Wiley, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Man

The Commerce of Cultures in Melanesia
Author(s): Simon Harrison

Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 139-158
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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THE COMMERCE OF CULTURES IN MELANESIA
SIMON HARRISON
University of Ulster
In many parts of Melanesia, property rights in rituals were traded or formally transferred across
cultural boundaries as prestige goods in the indigenous gift economies. This article examines the
implications of these transactions for the understanding of ritual, political economy and cultural
identity in Melanesian societies.
Introduction
Over the past decade, a number of authors have distinguished two types of
indigenous political systems in Melanesia: in one, men's power was grounded in
their control of wealth, and in the other it was grounded in their control of
religion or the symbolic order. Lindstrom (1984), for instance, differentiates be-
tween wealth-based and knowledge-based polities, according to whether the
strategic resources of political action were material goods or knowledge. Erring-
ton (1988) draws the same contrast and gives it a geographical reference,
distinguishing the 'knowledge cultures' of the Sepik region of Lowland New
Guinea, with their emphasis on esoteric knowledge, from the 'thing cultures' of
the New Guinea Highlands whose principal valued goods were pigs and pearl-
shells. For Lindenbaum (1984) similarly, the locus of male domination was
economy in the Highlands and religious ideology in the Lowlands: the key
political institutions in the central Highland societies were ceremonial exchange
systems in which men appropriate women's productive labours; the equivalent in
Lowland and fringe Highland societies were male initiation systems in which
men symbolically appropriated women's reproductive labours. Godelier's (1986)
distinction between Big Men and Great Men also rests on the same sort of
dichotomy: the classic entrepreneurial figure of the Big Man arose only in so-
cieties where wealth was essential to processes of social reproduction in
transactions such as bridewealth payments; otherwise, Melanesian societies had
Great Men, leaders of miscellaneous kinds whose power ultimately derived from
the domain of ritual (see also Harrison 1988; Liep 1991: 32; Modjeska 1991:
236-7).
If power had a predominantly economic basis in some Melanesian societies
and a predominantly religious or ideological basis in others, it is important to
discover whether there were underlying structures or processes common to
both systems of domination. I shall discuss a type of transaction, found in a wide
range of Melanesian societies, which cuts across the geographical and conceptual
Man (N.S.) 28, 139-158
140 SIMON HARRISON
dichotomies to which I have just referred. These were transactions in which

copyrights in ritual symbolism functioned essentially as luxury or prestige goods.
I argue that men's power in these societies had only one basis: namely, their
control over the circulation of prestige goods. It was simply that these goods
could assume a variety of forms, including the form of religious representations.
Trading in rituals
In a number of parts of the world, ethnographers have sometimes reported the

trading of rituals from one ethnic group to another; to be more precise, the
transfer of what amount to property rights in rituals across cultural or ethnic
boundaries by means of some form of sale or formalised prestation. The Ameri-
can Plains Indians peoples bought from one another rights to replicate each
other's military clubs and ceremonial associations, with their distinctive songs,
dances and regalia (Lowie 1921: 315-16, 321; 1954: 101). The costs could be
high: in about 1875 the Crow purchased a ceremonial complex from their Hi-
datsa neighbours for 'about 600 horses and property to boot' (Lowie 1935: 207).
On the American Northwest Coast, among the Kwakiutl and their neighbours,
the masked dances of the Winter Ceremonial were valuable property transmitted
among the nobility as part of dowries, and ownership of the dances was often
transferred between ethnic groups in the marriage alliances of their chiefly
families (Drucker 1963: 146; Goldman 1975: 66-82).
It was Mead (1938) who first pointed out that many Melanesian societies had
propensities to traffic in rituals. A recent example can be found inJolly's (1991)
comparison of some of the 'graded societies' of north Vanuatu. A graded society
is a series of ceremonial ranks and tides through which individuals progress by
payments and sacrifices of pigs, each step conferring specific ritual prerogatives
and insignia. Jolly argues that these ceremonial systems were not fixed, but
changed constantly through endogenous innovation and through borrowing (see
also Allen 1981; Brunton 1989a: 170-1; Patterson 1981: 192). The peoples of
north Vanuatu were linked by a vigorous inter-island trade, and regularly pur-
chased components of each other's graded societies with goods such as pigs and
yams:
[T]itles are not solely attached to particular collectivities, but were in pre-colonial times, and
even now are vigorously exchanged between them. This exchange involved material resources
such as pigs, yams, paints, mats and bodily insignia, but also imports and exports of chants and
dances, and their associated meanings (olly 1991: 51; see also pp. 69, 70).
Some Melanesian societies treated their ritual systems essentially as valuable

