Free The Wayfinders by Wade Davis Page B

curiously equitable. Women had considerable influence,
controlled elements of the economy through their labour, and worked their
own forms of magic which had nothing to do with seduction, though sex became
something of an obsession for Malinowski. Inevitably a product of his own
world, he was stunned by the freedom enjoyed by young Trobriand maidens.
Before marriage, anything seemed to go. Once formally wed, fidelity was
highly prized, and adultery severely sanctioned. Malinowski reflected upon
this at length in one of the two books he wrote based on his time on the
islands. His second book, however, is the one that concerns us,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
, for this tells the story of
the sea.
    Malinowski reached the Trobriand Islands by boat,
after a journey across violent currents and an open ocean that would have
impressed any child of Kraków, the landlocked Polish city of his birth. He
wanted to know how people could possibly maintain social connections across
such barriers. While the Trobriand Islanders drew their subsistence almost
exclusively from the land, their commerce moved over water. But, thought
Malinowski, on the face of it nothing they produced could rationalize the
risks even of the single voyage he had endured to reach them. It soon became
clear to him that something was going on that had nothing to do with
practicality, a curious system of exchange in which nothing of evident worth
or value moved at great risk and with the promise of immense prestige. The
Trobriand Islands, he discovered, were just one of many points in a trading
network that linked scores of communities over thousands of square
kilometres of ocean, small huddled clusters of humanity that clung to coral
reefs and spread over the remains of sunken mountains.
    Known as the Kula ring, it was a system of
balanced reciprocity based on the ceremonial exchange of two items,
necklaces of discs chiselled from red spondylus shells known as the
soulava
, and arm bands of white cone shell, the
mwali
.
These were strictly symbolic objects with no intrinsic or utilitarian value.
And yet for at least five hundred years men had been prepared to risk their
lives to carry these jewels across thousands of kilometres of open sea. The
necklaces moved clockwise through the years, while the arm bands flowed in
reverse, always travelling in a counter-clockwise direction. Each individual
involved in the trade had at least two partners, relationships that like
marriages were intended to last for life, and even be inherited by
subsequent generations. To one partner a voyager would give a necklace in
exchange for an arm band of equal value, and to the other he would pass
along an arm band and receive in return a necklace. Each contact had his
second partner on another island, and thus there was a continuous
distribution chain. The exchanges did not occur all at once. Once in
possession of a highly valued object, one was expected to savour for a time
the prestige it conferred even as one made plans ultimately to pass it
along. As a single object made its way around the Kula, perhaps taking as
long as twenty years to complete the passage, only to continue again, its
value grew with each voyage, with each story of hardship and wonder,
witchcraft and the wind, and with the names of all the great men whose lives
it had passed through. Thus the sacred objects were in constant motion,
encircling the scattered islands in a ring of social and magical power.
    Malinowski understood and wrote of the functional
purpose of the Kula ring. It established relationships over great distances
among peoples of different languages, facilitating the ultimate movement
back and forth of utilitarian objects, pigments and dyes, stone axes,
obsidian, ceramics, polished ceremonial stones, woven goods and certain
foods. The Kula also provided the context for the display of prestige and
status upon which the authority of the hereditary chiefs was based. Their
names were associated with the