ABSTRACT
So far we have merely watched throngs of people forgathering, carrying the fruits of their labour, not to their own village but to quite a different one, displaying them in this latter, and offering them on the part of someone to someone else. We have vaguely divined that there is some system in this apparent confusion, that there is a giver and a recipient; that among the helpers and carriers, the measurers and the admirers, there obtain certain sociological relations as between one group and another. But what are these relations, what forces move these people, what incentives make them toil and pant and find satisfaction in their work? Above all, what motive can make one man offer the best part of his harvest to another? These questions still remain unanswered. And indeed the answer is neither simple nor obvious. Traditional decrees are framed into a complex system of economic, legal and sociological rules, which at first appear to us almost perverse in their complexity and obliqueness. So difficult are they to grasp that most of the long-time white residents in the Trobriands, some of whom are married to native women and benefit under the Trobriand harvesting system, are incapable of understanding, still less of explaining them. It will therefore be necessary for us to go into these rules carefully and minutely. It will also be necessary to see whether we can reduce them to the mainsprings of human action, to hunger, love and vanity.
