Giving the worst part

When I think of trade, I usually have this image of two persons exchanging objects of a certain value. For example, in prehistory, one could probably exchange pieces of good raw material from their region for another material, or a piece of meat… Even if I am not aware of the exact nature of the objects exchanged in the past, my impression is that they were valuable.

But what if the objects traded were actually the less valuable ones? In her paper Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects, Weiner (1994) introduces the notion of keeping-while-giving, where individuals keep their valued possessions, but give mundane objects in order to keep the trade going. She compares different forms of this behavior seen in some indigenous groups of New Guinea in order to better understand its implications.

One of the illustrations of keeping-while-giving is given by the shell exchange in the kula, a political and power system found in the region. In this system, the biggest shells are seen as valuable and “dense”; in a sense, they give status to its owner. In the kula, however, people exchange shells at special occasion in order, I guess, to maintain social bonds and to give a certain impression of equality. The exchange of shells gives everyone the impression that they could, at some point, own one of those ranking ones. In reality, the odds of getting their hands on one are very slim as the owner will usually exchange its ordinary shells instead. In other words, if the trade is few by the desire of getting one “dense” shell, it is actually done with mostly ordinary shells…

A similar situation is found in the Samoa, an archipelago of New Guinea. In there, the exchanged objects are hand-made mats. They are usually exchanged and given on special occasions and it is usually the new ones, the ones without ranking, that are exchanged more often. In the Samoa, a mat can pass from one generation to the next without living the house if it is deemed very valuable. The mats acquire more status as they get “older”, but they also give their status to their owners, in a mutual giving pattern. To add to this situation, the status of the object is also linked to the status of its previous owners, situation that the author compares with New York art dealers who will try to sell their art to important figures…

I thought this paper was relevant because it made me realize something I already knew but had forgotten; that we should not be blinded by our own cultural custom when trying to interpret the archaeological record, or even simply trying to understand other contemporaneous cultures.

At the beginning of her paper, Weiner says that when she first saw women exchanging banana leaf bundles, in the Trobiands, she did not understand what was the purpose of this behavior; according to her judgment, leaf bundles did not have any aesthetic or even use values. It is only after studying the shells of the kula and the mats of the Samoa that she understood that it is not always the valuable objects that are exchanged. Ordinary objects sometimes have as much, if not more, importance as valued ones in social interactions.

What I take from this paper is that, due to the variability in behavior, we always need to question our interpretation. An exotic object found in the archaeological record does not always mean that it was considered as valuable. Nowadays, people dream of novelty; getting a new car is usually more synonymous of success than driving a rusted 1990 one… However, we should not forget that some people attach more importance to the history of an object than to its characteristics. A good analogy would be the value given to very antique, but well-preserved, cars, or even better, Christian relics… They are old and could seem insignificant to an ignorant eye, but their history make them more “dense”, more valuable than anything else.

We need to be careful in assessing value to artifacts, as much as we need to be careful in overlooking those that seem, to us, unimportant.

Reference:

Weiner, A. B. 1994. Cultural Difference and the Density of Objects. American Ethnologist 21(2): 391-403