bring him a buffalo, a good one with long horns. I had one cow in the corral, fat and fertile, and two of her calves, one with horns just budding, the other with about a knuckle or two of growth. I went to someone in my matriclan to barter. He let me buy his best bull, but I had to give all three younger animals, along with two horses, in order to get him. His horns were as long as a whole arm, all the way to the armpit.

[How old do you think he was?] He must have been eighteen or nineteen. He wasn't even slaughtered. My mother's brother got another large animal from his wife-giver, and he gave him as a counterprestation.

A calculus of total value was derived from the sum of the ages of the animals transacted for, including horses added to complete the deal.^[2]

The complex combinations of different ages and sexes used in traditional exchange are negotiated in relation to the time invested in raising the animal. Before a pig has tusks it is not a prestige animal and can be given as a contribution tò the "vegetables" (roghe ) served along with the

[2] Horses seem to have been used here to "fill in" as functional animals whose value is more stable, usually from Rp. 25.000 to Rp. 50.000, as long as the animal is healthy and ridable. The value of a horse is equivalent to a fine indigo dyed textile, and that of a colt somewhat less.

meal, but it is not appropriate for formal sacrifice. It can, however, be part of a combined equivalent offered in recompense for an older animal:

My brother-in-law went to a feast and "borrowed" a pig to give to his wife's family there. We let him take it because he said it would be replaced in a few months, by the time we were harvesting rice. The pig was five years old, and its tusks had just appeared. When he came to help with the harvest, he had two piglets, but neither of them was much over a year old. "What are these worth?" I said to him; "neither of them could be taken anywhere!" We made him take them back. Later, he returned with a sow and a pig with budding tusks. We accepted them.

Young animals can be brought to simple ceremonies like village yaighos , where many pigs are killed for a shared meal, but they cannot be matched with buffalo and horses for larger feasts, bridewealth, or funeral exchanges.

The struggle to find an animal that can match others of considerable age often proves ruinous:

We got the news that my father had died, and as his oldest son I had to bring a long-horned buffalo for the funeral feast. I wanted a bull, but no one would give one to me, not for anything. So I found a cow who had become sterile. She must have been twelve or thirteen. I gave them three animals from my own corral—one was a bull with wrist-length horns [about four years old], another one with thumb-length ones [about three], and finally a cow who must have been four or five and could still bear more young. That was how much I had to pay in order not to lose honor at my father's funeral.

Although this person's corral later became well filled by the contributions of others, the high social importance of the son's sacrifice made his immediate need intense and justified the losses he had to assume to pay this final act of respect to a deceased parent.

The use of an animal's age to determine its value is a principle of "temporal investment," but it is not a measure of labor as a Marxian model would suggest. Pigs and chickens require more attention per animal than do horses or buffalo because they must be fed carefully prepared meals of house scraps and cannot simply be taken out to pasture in large numbers or led docilely to the water. Since buffalo are tended in herds by young boys, the total number of man-hours devoted to each head of buffalo is certainly much less than the woman-hours invested in fattening a single pig. Does a cultural bias give greater importance to man-hours than

woman-hours in reckoning labor costs? Perhaps, but pigs also require a certain amount of men's work in building pens and protecting crops. The key lies not in labor, but in temporal links and the social meaning of exchange intervals.

The great value of older animals is due to the way their lives are tied to their master's biography and come to serve as metonyms for his identity. Because a man begins to raise animals on his own as soon as he establishes his own household, his animals represent the temporal moment in which he achieved adulthood. One animal, perhaps a favorite calf, may at that point be specially dedicated to a ritual purpose that lies in the still-distant future—such as the dedication of a newly rebuilt lineage house, the funeral for the owner's father, or a feast in which the household head takes a new horse name, thus establishing his renown. As he raises the animal, it is identified with these plans and with the owner's own career in the ritual arena. The animal must be protected from disease and drought for its master to obtain social recognition. Sacrificial identification, in short, builds on a long association in which the life of the man and the life of his animal run parallel courses.

The argument I have made can be summarized in four related propositions: (1) The meaning of horn and tusk length is a measure of the animal's age, with the result that "prestige value" is in fact a code for "temporal value"; (2) the visual "record" of a feast displayed in the ancestral house in the form of horns and tusks indexes temporal investment; (3) temporal investment is measured along a man's own life span and has its origins in the idea of sacrificial identification between man and beast; (4) the respective ages of animals provide a standard for equivalence and exchangeability and can allow for conversions across species.

