Argonauts of the Western Pacific - Bronisław Malinowski (darmowa biblioteka online .TXT) 📖
Argonauts of the Western Pacific to rozprawa naukowa autorstwa Bronisława Malinowskiego. Jest ona efektem wyprawy badacza na wyspy Toulon i wyspy Trobriandzkie.
Malinowski opisuje w niej przede wszystkim rytuał Kula, ukazujący zdolności handlowe ludów tam żyjących. Rytuał polega na wymianie biżuterii, opierającej się na pewnych szytwno ustalonych regułach związanych m.in. z równą wartością wymienianych przedmiotów. Malinowski upatruje w przedstawicielach społeczeństw pierwotnych wcielenia Argonautów z mitologii greckiej, którzy udali się po Złote Runo. Rozprawa Malinowskiego została oparta na wynikach jego metody badań antropologicznych — metody uczestniczącej, a nie wyłącznie obserwacyjnej. Jego działalność była przełomowa dla antropologii, która do tej pory bazowała na prowadzeniu obserwacji, a także rozszerzaniu założeń na kolejne wyniki badań.
Bronisław Malinowski był polskim antropologiem i socjologiem publikującym w pierwszej połowie XIX wieku. Prowadził badania społeczeństw pierwotnych w różnych zakątkach świata.
- Autor: Bronisław Malinowski
- Epoka: Współczesność
- Rodzaj: Epika
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This sketch of Trobriand tribal life, belief and customs must suffice, and we shall still have opportunities of enlarging upon these subjects that most matter to us for the present study.
VIIITwo more districts remain to be mentioned, through which the Kula trade passes on its circuit, before it returns to the place from where we started. One of them is the Eastern portion of the Northern Massim, comprising the Marshall Bennett Islands (Kitava, Iwa, Gawa, Kwayawata), and Woodlark Island (Murua), with the small group of Nada Islands. The other district is that of St. Aignan Island, called by the natives Masima, or Misima, with the smaller island Panayati.
Looking from the rocky shores of Boyowa, at its narrowest point, we can see over the white breakers on the fringing reef and over the sea, here always blue and limpid, the silhouette of a flat-topped, low rock, almost due East. This is Kitava. To the Trobrianders of the Eastern districts, this island and those behind it are the promised land of the Kula, just as Dobu is to the natives of Southern Boyowa. But here, unlike in the South, they have to deal with tribesmen who speak their own language, with dialectic differences only, and who have very much the same institutions and customs. In fact, the nearest island, Kitava, differs only very little from the Trobriands. Although the more distant islands, especially Murua, have a slightly different form of totemism, with hardly any idea of rank attached to the sub-clans, and consequently no chieftainship in the Trobriand sense, yet their social organisation is also much the same as in the Western province40. I know the natives only from having seen them very frequently and in great numbers in the Trobriands, where they come on Kula expeditions. In Murua, however, I spent a short time doing field work in the village of Dikoyas. In appearance, dress, ornaments and manners, the natives are indistinguishable from the Trobrianders. Their ideas and customs in matters of sex, marriage, and kinship are, with variations in detail only, the same as in Boyowa. In beliefs and mythology, they also belong to the same culture.
To the Trobrianders, the Eastern islands are also the chief home and stronghold of the dreaded mulukwausi (flying witches); the land whence love magic came, originating in the island of Iwa; the distant shores towards which the mythical hero Tudava sailed, performing many feats, till he finally disappeared, no one knows where. The most recent version is that he most likely finished his career in the white man’s country. To the Eastern islands, says native belief, the spirits of the dead, killed by sorcery, go round on a short visit not stopping there, only floating through the air like clouds, before they turn round to the North-West to Tuma.
From these islands, many important products come to Boyowa (the Trobriands), but none half as important as the tough, homogeneous green-stone, from which all their implements were made in the past, and of which the ceremonial axes are made up till now. Some of these places are renowned for their yam gardens, especially Kitava, and it is recognised that the best carving in black ebony comes from there. The most important point of difference between the natives of this district and the Trobrianders, lies in the method of mortuary distributions, to which subject we shall have to return in a later part of the book, as it is closely connected with Kula.
From Murua (Woodlark Island) the Kula track curves over to the South in two different branches, one direct to Tubetube, and the other to Misima, and thence to Tubetube and Wari. The district of Misima is almost entirely unknown to me — I have only spoken once or twice with natives of this island, and there is not, to my knowledge, any reliable published information about that district, so we shall have to pass it over with a very few words. This is, however, not so alarming, because it is certain, even from the little I know about them, that the natives do not essentially differ from the other Massim. They are totemic and matrilineal; there is no chieftainship, and the form of authority is the same as in the Southern Massim. Their sorcerers and witches resemble those of the Southern Massim and Dobuans. In industries, they specialise in canoe-building, and in the small island of Panayati produce the same type of craft as the natives of Gawa and Woodlark Island, slightly different only from the Trobriand canoe. In the island of Misima, a very big supply of areca (betel) nut is produced, as there is a custom of planting a number of these nuts after a man’s death.
