We have been following the various routes and ramifications of the Kula, entering minutely and meticulously into its rules and customs., its beliefs and practices, and the mythological tradition spun round it, till, arriving at the end of our information, we have made its two ends meet. We shall now put aside the magnifying glass of detailed examination and look from a distance at the subject of our inquiry, take in the whole institution with one glance, let it assume a definite shape before us. This shape will perhaps strike us as being something unusual, something not met before in ethnological studies. It will be well to make an attempt at finding its place among the other subjects of systematic ethnology, at gauging its significance, at assessing how much we have learned by becoming acquainted with it.
After all there is no value in isolated facts for science, however striking and novel they might seem in themselves. Genuine scientific research differs from mere curio-hunting in that the latter runs after the quaint, singular and freakish—the craving for the sensational and the mania of collecting providing its twofold stimulus. Science on the other hand has to analyse and classify facts in order to place them in an organic whole, to incorporate them in one of the systems in which it tries to group the various aspects of reality.
I shall not, of course enter upon any speculations or add any hypothetical assumptions to the empirical data contained in the foregoing chapters. I shall confine myself to some reflections on the most general aspect of the institution, and try to express somewhat more clearly what to me appears the mental attitude at the bottom of the various Kula customs. These general points of view ought, I think, to be considered and tested in further field-work done on subjects akin to the Kula as well as in theoretical research, and might thus prove fertile for future scientific work. In this form it may be granted that it is the privilege of the chronicler of a novel phenomenon to pass it over to the consideration of fellow-workers; but it is his duty as well as his privilege. For, apart from his first-hand acquaintance with the facts—and indeed, if his account is good, he ought to have succeeded in transferring the best part of his knowledge to the reader—the fundamental aspects and characteristics of an ethnographic phenomenon for being general are none the less empirical. It is therefore the Chronicler’s task to finish his account by a comprehensive, synthetic coup d’œil upon the institution described.
As said the Kula seems to be, to a certain extent, a novel type of ethnological fact. Its novelty lies partly in the size of its sociological and geographical extent. A big, inter-tribal relationship, uniting with definite social bonds a vast area and great numbers of people, binding them with definite ties of reciprocal obligations, making them follow minute rules and observations in a concerted manner—the Kula is a sociological mechanism of surpassing size and complexity, considering the level of culture on which we find it. Nor can this wide network of social co-relations and cultural influences be considered for a moment as ephemeral, new or precarious. For its highly developed mythology and its magical ritual show how deeply it has taken root in the tradition of these natives and of what ancient growth it must be.
Another unusual feature is the character of the transaction itself, which is the proper substance of the Kula. A half commercial, half ceremonial exchange, it is carried out for its own sake, in fulfilment of a deep desire to possess. But here again, it is not ordinary possession, but a special type, in which a man owns for a short