Global gifts

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Module 3, Week 3, Lectures 1
Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 410
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
October 14, 2019
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2019/3.3.1

We can see Ongka in a new light. He's not a living fossil. He straddles two worlds. He makes money from selling coffee, and he keeps a cycle of moka going too.

• Has a bank account
• Grows coffee
• He has also said that cash-cropping and moka should coexist (Strathern and Stewart 2004, 133).

Ongka and other big men draw on money earned in markets to make bigger gifts. Money has led to the efflorescence of the moka system.

What appears to be change is often continuity.

• Since the very first contacts between Australians and Auhelawa in the late 19th century, Auhelawa people have migrated to earn wages as workers.
• The trade goods they bought with wages became gifts to their kin when they returned: lautom.

• Many people who were born in Auhelawa no longer live there, but their kin believe that this absence is temporary, and they will return.
• People living and working in other parts of the country will often return during the summer holidays with gifts, a visit that anticipates their return to membership in the social order they left.

• Wantok: A person who speaks the same (wan) language (tok), and with whom one expects a relationship of mutual support.
• Anyone who comes from the same area as oneself relative to others in a new environment are wantoks.
• Migrants to towns reach out to wantoks and usually live among wantoks.

Go on to Canvas and take Quiz no. 16: What are wantoks?

Have we read of any other kind of relationship which is similar to a wantok relationship?

The code for this quiz will be announced in lecture.

• In 2018, globally, over US$ 624 billion were received around the world.
• Over 68 billion US dollars was sent overseas from the US as remittances in 2018 (World Bank 2019c,d).

• In many receiving countries, remittances sent back are well over what the country receives in foreign development aid (OECD 2017).
  • In Haiti, 64% of external resource flows come from remittances, 33% from foreign aid.
• In many of these countries, remittances are equal to or greater than what the country earns from exports (World Bank 2019a,b).

  • In Tonga, remittances in 2018 equaled 40% of GDP (up from 20% in 2010)
  • In 2018, exports in Tonga accounted for 21% of GDP (up from 12% in 2010, but trending downward since 1975).
  • Other countries where remittances are worth more than export income: Liberia, Comoros, Nepal, Haiti, Tajikistan.
  • These countries, in other words, participate in global capitalism mainly by exporting people.

• Fievel the mouse
• Wantok networks, Samoan diasporas

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. 2017. “Resource Flows beyond ODA in DAC Statistics.” Accessed September 5. http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/beyond-oda.htm.

Strathern, Andrew, and Pamela Stewart. 2004. Empowering the Past, Confronting the Future: The Duna People of Papua New Guinea. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan.

World Bank. 2019a. “Exports of Goods and Services (% of GDP).” World Bank Open Data. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?view=chart.

———. 2019b. “Personal Remittances, Received (% of GDP).” World Bank Open Data. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS.

———. 2019c. “Personal Remittances, Paid (current US$).” World Bank Open Data. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BM.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT.

———. 2019d. “Personal Remittances, Received (current US$).” World Bank Open Data. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT.