Art is Trash!

Artists working on West Island turn trash into art

Anthropology is the study of social and cultural aspects of human life. Although making tools is an aspect we share with other species (various primate species, for example, use sticks and stones), the variety and complexity of our tools, and our ability to make tool-making tools seems to distinguish us. 

For tool making, gratitude seems due to our predecessor, Homo habilis, “handy man” of 2.6-1.7 million years ago. Archaeology is constantly being revised but currently, Homo habilis is famous for making the first tools.It's possible even earlier hominids made tools; but whoever was responsible someone didn't just use what he or she found, but actually transformed the object so it could be used. We think the earliest example of this is the Oldowan pebble choppers made by homo habilis. Now extremely valuable, these were random rocks till archaeologists 'discovered' them and put them in a museum.

Factory

 Since these ancestors, tools and the things we have created through them, often develop a life of their own, almost literally. For example, we give our boats names such as “The Queen Mary” and mourn them when they sink.Yet the Industrial Revolution allowed us exponentially, the ability to create tools and objects. Factories can makes loads of things, quickly. Mechanical reproduction, a guy name Benjamin observed, meant that original works of arts obtained a different significance. Now in the electronic age, a musical track is produced as a binary sequence which is exactly and infinitely reproducible.

But what gives these objects their value? If they have an allotted time, how do we treat the objects when they reach them.

Watts Towers

Watts Towers

Simon Rodia made me, and many others, reconsider how we use 'things' when we have finished with them. From the 1920s to the 1950s, this Italian migrant living in Los Angeles collected trash and transformed it into beautiful, surreal monuments. In the late 50s the local government decided to destroy his towers as they were called, against much local opposition. According to the story, the towers stood up against the crane attempting to pull them down. And today they still stand, a fantasy of curly designs, pastel colors, and mirrors. Discarded objects now have been transformed into art and heritage, which is the theme of this blog.

Art Adrift

Rubber sandals collected
by Emma 

We tend to associate coral atolls like the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, part of Australia's Indian Ocean Territories, with pristine white sands and and overhanging palms. Yet strewn above the high water mark of most of the ocean beaches, particularly those facing Australia and Southeast Asia are, along with coconut shells, lines of plastic bottles, plastic sandals (called "thongs" in Australian English), nets, ropes, and other human detritus. Shampoo containers from Indonesia, plastic toys and cutlery, toothbrushes.  This debris appears to have floated down the streams, rivers and other waterways of Southeast Asia and Australia, across the north-east Indian Ocean over the coral reefs that surround this out of and onto the calm sandy white peaches of the islands. Some artists in particular have sought to transform this maritime refuse into another category--art. In this blog I focus on 3 artists, Emma Washer, Cara Ratajczak and my aunt, Sandy McKendrick, who have, over the years, created stunning pieces by collecting and juxtaposing items salvaged from the beaches of Cocos.

"Rubbish on the beach is a supermarket for artists," Sandy McKendrick explains. She :

walks kilometers along the coast looking for things that catch my eye whether it is things that are shades of green or bits of furniture. It might also be wood that has paint on it; bamboo that has been carved; big thick mooring ropes wash up in massive bundles.When you unravel these have really vibrant cores.  What I really love is when we find thongs (i.e. flip-flops, plastic sandals) that have a name carved into them.  I don't find a new thong all that satisfying. The ones I love are the old ones. Those thongs have traveled thousands of kilometers. With the next high tide that might get picked up and taken away. The toothbrushes have identity. When you collect them put them together they are like people with different hair styles. They become more beautiful as they disintegrate, like old sculptures. The chance of finding that particular thing at that particular time, that particular piece of rope that happens to be washed up. 

The barge, Biar Selamat, now transformed into a small art gallery.

Emma Washer, an artist who has lived on West Island since she was a child, has realized what might seem like a fantastic dream. She has built an art gallery on West Island, using the barge that used to transport people between Home and West Island. She took an old barge, which was used to ferry residents across the lagoon, and fitted out interior areas with lights and air-conditioning. The barge had been in a forlorn state, I'm told, before it was rescued and transformed. Now her Big Barge art gallery, exhibits works from local and other artists, some of them utilizing similarly salvaged materials.  The third artist, Cara, I have not met yet, but am hoping to one day.

