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Trobriand Islanders-Malinowski and Weiner

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Banana Leaf Bundles and Skirts:
A Pacific Penelope's Web?

Margaret Jolly

In her review of the significance of cloth in Pacific polities, Annette Weiner has evoked the persona of Penelope, “weaving by day, and unweaving the same fabric by night, in order to halt time” (1986, 108).[1] This image of a Pacific Penelope halting time was inspired by Weiner's reanalysis of the Trobriand islands. In her monograph (1976), in several subsequent papers (1980, 1982a, 1983a, 1986) and in her shorter text (1988) she conclusively demonstrated that Malinowski and a host of other male observers had failed to see women's central place in Trobriand exchange: that in fixating so totally on men's exchanges of yams in urigubu and of shell valuables in the …show more content…

Not far from this gravesite, another stone marks the grave of Mitakata, successor to Touluwa and Powell's informant in 1950. Mitakata died in 1961, and Vanoi became his heir. (1976, xix)
The rhetorical device that Weiner uses in Women of Value, Men of Renown, namely, heading each section with a quotation from Malinowski, does, as she suggests, highlight their historical relation, but, again, ultimately it stresses the consistency of their ethnographic questions and the constancy of Tro-
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― 40 ― briand culture despite the gap in time and interpretation. The same point is made explicitly in a later essay.
What initially astounded me upon my arrival in Kiriwina was the striking similarity between a Kiriwina village in 1971 and Malinowski's descriptions and photographs of the same village in 1922. Although superficially some things had changed (an airstrip, tourists, some Western clothing) everything else was as if nothing was changed. (Weiner 1980, 272)
The introductory notes to this later essay situate the Massim in Melanesian colonial history—cataloging the successive influences of whalers, pearlers and bêche-de-mer traders, gold prospectors, and labor recruiters from the 1850s; Christian missions from 1894; and the controls of government from the establishment of a British colonial administration post at Losuia in 1906 to the Massim's incorporation within the

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