Anthropology Of Kula Ring Research Paper

1. Some Defining Features Of Present-Day Kula

Modern kula centers in the exchange of white (Conus) armshells and red (Spondylus or Chama) shell neck-laces in opposite directions around the islands (Fig. 1). Only middle and upper ranked shells have personal names, but all shells are qualitatively graded. There are other kinds of kula media (see Sect. 2), but only these shells currently circle the region establishing its basic socio-geography. Kula transactors, however, should exchange directly in a limited sector with partners or potential partners in participant communities on either side of them (although illicit bypassing occurs). Working a strategic politics of influence in the inter-island world, they attempt to make names for themselves that also impact on their standing in their own community.

Transactors obtain shells of one category on visits to partners in one direction and later transact them to their own visitors from the opposite kula direction. Typically these exchange practices engage long term debt involving a year or much more between a gift and its equivalent repayment. A major transaction with multiple, additional shell exchanges pinned to its passage may go on for years. Nevertheless, less prestigous exchanges may occasionally be completed with a visitor who brings the appropriate type of shell for immediate exchange, thus avoiding the risks of default inherent in time and distance.

Although kula participants are primarily men, recent research points to the contemporary importance of women traders in the Bwanabwana region (Macintyre 1983a) and, less prominently, in some other areas such as northern Mwadau and Dobu (J. Leach in Leach and Leach 1983, p. 17); nevertheless, women participants do not usually sail on kula. This research has also revealed a crucial type of shell ownership not noted by Malinowski (but probably operative in his time) called ‘kitomu’ (or cognates), which is fundamental to the modus operandi of kula. A shell’s first owner is its maker. Owners may do as they will with their kitomu shells, keeping or else alienating them to obtain high value items like pigs, magic and cash or to pay off a kula debt; the shell then becomes another person’s kitomu. Alternatively one may circulate one’s kitomu in kula; an equivalent return becomes, on receipt, one’s kitomu, the prior shell becoming the kitomu of the equivalent’s donor. Thus particular kitomu are alienated, but, apart from default, one still owns a shell as kitomu (Damon in Leach and Leach 1983, Munn 1977, 1986, Weiner 1988, 1992 cf. also Godelier 1996, p. 90–1). Kitomu shells, empty of prior obligations, provide an element of freedom in transaction that variously aids owners in the incrementation of their kula.

2. Adjustment Of Some Common Oversimplifications Of Kula

Following Malinowski’s emphasis, a common assumption is that modern kula entails a ritual exchange of just the two types of shell set apart as a system from trade with other non-ritual goods (see Sect. 3). But a variety of evidence indicates that such a sharp line cannot be drawn. For instance, in Bwanabwana (Fig. 1) pigs are intrinsic to kula (there called ‘kune’) although they obviously do not circulate around the whole ring (Macintyre 1983a, pp. 105–6). Overseas directional transactions of Gawan-built canoes can also be described as ‘kula-ing’ one’s canoe. Armshells from southern canoe recipients become the canoe owners’ kitomu; with the exchange finished, canoes are alienated from their makers (Munn 1986).

If kula media are not as exclusive as sometimes supposed, so also the circulation of the shells themselves is not exclusive to Massim islands participating in the ring: other islands make use of these shells, leaking them into and draining them out of the kula region, thus affecting kula circulation. Indeed, as Malinowski reported, a source of the necklaces (Rossel Island) is itself far south of the ring. Kula is in this sense an open not a closed system.

Neither is kula static. In its present form, it is a modern development radically affected by British colonization. One key change has been the widening of participation in kula. Formerly confined to men of influence, kula effloresced, becoming increasingly ‘democratized’ as endemic warfare gave way to British ‘pacification’ (Macintyre 1983b; Young 1983). Of course change is ongoing; for instance, in the 1990s the increased use of western boats by Bwanabwanans was reducing the southward extension of canoe transactions, thus negatively affecting Gawan acquisitions of kitomu from canoes (Damon, personal communication 1999).

At another level, change is inherent in the way individual kula paths and routing are constituted. A path of partners is initiated and maintained only through the passage of shells: without shells a path disappears. Pace Malinowski (1922, p. 83), partner-ships are not necessarily ‘permanent.’ In a politics that entails the constant testing of trust, shifting personal relations ongoingly alter paths across the ring. Nor are routes between communities fixed. Over time kula’s competitive practices can yield not just individual path alterations, but also alterations in routes. Thus by the 1970s Duau (north-east Normanby) villages no longer did much kula directly with Bwanabwana: new southern coastal villages of people from the interior had managed to insert themselves into the route (Thune in Leach and Leach 1983, p. 352).