In 2009, the Big Barge gallery was opened with an exhibition called Art Adrift,which exhibited boats made out of beach debris. As Sandy explained:

This was a 6 week project of the 3 artists working with Cocos Malay traditional boat builders and local community to explore maritime history of islands and create vessels of fantasy from flotsam, melding traditional skills and contemporary arts practice.

Then Art Afloat was the next stage, that was floating art works at Direction Island and Christmas Island. On Home Island, the Cocos Malay school children, the elders like Nek Neng (see blog The Bird that Returns Home) and the local doctor, among others, all participated in creating the exhibition. 

Finally, the two projects were combined in the harbor town of Fremantle, Australia, for the 2013 Fremantle Festival. Part of this festival was the work of art below created by Asylum Seekers on Christmas Island and then displayed in Fremantle harbor.

Identities of things

Emma explained to me that: "Lots of the rubber sandals that come adrift are repaired, if the plugs have come out they’ll resew the thongs. Often they’ve been fixed a number of times. In our society we just chuck them out". The difference in the way the rubber sandals are treated came out when the artists were working with asylum seekers on Christmas Islands. Emma reflected:

 When we use rubber sandals for art the first thing we did was cut of the straps. We gave them ropes. Then the first the thing they did was remake them into rubber sandals. They all started fixing [the straps even though we had cut them]. In the picture they’ve all been remade into thongs. They said “oh we can fix these” because it’s so easy to make them wearable.

In other words, the asylum seekers wanted to make the rubber sandals wearable as well as beautiful. 

Emma's art (ABC)

So , a rubber sandal may have had the most extraordinary biography. Rubber synthesized from chemicals is transformed in a Chinese factory, where the worker is compensated with money for creating a pair of sandals. The two sandals are then transported as cargo on a boat taken to the Surabaya port in East Java, Indonesia. Perhaps a bribe to the harbormaster helps facilitate the container the sandals are resting in to move quickly onto the docks. From here, it is distributed through Chinese and Muslim merchants to a  market in a small town. There, a man spends half his daily wage on them and carves his initials. Now when he goes to the mosque for Friday prayers and removes them, he knows that he can find them on the way out, and no-one else can claim them. No-one, that is, until his poor cousin asks for them, and the man is too embarrassed to refuse.  The poor cousin can only afford a hut by the river. Then when the river embankments collapse in the next monsoon, the pair of rubber sandals gets separated forever with one washing downstream and floating in the ocean. For months the human world is oblivious to its existence bobbing under the sun. Possibly fish and birds nibble at it. It gets washed up on Christmas Island, where an artist collects it and other artists, asylum seekers transform it into a sculpture. It is exhibited in Fremantle Harbor. Then it features in this blog! Then, maybe, it is again washed away to Africa perhaps, where it is seen as trash, or used for something else, and then the possibility of its use is endless. On the one hand, it is an inanimate piece of rubber, on the other, humans invest radically different meanings into it, all of which, bring the thing to life. 

A good example of this is the commodity--things we buy and sell. Our common sense tells us that a diamond has more value than a diamante or glass. But our common sense partly misleads us. You might get two tables equally useful for eating on, yet one with the right label (a famous designer) or the right history (a famous movie star sat on it) is more valuable. This value is an exercise of imagination. To borrow Marx's idea, it is as real or fanciful as if the table had started crawling around and talking to us: 

The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every­day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas...

The commodity value of a table appears natural or inherent, but it is cultural and extrinsic to the table.

