Deborah Gewertz

Tit for Tat: Barter Markets in the Middle Sepik

Using field data on four middle Sepik linguistic and cultural groups, which are economically interrelated through fish-for-sago barter markets, this paper demonstrates that there is an inverse relation between economic independence and postural aggressiveness; the same relationship also exists between males and females within the fish-supplying villages. It is suggested that it is in the interest of vulnerable groups to maintain an economic advantage, paying for autonomy with a show of deference.

From intensive agriculture to prairie heritage: a paradox of land repurposing in Eastern South Dakota, USA

In this paper we take up Tania Li’s question ‘what is land’. While her interest is in how land becomes inscribed so as to make it investable, ours is in reversing the sequence so as to make long-inscribed land de-investable. We focus on a family farm in Eastern South Dakota which was bequeathed to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in order that its tilled fields of industrially produced corn and soybeans be replaced with native, tallgrass prairie. The process – one of de-inscription – involved evocations of settler heritage which, ironically, provided a prairie-friendly justification for massive prairie destruction.

What Gifts Engender: Social Relations and Politics in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea

Gift exchange plays a crucial role in the social and political organisation of Mendi in Papua New Guinea. This book reveals how considerable light can be shed on Mendi society, particularly on its political economy, by examining both the well-known ceremonial exchange festivals and the hitherto relatively little-studied everyday gift-giving practices. The author shows that the latter are crucial for understanding inter-group politics, the process of leadership, male-female relationships and the status of women, and the production, distribution and circulation of wealth. Currently the only book available on this society, the work offers an unusual combination of a social structural analysis with a study of local history and change. It is also of interest for its integration of the study of gift exchange and politics with the study of gender roles and relationships.

Exemplars and the reproduction of everyday life: The Amherst affair

Beginnings and endings frequently provide opportunities for institutions to present them? selves and their social functions in a favorable light. The commencement ceremony which marks the end for young men and women of their lives as students and the beginning of their lives as adults as fully-engaged members of society is one such occasion for an American liberal arts college. Those graduating are given assurance that their expensive educations have given them the skills and the values necessary for them to flourish as productive members of what is assumed to be the social order. Sig? nificantly, while being congratulated on the development of their intellectual capacities, they are, at the same time likely to be enjoined that they should temper or channel their self-interest so that their own personal prosperity will contribute to the common good. It was as part of such an injunction that President Peter Pouncey of Amherst College recently presented Odysseus and several more contemporary figures as heroes, as individuals for the Amherst graduates to emulate as they went forth in the world. President Pounceys speech with its allusions to classical literature and its references to the heroic did indeed seem to be entirely consonant with this moment in the life of an elite liberal arts institution. But, on further thought, the two of us one on the commencement platform and the other on the periphery of the audience wondered how this speech could have been persuasive: how, given