Argonauts of the Western Pacific - Bronisław Malinowski (darmowa biblioteka online .TXT) 📖

fast to this one, and to equip for the other world; but above all, the deep feeling that the vaygu’a are the supreme comfort, that to surround a man with them, even in his most evil moment, makes this moment less evil. The same mental attitude is probably at the bottom of the custom which prescribes that the widow’s brothers should give a vaygu’a to the brothers of the dead man, the same vaygu’a being given back on the same day. But it is kept just long enough to be of comfort to those, who, according to native kinship ideas, are most directly hit by the death.

In all this we find the expression of the same mental attitude, the extreme value attached to condensed wealth, the serious, respectful way of treating it, the idea and the feeling that it is the reservoir of highest good. The vaygu’a are valued in quite a different manner from that in which we value our wealth. The Biblical symbol of the golden calf might even be better applied to their attitude than to ours, although it would be not quite correct to say that they „worship” the vaygu’a, for they worship nothing. The vaygu’a might perhaps be called „objects of cult” in the sense expressed by the facts of the Kula, and the data just adduced; that is, in so far as they are handled ritually in some of the most important acts of native life.

Thus, in several aspects, the Kula presents to us a new type of phenomenon, lying on the borderland between the commercial and the ceremonial and expressing a complex and interesting attitude of mind. But though it is novel, it can hardly be unique. For we can scarcely imagine that a social phenomenon on such a scale, and obviously so deeply connected with fundamental layers of human nature, should only be a sport and a freak, found in one spot of the earth alone. Once we have found this new type of ethnographic fact, we may hope that similar or kindred ones will be found elsewhere. For the history of our science shows many cases in which a new type of phenomena having been discovered, taken up by theory, discussed and analysed, was found subsequently all the world over. The tabu, the Polynesian word and the Polynesian custom, has served as prototype and eponym to similar regulations found among all the savage and barbarous as well as civilised races. Totemism, found first among one tribe of North American Indians and brought to light by the work of Frazer, has later on been documented so widely and fully from everywhere, that in re-writing his early small book, its historian could fill out four volumes. The conception of mana, discovered in a small Melanesian community has, by the work of Hubert and Mauss, Marett and others, been proved of fundamental importance, and there is no doubt that mana, whether named or unnamed, figures and figures largely in the magical beliefs and practices of all natives. These are the most classical and best known examples, and they could be multiplied by others were it necessary. Phenomena of the „totemic type” or of the „mana type” or of the „tabu type” are to be found in all ethnographic provinces, since each of these concepts stands for a fundamental attitude of the savage towards reality.

So with the Kula, if it represents a novel, but not freakish, indeed, a fundamental type of human activity and of the mental attitude of man, we may expect to find allied and kindred phenomena in various other ethnographic provinces. And we may be on the lookout for economic transactions, expressing a reverential, almost worshipping attitude towards the valuables exchanged or handled; implying a novel type of ownership, temporary, intermittent, and cumulative; involving a vast and complex social mechanism and systems of economic enterprises, by means of which it is carried out. Such is the Kula type of semi-economic, semi-ceremonial activities. It would be futile, no doubt, to expect that exact replicas of this institution should be found anywhere and with the same details, such as the circular path on which the valuables move, the fixed direction in which each class has to travel, and existence of solicitory and intermediate gifts. All these technicalities are important and interesting, but they are probably connected in one way or another with the special local conditions of the Kula. What we can expect to find in other parts of the world are the fundamental ideas of the Kula, and its social arrangements in their main outline, and for these the field-worker might be on the look-out.

For the theoretical student, mainly interested in problems of evolution, the Kula might supply some reflections about the origins of wealth and value, of trade and economic relations in general. It might also shed some light upon the development of ceremonial life, and upon the influence of economic aims and and ambitions upon the evolution of intertribal intercourse and of primitive international law. For the student mainly viewing the problems of Ethnology from the point of view of the contact of cultures, and interested in the spread of institutions, beliefs and objects by transmission, the Kula is no less important. Here is a new type of inter-tribal contact, of relations between several communities slightly but definitely differing in culture, and a relation not spasmodic or accidental but regulated and permanent. Quite apart from the fact that in trying to explain how the Kula relationship between the various tribes originated, we are confronted with a definite problem of culture contact.