The Meat Market Versus the Exchange Market

The special characteristics of sacrificial animals bring us back to the second factor that was mentioned earlier (see chapter 6): the existence of an alternate market for livestock based on cash. Why couldn't the bereaved son have decided to purchase a long-horned bull with money? How are the rules for determining value different in feasting and in cash sales?

There are two parts to the value of an animal in the traditional economy. The first is its value alive, as part of a herd that can reproduce and increase in numbers. The second is its value in sacrifices, where it will provide both a measure of the sacrificer's prestige and a gift to the invisible ancestors who bring new resources into the hands of their descendants. Both of these values assume that an animal is never completely lost; it is simply

moved to a place in another cycle of meaning. The sale of an animal to a meat merchant, however, does involve a loss. And that loss is justifiable in local terms only if what was acquired in compensation for the animal is of enduring value.

For several hundred years, Sumbanese have sold some of their livestock to merchants who shipped them to other islands. Payment for horses and buffalo was presented in an imperishable form: Dutch guilders and English pounds sterling were melted down to make gold jewelry; metal knives, swords, and gongs were stored for generations in cult houses. The development of a cash market for Kodi livestock did not come until the period of independence, when road improvements allowed merchants to transport animals from the more distant areas of the island to the port towns. The cash market is still irregular and unreliable, with merchants generally coming to buy before large Moslem feasts such as Hari Idul Fitri, When the demand for meat on Java goes up dramatically.

New market transactions have established a different standard of value, the "commercial" standard based on the amount of meat on the body. At the ports of Waikelo and Waingapu, buffalo are weighed on a scale, and their price is determined by a set per-kilo rate. For village purchases in Kodi, the animals cannot be weighed, but they are measured and estimates are made of the amount of meat on the body.

Livestock are sold only rarely in Kodi; in essence, they are a protected domain of stored value (Ferguson 1985) because of their importance to the community. Whenever an owner thinks of selling an animal, many people will try to discourage him from doing so. These people may have some claims on the animal because of earlier debts, or they may anticipate wanting to borrow the animal in the future. As a rule, livestock are sold only to cover major expenses on which there can be some group consensus: a life-saving operation, materials to build a stone house, or a son's college expenses.

Evidence from my survey of exchange activities suggests that fewer than a hundred animals are sold each year from the Kodi district, and most of these are horses or cattle. Official statistics for all of West Sumba record that 175 buffalo were exported in 1986, as against 1,396 horses and 615 cattle (Biro Statistik 1986, 89). Because exports are subject to regulation in the port city, these figures are probably fairly accurate.^[3] Estimates of

[3] Official statistics for the livestock slaughtered in traditional feasting in 1985 are 200 buffalo, 12 cattle, and 132 pigs. These figures are gathered at the time the slaughter tax is collected and are acknowledged by all sources (including the livestock department employees) to involve gross underreporting. I was often told of animals hidden from government clerks and (perhaps more common) tacit

agreements between feastgivers and government clerks to note down only a portion of those actually slaughtered so that the feast would not appear to violate government restrictions on animal slaughter.

the number of buffalo slaughtered each year in traditional feasts usually amount to two or three times this figure. The small sample of fifty households in my exchange survey included three separate feasts at which over a hundred buffalo were killed (Balaghar in 1984, Wei Lyabba in 1985, and Parona Baroro in 1986), and twelve funerals involving the slaughter of an average of two and a half head.

There are, however, crucial symbolic differences between animals sold for export and those offered for sacrifice, which show how this system of cultural diacritics can work. The various considerations of these markets can be summarized as follows:

Animals in the traditional exchange system are "reinvested" in two different ways. One occurs during the span of a human life, what I call biographical time, the other only in the longer-term exchanges of ancestors and descendants, that is, in intergenerational time. Debts are returned to individuals through the obligation to "replace the meat" distributed at a feast or to return another animal for one "loaned" in a time of need. The principle of delayed reciprocity requires an increase in the value of the gift consistent with the passage of years or months before it is repaid. A similar principle, transposed onto the relations between ancestors and descendants, operates in extending the process of reciprocity down through the generations: because the souls of animals offered to the marapu are believed to be recycled into the corral for their descendants, if previous

generations have been generous, the living can draw on their reserves of fertility and prosperity. These differences become clearer when we explore other contrasts between an exchange market where animals can be used in sacrifice and a meat market where they are mere commodities.