property which they had definite rights to withhold or bestow. Outsiders might
indeed induce them to share or divulge their rituals, but only for a price and in
some cases a substantial one. The Ngaing and other peoples of the Rai coast
treated their deities, and the myths and rituals relating to them, as precious assets
in this way, as stores of wealth they needed constantly to safeguard from misap-
propriation by covetous outsiders:
Rights to deities had to be established by genealogy or purchase. Otherwise, they were invari-
ably withheld from outsiders who, it was believed, would exploit them to their own advantage
and so impoverish the original owners (Lawrence 1964: 30).
SIMON HARRISON 141
In some societies, these sorts of property rights were so jealously guarded that
their infringement, or the 'piracy' by one group of a ritual belonging to another,
could lead to feuding and bloodshed (see, for instance, Schwartz 1975: 117). The
peoples of Humboldt Bay, on the coast of West New Guinea, had male initiation
cults, similar to those in many other parts of New Guinea, in which the principal
sacred objects were bamboo flutes. The existence of the flutes was in principle a
secret known only to initiated men, and boys were shown the flutes and taught
to play them as part of their initiation into adulthood. In the Humboldt Bay
villages, women and non-initiates were told that flute-music was produced by a
spirit, identified with the cassowary, which devoured the boys during their initia-
tion and then restored them to life as adult men (Kooijman 1959: 21-2).
These coastal villages had important trading relationships with their inland
neighbours (who differed from them in language and culture), and especially
with the villages on the nearby eastern shores of Lake Sentani. They gave the
lake-dwellers dugout canoes and sea-fish in return for pigs and sago flour. In
particular, the coastal villages supplied coloured beads, which were used as valu-
ables in prestige transactions such as marriage payments (Kooijman 1959: 14-15).
Around the turn of the century, the men of the coastal village of Nafri taught
the ritual to the chief of the lake-village of Ayafo, apparently in the expectation
of receiving from him some particularly valuable beads. He managed to make a
set of working flutes after some trial and error, and then staged the ritual in his
own village, shortly afterwards organising the building of a men's house there so
as to institute the cult permanently.
The men of Nafri, however, looked upon this imitation as theft, and the resultant tension
between the two villages led to fights and murders. The strife only ended when [the chief of
Ayafo] did what he should have done in the beginning - he paid. For the sum of ten ancient
beads, a glass ring and several old drums Ayafo acquired legal ownership of the sacred flutes
and their secret (Kooijman 1959: 15).
The chiefs of two other eastern Lake Sentani villages, presumably wishing not to
be outdone, soon followed suit and acquired the cult from their coastal trade-
partners in exchange for valuables, though the cult spread no further along the
lake. Significantly, in acquiring the cult these three villages acquired certain other
cultural practices of the coastal peoples: the architectural style of their cult-
houses, with distinctive pyramidal roofs; the prohibition, imposed on initiated
men, of killing or eating cassowaries; and, in the 1920s, the coastal styles of male
and female coiffure (Kooijman 1959: 21-2). To a degree, these three Lake Sen-
tani villages 'became' coastal ones at the level of culture, acquiring a portion of
their trading partners' identities.
This was the normal pattern with sales or gifts of rituals in Melanesia: the
donors did not usually surrender their title to the ritual, but rather extended to
the recipients rights to perform it. The transactions typically took the form of a
kind of franchise, under which the donors sold or formally conferred the rights
to reproduce certain aspects of their culture.
Ritual and cultural identity
These transactions were simply a special form of diffusion, and in that respect
were an aspect of a broader characteristic for which Melanesian cultures have
142 SIMON HARRISON
long been noted: namely, their highly developed propensities to borrow one
another's traits (Brunton 1989a; Mead 1938). But these fornal transfers of rights
in ritual do present certain problems of their own.
The basic problem they raise is that it seems odd for religious or ethnic affilia-
tions, or their symbols, to be treated as objects of commerce. Of course, there is
nothing in principle to prevent them from being treated so, if they happen to be
objects of someone's desire. It is simply a matter of their possessors claiming
proprietary rights in them, being able to protect these rights, and letting these
rights take an exchange value. On Malo in Vanuatu there were private or semi-
private languages made up of special gestures, postures and verbal expressions,
and these codes were owned by individuals as their copyright property. Some of
the symbols were so recondite that only one or two people understood them. A
junior wishing to acquire one of these codes had to purchase it, symbol by
symbol, from its possessor, and in doing so he entered into a highly privileged
and restricted circle of communication (Rubinstein 1981: 158). Here, we see a
Melanesian commerce in semi-idiosyncratic ritual, in 'ritual' almost as much in a
Freudian as in an anthropological sense. The commerce of cultures in Melanesia
was simply on a bigger scale. It dealt in identities, images and symbols having a
collective, political dimension and not just an interpersonal one. But it was
grounded in the same assumptions about the nature of identity.
The point is that, in the West, these kinds of symbols of personal or cultural
identity are normally considered inalienable from their possessors, indeed as part
of their identities as human beings. It would be inappropriate to treat them as
merchandise. To borrow Kopytoff's (1986: 73-4) term, they are 'sacralised': elev-
ated by cultural fiat above the status of commodities. Kopytoff suggests that every
economy has an inherent drive towards a limitless commoditization of things, a
drive which cultural values and conceptions serve to contain (1986: 68-75). I
would argue that antinomies of this sort are primarily a feature of commodity
economies, and of the particular distinction they create between persons and
things (Gregory 1982: 18, 43; Kopytoff 1986: 84-7; Strathem 1988). For in gift
economies, all goods stand for human relationships, for persons or for aspects of
persons, and create by being transacted a commonality of identity between their
givers and their receivers. These economies can treat rights in ritual, or in other
symbols of cultural or religious affiliation, as goods because all their goods have
in common with ritual the property of symbolising human identities and rela-
tionships in the first place.
Although the transactions I am concerned with crossed cultural boundaries,
they seem in most instances to have taken place between partners in established
trade or exchange relationships. In some cases, the partners were bound in endur-
ing and close ties of mutual dependence. In others, their relations were more
tenuous and distant; the partners faced each other across a boundary between two
gift economies, and they traded with a rather more explicit view to their own
advantage. Such transactions approximated to commodity exchange, and in my
discussion of them I shall therefore sometimes use terms such as sale, purchase
and exchange value. But, in general, even these transactions were constructed as
personalised, as taking place under conventions of sociability similar to those
governing exchanges closer to home.
SIMON HARRISON 143
One effect of these transactions was that the social systems within a given
region could become linked in complexly intertwining networks of rights in
ritual property. Each society was distinguished from its neighbours, not so much
by having a unique 'culture', but by having a kind of portfolio of property rights
in a unique combination of ritual complexes in which its neighbours simply
owned different combinations of shares (see Harrison 1987). In the 1950s, the
Ngaing numbered between eight and nine hundred people, divided into about
twenty local communities. Traditionally, these were politically independent war-
making units, though they were also linked by trade, intermarriage and a
structure of dispersed matriclans. A community consisted of several patriclans, or
patriclan-like groups, each of which had a separate magical and ritual patrimony:
a cult-house (or a section of one, in the case of a cult-house shared by several
clans), slit-drums, gourd trumpets, drum melodies, secret magical formulas, and a
variety of other sorts of material and intangible religious property. In each patri-
clan there were normally one or two prominent men, who achieved their
position by success in important activities such as warfare and ceremonial ex-
change and, especially, by mastering their clan's ritual knowledge (Lawrence
1965: 198-203, 217-18).
According to myth, the important elements of Ngaing material culture were