These few remarks must suffice, as I cannot enter into any theoretical speculations myself. There is one aspect of the Kula, however, to which attention must be drawn from the point of view of its theoretical importance. We have seen that this institution presents several aspects closely intertwined and influencing one another. To take only two, economic enterprise and magical ritual form one inseparable whole, the forces of the magical belief and the efforts of man moulding and influencing one another. How this is happening has been described before in detail in the previous chapters115.

But it seems to me that a deeper analysis and comparison of the manner in which two aspects of culture functionally depend on one another might afford some interesting material for theoretical reflection. Indeed, it seems to me that there is room for a new type of theory. The succession in time, and the influence of the previous stage upon the subsequent, is the main subject of evolutional studies, such as are practised by the classical school of British Anthropology (Tylor, Frazer, Westermarck, Sydney Hartland, Crawley). The ethnological school (Ratzel, Foy, Grabner, W. Schmidt, Rivers, and Eliott-Smith) studies the influence of cultures by contact, infiltration and transmission. The influence of environment on cultural institutions and race is studied by anthropo-geography (Ratzel and others). The influence on one another of the various aspects of an institution, the study of the social and psychological mechanism on which the institution is based, are a type of theoretical studies which has been practised up till now in a tentative way only, but I venture to foretell will come into their own sooner or later. This kind of research will pave the way and provide the material for the others.

At one or two places in the previous chapters, a somewhat detailed digression was made in order to criticise the view about the economic nature of primitive man, as it survives in our mental habits as well as in some text books the conception of a rational being who wants nothing but to satisfy his simplest needs and does it according to the economic principle of least effort. This economic man always knows exactly where his material interests lie, and makes for them in a straight line. At the bottom of the so-called materialistic conception of history lies a somewhat analogous idea of a human being, who, in everything he devises and pursues, has nothing but his material advantage of a purely utilitarian type at heart. Now I hope that whatever the meaning of the Kula might be for Ethnology, for the general science of culture, the meaning of the Kula will consist in being instrumental to dispell such crude, rationalistic conceptions of primitive mankind, and to induce both the speculator and the observer to deepen the analysis of economic facts. Indeed, the Kula shows us that the whole conception of primitive value; the very incorrect habit of calling all objects of value „money” or „currency”; the current ideas of primitive trade and primitive ownership all these have to be revised in the light of our institution.

At the beginning of this book, in the Introduction, I, in a way, promised the reader that he should receive a vivid impression of the events enabling him to see them in their native perspective, at the same time without for one moment losing sight of the method by which I have obtained my data. I have tried to present everything as far as possible in terms of concrete fact, letting the natives speak for themselves, perform their transactions, pursue their activities before the reader’s mental vision. I have tried to pave my account with fact and details, equip it with documents, with figures, with instances of actual occurrence. But at the same time, my conviction, as expressed over and over again, is that what matters really is not the detail, not the fact, but the scientific use we make of it. Thus the details and technicalities of the Kula acquire their meaning in so far only as they express some central attitude of mind of the natives, and thus broaden our knowledge, widen our outlook and deepen our grasp of human nature.

What interests me really in the study of the native is his outlook on things, his Weltanschauung, the breath of life and reality which he breathes and by which he lives. Every human culture gives its members a definite vision of the world, a definite zest of life. In the roamings over human history, and over the surface of the earth, it is the possibility of seeing life and the world from the various angles, peculiar to each culture, that has always charmed me most, and inspired me with real desire to penetrate other cultures, to understand other types of life.

To pause for a moment before a quaint and singular fact; to be amused at it, and see its outward strangeness; to look at it as a curio and collect it into the museum of one’s memory or into one’s store of anecdotes — this attitude of mind has always been foreign and repugnant to me. Some people are unable to grasp the inner meaning and the psychological reality of all that is outwardly strange, at first sight incomprehensible, in a different culture. These people are not born to be ethnologists. It is in the love of the final synthesis, achieved by the assimilation and comprehension of all the items of a culture and still more in the love of the variety and independence of the various cultures that lies the test of the real worker in the true Science of Man.

There is, however, one point of view deeper yet and more important than the love of tasting of the variety of human modes of life, and that is the desire to turn such knowledge into wisdom. Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes to look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself — yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically. In grasping the essential outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding, due even to savages, we cannot but help widening our own. We cannot possibly reach the final Socratic wisdom of knowing ourselves if we never leave the narrow confinement of the customs, beliefs and prejudices into which every man is