‘Like Playing a Game Where You Don't Know the Rules’: Investing Meaning in Intercultural Cash Transactions Between Tourists and Trobriand Islanders

ABSTRACT

When tourists visit cultural tourism destinations, the primary form of interaction between visitors and local residents is in the exchange of money for material objects and performances. While purchase of cultural commodities in tourism contexts may appear to be simple market transactions, they are often in fact morally fraught sites of ambiguous interaction, invested with disparate meanings by different participants. Drawing on Bloch and Parry's (1989) analysis of the symbolism of money and its relationship to culturally constructed ideas about production, consumption, circulation, and exchange, this article examines the conflicting and contested views of cash transactions and other types of exchange in meetings between tourists and Trobriand Islanders in Papua New Guinea. I argue that intercultural exchange in tourism is not necessarily a straightforward commodity exchange, but evokes social relations that are often quite differently conceptualized by the producers and consumers of touristic products.

KEYWORDS:

• Exchange
• money
• tourism
• morality
• authenticity
• Trobriand Islands

Acknowledgements

I thank Rupert Stasch for organizing the conference panel at the 2011 AAA meetings in Montreal that led to the papers in this issue, and to my fellow conference presenters for a stimulating session. Rupert, Mark Busse, Cris Shore, Mark Mosko, and the Ph.D. writing group at the University of Auckland provided useful comments on early drafts of this paper, and Rupert's ongoing support and guidance have helped this paper to develop through several rewrites. As always, my most heartfelt thanks are owed to the Siwaidou family and other wonderful Trobriand Islanders who facilitated this research and made me feel so welcome in their midst.

Funding

My thanks are owed to the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Auckland Faculty of Arts for providing funding to carry out fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, which took place over 18 months in 2009–2010.

Notes

1. All participants were explicitly asked whether they preferred I use their own name or a pseudonym. I have reflected their choices here, but do not indicate each case where names have been changed.

2. In general terms (though of course there are exceptions), travellers who reach the Trobriands are usually affluent professionals, mobile, well educated, widely travelled, adventurous, and curious enough to opt to travel to PNG. Many are retired. Among tourists, my inquiries turned up few systematic differences of viewpoint along lines of gender, whereas age and previous travel experience often were axes of significant differentiation (see MacCarthy 2012). For Trobrianders resident in their home islands, the other group of people with whom I worked extensively, the patterns of opinion that I report across this article did not vary systematically along lines of gender, chiefly versus non-chiefly lineage, or other obvious areas of local social differentiation.

3. In this paper, I use the term ‘traditional’ to describe exchanges that make use of items of wealth produced locally (yams and pigs), exchanged intra-regionally (stone axe blades and shell valuables), and state-issued notes and coins which are used to meet ongoing social obligations and to maintain and solidify both kin and non-kin relationships. I do not intend for expressions like ‘traditional’ currency or ‘traditional’ exchange to imply any assumptions of a frozen-in-time continuity from a distant past uncoupled from modern life and economic exchange.

4. Accurate statistical data for PNG are difficult to obtain. While a census was carried out in 2011, only preliminary data are available and due to high mobility, communication difficulties, and flexible kin arrangements, even such data as are available have limited accuracy. According to my own observations, perhaps 90% of resident Trobriand Islanders do not have a regular source of cash income, though some of these persons may engage in the market economy in an informal and generally low-return manner, such as selling produce or value-added products like cakes or scones.

5. Malinowski did not make reference to kitoum, but they have been discussed by a number of more recent scholars such as Damon (1980; 2002), Munn (1986), and Weiner (1976; 1988; 1992). May (1982: 297) briefly discusses efforts made as part of micronationalist movements in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s to prevent kula valuables being sold outside the traditional exchange networks.

6. The term dimdim refers to both skin colour (white) and point of origin (non-Trobriand). It is not a term particular to the Kilivila language, but is used throughout Milne Bay Province.

7. There are exchanges that take place to formalize and publically recognize matrimony, and today money is virtually always integral to these transactions. However, it should be noted that these exchanges, called kaikaboma and katuvila in the Trobriand vernacular, are not on the scale of ‘bride price’ as represented in the literature from many other parts of PNG and Melanesia more broadly.

8. The vernacular language of the Trobriand Islands is usually referred to as Kilivila, but is also often called both in the literature and by Trobriand Islanders by the name of the largest island, Kiriwina. I use these terms interchangeably here.

9. While Trobriand Islanders most often glossed the verb -nigada as ‘beg’ in English, it may also be glossed as ‘request’ or ‘demand’; see also Hammons (2014).