Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving - Softcover

Weiner, Annette B. B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520076044 ISBN 13: 9780520076044

Verlag: University of California Press, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

Inalienable Possessions tests anthropology's traditional assumptions about kinship, economics, power, and gender in an exciting challenge to accepted theories of reciprocity and marriage exchange. Focusing on Oceania societies from Polynesia to Papua New Guinea and including Australian Aborigine groups, Annette Weiner investigates the category of possessions that must not be given or, if they are circulated, must return finally to the giver. Reciprocity, she says, is only the superficial aspect of exchange, which overlays much more politically powerful strategies of "keeping-while-giving."

The idea of keeping-while-giving places women at the heart of the political process, however much that process may vary in different societies, for women possess a wealth of their own that gives them power. Power is intimately involved in cultural reproduction, and Weiner describes the location of power in each society, showing how the degree of control over the production and distribution of cloth wealth coincides with women's rank and the development of hierarchy in the community. Other inalienable possessions, whether material objects, landed property, ancestral myths, or sacred knowledge, bestow social identity and rank as well. Calling attention to their presence in Western history, Weiner points out that her formulations are not limited to Oceania. The paradox of keeping-while-giving is a concept certain to influence future developments in ethnography and the theoretical study of gender and exchange.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Annette B. Weiner is Kriser Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. She currently serves as President of the American Anthropological Association.

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"Weiner provides not only a new perspective on social and natural reproduction but also a framework through which to compare societies. This is an original point of view that will have real effects on the direction of future fieldwork and comparative analysis."—Ivan Karp, Smithsonian Institution

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"Weiner provides not only a new perspective on social and natural reproduction but also a framework through which to compare societies. This is an original point of view that will have real effects on the direction of future fieldwork and comparative analysis." Ivan Karp, Smithsonian Institution

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Inalienable Possessions

The Paradox of Keeping-While-GivingBy Annette B. Weiner

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Annette B. Weiner
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520076044


Introduction

In the little houses the tenant people sifted their belongings and the belongings of their fathers and of their grandfathers. Picked over their possessions for the journey to the west…. The men were ruthless because the past had been spoiled, but the women knew how the past would cry to them in the coming days….

When everything that could be sold was sold…still there were piles of possessions;….

The women sat among the doomed things, turning them over and looking past them and back. This book. My father had it. He liked a book…. Got his name in it. And his pipe—still smells rank…. Think we could get this china dog in? Aunt Sadie brought it from the St. Louis Fair. See? Wrote right on it…. Here's a letter my brother wrote the day before he died…. No, there isn't room.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

This book has its origins in my first ethnographic field-work in the Trobriand Islands located off the coast of Papua New Guinea that, early in this century, took on unprecedented anthropological importance through Bronislaw Malinowski's research and personal renown. Malinowski reduced the extensive exchange events hewitnessed to a simplified but pioneering classification of “gift” and “counter-gift,” theorizing that reciprocity was the basis for social relations in “primitive” societies. My research, beginning sixty years later, revealed dynamic social actions far more socially dense than Malinowski's classic conclusions. While comparing what I found in the Trobriands with analogous situations in more politically hierarchical Polynesian societies, I realized how deeply his assumptions were grounded in nineteenth-century evolutionary beliefs about the communal nature of “primitive” economics.

The “norm of reciprocity” is, in actuality, a theory of economic behavior whose anthropological tenets were shaped centuries earlier. During the rise of capitalism, the give and take of reciprocity took on an almost magical, sacred power among Western economists. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith and others argued that reciprocal relations operated in the marketplace sui generis, keeping the market equitable and stable without external legal controls. A century later, this same belief in reciprocity as a regulatory mechanism was described for “primitive” societies when it was thought that “natives” lived without governing bodies or legal codes. There the gift given and received kept groups socially and politically stable without recourse to government or law. This trust in the motivation behind “primitive” reciprocity persisted so that confidence in how the norm worked in the exchanges of thousands of seemingly inconsequential gifts enabled anthropologists, beginning with Malinowski, to determine fixed, rational criteria for the reciprocal acts they recorded ethnographically. But these criteria, thought to be more scientifically and theoretically sound, also were culture bound so that, over time, it remained even more difficult to perceive how Western economic rationalities were being imposed on theories of other cultures' economic systems.

The acceptance of gender ideologies fundamental to capitalist systems introduced other formidable problems for anthropological theory. Analytical dichotomies, such as stasis/change, nature/culture, and domestic/public, always identified women with the supposedly negative side. Theories grounded in ethnographic descriptions of “gift exchange” among men served to affirm and legitimate men's autonomous control in economic and political pursuits. Women, though physically present, were seen but ignored as active participants in their own right. Even their own productive efforts that supported or enhanced a society's economy were discounted.

In many societies throughout the world, however, women are theproducers and, in part or wholly, the controllers of highly valued possessions—a currency of sorts made from “cloth.”1 Intricate symbolic meanings semantically encode sexuality, biological reproduction, and nurturance so that such possessions, as they are exchanged between people, act as the material agents in the reproduction of social relations. Most important, cloth possessions may also act as transcendent treasures, historical documents that authenticate and confirm for the living the legacies and powers associated with a group's or an individual's connections to ancestors and gods. Historically, women's control over these arenas has accorded them powers associated with magical potency, sacred prerogatives, political legitimacy, and life-giving and lifetaking social controls.2 Although Simone de Beauvoir asserted that gender is a “historical situation” and that biological reproduction is surrounded by historically constructed (negative) conventions and meanings, neither she nor other feminists attend to the political significance of women's complex roles in these cosmological domains. Other objects, however, such as shell, stone, precious metals, or even human bones that are usually associated with men's wealth, contain similar symbolic referents to biological and cosmological phenomena. And in these cases, the ethnographic literature abounds with classifications in which men's actions are privileged because they are connected to the sacred domain whereas women's similar activities are relegated to a profane category.

These interpretive discrepancies illuminate the pervasiveness of Western thought where women's participation in biological reproduction and nurturance are fetishized with negative value. But when the commingling rather than the oppositions between female and male symbol systems is seriously considered, we find that women's control over political and cosmological situations and actions can be beneficent or malevolent, matching the ambiguous potential of men's control and power. This view also reveals the sociopolitical ramifications of how women and men are, at the same time, accorded and deprived of authority and power. Men's autonomy is held in check, undermined, supported, confounded, or even, at times, superseded by women's economic presence.

The subject of this book is not women per se but an attempt to cast off some of the most cherished precepts in social theory and, in so doing, establish a new practice for comparative ethnographic description and explanation. Ethnographic data cannot be easily pared down to a single semantic marker that encodes reciprocity. Possessions aregiven, yet not given. Some are kept within the same family for generations with retention not movement, bestowing value. Ironic ambiguities exist in the games people play, in the perverse strategies they employ, and in the complex symbols they use. In practice, kinship is a decisive marker and maker of value, not in terms of genealogical rules or norms of behavior, but because certain basic productive resources express and legitimate social relations and their cosmological antecedents in spite of all the exigencies that create loss. The reproduction of social relations is never automatic, but demands work, resources, energy, and the kind of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520076044
• ISBN 13: 9780520076044
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar