The politics of exchange : a study of ceremonial exchange amongst the Chimbu

Abstract

The Chimbu were, in 1961, a comparatively well known New Guinea Highland group. In the "broadest sense of the words, they fitted in to the Highland pattern of acephalous, patrilineal, sedentary, sweet-potato cultivating societies. At that stage Dr. Paula Brown, as an anthropologist, and Dr. H.C. Brookfield, as a geographer, had carried out joint fieldwakk in the Chimhu area, concentrating mainly on the agricultural and political systems. As a result of their work, the overall pattern of settlement and distribution of groups throughout the Chimhu-speaking area was known. Information regarding the language was a good deal less reliable than the up-to-date information on social organisation and agriculture provided by Brown and Brookfield. Various Roman Catholic and Lutheran missionaries had compiled grammars, dictionaries and word lists of varying degrees of reliability. None were comprehensive and all suffered from a lack of a standardized orthography. They were, however, invaluable as an entry into the language. My interests lying jointly in the fields of anthropology and linguistics, it seemed sensible to choose an area of fieldwork on which, there was already a basic information about both the language and the social organisation. Chimbu was such an area.