between them, and indeed this is an example how necessary it is to be careful not to rely too much on native terminology for purposes of classification.
The term for the hire of a canoe is toguna waga.
- Ceremonial barter with deferred payment.—In this class we have to describe payments which are ceremonially offered, and must be received and re-paid later on. The exchange is based on a permanent partnership, and the articles have to be roughly equivalent in value. Remembering the definition of the Kula in Chapter III, it is easy to see that this big, ceremonial, circulating exchange belongs to this class. It is ceremonial barter based on permanent partnership, where a gift offered is always accepted, and after a time has to be re-paid by an equivalent counter-gift.
There is also a ceremonial form of exchange of vegetable food for fish, based on a standing partnership, and on the obligation to accept and return an initial gift. This is called wasi. The members of an inland village, where yams and taro are plentiful have partners in a Lagoon village, where much fishing is done but garden produce is scarce. Each man has his partner, and at times, when new food is harvested and also during the main harvest, he and his fellow villagers will bring a big quantity of vegetable food into the Lagoon village (see Plate XXXVI), each man putting his share before his partner’s house. This is an invitation, which never can be rejected, to return the gift by its fixed equivalent in fish.
As soon as weather and previous engagements allow, the fishermen go out to sea and notice is given to the inland village of the fact. The inlanders arrive on the beach, awaiting the fishermen, Who come back in a body, and their haul of fish is taken directly from the canoes and carried to the inland village.
Such large quantities of fish are always acquired only in connection with big distributions of food (sagali). It is remarkable that in the inland villages these distributions must be carried out in fish, whereas in the Lagoon villages, fish never can be used for ceremonial purposes, vegetables being the only article considered proper.
Thus the motive for exchange here is not to get food in order to satisfy the primary want of eating, but in order to satisfy the social need of displaying large quantities of conventionally sanctioned eatables. Often when such a big fishing takes place, great quantities of fish perish by becoming rotten before they reach the man for whom they are finally destined. But being rotten in no way detracts from the value of fish in a sagali.
The equivalence of fish, given in return for vegetable food, is measured only roughly. A standard sized bunch of taro, or one of the ordinary baskets of taytu (small yams) will be repaid by a bundle of fish, some three to five kilograms in weight. The equivalence of the two payments, as well as the advantage obtained by one party at least, make this exchange approach barter.8 But the element of trust enters into it largely, in the fact that the equivalence is left to the repayer; and again, the initial gift which as a rule is always given