The small islands of Tubetube and Wari, which form the final link of the Kula, lie already within the district of the Southern Massim. In fact, the island of Tubetube is one of the places studied in detail by Professor Seligman, and its ethnographical description is one of three parallel monographs which form the division of the Southern Massim in the treatise so often quoted.
Finally, I want to point out again that the descriptions of the various Kula districts given in this and in the previous chapter, though accurate in every detail, are not meant to be an exhaustive ethnographic sketch of the tribes. They have been given with a few light touches in order to produce a vivid and so-to-speak personal impression of the various type of natives, and countries and of cultures. If I have succeeded in giving a physiognomy to each of the various tribes, to the Trobrianders, to the Amphlettans, the Dobuans, and the Southern Massim, and in arousing some interest in them, the main purpose has been achieved, and the necessary ethnographic background for the Kula has been supplied.
I — A concise definition of the Kula. II — Its economic character. III — The articles exchanged; the conception of vaygu’a. IV — The main rules and aspects of the Kula: the sociological aspect (partnership); direction of movement; nature of Kula ownership; the differential and integral effect of these rules. V — The act of exchange; its regulations; the light it throws on the acquisitive and „communistic” tendencies of the natives; its concrete outlines; the sollicitory gifts. VI — The associated activities and the secondary aspects of the Kula: construction of canoes; subsidiary trade — their true relation to the Kula; the ceremonial, mythology and magic associated with the Kula; the mortuary taboos and distributions, in their relation to the Kula.
IHaving thus described the scene, and the actors, let us now proceed to the performance. The Kula is a form of exchange, of extensive, inter-tribal character; it is carried on by communities inhabiting a wide ring of islands, which form a closed circuit. This circuit can be seen on Map V, where it is represented by the lines joining a number of islands to the North and East of the East end of New Guinea. Along this route, articles of two kinds, and these two kinds only, are constantly travelling in opposite directions. In the direction of the hands of a clock, moves constantly one of these kinds long necklaces of red shell, called soulava (Plates XVIII and XIX). In the opposite direction moves the other kind bracelets of white shell called mwali (Plates XVI and XVII). Each of these articles, as it travels in its own direction on the closed circuit, meets on its way articles of the other class, and is constantly being exchanged for them. Every movement of the Kula articles, every detail of the transactions is fixed and regulated by a set of traditional rules and conventions, and some acts of the Kula are accompanied by an elaborate magical ritual and public ceremonies.
On every island and in every village, a more or less limited number of men take part in the Kula that is to say, receive the goods, hold them for a short time, and then pass them on. Therefore every man who is in the Kula, periodically though not regularly, receives one or several mwali (arm-shells), or a soulava (necklace of red shell discs), and then has to hand it on to one of his partners, from whom he receives the opposite commodity in exchange. Thus no man ever keeps any of the articles for any length of time in his possession. One transaction does not finish the Kula relationship, the rule being „once in the Kula, always in the Kula”, and a partnership between two men is a permanent and lifelong affair. Again, any given mwali or soulava may always be found travelling and changing hands, and there is no question of its ever settling down, so that the principle „once in the Kula, always in the Kula” applies also to the valuables themselves.
The ceremonial exchange of the two articles is the main, the fundamental aspect of the Kula. But associated with it, and done under its cover, we find a great number of secondary activities and features. Thus, side by side with the ritual exchange of arm-shells and necklaces, the natives carry on ordinary trade, bartering from one island to another a great number of utilities, often unprocurable in the district to which they are imported, and indispensable there. Further, there are other activities, preliminary to the Kula, or associated with it, such as the building of sea-going canoes for the expeditions, certain big forms of mortuary ceremonies, and preparatory taboos.
The Kula is thus an extremely big and complex institution, both in its geographical extent, and in the manifoldness of its component pursuits. It welds together a condiderable number of tribes, and it embraces a vast complex of activities, interconnected, and playing into one another, so as to form one organic whole.
Yet it must be remembered that what appears to us an extensive, complicated, and yet well ordered institution is the outcome of ever so many doings and pursuits, carried on by savages, who have no laws or aims or charters definitely laid down. They have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure. They know their own motives, know the purpose of individual actions and the rules which apply to them, but how, out of these, the whole collective institution shapes, this is beyond their mental range. Not even the most intelligent native has any clear idea of the Kula as a big, organised social construction, still less of its sociological function and implications. If you were to ask him what the Kula is, he would answer by giving a few details, most likely by giving his personal experiences and subjective views on the Kula, but nothing approaching the definition just given here. Not even a partial coherent account could be obtained. For the integral picture does not exist in his mind; he is in it, and cannot see the whole from the outside.
The integration of all the details observed, the achievement of a sociological synthesis of all the various, relevant symptoms, is the task of the Ethnographer. First of all, he has to find out that certain activities, which at first sight might appear incoherent and not correlated, have a meaning. He then has
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