1 - Introduction

Summary

‘Moka is like a card game. Now it comes to us and we win. Later it passes to someone else; and so it goes round.’

Kont, a big-man of the Kawelka Membo clan

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In this book I discuss the moka ceremonial exchange system of the Mount Hagen area in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. In particular I relate the exchange system to activities of ‘big-men’, or self-made political leaders, who are so prominent throughout the Highlands. Big-men are important in many of the Highlands societies as manipulators of wealth and accumulators of prestige. It is not surprising, then, that they have been eager, since pacification, to take up new channels for obtaining wealth offered by the Australians' introduction of cash-crops into their economy (Finney 1969). However, other workers in Hagen have studied cash-cropping in more detail than I myself have; my work has been concentrated on the moka exchanges, which are the traditional channel for obtaining the status of big-man (wu∂ nyim) in Hagen.

To understand New Guinea Highlands societies we must focus on competitive processes. In Hagen it is the moka system which provides an explicit arena for recurrent bouts of competition between individuals and groups. As R. F. Salisbury (1968) has put it: ‘Analyses of the actual working of societies widely labelled as “reciprocative” … have shown that interindividual transactions are always unbalanced and involve a continual struggle to obtain as much advantage over an opponent as possible.’ Salisbury's statement here may be too strongly phrased, but it cogently draws attention to the phenomenon of latent competition in systems of ceremonial reciprocity such as the moka.