Old Light on a New Controversy: Alex Rentoul's Account of the Trobriand Women's Sagali
Of the many critical reactions to Bronislaw Malinowski's classic work on the Trobriand Islands, one of the most ethnographically productive has been Annette Weiner's critique that Malinowski neglected the role of women in exchange. In her celebrated restudy, Women of Value, Men of Renown (1976), Weiner tells of how, within a day of her arrival in a Trobriand village on the island of Kiriwina, she was brought to see a five hour long exchange ceremony that was conducted entirely by and for women. As several hundred people watched in a hamlet clearing, women came up singly and in groups to donate beautifully decorated leaf-fiber skirts along with bundles of the raw material used to fashion them, strips of dried banana leaves, piling them up in different sized heaps, which were soon carried off by their intended recipients. Hundreds of these women's wealth items might change hands in a single transaction. The ceremony ended the main mourning period observed for a deceased individual, and the atmosphere was festive, with raucous laughter, shouting, and spirited argument. Weiner would later show that, in addition to recognizing the work done by numerous people in connection with the mourning and burial, the presentations of skirts and leaf bundles reciprocated the social debts that the deceased owed to his father's people and affines, separating him from his former relationships in order to reclaim his name and body substance for the matrilineal group into which he was born. But on that first day, when Weiner witnessed the ceremony (she was to witness nine more like it during her fieldwork), she was surprised to discover no account of anything like it in Malinowski's thick volumes, nor mention of the items transacted. The entire complex of women's exchange activity and forms of wealth " apparently had escaped Malinowski's observations " (1976, 8). Nor was the complex addressed substantially in the work of subsequent Trobriand ethnographers (e.g. Powell 1960). Why were women's roles and wealth items invisible to these male ethnographers who so ably described men's roles and kula shells? On her first day in the field, a novice female could see the importance of what the discipline's most acclaimed male observers, after extensive study, had treated as unworthy of mention. Surely this was a most dramatic instance of male bias, a tendency for male observers to treat women's business as " essentially uninteresting and irrelevant " (Rosaldo 1974, 17). …