BOOK REVIEWS

Wage, Trade, and Exchange inMelanesia: A Manus Society in theModern State, by James G. Carrier andAchsah H. Carrier. Studies in Melane­sian Anthropology Series no. 7. Berke­ley: University of California Press,1989. ISBN 0-520-06389-9, xvii + 257pp, figures, maps, tables, notes, bibli­ography, index. US$35.

In Wage, Trade, and Exchange inMelanesia: A Manus Society in theModern State, James and Achsah Car­rier argue persuasively that rural pre­capitalist villages should be examinedin the context of the larger capitalisteconomies that encompass them. Theauthors examine changes in the smallisland society of Ponam, just north ofManus Island in the Manus Province ofPapua New Guinea, using their ownethnographic observations (from sev­eral visits between 1978 and 1986),those of Mead and Fortune from fiftyyears ago from another area of Manus,and archival sources. The Carrierssuggest that many aspects of Ponamlife, even those that appear most "tra­ditional," have been altered by coloni­zation and by the participation ofPonam workers in a national capitalisteconomy; they caution that anthropol­ogists have probably overlooked simi­lar influences in other areas.

The Carriers set out to explore therelationship between rural villages andcapitalist nations, drawing extensively,but not uncritically, on the work ofMeillassoux (Maidens, Meal andMoney, 1981) and Gregory (Man 15[1980]: 626-652; Gifts and Commodi­ties, 1982). Meillassoux suggests that itis in the interests of capitalist systemsto preserve tradition in encapsulated

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rural areas, because this allows ownersto pay low wages to their workers sincethese men usually leave their wives andchildren to live by subsistence farmingin the village. The Carriers applaudMeillassoux for recognizing the inti­mate connections between seeminglypristine traditional lifestyles and largercapitalist economies, but object that"tradition" in rural areas is not mum­mified as Meillassoux suggests;instead, local practices are altered bythe wider national economy. In orderto understand the "articulation" ofvillage and capitalist economies fromthe village perspective, the authors turnto Gregory who suggests that wagelabor feeds money into rural, precapi­talist villages and leads to an expansionof traditional "gift exchange" systems.

The Carriers use this theoreticalapparatus to examine Ponam history.Ponam Islanders (like other Manuspeople) have been more successful thanmost other Papua New Guinea groupsin attaining high levels of educationand relatively high-paying skilled officejobs in urban areas. Those who remainon Ponam continue to fish and to tradesago with neighboring Manus groupsbut they are dependent on moneyremitted by migrant workers. This hasnot, however, led to a collapse of tradi­tional social organization andexchange. Instead, local production(mostly in the form of fishing) is orga­nized according to kin and clan rela­tions and is still governed by a precapi­talist logic: people owning "capital" inthe form of fishing rights or equipmentdo not amass wealth, but instead accu­mulate social credit by giving awayfish. Ponam Islanders still hold tradi­tional markets where they exchange

THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL I99I

their fish for the sago of a neighboringgroup, and exchanges (associated withmajor life events such as marriage anddeath) within the village are flour­ishing.

Closer examination reveals thatmany of these activities have been sub­tly altered by colonization and partici­pation in the capitalist economy. Mostdramatically, lapan or financier bigmen who previously rose to the top ofManus society by manipulating bride­wealth payments and exchanges withneighboring groups, have now disap­peared because the most significantsources of wealth (from wage labor)are now beyond their control, andbecause the extensive system ofregional interdependence and tradethat existed prior to contact has largelycollapsed. Moreover, the limited formof regional trade that has survived (thefish and sago market) is now supportedby cash that comes largely frommigrant workers since the ManusIsland sago producers now fish forthemselves and have little need forPonam fish.

