ABSTRACT
Weiner, in her book Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, helps clarify what is meant here. It is not a matter of giving gifts and those receiving them acquiring indebtedness, as in the case of gifts, but rather it is about objects which are in effect loaned to be later returned: ‘At issue is not how one gift elicits a return, but rather which possessions the members of a group are able to keep through generations, even if they must loan them for a time to others . . . Often these possessions are on loan to people born into other matrilineages, a prominent way of temporarily making kin of non-kin. Later, these inalienable possessions must be reclaimed, often by people in the next generations who had nothing to do with the original giving . . . So although the circulation of inalienable possessions permits the reproduction of an expanded network of kin through time, such acts always carry the potential for loss and the chance of betrayal’ (Weiner 1992: 26). If the object is destroyed then the giver/loaner will aim to replace it.