This dynamic view of kula also illuminates noncircular aspects of its socio-geography. Although the overall routing is circular, at any given moment many paths of partners do not circle the region. A path may never attain circularity because closure can be produced only by making reliable connections via the passage of shells.

Just as kula is ongoingly subject to change, so also it is marked by variability throughout the ring. Notable are different local articulations with marital and other domestic exchanges. In Bwanabwana, kula is not sharply separable from marriage exchanges, but in the Trobriands the two are kept apart (Macintyre 1983a, Weiner in Leach and Leach 1983). Elsewhere, articulations vary. Gawan men take shells from their kula paths to give to affines for the latters’ paths; shell returns ideally go back to donors and the original paths (Munn 1986). But on Vakuta, shells taken off paths for affinal recipients in return for gifts of pigs become these affines’ kitomu, even though they may not be the donors’ kitomu (Campbell in Leach and Leach 1983, pp. 206–7); presumably donors must find path replacements elsewhere. These sorts of local differences, among many others, have ripple affects on trans-local shell movements (cf. also Wagner 1989, p. 270, Persson 1999).

3. Anthropological Approaches To Kula

Serious focus upon kula first emerged within two formative studies of anthropological thinking on exchange Malinowski’s (1922) first major work developing his use-oriented functionalism, and Mauss’ (1950) classic essay on the gift. Basic problems posed by typical, pre-1970s kula commentaries drew on Malinowski’s questionable dichotomy between kula as a ceremonial practice involving the transaction of ‘useless’ things and the economic trade of ‘useful’ things (for a brief critique see Young 1983, p. 8). The distinction between ceremonial (kula) and nonceremonial trade was also the prototype for the later development of more complex models of economies with multiple separate ‘exchange spheres’ (cf. Firth 1957 p. 218).

The same Western economic dualism framed the search for some single explanatory function, or ‘purpose’ of kula such as ‘prestige competition’ (J. W. Leach in Leach and Leach 1983, pp. 5–6). In particular, it fuelled the concern with finding an economic function for kula by putting it in the service of the ‘useful’ commerce—for instance, as establishing ‘the peace of the market’ enabling utilities to circulate (Singh Uberoi 1962, p. 148; see Macintyre’s 1983b critique of the association of kula with peacemaking). The period’s most serious reexamination combined some of these ideas in a more broadly based structuralfunctional study (Singh Uberoi 1962) which viewed Trobriand kula as a sociopolitical practice periodically releasing men from internal descent group relations to establish inter-island bonds.

It is, however, Mauss’s concerns that pervade contemporary kula analyses. Mauss situated kula in a theory of moral–juridical contract empowered by bonds between persons and things. His attention to the cultural symbolism and ontology of ‘person-thing’ relations in gift exchange (rather than simply to exchange relations between things, as in the ‘exchange spheres’ model) has been influential in recent exchange and kula studies. Mauss’ contrast between ‘archaic’ gift exchange and the modern Western market-based system is also one root of current arguments involving another dualism, that of ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ exchange. Kula figures prominently in these arguments—for instance, in Gregory’s (1983) widely cited, if problematic, model of gift exchange as the transaction of ‘inalienable objects’ in contrast to the ‘alienable objects’ of commodity exchange. Yet the dynamics of kitomu (Sect. 1, 2) alone suggest the difficulties of applying this dichotomous framework to kula.

No single orientation dominates contemporary kula studies. Rather, kula has been subject to varied forms of rethinking: for example, in terms of a Marxian concern with grounding circulation in production and labor value (Damon 1980), a symbolic formulation of action, spacetime and value (Munn in Leach and Leach 1983, Munn 1986), or gendered models of power and social reproduction (Weiner 1992). Most recently Persson’s (1999) detailed comparison of selected Massim societies approaches kula through the study of regional variation proposing ‘a holistic perspective going beyond societies as closed entities’ (Persson 1999, p. 224). Since its introduction into anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century, kula has been a sounding board for anthropological issues, and continued to be so at the century’s end.

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