created by deities who revealed to the first human beings the technical and
magical knowledge associated with their use or manufacture. Some Ngaing lo-
calities credited quite different gods with having created the same item of culture.
Ngaing magic involved the symbolic re-enactment of the deities' acts, and the
recitation of spells containing the secret names of the deities or of the artefacts
they created. Bows and arrows, slit drums, hand drums, wooden bowls, shell and
dog-tooth valuables, bullroarers and so forth all had their specific deities and
associated myths and magical spells. There were deities associated with the con-
trol of the weather, with the fertility of taro and other crops, with the institution
of pig-exchange and the growth of pigs, and with the ceremonies of male initia-
tion. All the deities had their abodes in specific locales within or outside Ngaing
territory, and thereby had particular areas within which people owed them allegi-
ance and possessed rights in the mythology and rituals relating to them (Lawrence
1965: 208).
Most of the twenty or so local communities had their own war gods, but
affiliations to many other deities cut across political and even linguistic boun-
daries. Some deities were common to the Ngaing as a whole, and others to
particular Ngaing regions, but in both cases many deities were shared with a
variety of neighbouring groups. From the point of view of religion, the territory
of the Ngaing and their neighbours was cross-cut by many overlapping and
intersecting ritual domains. These had little correspondence with group structure,
though they seem in at least some cases to have corresponded to routes taken by
the deities in mythical journeys. Within each of these domains, people took an
intensely proprietorial attitude towards their deity and mythology. Any attempt
by outsiders to use religious secrets without formally purchasing the rights to
them was strongly resisted and treated as theft (Lawrence 1965: 203-6, 215).
There were great local variations in details of ritual and culture among the
Ngaing. The Ngaing themselves were just one of many small groups in their area
144 SIMON HARRISON
with different languages and systems of kinship and descent. But these peoples
were interrelated by trade and all seem to have had structures of ritual organisa-
tion similar to those I have described. And they all seem to have shared the same
conceptions of religious knowledge as property, and of their gods as goods (Law-
rence 1964: 9-28; 1965: 222-3).
It seems likely that these property rights were in fact transacted through the
region's trade networks: material and intangible goods both travelled along the
same routes, and it was through this mechanism that areal affiliations to particular
deities were established and extended. At any rate, the structures of affiliation to
patron deities, in many cases cross-tribal and linking groups differing in language
and social structure, constituted in their totality a regional network of ritual
interrelationships. The gods of these societies, pace Durkheim (1912), did not
correspond to groups but to pattems of interconnexions between groups.
The problem of cultural continuity in Melanesia
Like many Melanesian peoples, the Chambri people of the middle Sepik
... explicitly regard their society as based on borrowing. They assert that most of their ances-
tors were of foreign origin; they recognize without embarrassment that many of their rituals
were acquired from the Iatmul along with much of their esoteric knowledge. Moreover, they
state that these rituals have been further modified through importations from yet other less
powerful groups. In addition, they say that important dance complexes, myths, flutes and talis-
mans have come from a wide variety of groups (Errington & Gewertz 1986: 99 [footnote
omitted]).
A legend concerning the importation of certain sacred flutes illustrates the foreign
provenance of much of Chambri ritual. Each of the Chambri moieties owned its
own pair of flutes. Such flute-pairs were regarded as the material embodiments of
named spirits, and were traditionally played during mortuary ceremonies. Ac-
cording to tradition, an ancestor called Sengabi originally obtained the flutes of
his moiety, and the spirit-being personifying these flutes, in trade from the Sawos
people to the north of Chambri. At the time, the other moiety already had flutes,
called Amakio, but Sengabi's moiety had none. Sengabi went in search of flutes
among the Sawos people, taking with him a huge sleeping basket to give in
exchange. Such baskets - woven bags which Sepik River people slept in for
protection from mosquitoes - were manufactured by the Chambri in pre-
colonial times, and traded widely by them to other riverain groups. Sengabi
eventually found purchasers in the Sawos villages of Nogosop and Gaikorobi,
whose men offered to buy the bag for shell valuables. But Sengabi, hearing flutes
played, asked to be given these instead. The Sawos agreed and Sengabi returned
to Chambri with the flutes, which bore the name Lokwi, accompanied by two
Sawos men to instruct the men of his moiety how to play them (Errington &
Gewertz 1986: 105-6).
In an earlier work, Gewertz (1983) argued persuasively that the key economic
resource of the Chambri and their neighbours was not territory (as it was, for
instance, in the Highland societies) but their trading relationships with each
other. The obvious motive for cultural borrowing would seem to lie here, in the
fundamental importance of these intersocietal relations of mutual dependence
within the regional trading system.
SIMON HARRISON 145
But Errington and Gewertz argue that the borrowing is to be explained by the
nature of the political processes internal to the Chambri, and in particular by the
incessant conflicts between seniors and juniors over the control and inheritance
of ritual knowledge. Seniors tried to retain their knowledge for as long as possible
in order to hold on to their own authority. Often, they kept their secret lore to
themselves for too long, and died without passing it on to their heirs. As a result,
Chambri culture was 'entropic': the funds of ritual 'power' that men competed
for diminished perpetually, provoking greater competition, and so creating a
vicious circle. The Chambri themselves were acutely aware of this constant dissi-
pation of knowledge. They had regularly to replenish their access to this power
from the outside, by acquiring the religious lore, paraphernalia and techniques of
neighbouring peoples (Errington & Gewertz 1986: 101-4).
Incapable of sustaining a culture of their own in the long term, Chambri seems
to have been simply a kind of sink into which other people's cultures vanished.
If its culture was entropic, this may perhaps explain the propensity of the Cham-
bri constantly to import culture, but it fails to explain their equally marked
tendency to export. For the Chambri seem just as vigorously to have produced or
adapted dance-complexes and ritual sacra such as masks and flutes for trade to
their neighbours (Errington & Gewertz 1986: 99, 107; Mead 1938: 163, 176-7).
It is difficult to understand why the Chambri should have been willing to share
access to these resources of power with outsiders, if these were a scarce and
ever-dwindling good for which the Chambri struggled among themselves. A
society suffering chronic cultural entropy, yet apparently producing a wealth of
cultural forms for export to its neighbours, would seem to be a contradiction.
Errington and Gewertz (1986: 106-7) suggest that entropic processes may be a
general characteristic of Sepik cultures, and may explain the marked propensity of
these cultures, first noted by Mead (1938), self-consciously to borrow each
other's traits. But if entropy were truly an areal feature of Sepik cultures, it is hard
to see how these societies could have developed, as they did, religious and ritual
systems of a complexity and elaboration unmatched in many other regions of
Melanesia. If these cultures had constantly undergone the processes which
Errington and Gewertz suggest, the net effect would surely have been a general
impoverishment of culture in the Sepik. Or rather, perhaps, these cultures would
never have been capable of more than some rudimentary level of development in
the first place.
There is a similar problem with Brunton's (1989a) argument that many Me-
lanesian societies were characterized by 'cultural instability'. Brunton carefully
documents the willingness of Melanesian societies, both in pre-colonial and post-
colonial times, to adopt new ritual complexes and modify or abandon existing
ones. He relates these propensities for change, obsolescence and borrowing to the
political 'instability' of these societies. They tended to lack stable political groups,
and stable structures of authority, capable of maintaining a historical continuity in
their ritual systems. Local religious traditions were repeatedly interrupted, lost or
overturned in upheavals such as shifts in the locus of power between competing
actors and factions (1989a: 93-4, 129, 166-7, 173, 177). This religious 'vola-
tility' (1989a: 129, 173) itself further exacerbated the political fragmentation and
146 SIMON HARRISON
divisiveness of these societies, so creating a 'spiral of entropy' (1989a: 162, 169).

