Revision:The Trobrianders

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The Trobrianders were a tribe studied on Papua New Guinea by the Polish/Austrian expatriate Bronislav Malinowski. Whilst working in Australia, the First World War broke out. As an ex-Austrian national, he was compelled to either be repatriated or be moved elsewhere. As such, an expedient opportunity presented itself to further his study of "savages".

Spending a great deal of time living and studying the Trobrianders, isolated from western contacts and immersed in their culture, Malinowski was able to pioneer functionalism and his methodological innovation of participant observation. What follows is a variety of observations from Malinoski's seminal work, "The Argonauts of the Western Pacific".

• A man"s wife is thought to become pregnant when an ancestral spirit enters her body and causes conception. Even after a child is born, Malinowski reported, it is the mother"s brother rather than the father who presents a harvest of yams to his sister so that her child will be fed from food from its own matrilineage. However, the father is one of the most important person"s in a child"s life, and remains so even after his child grows up and marries. Even a father"s procreative importance is incorporated into his child"s growth and development. A Trobriand man gives his child many opportunities to gain things from his matrilineage, thereby adding to the available resources that he/she can draw upon.

• The presence of a woman"s wealth means that men are not totally dependant on their own shell and stone valuables at a death. These aspects of women"s wealth, that is, stabilising relationships and levelling some kinds of men"s resources while keeping the other kinds free, determine the level of hierarchy that chiefs are able to maintain, while alternatively showing the limitations chiefs face in gaining additional powers that would bring them greater autonomy.

• After a man becomes chief, in addition to his arranged marriages, he may take wives for "love". Unlike villagers who are monogamous and are not supposed to take lovers, chiefs are expected to make new "friends".

• At marriage, a woman goes to live with her husband; but shortly before she gives birth, she returns to her mother"s house, where she remains throughout the rest of her pregnancy and for several months after the baby is born.

• Marriage is exogamous within a hamlet but not within the village. At marriage, even though a woman goes to live at her husband"s place, she is rarely left without the support and continued companionship of her own kin.

• Some women (and a few men) are thought to be "flying witches", individuals who have the ability to leave their bodies while asleep. In an invisible state they attack someone by destroying a vital organ, and only another flying witch can recite spells that will counter the attack and cure the patient. Therefore, a flying witch can be good or evil, and villagers take great care when they associate with anyone believed to have these powers.

• Seduction with magic: the words for beauty magic are chanted into coconut oil, which is then rubbed on the skin or into flowers and hers that decorate armbands and hair. The spells are directed toward heightening the visual and olfactory effects of a person"s body to create erotic feelings on the part of a lover. Certain spells are thought to make people extremely beautiful. The special beauty magic is recited while a pearl shell is passed over the person"s face so that the face will take on the white, shiny qualities of the shell, making the person strikingly enticing. These spells, however, are not the property of young people but are practised by women who use them only on their brother"s children.

• Throughout all the years of public disputes, fighting, competition between chiefs, and changes brought about by colonial laws and traders" enterprises, women have gone about their business undisturbed by government officers and missionaries, who like Malinowski, never thought that they played any economic role. Men are the carvers, the gardeners, the fishing experts, the orators, and the chiefs. No-one recognised the activity that is central to women"s position and power in Trobriand society. Yet it is an activity that deeply interpenetrates the economics and the politics of men. In Kiriwina, women manufacture and control their own wealth: red skirts made from banana-leaf fibres and bundles of banana leaves. Skirts and bundles have economic value, and their major use as payment to mourners after a death directly incorporates the wealth of men. However, there are limitations to the women"s power. These boundaries are illuminated in the differences between women"s soft valuables and men"s hard valuables. In Kiriwina, as we have seen, men"s valuables are used to repay other men for their exceptionally hard garden work, to buy additional seed yams, to purchase important magic spells, to give the bride"s kin at marriages, and even to pay a sorcerer. In each case, hard valuables provide the wherewithal to obtain the kinds of increasing resources that are necessary to make men politically dominant. The effort to retain this wealth so one may increase one"s productive control over others is undercut by the equally destructive role that death plays. In the final march to the house of the spouse and father of the dead person, men"s valuables are given away without any material return. Just as each death drain"s the men"s other kinds of wealth, when they must provide women with bundles, so too, death drains their hard valuables.

• Married couples labour together in the strenuous work of preparing the soil. Men and women work in their gardens and return home only at dusk, tired and dusty.

• In addition to the work of yam cultivation, all men and occasionally women also plant taro gardens, and, most important, a general food garden where sweet potatoes, tapioca root, greens, beans, squash, and banana and bread-fruit trees are grown. The gardens are tended and weeded by women.

• It is the complex network of men making gardens for their sisters and daughters and, at the same time, receiving harvested yams from their wives" brothers and fathers that forms the basis for all important kin and affinal relationships between women and men.

• A man"s can develop political power only if he has strong support from his wife"s relatives, and this support is primarily demonstrated through yam production. When a man reaches his forties, however, he develops a secondary source of yams that enables him to augment the yam garden harvest and the small basket of yams that his wife"s brother loads into his yam house. By then a man"s own sons and sister"s sons are grown men, and they contribute in important ways to his additional accumulation of yams.

• Young women are just as assertive and dominant as men in their pursuit or refusal of a lover.

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