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From Shells to Money: Ceremonial Exchange Among the Simbu of Papua New Guinea
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16405 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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5 / 1989 |
3,611 Words |
| Author
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Karl F. Rambo
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While conducting fieldwork among the Simbu in 1985 and 1986, I occasionally encountered people in the small roadside markets selling crescents of large, old pearl shells, to be warm around the neck. Although the price for these was generally only about U.S. $5, the once highly prized shells drew few interested purchasers. In my discussions with the sellers, they invariably mentioned how--in the past--one such shell would form a substantial portion of the bride-price given by the groom's family to the bride's family in the ceremonial gift given at a marriage. Now money equal to thousands of dollars, collected from many people and displayed on tall bamboo poles, is the valuable supplementing traditional items such as pork. Gifts of purchased cartons of beer, stacked and displayed at the ceremonies, are now much more frequent than the once-common ceremonial gifts of colorful bird of paradise plumes.
This adoption of cash into the ceremonial system has affected the course of economic change and development in the New Guinea highlands in an unusual way. Although the Simbu people now eagerly desire money, what motivates their actions is more than a desire for material goods.
Until relatively recently, these people were remote from any of the effects of the market economies that link together much of the rest of the world. Prior to contact with the outside world, the Simbu relied almost solely on the products they themselves produced. At that time the New Guinea highlands lay at the end of multistaged trading systems that extended hundreds of kilometers to the costs, the source of a most precious traditional valuable--seashells. The source of the shells was so remote that some highlanders believed they grew on trees. Prior to the arrival of Australian colonialists, small quantities of shells passed through many hands on their way to the highlands. There, they became one of the most important items needed for the ceremonial gift exchanges.
These ceremonial exchanges were, and continue to be, essential for establishing and maintaining social relationships between the individual members of the small tribes of the region. Today however, this area no longer remains as isolated from the rest of the world as in the past. Money, and goods purchased with money, has for the most part replaced shells and many other traditional goods previously used in these exchanges. The advent of money in the Papua New Guinea highlands and its incorporation into the ceremonial exchange system have resulted in the amalgamation of elements of two sometimes conflicting economic value systems.
The recent change in the highlands of Papua New Guinea are of particular interest to anthropologists and other social scientists in that these changes are recent and well documented. People who were for all intents completely isolated from the industrialized and industrializing world become involved in a worldwide economy when they produce goods or sell their labor in a money-linked market. The last three centuries are replete with examples of incorporation of cultures into such a worldwide economy. In many ways, each case recapitulates the earlier adoption of money by peoples who now rely almost exclusively on a monied, market economy. Money has facilitated the incorporation of many far-flung peoples by providing a medium of exchange that translates the value of many material things and services into a common system. Often, however, with the development of a money economy come greatly increased economic stratification and a loss of
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