Melanesian and other egalitarian cultures, as it were, perpetually leaked.
But, again, if this were true the situation in Melanesia would surely have been
one of general cultural impoverishment. It would be difficult to describe Melane-
sia as characterised by a marked simplicity of culture.' Once more, we are led to
a contradiction: individually, Melanesian societies seemed constantly to lose or
discard their ritual traditions, yet without any loss making itself apparent on a
regional or intersocietal scale.
Melanesian cultures may perhaps look unstable or entropic if we take individ-
ual sociocultural groups as our units of analysis, and assume that their
funidamental problem was to ensure the continuity of their particular local tradi-
tions across the generations. From the viewpoint of any given group, one might
indeed see constant discontinuity and change. But if we take intergroup relations as
our focus, we see groups embedded in systems of trade and exchange and main-
taining relations with each other by producing and exchanging a variety of goods
including cultural or religious forms. There is no evidence that these regional
systems themselves were prone to spirals of entropy.
Let me take the classic instance of a Melanesian 'importing culture': the
Mountain Arapesh. The Beach Arapesh villages were linked to those of the
Mountain Arapesh in networks of hereditary trade-partnerships between individ-
ual men. These networks formed three principal trade-routes called the roads of
the dugong, of the viper and of the setting sun. Along these routes the Mountain
Arapesh supplied tobacco, bird plumes, pots and net bags, in return for stone
axes, bows, arrows, baskets and shell valuables. Besides these material goods, the
Mountain Arapesh also regularly purchased masked dance-complexes from their
coastal partners, who had themselves bought them earlier from maritime peoples
who came to them annually on trading voyages.2 The dance-complexes were
very highly prized by the Mountain Arapesh, among whom there was an insa-
tiable demand for what they saw as the superior quality of the cultural forms of
the coastal peoples; beach villages were referred to as the 'mothers' of the
'daughter' mountain villages to which they supplied these dance-complexes.
Each dance brought with it new styles of body-decoration, songs and techniques
of magic and divination. The purchase included physical objects such as masks
and ornaments, but it was not simply the objects alone that were purchased but
the rights to copy them. The Mountain Arapesh bought the dances as whole
villages in return for large quantities of pigs, tobacco, bird plumes and shell
valuables. A purchase of a dance-complex was initiated by a leader in the pur-
chasing village who organised the collection of the necessary wealth. It involved
solicitory gifts that often extended over several years.
A newly-acquired dance would go out of fashion in a village when a still
newer dance came on offer; the old dance was then sold off to another com-
munity further inland along the trade-route. Thus the dances travelled gradually
from one locality to the next into the interior. If the sellers were dissatisfied with
the purchasers' offerings, they would usually remove a few elements from the
complex rather than sell it entire; and because inland villages were poorer than
their seaward partners, a dance-complex tended progressively to simplify and
devalue with each transfer. In some cases, the complexes were incorporated into
SIMON HARRISON 147
the esoteric rituals of male initiation; alternatively, their purchasers might decide
instead to 'show them to the women' and treat the dances as wholly secular
(Mead 1935: 8-10; 1938: 333-5).
The cultural differences between the coast and the hinterland seem to have
had real economic value to the coastal and maritime peoples, for they generated
a net inflow of wealth. While their inland partners were, in effect, trying to
collapse these cultural distinctions, the coastal peoples for their part presumably
sought to preserve them and so to continue to capitalise on their value (see Mead
1938: 335). It was not the content of their culture that the Beach Arapesh were
trying to hold constant, just the differentials between their culture and that of the
hinterland. The results were, on the one hand, the constant production or supply
of novel dance-complexes by the maritime and coastal peoples; on the other, the
perpetual striving by the hinterland peoples to emulate the perceived elegance
and sophistication of the coastal cultures. In its endless attempts to appropriate
these cultures, Mountain Arapesh culture was running to stand still. The Beach
Arapesh were running to keep one step ahead. In both cultures there was thus a
constant tumover of symbolic forms. To call this situation one of cultural insta-
bility is perhaps true, but it misses the point. The Beach Arapesh, at least,
presumably had no intention that either their culture or that of their trade-part-
ners should remain stable; indeed, quite the reverse.
If the Mountain Arapesh appeared to wear their culture lightly, and were able
to shed old rituals and adopt new ones readily, it was because these cultural forms
were not conceptualised as 'traditions', as possessions intrinsic to some particular
group's identity, to be handed down by each generation to the next within the
group forever (see Mead 1938: 177). Rather, they were treated as luxury goods
and were produced or acquired in the first place to move along lines of com-
munication between groups. Often, a village seeking to purchase a new dance
first had to sell its current dance to obtain the necessary funds:
[Village A] may be making advance payments to [village B] for the Midep complex, while
[village B] is trying to collect enough to buy the Shene complex from [village C]. The pigs
paid for the Midep become part of the purchase price for the Shene (Mead 1938: 334).
The interdependent, chain-like structure of these transactions recalls certain New