Sacrificial Economies and Commodity Economies

In commodity exchanges, people act as autonomous individuals and their association is mediated by things. The things change hands, payment is made, and the transaction is finished. In sacrifice, people are brought together through association with a mediating animal, and the destruction of the animal creates a bond between them and its recipients, the spirits or marapu . The return on sacrifice, as in most traditional exchange, is a delayed return. It may bring benefits to the sacrificer, or only to his descendants. The precise inversion of many of the characteristics of commodities in sacrifices suggests why these two models should produce such different standards of value.

Traditional exchanges between living people use biographical time as a measure of value. A buffalo is esteemed because of the years of his own life the owner has invested in raising it. When this animal is offered for sacrifice, therefore, the owner is giving up a section of his biography, which is presented to the marapu in the hopes of receiving still greater blessings from them. These blessings, however, may be delayed, appearing only in the next generation. Thus the biographical time that determines exchange values has to be supplemented by the intergenerational time of sacrifice.

The special temporality of sacrifice comes from its role in social reproduction. In sacrifice, ideas of cyclicity and reincarnation depend on a reciprocity that embraces both human beings and the ancestral spirits. They are the ones who consume the essence of sacrifices, who "eat time" or "eat memories" instead of consuming the flesh itself. Through the invocations of each animal, they first "eat its own history"—its connection to other persons and the exchange paths that led it to the sacrificial field. Their later gifts of fertility allow for the renewal of life and the continuation of new generations.

Eyelashes and Exports

A contrast in the treatment of animals sold in commercial transactions and animals sacrificed reveals how this principle of renewal works. Buffalo that die in the ancestral village travel to the great "corral of banyan wood" (nggallu maliti, nggallu kadoki ) in the skies, where their souls await

rebirth to the descendants of those who sacrificed them. They must die as complete animals so their souls will travel upward intact. Animals sold to the meat dealers who eventually ship them to other islands, however, have their eyelashes removed before they leave the village.

This apparently trivial plucking of lashes has considerable symbolic importance, for it removes the sign of a payment that is made in the expectation of a return. The term for eyelashes, wulu mata , is also used in Sumbanese languages to refer to the fringe of traditional textiles, and is a polite term for all kinds of ritual payments that compensate persons for performing as ceremonial mediators. Thus, the go-betweens in a marriage negotiation are paid in wulu mata , as are priests who perform at a feast or the messengers who help to work out a truce between feuding parties. Usually these payments consist of cloth, small sums of money, and betel nut. They are called "eyelashes" as a form of modest speech indicating that the debt owed to these intermediaries is greater than the compensation offered, but further benefits will be provided by the spirits in attendance. The "fringe," in other words, is only the visible payment; it stands for a much larger invisible payment that should follow.

The "fringe payment" of eyelashes is also what protects the source. Lashes are the furry shield of each mata , which has the double meaning of "eye" and "origin"; thus wulu mata refers also to compensations made to protect source villages and the source of fertility for each animal. The continuity of the ancestral village is protected by sacrifices to feed its ancestors. When an animal is sacrificed within the village, its eyelashes do not leave. Its head is given to the person who "owns" the sacrifice; it is then cooked in a special meal four days after the feast. Only after this meal has been prepared can the souls of the buffalo depart to the afterworld.

When livestock are sold for export their souls are not recycled to the ancestors to promote life in future generations. Plucking the eyelashes, then, is a way to hold on to a part of the animal's vitality, and particularly the animal's reproductive powers, even if its body is definitively sent away. Eyelashes, like horns, are vital excrescences which show that the animal is alive. Removing them and storing them in a coconut shell along with other ancestral treasures in the attic keeps a part of the animal in the village. The Kodi say that the eyelashes "keep the soul from leaving" even when the flesh is gone. Through prayers recited over the eyelashes, the ndewa , or ancestral essence, of the animals may be called back. Although the meat itself cannot be dedicated to the ancestors or consumed and distributed, one small aspect of the animal's vital essence is set aside, not lost to outside forces.

