ABSTRACT
European travel encounters involved a huge range of exchanges – linguistic, economic, cultural, religious, and sexual – but this rich diversity is often ignored in the narratives, as are the unequal power relations which inform such exchanges. Accounts of encounters regularly efface problems of linguistic and cultural difference, and untranslatability under a self-serving narrative of communication, amity, and imperial/colonial benevolence. In material exchanges this manifests itself as a complex mix of self-interested economic trade and the larger rituals of gift-giving. Drawing on anthropological as well as narrower economic models, the essay explores the complexity of such exchanges in examples from North America and the South Seas.