Guinea Highland prestige economies, as I shall show later. For the commerce in
dance-complexes was, I suggest, a prestige economy, with its key valuables being
cultural forms. Each community in the system was in effect continuously ex-
changing - to use Bourdieu's (1984; 1990: 128, 135) termninology - its symbolic
capital for the economic capital of its inland partners, and then doing the opposite
with its partners towards the sea.
Cultural property rights and intersocietal power relations
I know of no cases in Melanesia of two groups directly exchanging property

rights in their respective rituals. It seems that the normal pattern was for these
rights to move against items such as pigs and shell valuables: in other words, in
return for the kinds of material goods that functioned as prestige items in these
societies. It was an exchange of dissimilar goods. Those conferring rights in their
rituals were converting their symbolic capital into economic capital, and the
recipients were doing the reverse.
148 SIMON HARRISON
If Melanesians sometimes treated their rituals as property capable of having an

exchange value, a question this raises is the nature of the intrinsic or 'prime' value
they ascribed to their rituals.3 Melanesian religions have been noted for the
emphasis they placed on material prosperity, and for the way that magic and
ritual seemed conceived essentially as part of the economy or technology (Kees-
ing 1982: 242; Lawrence & Meggitt 1965: 18; Malinowski 1935). These societies
appeared interested not so much in the meaning of their rituals as in their effects:
less concemed with religious exegesis than with testing the power of their rituals
to yield pragmatic benefits such as wealth, health, fertility and success in warfare
(see for instance Gardner 1983). It was in this spirit of empirical experimentation
that the Irakia Awa, for instance, adopted in the 1970s the intensive pig-hus-
bandry methods of their Fore neighbours, together with the ritual they supposed
was responsible for their neighbours' abundant herds. They sought simply to try
the Fore pig-complex, and intended to abandon it if it failed to produce the
desired results (Boyd 1985: 125-6, 132).
Now, in gift economies goods assume the form, not of inert objects, but of
surrogate human beings or living things (Gregory 1982: 45). Melanesians seem to
have conceived of their rituals as powerful stores of precisely this kind of living
force; potentially, rituals were supreme gift objects, and they epitomised that
variety of 'fetishism' peculiar to gift economies (Gregory 1982: 24; Mauss 1966:
10; cf. Parry & Bloch 1989: 11). An alien ritual was a gift of power, potentiating
the group receiving it. Indeed, some Melanesian peoples seemed to regard the
efficacy of rituals as tending to increase in proportion to the foreignness of their
provenance (Knauft 1985: 328).
Of course, rituals were usually reworked and reinterpreted as they passed from
one social system into another. Knauft (1985) and Tuzin (1980) have both made
excellent studies of the ways in which rituals were adapted to local concems as
they diffused, or were given different local emphases, while nevertheless retaining
a basic continuity of form. My point is that Melanesian ritual systems reflected
the same basic concerns, with power, fertility, well-being and so forth. Neigh-
bouring social systems shared a common regional aesthetic, an essential mutual
intelligibility at the level of religious ideas.
It is certainly true that many Melanesian societies seem to have had also a
strong propensity for what Schwartz (1975) called cultural totemism: a pro-
nounced concern with emphasizing and elaborating their cultural differences (see
also Knauft 1985: 327-8). The Manambu of the East Sepik, for instance, con-
structed their cult-houses in a style slightly different from that of their Iatmul
neighbours, and claimed that they would 'die' if they built cult-houses like those
of the Iatmul (Harrison in press). It is unnecessary to give other examples of this
kind of cultural exclusiveness and parochialism. Indeed, cultures are perhaps in-
herently relational and oppositional, generating themselves in processes of mutual
differentiation (Boon 1982; Cohen 1985). But Melanesian societies often seemed
to create this distinctiveness or difference in order to mediate and bridge it. I
mean that in these processes of mutual differentiation, in the deliberate mutual
heightening of each other's 'otherness', there was the creation of a particular kind
of value. The identities of others, in the form of the rituals they possessed, were
SIMON HARRISON 149
valuable to acquire just as they were valuable to acquire in the material form of
gifts such as shell valuables.
A common pattern in Melanesia seems to have been for politically weak
groups to seek to acquire the ritual practices of powerful and militarily dominant
neighbours, rather than the reverse, and this could give rise to enduring asymme-
tries resembling patron-client, or centre-periphery, relationships across cultural
boundaries (see Harrison 1987; 1990: 18-24, 76-9; Knauft 1985: 332). The very
hostility and aggression of one's neighbours could make their rituals particularly
valuable to acquire. The Gebusi, for instance, adopted cultural forms from their
Bidamini enemies even as they were being invaded and absorbed by them, and
Knauft speaks of them as 'enamored of Bidamini songs and dances' (1985: 329).
In the Sepik region Tuzin has shown, similarly, that the southern Arapesh
derived most of their conventions of religious art and ritual from their aggress-
ively expansionist neighbours, the Abelam (1976: 79).
The male cults of the Abelam were focused on beings called nggwalndu, clan-
spirits which men represented in painting and statuary and in the elaborate
facades of their cult-houses. Within this overall common framework of ritual
there was considerable diversity among the Abelam in ritual, art styles and forms
of ceremonial organisation. These elements themselves constantly changed and
diffused, and such borrowings were helped by the fact that Abelam communities
had essentially similar clan structures and in many cases shared common names
for clan-spirits. Men could be initiated into the mrale cults of villages other than
their own, on payment of a fee, and would then be entitled to replicate the rituals
and sacra back in their own villages (Forge 1990: 163-164). The Abelam villages
also exported their rituals to the Plains Arapesh (southem neighbours of the
Mountain Arapesh) and to other peoples on their borders:
Rights to hold ritual, objects to serve as the focus of secret ceremonies, ritual paraphemalia,
spells, and instructions for ceremonies were sold to neighbors for many pigs and shell-ring
wealth items. The sales were sometimes outright, but more usually attempts were made to
'lease' ritual complexes and claim payment each time they were staged (Forge 1990: 163).
A sale or lease of a ritual complex to a non-Abelam village was arranged by the

