only reason which I can suggest is that nowadays, with immensely increased intertribal intercourse, there is a great drainage on all Kula valuables by other districts lying outside the Kula. Now, on the one hand the doga are extremely valued on the main-land of New Guinea, much more, I assume, than they are within the Kula district. The drainage therefore would affect the doga much more strongly than any other articles, one of which, the spondylus necklaces, are actually imported into the Kula region from without, and even manufactured by white men in considerable quantities for native consumption. The armshells are produced within the district in sufficient numbers to replace any leakage, but doga are extremely difficult to reproduce, as they are connected with a rare freak of nature—a boar with a circular tusk.
One more article which travels in the same direction as the mwali, consists of the bosu, the big lime spatulæ made of whale-bone and decorated with spondylus shells. They are not strictly speaking Kula articles, but play a part as the korotomna gifts mentioned above and nowadays are hardly to be met with. With the necklaces, there travel only as an unimportant subsidiary Kula article, belts made of the same red spondylus shell. They would be given as return presents for small armshells, as basi, etc.
There is one important exception in the respective movements of necklace and armshell. A certain type of spondylus shell strings, much bigger and coarser than the strings which are used in the Kula, are produced in Sinaketa, as we saw in the last Chapter. These strings, called katudababile in Kiriwinian, or sama’upa in Dobuan, are sometimes exported from Sinaketa to Dobu as Kula gifts, and function therefore as armshells. These katudababile, however, never complete the Kula ring, in the wrong direction, as they never return to the Trobriands from the East. Part of them are absorbed into the districts outside the Kula, part of them come back again to Sinaketa, and join the other necklaces in their circular movement.
Another class of articles, which often take a subsidiary part in the Kula exchange, consists of the large and thin polished axe blades, called in the Kiriwinian language beku. They are never used for any practical purposes, and fulfil only the function of tokens of wealth and objects of parade. In the Kula they would be given as kaributu (solicitary gifts), and would go both ways. As they are quarried in Woodlark Island and polished in Kiriwina, they would, however, move in the direction from the Trobriands to Dobu more frequently than in the opposite one.
To summarise this subject, it may be said that the proper Kula articles are on the one hand, the armshells (mwali), and the curved tusks (doga); and, on the other hand, the fine, long necklaces (soulava or bagi), of which there are many sub-classes. An index of the special position of these three articles is that they are the only ones, or at least, by far the most important ones, mentioned in the spells. Later on, I shall enumerate all the sub-classes and varieties of these articles.
Although, as we have seen, there is both a good deal of ceremony attached to the transaction and a good deal of decorum, one might even say commercial honour, implied in the technicalities of the exchange, there is much room left as well for quarrelling and friction. If a man obtains a very fine valuable, which he is not already under an obligation to offer as yotile (return payment), there will be a number of his partners, who will compete to receive it. As only one can be successful, all the others will be thwarted and more or less offended and full of malice. Still more room for bad blood is left in the matter of equivalence. As the valuables exchanged cannot be measured or even compared with one another by an exact standard; as there are no definite correspondences or indices of correlation between the various kinds of the valuables, it is not