to A. At a certain stage of the mortuary proceedings, such a gift is given and received back again by a deceased man’s kinsmen and his widow’s brothers. Yet it is obvious at once that no transaction could be further removed from trade. The above described gifts at the presentation of new canoes (kabigidoya) belong to this class. So do also numerous presents given to one community by another, on visits which are going to be returned soon. Payments for the lease of a garden plot are at least in certain districts of the Trobriands returned by a gift of equivalent value.
Sociologically, this class of gifts is characteristic of the relationship between friends (luba’i). Thus the kabigidoya takes place between friends, the Kula takes place between overseas partners and inland friends, but of course relations-in-law also belong par excellence to this category.
Other types of equivalent gifts which have to be mentioned here shortly, are the presents given by one household to another, at the milamala, the festive period associated with the return of the ancestral spirits to their villages. Offerings of cooked food are ceremonially exposed in houses for the use of the spirits, and after these have consumed the spiritual substance, the material one is given to a neighbouring household. These gifts are always reciprocal.
Again, a series of mutual gifts exchanged immediately after marriage between a man and his wife’s father (not matrilineal kinsman in this case), have to be put into this category.
The economic similarity of these gifts is not expressed in terminology or even in linguistic use. All the gifts I have enumerated have their own special names, which I shall not adduce here, so as not to multiply irrelevant details of information. The natives have no comprehensive idea that such a class as I have spoken of exists. My generalisation is based upon the very interesting fact, that all through the tribal life we find scattered cases of direct exchange of equivalent gifts. Nothing perhaps could show up so clearly, how much the natives value the give and take of presents for its own sake.
- Exchange of Material Goods against Privileges, Titles and non-material Possessions. Under this heading, I class transactions which approach trade, in so far as two owners, each possessing something they value highly, exchange it for something they value still more. The equivalence here is not so strict, at any rate not so measurable, as in the previous class, because in this one, one of the terms is usually a non-material possession, such as the knowledge of magic, the privilege to execute a dance, or the title to a garden plot, which latter very often is a mere title only. But in spite of this smaller measure of equivalence, their character of trade is more marked, just because of the element of mutual desire to carry out the transaction and of the mutual advantage.
Two important types of transaction belong to this class. One of them is the acquisition by a man of the goods or privileges which are due to him by inheritance from his maternal uncle or elder brother, but which he wishes to acquire before the elder’s death. If a maternal uncle is to give up in his life time a garden, or