leaders of the two villages, and involved lengthy negotiations. For the sellers
demanded very high fees including pigs, high-grade shell valuables and large
amounts of food while they prepared the requisite masks, carvings, paintings and
headdresses. Once the preparations were complete, the sellers carried the sacra to
the purchasers' village in a massive armed display, demonstrating their power by
destroying and pillaging property along the route. In some cases they stayed to
take part in the ritual and made considerable demands on their hosts' hospitality,
but otherwise they simply took their payment and went home (Forge 1990:
164-5).
In pre-colonial times the sellers usually carried out the work of preparing the
sacra in their own village, partly for their own safety and partly to make it clear
that ownership of the ritual still remained ultimately with themselves. For they
would deliberately omit many of the most vital parts of the ritual, particularly the
secret names of the nggwalndu and the spells by which they were invoked. What-
ever the Arapesh may have thought they were buying, from the Abelam point of
view what was being sold were primarily valuable and magically powerful ob-
jects, not full title to the rituals necessary for their reproduction and manufacture.
150 SIMON HARRISON
Some Abelam acknowledged that the Arapesh might in time grow strong by
their acquisitions of Abelam rituals, however partial and incomplete the versions
they obtained. But since the purchasers did not know fully how to use the objects
they bought, the Abelam regarded the buyers as liable to be harmed rather than
benefited by acquiring them (Forge 1990: 163-5).
The Abelam villages were aggressive in their relations with the Arapesh, and
had been displacing them northwards in predatory warfare for much of their
known history (Forge 1966; Tuzin 1976: 72-6). Perhaps this accounts for the
degree of fraud and subversion, unrivalled elsewhere in Melanesia so far as I
know, with which they foisted on their neighbours inauthentic versions of their
rituals. The purchasers for their part, in their position of relative military weak-
ness, seem almost to have fetishised the culture of their powerful and dominant
neighbour.
It is significant that the Abelam sought to define these transactions only as
leases and to keep the ultimate 'copyrights' in their rituals, by withholding im-
portant religious secrets and by demanding payments each time a ritual was
staged. Perhaps Arapesh villages acquiesced in these demands on the under-
standing that they would receive further disclosures of ritual knowledge; but in
the final analysis any demands for wealth would presumably have needed effec-
tive threats of force to back them up. At any rate, the Abelam villages seem to
have sought to keep their Arapesh trade-partners in long-term indebtedness and
dependence, their principal aim being the extraction of wealth. If we were to
locate these transactions on a gift-commodity continuum, they would be closer
to commodity exchange than would any of the other cases I discuss. The main
items of Abelam wealth, essential to their entire exchange system including
bridewealth payments, were shell rings which they were able to obtain only from
the Arapesh in return for pigs. Forge argues that the Arapesh never tried to
exploit their monopoly; they misperceived themselves as dependent on the Abe-
lam, though the real situation was quite the reverse (1990: 165).
Leadership among the Arapesh was based essentially on ritual authority (Tuzin
1991); Abelam leaders were also ritual experts, but fundamentally they were
entrepreneurial Big Men who achieved their status in competitive gift-exchanges
(Kaberry 1971: 51-6, 60-1). A curious symbiosis seems therefore to have de-
veloped between their respective Great Man and Big Man systems: Arapesh
supplied the shell valuables on which the Abelam exchange system depended;
Abelam reciprocated by producing the ritual forms on which the Arapesh system
of religious authority depended.
Ritual and gift-exchange
A characteristic of gifts is that they remain inalienable from their original owners,
and so create an enduring relationship between their givers and receivers
(Gregory 1982: 43). It is significant that many Melanesian societies not only
claimed to have obtained their present-day rituals from other peoples, but that
rituals so acquired often retained their associations with their original donors
for a long time. Their recipients seemed not to have been concerned to suppress
these associations but, on the contrary, to memorialise their relationship with
the donors. The Kaluli, for instance, openly admitted that most of their dance
SIMON HARRISON 151
ceremonies were foreign imports (Knauft 1985: 328; Schieffeein 1976: 225-9).
The Kunimaipa, also
... acknowledge that their major ceremonies came from neighbouring ethnic groups, not from
a creator, and they readily accept modifications and innovations (McArthur 1971: 189).
One of their cultural acquisitions was a ritual which McArthur calls the dance
village ceremony, in which a local group held funerary rites for its dead members,
killed large numbers of pigs and distributed the meat to guests. The Kunimaipa
said that they had acquired this ceremony from a being called Matere, whom
they invoked in spells to promote the growth of pigs. Some Kunimaipa regarded
Matere as a spirit, but others claimed he was an important leader from a certain
nearby ethnic group. The first Kunimaipa to witness this ceremony did so as
guests of this people after Matere's death, when his kin performed it to celebrate
the funerary rites over his skull. After the ceremony these guests
... asked for the skull so that they, too, might organise a ceremony back in their parish. In
turn they handed both the skull and the knowledge of the ceremony on to their neighbours,
who in due course continued the process. Gradually all the Kunimaipa-speaking peoples
learned the custom (McArthur 1971: 173).4
In some societies a sequence of performances such as this, by a series of local