The Carriers then examine the"articulation" of the Ponam Islandeconomy with the wider capitalisteconomy in some detail. They find thatthe elaborate system of intravillageexchanges allows villagers to capturethe money of migrant workers becausethe migrants are obliged to send homemoney to contribute to exchanges inorder to maintain their standing as"good" people in the community, toaccumulate social credit, and to retaintheir access to local resources they willneed when they eventually retire andreturn to the island. In short, migrantssupply the villagers with money, and in

turn the villagers take care of the pro­duction of social identities and rela­tions. Each group is dependent on theother, and, most important, migrantsremain committed to village life andcontinue to send money home.

The Carriers are to be commendedfor pointing to, and carefully illustrat­ing, the importance of consideringvillage societies both in historical per­spective and in relation to the outsideworld. It is all too tempting to assumethat strange behaviors are traditionaland apparently isolated villages arelargely untouched by the outsideworld, but few who read this study willnot be made aware of the dangers ofsuch a perspective. The work is alsovaluable for its attempts to movebeyond a particular case and todevelop a more general model of therelationship between rural villages andlarger economies, and thus should beof interest to scholars of developmentand underdevelopment.

My criticisms are minor. While theCarriers quite convincingly show whymigrants remain committed to Ponam,it is less clear why village families withmigrant children are interested inmaintaining mutual aid relations andsharing their wealth through theexchange system (which tends to redis­tribute migrant wealth equallythroughout the village) with less fortu­nate fellow villagers? One might expecta deterioration of local exchange andinformal aid as village families becomeincreasingly oriented toward maintain­ing ties with migrant workers whocontrol the most significant source ofwealth, and correspondingly less inter­ested in maintaining ties with fellowvillagers. This has not happened on

BOOK REVIEWS

Ponam, but the Carriers do not fullyexplain why. This, however, is a rela­tively minor flaw in an importantwork.

KAREN BRISON

Washington University

~:.

The French Presence in the SouthPacific, 1842-1940, by RobertAldrich. Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8248­1268-9, xii + 387 pp, maps, notes,bibliography, index. US$3S.

Robert Aldrich has performed a con­siderable service by providing studentsand historians with a work of synthesison the French Pacific territories, fromtheir occupation in the early nineteenthcentury until the eve of considerablepolitical change after the 1940s. It ishard to think of any work in French orEnglish that summarizes quite so wellthis long phase of French imperialismand colonization among the marginalpossessions of a European powerwhose interests lay elsewhere. Explain­ing this phenomenon of French incur­sion into an "Anglo-Saxon" sphere isalmost as difficult as accounting for thecontinuation of a "French presence"long after the period of decolonization.

The book contains little that is newin the way of argument about imperialexpansion in a somewhat sketchy firstchapter dealing with the chronology ofFrench annexations and protection inthe three main groups-East Polynesia,New Caledonia, and the New Hebrides(now Vanuatu). There is a more solidaccount of the background factors inthree chapters on the French navy,

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French missions, and French economicinterests, so far as these can be adducedfrom old and some new materials ontrading houses, shipping firms, andbanks. Lack of any trade or financialseries precludes a serious analysis ofthe scale and proportion of Frenchmetropolitan commercial exchangesand investment at any phase of theperiod covered by the book. On theother hand, there are some excellentinsights into the importance of opera­tions conducted by the Banque de I'In­dochine et Suez from the work ofYasua Gondjo, and good use has beenmade of Anne-Gabrielle Thompson'sstudy of John Higginson. The gap thatstill exists in our knowledge of theinfluence and profitability of LeNickel, however, cannot yet be filled.More might have been made of thefinancial role of French administra­tions in the economies of the threeterritories. Government, after all, wasthe largest of the few investors, overthe longest period, and had a consider­able place in creating a market forimports, employing labor, and securingthe limited amount of infrastructureand urbanization that developedaround the main ports and capitals.The chapter on settlers and officialsplays down this official (and metropol­itan) action over a century of taxation,budgets, and capital expenditure.

Chapter six on "The French and theIslanders" is a brave attempt to coverthe most difficult theme of all, namelythe results of cultural change, misce­genation, education, and a century ofaccommodation among islandsocieties. Perhaps more space shouldhave been allowed to analyze the ele­ments of resistance and syncretism