Tolai tabu as wealth and money: A shifting and unstable distinction

ABSTRACT

Distinctions between ‘wealth’ and ‘money’ such as the competing classifications of ‘bridewealth’ and ‘brideprice’ have a long pedigree in anthropology. Equally important has been the terminological struggle between ‘shell-money’ and ‘shellwealth’. In this paper, I explore the ways in which a well-known example, Tolai tabu, circulates in the twenty-first century. I argue that whilst describing it as a form of wealth (in contrast to market-based idioms such as ‘money’ or ‘price’) continues to make sense, this distinction only comes into being from certain perspectives. In an era of rapidly emerging socio-economic inequality, the best starting point is not an assumed holistic opposition between Western commodity idioms and their non-Western Other. Ethnographic observation reveals how perspectives on tabu that stress its difference and similarity from money come in and out of being in different conversational contexts as an attempt to shape the limits of future relations and obligations.

KEYWORDS:

• Wealth
• value
• tabu
• money
• gift/commodity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Keir Martin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3157-0773

Notes

1 Diwara is the name given to tabu on the neighbouring Duke of York Islands.

2 Many anthropologists have referred to tabu as ‘tambu’. In keeping with the convention at Matupit village where I conducted fieldwork and following the example of the Tolai anthropologist Jacob Simet, I use the spelling ‘tabu’.

3 There is a long history of ethnographic literature dealing with the character of Tolai tabu and its relationship to state currencies; (e.g. Epstein 1968; Epstein 1969; Salisbury 1970; Bradley 1982; Epstein 1992, 108; Errington and Gewertz 1995; Foster 1998; Martin 2013).

4 Here there is a potential terminological confusion worth clarifying. The term ‘egalitarianism’ is widely used to describe Melanesian societies and the kind of fluid and insecure forms of (Big Man) leadership often traditionally found within them. This use of the term is radically different from its use by Dumont to describe the paramount value of Western societies where an ideological value of ‘egalitarianism’ leading to the equal inalienable rights of each individual person being the paramount consideration can often be compatible with a sever socio-economic stratification in contrast to the relative lack of such stratification in the types of village societies traditionally studied in Melanesian anthropology.

5 A matamatam is a large and rarely held ritual event involving wide spread distribution of tabu by Big Men.

6 Whether this is ‘hierarchy’ in the Dumontian sense or mere ‘stratification’ or ‘inequality’ (Tcherkezoff 2008), I leave aside for the time being.

7 A vernacular term for a Big Man.

8 The PNG state currency.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [R42200134324]; Wenner-Gren Foundation [6860].