Indecorous, Too Hasty, Incorrect: Market and Moral Imagination in Auhelawa, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

As IfThe decorum of transaction is strictly kept, and highly valued. The natives sharply distinguish it from barter, which practice extensively, of which have a clear and for which have a term in Kiriwinian: Often, when criticizing an incorrect, too hasty, or indecorous procedure of Kula, will say: He conducts his as if it were gimwali. (Malinowski 1932 [1922]:95-96)This is perhaps hardest-working passage in entire text of Argonauts. The argument here is not particularly important to text as a whole, as Argonauts is a book where all parts pull their weight equally in service of ethnographic depiction. In service of social theory, though, this passage is probably most quoted. It helps anthropologists and others quickly and clearly establish concept of reciprocity as an instituted norm of exchange. With it, dispense with any naive marginal utility theory of value in minds of their readers in one single stroke. Indeed, few people outside of anthropology need to hear Imagine yourself suddenly set down... (Malinowski 1932 [1922]:4). The image of sloppy reciprocity, however, has not only been evoked in countless introductory anthropology textbooks, but also cited in archaeology, sociology, law, and ethics to make same point (Kimbrell 1994:300-301, Patton 1996:31-32, Fort and Noone 2000, Tandy 2000:117, Prentice 2007, Henaff 2010:309).Malinowski, Mauss (1990 [1925]), and Polanyi (1957), among others, all interpret this passage differently, but each emphasizes evidentiary weight of He conducts his as if it were as a reported statement from a typical Kiriwina person. By quoting a native observer, authors show that the Kula is, in fact, a single, unitary system, denoted always by its own proper noun.1 It is an excellent example of Malinowski's ethnographic method. Malinowski wanted to create a corpus inscriptionum Kiriwinensium (a body of inscriptions of Kiriwina) with which he could discover native's point of view of everyday life (Malinowski 1932 [1922]:18-19). In this passage, statement shows that they have a clear idea, and have a settled term, for bad form. This quotation has led scholars to reify Kiriwina words and A contextually-bound utterance has been turned into an abstract statement of doctrine.2 and gimwali have become names for spheres of exchange (Bohannon 1955:60).In a paradigm in which and gimwalia are spheres, many scholars have reasoned that commodity form of value will always present people with a trader's dilemma between observing norms of reciprocity and seeking individual gain, and that these kinds of moral categories will constrain individuals' self-interested accumulation (Evers and Schrader 1994). Market trading often takes place in interstitial spaces between distinct social worlds (Benediktsson 2002, van der Grijp 2003, Koczberski 2007, Addo and Besnier 2008, Cahn 2008, Besnier 2011, Sharp 2013). In many communities that straddle subsistence production and market trade, money is often classified according to how it is earned, and this places limits on how it can be spent (Shipton 1989, Toren 1989, Walsh 2003, Peebles 2012). All this has led many observers to see market trade as always posing a dilemma.Yet, settled terms are not only thing that makes this statement rhetorically effective. Malinowski is himself, as elsewhere, making use of ethnographic irony too: a shell valuable is like holy water, or a salad fork. Its ethnographic authority, in other words, rests not on exoticism, but on uncanny. The tone of this speaker's statement-ironic, arch, snobbish-comes through in quotation and bolsters ethnographer's point. Rather than being simply a report on event, informant's comment looks to be an example of kula talk, that is, an account of events that aligns transactions with roads between chains of partners and thereby establishes rank of different valuables (Munn 1992:109, Weiner 1992:141, Damon 1993:236). …