The tabu, the Polynesian word and the Polynesian custom, has served as prototype and eponym to similar regulations found among all the savage and barbarous as well as civilised races. Totemism, found first among one tribe of North American Indians and brought to light by the work of Frazer, has later on been documented so widely and fully from everywhere, that in re-writing his early small book, its historian could fill out four volumes. The conception of mana, discovered in a small Melanesian community has, by the work of Hubert and Mauss, Marett and others, been proved of fundamental importance, and there is no doubt that mana, whether named or unnamed, figures and figures largely in the magical beliefs and practices of all natives. These are the most classical and best known examples, and they could be multiplied by others were it necessary. Phenomena of the ‘totemic type’ or of the ‘mana type’ or of the ‘tabu type’ are to be found in all ethnographic provinces, since each of these concepts stands for a fundamental attitude of the savage towards reality.
So with the Kula, if it represents a novel, but not freakish, indeed, a fundamental type of human activity and of the mental attitude of man, we may expect to find allied and kindred phenomena in various other ethnographic provinces.
And we may be on the lookout for economic transactions, expressing a reverential, almost worshipping attitude towards the valuables exchanged or handled; implying a novel type of ownership, temporary, intermittent, and cumulative; involving a vast and complex social mechanism and systems of economic enterprises, by means of which it is carried out.
Such is the Kula type of semi-economic, semi-ceremonial activities.
It would be futile, no doubt, to expect that exact replicas of this institution should be found anywhere and with the same details, such as the circular path on which the valuables move, the fixed direction in which each class has to travel, and existence of solicitory and intermediate gifts.
All these technicalities are important and interesting, but they are probably connected in one way or another with the special local conditions of the Kula.
What we can expect to find in other parts of the world are the fundamental ideas of the Kula, and its social arrangements in their main outline, and for these the field-worker might be on the look-out.
For the theoretical student, mainly interested in problems of evolution, the Kula might supply some reflections about the origins of wealth and value, of trade and economic relations in general. It might also shed some light upon the development of ceremonial life, and upon the influence of economic aims and ambitions upon the evolution of intertribal intercourse and of primitive international law. For the student mainly viewing the problems of Ethnology from the point of view of the contact of cultures, and interested in the spread of institutions, beliefs and objects by transmission, the Kula is no less important. Here is a new type of inter-tribal contact, of relations between several communities slightly but definitely differing in culture, and a relation not spasmodic or accidental but regulated and permanent. Quite apart from the fact that in trying to explain how the Kula relationship between the various tribes originated, we are confronted with a definite problem of culture contact.