groups in tum, was the normal way in which certain rituals were staged. Mod-
jeska (1991) describes a cult called the Kiria, a voluntary male cult with a series of
initiatory grades, among the Duna of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Accord-
ing to myth, the cult was established by two sisters who had travelled across Duna
territory. Certain stones and other ritual objects, used in the Kiria, had materi-
alised at each spot where the sisters slept, and every Kiria cult-house stood on one
of these sacred sites. Performances of the Kiria were staged in sequence by the
local groups along these ancestral routes, re-enacting the sisters' travels (Modjeska
1991: 246-8).
Modjeska argues that this system of enchained performances foreshadowed, in
symbolic or 'enchanted' form, the systems of enchained ceremonial exchanges
such as the Moka or the Tee, found in some other New Guinea Highland
societies. In these exchange systems, prestige goods such as pigs are transacted in
large-scale gift-giving ceremonies along a chain of local groups, with each group
making a prestation to the next. At the end of the sequence, return gifts are
passed along the chain in reverse order (Feil 1984; 1987; Strathern 1971b). These
systems represented the most highly evolved indigenous political economies of
the Highland societies, and were capable of integrating local groups politically
over wide areas, but they were quite lacking among the Duna. Yet it is as though
the Duna had imagined, in the form of the Kiria cult, the possibility of such a
system, and were
... ritually acting out principles of organisation still beyond society's capacity to envisage and
operationalise in real terms as practical political economy (Modjeska 1991: 248).
Moka exchange, and these sequential transfers of rituals from group to group,
share similar principles and logic. In some societies, they in fact co-existed: rights
in rituals were transacted in ways not only resembling, but closely interlinked
with, an established prestige economy or system of ceremonial gift-exchange.
In about 1949, some of the eastern clans of the Kyaka, another Highland
people, purchased from their Melpa neighbours a ritual complex called the
152 SIMON HARRISON
Goddess cult. It was believed to promote the health and fertility of any clan
possessing it, as well as success in the Moka ceremonial exchange system and in
warfare. The cult was spread from clan to clan by these groups' Big Men who
had been initiated into it by their affines and exchange partners in clans already
possessing the cult (Allen 1967: 44; Bulmer 1965: 133, 136, 148, 158).
The whole cycle of rituals took at least five or six years to complete, and only
two clans near the Melpa border had performed the full sequence by 1958
though others were part-way through. The final ceremony, which took a year or
more to prepare, involved the construction of a series of enclosures containing a
building in which were stored special stones representing the Goddess and other
related powers. In this ceremony, the men of the clan killed their pigs and
distributed the meat to exchange partners and other guests from surrounding
groups. Women were excluded from the cult, except for the wives of important
cult leaders, who were allowed to enter the enclosure and assist their husbands
with the distribution of pork. In acquiring this cult, the Kyaka also adopted the
Melpa practice of secluding women in special huts during menstruation and
childbirth, for the Goddess was said to kill a menstruating woman who inadver-
tently polluted an initiate (Bulmer 1965: 148-50).
Once a clan had completed the cycle of ceremonies, it was entitled to pass the
cult on to a further clan. The men of the clan receiving the cult were described
as thereby 'marrying' the Goddess. The Goddess was not conceptualised as an
ancestress, but as the clansmen's collective bride. She was an affine, and an affine
moreover 'not to one group but, in sequence, to all participating in the cult'
(Bulmer 1965: 151). The cult thus spread by means of a sequence of 'marriages'
between the Goddess and the men of a chain of local groups, each clan bestowing
this imaginary bride on the next. Again, we see ritual in Melanesia symbolising,
not groups, but their relationships with each other. In this case, these were the
intermarriages between clans and, in particular, the politically most significant of
these marriage alliances: those between their respective Big Men, under whose
leadership the cult was in reality being spread from clan to clan.
It was, of course, these selfsame Big Men who also took the leading roles in
the Moka, the system of inter-group exchanges of pigs and valuables. Big Men
led factions of their clans, rather than genealogical segments, and Big Men of the
same clan seem often to have been rivals for followers and status. Bulmer argues
that Big Men sought to acquire the cult in order to increase their own power and
influence within their own clans, just as in the Moka exchanges they used their
marriage-ties and exchange-partnerships with Big Men in other clans to enhance
their status (1965: 151). He noted that the cult co-ordinated
... the activity of more people, both within the clan and outside it ... than any other tradi-
tional institution with the exception of the Moka (Bulmer 1965: 151).
Indeed, I would suggest that the transmission of the Goddess cult from group to
group was functionally equivalent to a chain of Moka transactions: the gift of the
cult expressed and confirmed alliances, and particularly the mutually supportive
alliances of Big Men, in the same way as did their gifts of pigs and other prestige
goods in the Moka. In a sense, the Goddess cult was a prestige good: for a certain
period in their history, it was one of the objects in the Kyaka prestige economy,
albeit a complex symbolic object instead of a material one.
SIMON HARRISON 153
Peripatetic cults similar to this seem to have been common in the western
Papua New Guinea Highlands, meandering across cultural boundaries through
the trade and exchange systems. The Melpa, from whom the Kyaka adopted the
Goddess cult, claim originally to have bought it themselves from the Enga in
about 1880; the Mendi bought a version of this cult from the Melpa area in about
1930 and purchased another similar cult, called Timp, from their southern neigh-
bours around the same time, subsequently reselling it northwards up the Mendi
valley from one local community to the next (Allen 1967: 43, 45-6; Ryan 1961;
Vicedom & Tischner 1943-8). Strathern (1971a) has shown that the cargo cults
arising in the area in the early period of European contact were treated in the
same way, as valuable possessions meant to circulate from group to group in
exchange for payments of wealth. In Mount Hagen in the 1940s, a traffic in cargo
rituals arose in response to the massive influx of shell valuables and other wealth
brought by Europeans. Big Men in outlying areas sought access to this greatly
expanded pool of wealth by creating cargo cult rituals and selling them to groups
closer to the centres of European influence (Strathem 1971a: 263-4).
Durkheim (1912) regarded rituals as symbolising social groups. Mauss (1966)
regarded gifts and prestations as symbolising the relations between groups. So-
cieties such as the Kyaka and their neighbours seem to have fused these two
principles together. That is to say, property rights in their cults were not tied
exclusively to groups but, like the property in material valuables alongside which
they were transferred through the channels of trade and exchange, they belonged
to the regional political economy interrelating these groups.
So far as I know, no Melanesian society ever tried to claim proprietorial rights
in aspects of its culture belonging wholly to its public domain, such as its lan-
guage. The only cultural property rights that these societies traded across their
boundaries were in elements of culture that were already the subject of property
rights within these societies. In general, Melanesian ritual systems were controlled
by men, indeed in most cases exclusively and rigidly so, and there were often
severe penalties for women or noninitiates who disregarded men's religious
prerogatives (Herdt 1982). And in most cases, these rights were also distributed
unequally among men themselves (see, for instance, Godelier 1986). The manner
in which these property rights were transferred between groups was usually con-
nected closely with the pattern of rights within the groups. The Timp cult of the
Mendi illustrates my point. Here, knowledge of the spells and other religious
secrets was distributed among the Big Men of a local community's subclans, in
such a way that no one of these men possessed the full ritual. The cult was
transferred by each Big Man selling his knowledge to a partner in a correspond-
ing subclan of the receiving community (Allen 1967: 46; Ryan 1961). An
identical structure of intellectual property rights thereby mapped itself from one
community onto the next.
As an aggregation of simultaneous transfers from man to man, this closely
resembled in its organisation a Tee gift-exchange ceremony among the neigh-
bouring Enga, for this too was less a transaction between clans than simply a mass
of synchronous transactions between individual exchange-partners happening as
part of the same event (Feil 1984). It was simply that the Timp cult involved a
coordinated transfer of rights in religious knowledge instead of in live pigs. Of
154 SIMON HARRISON
course, these western Highland cult rituals themselves involved the killing and
distribution of pigs, and women's labour was as essential to the cult performances
as it was in the raising of pigs for the Tee or Moka. On the other hand, it was
ultimately men who controlled the exchange-systems and the material and intan-
gible goods which flowed through them. Josephides (1985) has argued that the
ceremonial gift-exchange system of the Kewa, another nearby Highland people,
was a means of invisibly 'converting' women's labour into men's prestige (cf.
Strathern 1988). Inequalities of gender seem to have been reproduced in a similar
way in men's transactions of their rights in ritual complexes. If I can describe pigs
as economic capital, and religious knowledge as symbolic capital, in these High-
land societies it was at least partly women's labour that underwrote the
production and circulation of both.
The basic sources of political authority in these Highland societies, as in much
of Melanesia, were not groups, so much as the relations between them or across
