I’m interested in money, of course, but shells used as money in
particular. Everyone knows about cowry shells used as money from East
Africa to Hawa’ii, but I hadn’t heard of Nassa shells used as well.
Now it also happens that the very earliest ‘shell jewellery’ found
(100,000+ years old) has been of Nassa shells ( - Google Nassa Blombo,
Nassa Skhul, etc).
I didn’t reckon Nassa shells that much – there are so many around that
they are cheap – (perhaps Nassas are pennies and Cowies are dollars)
Those two shells became money items over half the globe.
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Please excuse me if this is boring – those not interested can stop now.
But suddenly today, I came across an article:
Wealth Items in the Western Highlands of West Papua - Ploeg, A -
Ethnology; Fall 2004, Vol. 43 Issue 4, p291-313, 23p, 1bw
Available from me or via EBSCOHost
That discusses one of the far interior mountain tribes in Western New
Guinea (Irian Jaya), and their ways of counting wealth:
Here’s the section of the article (sorry about all the academic claptrap,
but that’s the way these people write)
Wealth Items
The primary wealth items among Paniai-Tage and Kamu-Tigi Me were cowrie
and nassa shells and pigs (Pospisil 1963:301, 1978:18; Hytkema n.d.a).
Shells had to be included in bridewealth (Pospisil 1963:204, 212; Hylkema
n.d.b: ch 2), but the two authors differ about the inclusion of pigs.
Pospisil (1963:212) says that "at least" one pig must be included; but
Hylkema has collected only a few cases that included pigs. These cases
concerned the Kamu-Tigi area, which for Hylkema are culturally separate,
so the discrepancy is likely the result of cultural divergence. Cowries
drew the greatest attention. They came by trade from the coast, which
limited their availability. While Pospisil (1963:308) located their origin
on the south coast, according to Hylkema (n.d.a), they reached the Me from
the north.^ Moreover, following Dubbeldam (1964:299),
Hylkema (n.d.a) opines that the cowry supply increased sharply in the
recent past due to the intensification of bird-of-paradise hunting in the
area north of the Me habitat. While he offers regrettably little evidence
for this view, it seems plausible, given the settlement of Dutch in the
Cenderawasih Bay area since 1856 and the resulting increase in trade
(Rutherford 2003:183-88; see also Ellen 2003:134-47).
Hughes (1977), who conducted field research in the central parts of what
became Papua New Guinea, investigating the indigenous trade that had taken
place in the early twentieth century, favors the process hypothesized by
Hylkema. Hughes (1977:198-202) concludes that during the period before
Europeans entered the Highlands, the import of goods, including cowries,
had increased greatly there. Moreover, more cowries were traded in from
the north rather than ftom the south (Hughes 1977:187-88).
The Me graded cowries into categories and subcategories based on size,
shape, and color, and further distinguished between old cowries (traded
before colonial incorporation) and those imported by colonial newcomers.
The categories differed widely in value, with the recently imported ones
less valuable. Pospisil (1963:301-04) writes that the Me in the Kamu area
in the mid 1950s distinguished five categories of old cowries, with a
value differential of over 300 or more, often expressed in multiples of
six, in accordance with the Me sexagesimal counting system (Pospisil
1989:20). Dubbeldam, an administrative officer among the Me in the Paniai
area around 1960 (Watson 1964:vi), reports a slightly different gradation
of cowrie denominations, with another series of names. Moreover, cowries
became smoother with use, and so acquired more value. Hylkema (2002:235)
writes that Me had designed yet another set of refined criteria on the
basis of which each separate shell could be differentiated within its own
category. Assigning specific cowries to their appropriate categories and
subcategories required expertise which few people, apparently always men,
attained (Hylkema n.d.a). Hylkema gives the impression that their rulings
were contested. The tact that a cowrie had been successfully used in a
transaction provided an alternative testimony of its value (Hylkema
2002:235).
As long as eowries had to be acquired from other Papuans, their number
remained limited. A further restriction on the number of shells was that
those in the middle categories were on a string that in time tended to
damage them (Pospisi! 1963:308). With colonial incorporation, large
numbers of shells were imported, especially into the Paniai area, the
center of administrative activities. In keeping with their mistrust of the
newcomers, the Me started distinguishing between old and newly imported
cowries (Robbins and Akin 1999:24). By such means, they succeeded in
letting the old ones retain their value into the 1970s (Hylkema n.d.a).
Some Me attempted to counterfeit old shells by frequently wearing those
introduced by the colonial newcomers (Pospisil 1963:301, 304, 338;
Dubbeldam 1964:302; Giay 1995:38-40). In 1969. the year that Hylkema
started work among the Me, the scope for cowrie transactions had increased
due to increased importation by foreigners. This made it easier for women
to acquire cowries even though men claimed that managing cowries pertained
to them. Hylkema (n.d.a) observed that men were sometimes taken aback by
the high-quality cowries that women owned.
Hylkema (n.d.a) argues that over time, the Me shifted their
categorizations and evaluatit)ns of cowries. The further from Paniai, his
supposed point of entry, the more valuable were the categories. Hylkema's
insights explain the differences between the categorizations reported at
almost the same time by Pospisil for the Kamu Me and by Dubbeldam for the
Paniai Me. Moreover, they assert that the steady import of cowries was a
novelty to the Me, which is in line with the people's intense
preoccupation with these shells and with their grading. Discussing
Melanesian currencies, Foster (1999:230-01) concludes, "Money forms will
always be subject to skeptical reception, an awareness that these harbor
within them unrevealed possibilities for the future, hidden agencies and
identities that might be exploited or might engender exploitation in as
yet unimagined ways." This is precisely how the Me perceived their
cowries.
