Ritual Energy and Social Life

This book takes up a controversial theme in the analysis of practices of gift exchanges, including places in Highlands societies of Papua New Guinea, focusing on the theory of "costly signaling." In this theory, costly signals are deployed in social relations as a means of establishing credentials or exercising power over others through the use of wealth or force. In this book, the authors argue that such signals gain their efficacy by expression in terms of ritualized forms that convey energy and culminate in elaborate events that are epideictic displays of wealth given between partners in different groups.

Adding to the idea of costly signals, these signals become the means of competitively establishing prestige among groups and leaders in a context of mutuality, whereby a feeling of ongoing reciprocity emerges and renews social relations over time. The text illustrates this argument by showing how it applies in the histories of exchanges among the Orokaiva people of Papua New Guinea and the Kawelka group in the Mount Hagen area of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, with a comparative chapter on Wiru speakers of the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

A further chapter widens the ambit of comparison by extending the costly signal theory to further contexts in parts of the Pacific and Asia, including a reexamination of the phenomenon of "cargo cults," and personal experiences by the authors in Inner Mongolia, Taiwan, and Ireland. This book is thus both a critical look at costly signaling and a broadening out into wider fields of conceptual thinking, giving it a unique place in the literature on exchange and interpersonal relations.