Plucking the eyelashes magically removes the reproductive capacity of

the animal. Its physical body may leave the island, but its regenerative powers are supposed to stay there. Since exported livestock are destined for immediate slaughter, this magical procedure makes no difference to local traders. As one Moslem exporter said, "On Java, they don't pray over them, they just eat them. No one cares there about their eyelashes."

In the context of local Kodi exchanges, however, the presence of absence of eyelashes can be an important issue. If the horses or buffalo presented to pay bridewealth are not reproductively intact, the wife-givers will surely consider this a serious affront. The gift of livestock in marriage payments is meant to begin a herd and to circulate among family members to produce new animals. A buffalo or horse given without eyelashes is given in bad faith. Only its physical form is surrendered, but part of its essence remains behind, and the herd cannot prosper. Although I doubt that it occurs very often, I heard of one wife-giver who was suspicious of his affines and claimed they had given him a cow with no eyelashes. The cow, though still young, in fact was prematurely sterile: she had borne calves for her earlier masters but not for him. He told me that the appropriate retaliation would be to withhold his "blessings" (wei myaringi ; lit., "cool waters") and so deny the new couple the possibility to bear children. The cow's barrenness would be reciprocated by his own daughter's barrenness, an inability to provide descendants to her new house and village. Once the wife-takers were advised of the wife-giver's suspicions, they tried to appease him in a special ceremony called horongo bahi , "extending the metal." Gold and an additional cow (complete with eyelashes) were presented to repair affinal relations and ask for fertility to be restored. Only after this second cow was with calf did the new bride come to conceive a child—at least as the story was reported.

Time, Exchange, and Traditional Economies

The ways time constitutes value in Sumbanese exchange shed light on a number of anthropological debates about exchange and temporality, ranging from earlier ideas of "dual economies" and ecological "rationality" to current efforts to articulate "moral spheres for exchange" (Appadurai 1986), "transaction orders" (Bloch and Parry 1989), and the "work of time" in exchange games (Bourdieu 1990, 98-108).

Theories of dual economies oppose a "traditional economy" ruled by religious, social, and symbolic concerns to a "modern" or "rational" economy that privileges the marketplace over all else. If the contrast between the meat market and the ceremonial exchange market in Kodi is interpreted in these terms, then the penetration of the commercial standard of value

based on the amount of flesh on the animal's body must be seen to be gradually displacing the "traditional" emphasis on temporal investment.

There are, however, clear economic advantages to using time as a standard of value, and these have important social consequences that make the ceremonial exchange market as "rational" as the meat market. Emphasis on the age of the animals killed, rather than on size or quantity, serves to space out the performance of the largest feasts, to put a brake on ritual inflation, and to control the competitive spiral of rival feasts held by near status equals. Pressures from wealthy impresarios on their poorer dependents are kept within bounds by the temporal standard, and the wealthy man must reciprocate with interest whenever he does receive contributions from his exchange partners.

These social factors would satisfy theorists of a generally utilitarian orientation, since they show how many apparently misguided traditional practices are in fact reasonable choices given local circumstances and constraints. But although they show how the system of temporal investment works (and reply to the superficial criticism of government officials who see it as merely "wasteful"), they do not explain why it can come into existence or how these standards of value work.

The recent literature on cultural exchange situates these problems in terms of the relations of gifts and commodities and the transformative power of money. The meat market and the exchange market could be considered separate spheres of exchange; that is, although some goods (especially buffalo and horses) change hands in both markets, they do so according to different rules. They are separate "value classes" in Kopytoff's (1986) terminology, which only roughly fit the more classical opposition of "gift" and "commodity" (Gregory 1982). The difference in rules corresponds not to varying degrees of "penetration" by an external economic standard, but to different cultural values linked to temporal differences.

This idea of temporal differences has been used by some analysts to refer to universal characteristics of exchange systems, but I argue that it must be given a specific local interpretation. Bloch and Parry (1989, 24) argue that two transactional orders exist in all societies, one "concerned with the reproduction of the long-term social or cosmic order" and the other "short-term transactions concerned with the arena of individual competition" (Bloch and Parry 1989, 24). Their explanation of how money is either opposed to or integrated into the morality of exchange in a variety of societies hinges on this temporal distinction. Spheres of exchange are defined to protect the long-term goals of the social order from being overly affected by adjustments due to gains or losses in the short-term arena.

