Play By The Rules
The right of participation in Kula exchange is not automatic. One has to "buy" one's way into it through participating in various lower spheres of exchange (Damon, 1980:278). The relationship giver-receiver is always asymmetrical: the former are higher in status. Also, Kula valuables are ranked according to value and age and so are the relationships that are created through their exchange. Participants will often strive to obtain particularly valuable and renowned Kula objects whose owner's fame will spread quickly through the archipelago. Such a competition unfolds through different persons offering pokala (offerings) and kaributu (solicitory gifts) to the owner, thus seeking to induce him to engage in a gift exchange relationship involving the desired object. Kula exchange therefore involves a complex system of gifts and countergifts whose rules are laid down by custom. The system is based on trust as obligations are not legally enforceable. However, strong social obligations and the cultural value system, in which liberality is exalted as highest virtue while meanness is condemned as shameful, create powerful pressures to "play by the rules". Those who are perceived as holding on to valuables and as being slow to give them away soon get a bad reputation (cf. Malinowski, 1920:100).
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Famous quotes containing the words play and/or rules:
“There are men from whom nature or some peculiar destiny has removed the cover beneath which we hide our own madness. They are like thin-skinned insects whose visible play of muscles seem to make them deformed, though in fact, everything soon turns to its normal shape again.”
—E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
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