their boundaries (Feil 1984; Lederman 1986; Strathem 1971b). It was through
these relations that power was established and legitimised, rather than by ancestry
or by appeal to an immutable past. Aspiring leaders had to build relationships
with their contemporaries by indebting them in trade and gift transactions.
Power came from controlling the circulation of goods, including goods such as
rights in rituals and, I would add, from using opportunities these systems could
offer for converting between intangible and material forms of political capital.
The driving force of many Melanesian prestige economies was rivalry between
men of the same group; it was their struggles for status that spurred them to seek
valuables from partners in other groups (Feil 1984; Uberoi 1962). It seems to
have been these same struggles that also drove men to seek to acquire foreign
ritual forms (see, for instance, Allen 1981). It was not because their cultures were
'entropic', nor was it simply out of a fascination with novelty and strangeness for
their own sake (cf. Brunton 1989a: 94). It was because transactions in such forms,
like transactions in any other prestige goods, were a measure of the scale of their
power.
It is true that some Melanesian societies had a jealously possessive attitude
towards their ritual traditions and sought to keep them very much to themselves.
But even in these societies we see the same basic processes, albeit minimally
developed, in which competition within the group drove men to seek relations
with outsiders and acquire the prestigious goods they had to offer. The Baruya
perhaps serve as an example. These were a Great Man society, with male initia-
tion the basis both of male domination and of political inequalities among men
themselves. They attributed their military successes over their neighbours to the
power of these initiation ceremonies, and in particular to the key sacra used in
the rites. These were bundles of sacred objects, together with secret spells per-
taining to them. They were the property of the politico-ritually dominant Baruya
lineages and, according to myth, had been given to them by the Sun and Moon.
Even the names of the men who owned these sacra were kept from other tribes,
for fear that these enemies might assassinate these men and so destroy the
precious knowledge they carried. The neighbours of the Baruya in fact had ritual
systems very similar to their own, which the Baruya attributed to their having
SIMON HARRISON 155
copied or stolen Baruya ritual techniques, or to their having been taught them by
the Baruya during intervals of peace (Godelier 1986: 79-89; 1991: 283-4).
Each set of sacra carried with it specific responsibilities in the Baruya initiation
system, and the sacra-owning lineages were ranked among themselves by the
relative importance of the ritual functions they possessed. These prerogatives
clearly had considerable value, for there were often conflicts over their owner-
ship. Groups that lacked sacra claimed, secredy, to possess them. Within the
owning lineages themselves, rival segments often struggled for their possession,
and these confficts could result in one or other of the competing segments bu-
ying, or trying to buy, sacra from some other tribe. One such group, in a bid to
increase its status, purchased a sacred bundle from a ritual expert among a neigh-
bouring people in exchange for salt bars. These bars were a luxury item and the
principal trade goods of the Baruya, with their production and exchange control-
led by men (Godelier 1986: 12, 89, 176; 1991: 283-4).
Interestingly, men who owned sacra were supplied with wives, often several
wives, to ensure that they reproduced and had heirs to inherit their vital knowl-
edge (Godelier 1986: 92-3; 1991: 283). Since these sacra attracted bestowals of
wives, I would suggest that they represented, in effect, funds of reproductive
capital, like bridewealth (cf. Harrison 1990: 114-39, 203). Their fundamental
difference from bridewealth was simply that they were, in theory if not entirely
in fact, the inalienable patrimony or heirlooms of certain descent lines and non-
negotiable as goods. Their mere possession was sufficient to guarantee their
owners' reproduction.
Conclusion
The ritual systems of the societies I have discussed, when viewed from the per-
spective of the indigenous gift economies, appear essentially as funds of
high-status symbolic property or intangible wealth. These group assets were
owned and managed by men, who assumed the right to prevent or restrict their
use by others. One can see a range of strategies in the way men managed these
funds in their relations with outsiders. At one extreme were societies such as the
Baruya, in which leaders sought on the whole to keep their ownership rights
confined permanently to their society, indeed to their own particular sub-groups
or descent lines, representing them as their exclusive birthrights and imposing
many restrictions on the possibility of their movement against other goods.
At the other extreme were societies in which men openly treated these
property rights as valuables. Religious representations entered the trade and ex-
change systems as a category of luxury or prestige goods, and men readily sought
to convert them from and into other forms of wealth. These societies thus ap-
peared culturally highly extraverted and acquisitive; often, their rituals had origins
distant in space rather than in time and drew their prestige and authenticity as
much from their foreignness as from their antiquity. I have focused on intersocie-
tal transactions, but I should say that ritual entitlements often functioned as
valuables even within many Melanesian societies, and particularly in societies such
as these. They were not simply transmitted from one generation to the next, but
had to be transacted in often complex exchanges in which the balance of
material wealth went from juniors to seniors, from heirs to their legators or from
156 SIMON HARRISON
neophytes to their initiators (see, for instance, Bateson 1958: 57; Errington 1974;
Joly 1991; Malinowski 1922: 185; Rubinstein 1981).
But the common essence of both of these polar strategies was the treatment of
religious representations as a category of property or wealth. What varied was
simply the degree to which these proprietary rights were permitted to be nego-
tiable against rights in other sorts of goods.
I referred at the start of this article to the view that power appears to have had
an economic basis in some Melanesian societies and an ideological or religious
basis in others. My argument is that both sorts of resources were substitutable for
each other in the economies of a wide range of Melanesian societies, and could
be treated in an identical way at the level of concrete political action. Political
actors appeared not to have two categories of assets in their control, just one:
namely, prestige goods, these being capable of assuming a range of material and
intangible forms. The politically significant discriminations the actors themselves
drew were simply between classes of goods ranked by status. The structures
within which they actually acted, and through which their societies articulated
with one another in regional systems, were conceptions of the relative social
valuation of different orders of goods, and these conceptions cut across dicho-
tomies such as those between wealth and knowledge, between things and ideas,
or between economy and religion.
NOTES
1 It is of course impossible to gauge the cultural elaboration and complexity of a society except
impressionistically. But one certainly finds in Melanesia nothing resembling the minimal levels of
formalised culture of those hunter-gatherer societies which Brunton (1989b) cites as examples of
the problems of egalitarian cultures.
2 There is evidence in the ethnographic literature of there having been a lively trade in dances
all along the northeastern coast of New Guinea, with the dances eventually finding their way
inland (see, for instance, Lawrence 1964: 26, 28, 30; Lipset 1990: 286; Mead 1938: 163, 175-6,
332-3).
3 The useful term 'prime value' is proposed by Renfrew (1986: 159) to denote the culturally-
ascribed 'inherent' value possessed by prestige goods.
4 Alternatively, a few Kunimaipa claim that the ceremony and the skull were brought from the
opposite direction by Matere's younger brother, and that each local group staged the ritual in
turn as he travelled across Kunimaipa territory (McArthur 1971: 173).
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Le commerce des cultures en Melanesie
Rksume
Dans nombre de localites melanesiennes, les droits de propriet sur les rituels faisaient l'objet
d'echanges marchands ou de transferts inter-culturels tres formels, identiques aux echanges de biens
de prestige dans les economies du don. Cet article considere les implications de ce type de transactions
pour la comprehension du phenomene rituel, de l'economie politique et de l'identite culturelle au
sein des societes melanesiennes.
Department of Sociology, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Co Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT52

ISA, U.K.

Wiley, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Man

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The Commerce of Cultures in Melanesia

Author(s): Simon Harrison

Man (N.S.) 28, 139-158

dichotomies to which I have just referred. These were transactions in which

In a number of parts of the world, ethnographers have sometimes reported the

Some Melanesian societies treated their ritual systems essentially as valuable

Ritual and cultural identity

The problem of cultural continuity in Melanesia

divisiveness of these societies, so creating a 'spiral of entropy' (1989a: 162, 169).

The interdependent, chain-like structure of these transactions recalls certain New

Cultural property rights and intersocietal power relations

I know of no cases in Melanesia of two groups directly exchanging property

If Melanesians sometimes treated their rituals as property capable of having an

A sale or lease of a ritual complex to a non-Abelam village was arranged by the

Ritual and gift-exchange

In some societies a sequence of performances such as this, by a series of local

Lindenbaum, S. 1984. Variations on a sociosexual theme in Melanesia. In Ritualised homosexuality in

Le commerce des cultures en Melanesie

Department of Sociology, University of Ulster, Coleraine, Co Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT52

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