Individual acquisition, then, is "consigned to a separate sphere which is ideologically articulated with, and subordinated to, a sphere of activity concerned with the cycle of long-term reproduction" (Bloch and Parry 1989, 26).

The separation of transactional cycles is endangered if grasping individuals divert the resources of long-term cycles for short-term transactions. The sale of livestock for cash to merchants who plan to export the animals would fall into this category, since the animals are removed from the local sphere entirely and the cycle of intergenerational renewal is broken. One standard of value, which operates on the basis of quality, subjects, and superiority, is displaced by another where quantity, objects, and equivalence are primary (Gregory 1982). It would be wrong to attribute these differences simply to the presence of money itself. The difference comes from moral evaluations that contrast the exchange of inalienable objects between interdependent transactors (the "gift economy") to the exchange of alienable objects between independent transactors (commodity exchange).

Time constitutes value in the traditional exchange economy because it marks the bond between the subject and his possessions and makes each possession more valuable because of its identification with its owner. The logical culmination of this identification is the complete inalienability of heirloom wealth. Along the scale from heirlooms down to trivial commodities, value is reckoned according to the time invested in an item's acquisition. Assertions that certain heirloom goods were presented to the founding ancestors are ways of lifting these goods "out of time" and making them absolutely inalienable. Assertions that any kind of object is completely replaceable, that it has no individual history acquired over time, in contrast, devalue it to the category of the commodity.

Bloch and Parry see a utilitarian approach as appropriate to the short-term cycle, but use a "moral" economy approach for longer-term transactions. I find the opposition of short-term schemers and long-term com-munitarians unconvincing. Bourdieu has shown that time and the tempo of exchanges constitute the exchange system in its most significant dimension. The gamelike aspect of exchanges, he noted, must be played out over time: "To abolish the interval is to abolish the strategy" (1990, 106). He does not carry the point even further, however, to say that an accumulation of intervals (of strategic delays and lapses in time) eventually makes up a new form of "objectified" value. The timing of exchanges, which participants experience as irreversible but observers may collapse into reversible cycles, is in fact the raw material from which exchange value is constructed.

Biographical Time, Intergenerational Time, and Social Reproduction

Instead of being two separate but related transaction orders, I argue that short- and long-term exchanges occur in interlocking cycles that influence ideas of convertibility. An heirloom gold valuable should not, and cannot, be exchanged for cash. A handful of rupiah bills could never, and will never, be reckoned into ceremonial exchanges between affines. But all along the long ladder that stretches between them, we find a relatively precise and accurate measuring of units of time invested, as represented by horns and tusks hanging on the wall. Thus, through exchange, reciprocal payments, and sacrifice, a system of value is established that is distinct from the commercial values of cash and commodity exchange.

From an actor's perspective, time has strategic value in that it can be cumulatively invested in gifts, which gives a generous household an advantage when debts are finally collected. This notion is relevant to the familiar debate about the "interest" that is added over time to the value of a gift. This interest is not simply a mystical quality inhering in the object, or a utilitarian quality figured in the same way as bank interest. Calculated in reference to individuals, rather, it measures the social value of the temporal intervals between the moments of giving and receiving. Time is measured not in years or months, but as it has been inscribed on human biographies—that is, as a "personal investment" reckoned in terms of a biological clock. The most direct expression of this form of time appears in the bodies of the sacrificial substitutes for persons—their livestock, whose own clocks are suspended over their ears.

Biographical time measures the forms of reciprocity that can be paid back over an individual's lifetime. It is inscribed within an intergenera-tional cycle, where the benefits of individual pursuit of renown are passed on to one's descendants. The reproduction of the group is a long-term goal, but one not necessarily at odds with the strategic manipulations of individuals. The marapu bestow blessings of fertility and prosperity so that their own names will be repeated in invocations and their own renown will be carried forth in time. The cult of the ancestors is also, in this sense, concerned with the future—but only as long as obligations to the past are recognized and the heritage of forebears is acknowledged.

