Week 8

Context
This plan was submitted in the eighth week of class for The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea, by Annette Weiner. The theme for this week was exchange.

Plan
I felt a strange sense of déjà vu as I read through Annette Weiner's introduction. Her experience of following in Malinowski's (physical and theoretical) footsteps reminded me of my own struggles past and present with Merriam's work on the Flathead Reservation. Malinowski's work greatly influenced cultural anthropology, Merriam's ethnomusicology. Both Weiner and I experienced about a 60 year separation between our fieldwork and theirs, and many important anthropological and ethnomusicological, as well as local, developments took place since these first encounters that we had to address and ameliorate in our research (although of course, she has had much more experience than I have in the field!). This connection is something I want to think about further, as these perceived similarities made me feel an unexpected closeness to Weiner's work, and as I read, this feeling never left me.

1. In her introduction, Weiner provides us with a brief history of Trobriand history, geography, and language. We learn how these islands acquired their name (thus lumping them all together in some forced imaginative scheme), and also how Malinowski spent most of his time on just one island and so some of the generalizations he made in his study didn't necessarily apply to the rest of them (i.e., the differences in powers of chiefs among the various islands, p. 6-7). With this in mind, was it okay for Weiner too to generalize across these various islands?

2. In her conclusion, Weiner reminds us of the importance of material things in shaping and sustaining everyday life. She writes, for instance, that "it should come as no surprise that Trobrianders, like other people in other parts of the world, give meanings to things that make them worth more than their cost in labor and the material of which they are made" (159). I was struck by the substantive amount of attention and care devoted to the distribution and production of yams, and the yam's featured role in Trobriand society. But why exactly is the yam so important? How did it come to be that this item came to be such a significant symbol of status as well as economic item for trade (as opposed to a shell or a banana)? I also couldn't believe that the yams were sometimes even left to rot and that people wouldn't eat them because of their prized status as currency.

3. How do other people feel about Weiner's tactic of taking excerpts from her daughter's diary and using them at the beginning of each chapter? 4. Is it significant that tourists were not offered yams or were not included in this particular system of exchange? (yet were offered wood carvings of yam houses)

See also

History

Geography

Circulations

Commodities

Property