NÅR „PENGE“ ER ANDET OG MERE END PENGE: Røde fjerruller på Reef Øerne

Abstract

Until the middle of the 20th century red feather rolls were an important and highly

visible aspect of social life in the the Northern Santa Cruz Islands comprising Nendö,

Reef Islands and Duff Islands. These rolls, commonly but misleadingly known and

referred to as “red feather money” even in anthropological literature, by the 1970s had

nearly gone out of use and by the 1990s they had disappeared. In this historical

reconstruction the red feather rolls are viewed in their heyday in their regional as well

as their local social context. The ethnographic knowledge behind the reconstruction is

based on all the available sources of the precolonial and colonial periods, the major

anthropological analyses of the 1960s and the 1970s and my own fieldwork data

established after 1973. The anthropological analysis of the material takes guidance

from Maurice Godelier (1978) who points out that valuables in primitive society often

have a dual character, they are both commodities and gifts; and from Kajsa Ekholm

(1978) who states that power relations in tribal societies are largely established,

consolidated and maintained through the control of valuables. Red feather rolls played

an important part in the regional trading system connecting the Northern Santa Cruz

Islands. This peculiar form of valuable was only produced in the rich central island of

Nendö from where it was taken to the more marginal islands as part of the inter-island

trading, usually in exchange of women. The big trading canoes were only built in the

Duff Islands and had to be for paid in red feather rolls. They were owned and sailed by

the leading big-men in the Western Reef Islands who accordingly were able to exercise

considerable control over the influx and the flow internally of the feather rolls. Feather

rolls were indispensable in the gift-exchanges accompanying all major social ceremonies

and events such as bridewealth, compensations and life-cycle ceremonies. So a generous

local big-man could use his feather rolls for the benefit of his relatives and favoured

friends who were in need of it, and at the same time he would make them into his loyal

supporters. In this social system, control of the unique valuable was the major road to

respect and influence, even to power, for the big-man. The red feather rolls were part

of an intricate local social order which depended for its reproduction on the regional

trading system. But all this had to disappear when market economy based on western

money, Christian influence, and colonial control took over. The regional trading system

collapsed; the red feather rolls lost their significance and the big-men the base of their

power.