Equality, Inequality, and Exchange

Abstract

Comments on: JOHN LIEP. A Papuan Plutocracy: Ranked Exchange on Rossel Island. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2009. Pp. 376. ISBN: 978-87-7934-446-4 I mention that good ethnographies appear after the fact to be based on good fortune because John Liep looks for all the world like one of those lucky types for whom this generalization holds true. Interested in economy and exchange, he found his way to Rossel Island, where people happen to operate what from some angles has to be seen as the most complex currency system in the world, one that turns on 34 different, ranked kinds of currency tokens, not counting state money, and that features a welter of more or less unusual ways of moving those currencies around between people in transactions that shape marriages, funerals, and almost all of the other most important social institutions of Rossel Island life. As Liep (p. xviii)1 puts matters, the complexity of the Rossel Island currency system makes it “an anthropological freak”—the kind of one-off limit case in the range of global variation that so often provides the materials for ethnographic success stories. What better basis than fieldwork among the Rossel Islanders could there be, then, for making pointed interventions into disciplinary debates about the nature of exchange?