In the Absence of the Gift: New Forms of Value and Personhood in a Papua New Guinea Community by Anders Emil Rasmussen, and: If Everyone Returned, the Island Would Sink: Urbanisation and Migration in Vanuatu by Kirstie Petrou (review)

During 1987, when living in a Chambri settlement within the town of Wewak (Papua New Guinea, East Sepik Province), we conversed with a university-educated accountant based in Port Moresby. We asked him how, as a successful migrant, he managed his relationships with those of his Chambri kin still intimately tied to their home villages. John said that he rarely visited his kin at home or in Wewak, seeking to avoid their myriad requests for money and other forms of assistance. Yet, periodically he did return—in this instance, to augment his niece's first Communion celebration. On arrival, he held an all-night beer party for the older men of Chambri Camp, all loosely defined as relatives. John began by thanking them for the help that enabled him to become a success. Accepting his thanks, they congratulated him for showing appropriate deference to his seniors with his "little present" of beer—taken as a placeholder for further expressions of his gratitude. Continuing darkly with allusions to sorcery, they indicated that he was wise to acknowledge their help lest someone be angry with him. Several then made more specific statements about John's obligations: one recounted that he had given baby presents at John's birth; another enumerated the names of those who had died since John's last visit, implying that contributions to death expenses would be in order. John nodded dutifully at these reminders.

Near the end of his visit, John told us that meeting his relatives' immediate requests had cost him at least 150 kina (about us$200) per day. And, because he had missed his plane that morning, he joked that his savings account would be depleted before he could leave. His Chambri wife added (in English): "These Chambri will finish you up entirely if you have any money." We asked John directly why he helped his relatives. He replied that they were his family and would become angry if he did not. After we persisted by asking what would happen if they did become angry, he answered (also in English): "They would kick me out of the family, and if I did anything big, they would not come, and no one would see it." Thus, despite his Western education and business activities—despite a life that most Chambri regarded as epitomizing development—John located himself, with only moderate ambivalence, very much through his relationships with other Chambri. In short, without these (costly) relationships, he would have little value. A quitclaim on these relationships and their obligations was not an option.

In the two books we review, remittances like those John provided are key to working through the existential issues of changing Pacific lives: of establishing personal worth and maintaining cultural identity under conditions of out-migration and socioeconomic disparity. The first book is by an anthropologist; the second, by a human geographer.

Anders Rasmussen's In the Absence of the Gift is based on fieldwork over a seven-year period among people from Mbuke Island in Papua New Guinea's Manus Province. As Rasmussen persuasively demonstrates, economic and affective ties between those on the island and their relatively well-educated and employed kinsmen living elsewhere (often in Port Moresby) were established and performed through remittances.

However, in contrast to the past, as conveyed by earlier ethnographers working elsewhere in Manus (including Reo Fortune and James...