Apart from cowries, some types of nassa-shell necklaces were used as
valuables, especially as part of bridewealth. Pospisil (1963:304) regards
both cowries and the shorter nassa necklaces as money. At the time of his
first field research, necklaces of tiny (one- to four-milimeter),
multicolored glass beads also served as money (Pospisil 1963:304), but
Hylkema (n.d.a) writes that they were no longer in use when he arrived
among the Me in 1969. Pospisil, quoting Umbreit, Elgin, and Kimer (1948).
defmes money as "the common medium of exchange and the common measure of
value." He subsequently points to the very wide range of goods that the Me
could purchase with cowries, and their habit of expressing the value of
goods in terms of cowries (Pospisil 1963:301). At the same time these
objects show the features that Godelier (1996:222-26, 1999) associates
with ""objectsprecieux'" (wealth items). First, Godelier points to their
uselessness in productive activities and in everyday life; second, to
their abstraction, by which he means that these objects are taken out of
their previous context and can thus be resignified and third, to the
beauty that people perceive in them. Me valuables appear to conform to the
definition of money as given by Umbreit and his collaborators. Moreover,
Giay (1995:20) and Breton (1999) have followed Pospisil's usage, with the
provisos that day's statement refers to the 1950s, when Me had been
exposed to European influences for two decades, and Breton based his view
from fieldwork among the Wodani, in the mid 1990s. Nonetheless, it seems
useful to add what kind of money was used. Shells, shell strings, and
shell necklaces seem to have been coins, or assemblages of coins. These
were valuables in their own right, as opposed to most present-day coins,
whose metal value is a fraction of their face value. Shell items lacked
the anonymity of present-day coins. Among the Me, there was no immaterial
money like bank accounts, nor were there drawing rights on banks or
financial institutions, the usual form of bank credit. Hence, the supply
of money was limited. In Western monetary systems, material money is being
used decreasingly and immaterial money increasingly (Klamer and van Dalen
1998). But given the Me's preoccupation with the physical properties of
their cowries, such a development is unlikely to have taken place among
them, had the colonial powers not intervened.
What further distinguished Me cowries from money used in the Western world
is that precious cowries had to be included in bridewealth prestations
(Hylkema n.d.b:ch.2). This suggests that the amount in itself was not
critical, but that the quality of the shells also mattered (cf. Gregory
1982:49). Moreover, Hylkema (2002:235) states that the strings held shells
of various values. This suggests again that numbers alone were
insufficient, unlike Western money. Erom what Hylkema writes, it seems
that the strings were a megavaluable, and that the constituent shells were
withdrawn from circulation.
'* Capitalism Pospisil's insistence that the Kamu Me employed money is
part of his wider argument that they ran a capitalist economy. Several
features of their way of life prompted him to use this characterization:
people, especially men, were after the accumulation of cowries, of money.
Pospisil calls them "businessmen" (Pospisil 1963:333, 1978:21). Sometimes
he puts the word in the mouth of his Me spokesmen (Pospisil 1978:30).
Hylkema employs this term also (2002:235).Wealth differences were
considerable, and when men co-operated, their individual contributions to
the co-operative projects remained, as Pospisil (1978:31)
remarks, "readily perceivable and separable from Ithose] of others."
Sales, in exchange for cowries, of a wide range of goods played the most
important part in circulation. Prices fiuctuated depending on supply and
demand. Barter did not occur much and gifts were unknown. But what
Pospisil (1963:31) means by gifts, "a giving without expectation of
approximately equal reciprocation," differs sharply from definitions of
Mauss and others, notably Godelier
The social institution that drew the greatest number of participants, and
which required the longest and most laborious preparations, was a pig
feast initiated by a wealthy pig-owner and co-sponsored by other pig-
owners, culminating in a massive sale of pork and other goods for cowries
(Pospisil 1963:327-31; de Bruijn 1978: HITS). During these feasts many Me
joined in and offered goods for sale. Kamu Me economy deviated from
Western capitalism in what Pospisil, inspired by Veblen, calls
its "conspicuous generosity" (Pospisil 1963:361): Generosity might take
the form of loans, or lavish distributions of food free of charge on such
occasions as birth ceremonies or [the ceremony] on the opening day of the
sequence of dances connected with a pig feast. There exists almost a
compulsion for extensions of credit in this native society. In some
regions, such as that of the Paniai Lake, rich people who prove to be
stingy with their credits are even punished by execution. (Pospisil
1963:31) By being generous, Me men acquired followers: a person's debtors
were his "stoutest supporters" (Pospisil 1978:50-51). Status and kin
considerations influenced the operation of the law of supply and demand on
price formation. But Gregory (1982:51) regards Pospisil's "conspicuous
generosity" as evidence that his statements about Me capitalism are
a "profound misunderstanding," pointing to the prevalence of gift
relationships, which seems correct, if we allow for the fact that people
were often pressured into gifting. Although Pospisil does not use the term
Big Man and does not touch greatly upon the ethnography of the Papua New
Guinea Highlands, his data make it clear that Kamu Me leaders operated in
polities pervaded by, in Godelier's (1982, 1991) expression, a Big Man
logic. Giay (1995:21-22) implicitly acknowledges this by quoting
Strathern's (1971) characterization of Melpa leadership while describing
Me leaders.
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Aren’t money and shells interesting?
regards
Richard Parker
Siargao Island, The Philippines.
My weblog - Notes From a Small Island, at
http://smallislandnotes.blogspot.com/
is about the island, Austronesian languages and customs, etc.
My website at
www.coconutstudio.com
is also about the island and its people, coastal early humans, fishing,
coconuts, bananas and other trivia.
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