Preface to the New Edition

Summary

2007: Waves of Change

This new preface updates materials that appeared in the original preface to the book that are now out of date. Most significantly, the new preface reflects our collaboration as a husband and wife research team over many years. Tremendous waves of change have passed through the lives of the people whose ceremonial exchange activities were detailed in this book. The most extensive materials for the book were gathered during fieldwork in 1964–5. At this time the system of exchanges known as the moka complex, in which persons and sets of persons in groups competed with one another for status through prestigious transfers of valuable shells and pigs, was in a phase of vigorous efflorescence. This situation was the result of two main factors: colonial “pacification”, and the creativity of local leaders who seized on the opportunities for the expansion of exchange networks brought about by the cessation of hostilities between groups.

Already in the mid-1960s, however, moka-maklng was not the sole preoccupation of the Hagen people. Australian administrators had introduced coffee as a smallholder cash-crop. Large, expatriate-owned coffee plantations also existed, employing migrant laborers from other areas. Lutheran and Catholic missions and churches had begun their work already in the 1930s, and many people professed Christianity as their new religion. Money, in the form of state money, had begun to enter the moka exchanges. Government and mission schools operated in numbers of rural and urban places. Local government councils were being set up, and people voted for their representatives in these, as they also did for Members of the new national House of Assembly.