Preface

Summary

Accounts by New Guinea Highlanders of their reactions to the first arrival of Europeans show both their initial shock at meeting complete strangers and the means whereby the shock was overcome: the exchange of valued goods. It was fortunate indeed that explorers in the Central Highlands carried, besides steel tools, shell valuables which were prized as wealth tokens throughout the area. Hageners' feelings about the explorers are typified by the words of an old man, who told me how, when he was a boy, Kiap Taylor (i.e. J. L. Taylor, an Australian Administration Officer) first passed through the territory of a tribe allied to his. When they saw Taylor's white skin, they thought he must be one of the pale-skinned cannibals who figure in Hagen folktales, but ‘then he gave us shell valuables in return for pigs, and we decided he was human’.

Shells in the Highlands are valued as prestige symbols, an integral part of elaborate, competitive ceremonial exchange systems which are manipulated largely by ‘big-men’. Europeans in the 1930s and 1940s brought these shells into Hagen in great numbers, until eventually their value was deflated, but the Hagen exchange system has survived: in 1969 one young man told me that soon he and his people might discard shells as a currency, but they would continue to exchange pigs, which have retained high economic value and ceremonial significance.

In this book I have attempted to analyse the Hagen ceremonial exchange system – the moka – both as an institution linking groups together in alliances and as a means whereby men try to maximise their social status.