Feasting in the ancestral villages promotes the reproduction of the collectivity through the leadership of an individual sponsor. Prayers request the continued fertility of both people and animals, offering animals for sacrifice as metonyms of their masters, small pieces of the greater human community. The politics of value in this situation concern not the

"universal" opposition of long-term and short-term interests, but locally specific constructions of value, measured in time and in the relation of animals to human lives.

Time as Value Versus Time as Money

E. P. Thompson's famous discussion "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" shows how the historical transition to industrial society in the West involved a restructuring of working habits accompanied by a new "time sense" which changed inward apprehensions as much as external activities (1967, 57). Time in a great many non-Western societies is not something that can be wasted, used up, or saved; nonetheless, it remains a crucial social resource that is deployed in very specific, if variable, ways. In the West, the technological conditioning of the "time sense" and the introduction of time measurement as a means of labor exploitation interrupted a previous work rhythm structured by task orientation and in which bouts of intense labor had alternated with idleness. Thompson (1967, 70) argues that the first notions of compensation for labor time appeared in strategies for paying harvesters, with a "share of the harvest" made proportional to time invested: "Attention to time in labor depends in large degree upon the need for the synchronization of labor."

We saw in part one how a concern with the synchronization of agricultural activities was expressed in the symbolic domination of the Rato Nale, who holds the highest ritual office in the region because of his control of time. Here, however, we see how the early Dutch observers who preached industry and offered a moral critique of idleness were blind to a native construction of time as a source of value because it worked on a larger time scale than they were accustomed to using. Labor hours were not counted in traditional Sumbanese society, and proportional payments were more often pegged to social relationships (and the expectation of reciprocal returns) than to time investments. But although minutes and hours did not constitute a "currency," and were allowed to be "passed" rather than "spent," years and generations were, as units of longue durée , tied to the notion of value in a relatively rigorous fashion. Time was not commodified; rather, it was presented as a characteristic of prestigious wealth objects and a measurable attribute of sacrificial animals.

The limited impact of money on the traditional economy and its relative marginalization or "estrangement" (Versluys 1941, 435), which continues into the present, should cause us to reflect on the great difference between the two statements "time is money" and "time is value." Money, in Sumba, has become a unit for measuring things of significant but not

substantial value. The price stated in coins, for example, replaced the somewhat casual measuring of rice and corn staples in petty trade. Value, by contrast, is always connected not only to an investment in time but also to a personal tie, a bond that has lasted through the years. Value accrues as time passes; "money," though, must become "capital" to display the same characteristics.

It is dangerous to translate concepts of economic value too readily into categories such as Bourdieu's famous "symbolic capital" which only obscure their continuing economic character. When traditional valuables are hoarded because they are believed to magically "attract" other wealth, they are a form of "capital" based on indigenous expectations of repayment, and their value is no more "symbolic" than that of a bank's assets. Thus, I do not argue that time results in the accumulation of "symbolic capital," but that it provides a way of measuring and storing values which are "economic" at the same time that they are "symbolic." Symbolism is not capital. It does not follow the same rules of accumulation, scarcity, or debt, and although it can only be shared according to cultural rules, these rules are so various that the concept is hardly of much use to demarcate a relation between the symbolic and economic realms.

Thompson (1967, 95) suggests that in the West the growing popularity of the axiom "Time is money" signaled a "restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively" which was a heritage of Puritanism and has made leisure problematic. He traces this change partly to the erection of barriers between "work" and "life," and this provides a clue to the difference we have also observed in Kodi. "Time as value" concerns the values of life, not narrowly those of work, and this is where it is so different from "time is money." Lived time consists of sustaining personal and social relations over the years and of enriching those relations with the exchange of goods and services. In a famous passage about the lack of an expression for "time" in the Nuer language, Evans-Pritchard (1940, 103) argued that the Nuer are "fortunate" because they do not have the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to coordinate activities with an abstract passage of time: their points of reference are the activities themselves. This "blessed ignorance" does not mean they are ignorant of the consequences of the passage of time. Among the Nuer, as in Kodi, it would seem to be more the case that time is valued for its long-term processes, for notions of growth and development, which cannot be encapsulated into small units such as hours and minutes, but need to be reckoned in years, generations, and epochs.