Emma's art materials

The same object has different meanings and values attached to it in different cultural contexts. It is a commodity to be bought and sold. Depending on the theory of value, initially in the factory its value is determined by the price of the materials and the labor or the class relationship between the person who owns the factory and the person who works in the factory. Then as it is transported the cost increases. As a gift, the value has to be determined with reference to the relationship between giver and the receiver--whether it is a patron and client; and whether they reciprocate in a general or specific manner. Once the rubber sandal is separated it has almost no commodity value. Then as art it might acquire an aesthetic value as well as a commodity value. The thing itself, the rubber sandal, steadily deteriorates, but the values attached to it change. All of these values or meanings are deeply and intricately connected to human relations and meaning. 

The way the rubber sandal moved across the ocean, pushed and pulled by currents, swells, and winds, seems a good metaphor for the way it moves into different spheres of meaning.  As Kopytoff (83) writes:

when the commodity is effectively out of the commodity sphere, its status is inevitably ambiguous and open to the push and pull of events and desires, as it shuffled about in the flux of social life.

If correct, this provides an easy first step to answering a whole range of difficult philosophical questions, such as "what is art?", and to a lesser extent, "what is a commodity?", "what is a gift?" and so on. In the first place, it is a meaning  and use that humans have invested in objects.

Inside the art gallery, the lower deck of the barge. Foregrounded is the inside of the barge's hull. In the background prints, painting etc. The bright tropical sun has whited out the windows in this photo.

References

The concepts I have used here come mostly from Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things". I have also drawn on Marshall Sahlins' Stone Age Economics. The analysis here is primarily enabled by Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof".

2016 Update

I wrote the above in 2014. Two years later, the life of these objects has been further enriched as they now feature on Australian stamps 

Stamps themselves have a fascinating extension from use value (to post letters with) and fetish value (as commodities to be bought and sold for profit). The plastic trash that floats up on the Cocos Islands continues to evolve.

Feast for Spirits of the Dead

A ritual meal is directed at the spirits of the dead

On June 21st, I observed a feast ritual for the spirits of the dead. Most people I spoke to called it kenduri arwah. "Kenduri" means "ritual meal" and "arwah" means "spirits of the dead", hence the title of this blog.*  As it was explained to me, this ritual occurs in the month of Sya'ban, which precedes the fasting month of Ramadan.  

Footwear is removed before entering  the mosque

The explicit purpose of the ritual was to help the spirits of the dead (grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters etc.). According to a local man knowledgeable in these matters, the dead are in their graves waiting for judgment day (kiamat), when they will be sent to heaven or hell. In the meantime, angels (malaikat) are punishing the deceased for their mistakes. Others I spoke to concurred that the object is to pray for these people, to help them.  It was unclear to me whether this is to lighten their punishment and/or to help them to realize their wrongdoings.

Some, but not all, local men gathered in the mosque for this ritual. It had two main parts; chanting and praying inside the mosque and then eating outside the mosque.

Chanting and Praying

The ritual chanting and praying occurred between sunset prayers (Maghrib) and dusk prayers (Ishya). 

Praying in the direction of Mecca during sunset prayers

During the sunset and dusk prayers, all men prayed in the direction of Mecca (as is always the case).

Chanting in a circle during the ritual

However, between sunset and dusk, while the first part of the ritual was held, men chanted in a circle. A  small offering was placed in the middle of the circle, close to the iman. This offering is sometimes called "bukti" (testament). It is for the spirits. 

Bukti: offering in middle of circle

It comprises a pitcher/jug (kendi) full of water; a glass to pour the water into; water to wash hands; and a saucer (called a selawat). I've only spoken to a few people about what actually happens; they believed spirits might actually consume the bukti. The consensus was "maybe" the spirits are in the mosque during the prayers.

Man reading chant

 While the men were chanting and praying, their wives and other women in the family lay out food for the living.

Women laying out food

The food was mostly snacks and sweet treats.

Sweets on offer

After dusk prayers, the men filed out of the mosque. 

Eating outside the mosque

The eating part of the ritual began with a small blessing being recited over the food.

Men selecting from the food on offer

Then the men selected some of the sweets. Some of the food was in containers, allowing some to gather extra to take home. Then it was the women's turn to eat. The mood was laid-back, and I was frequently exhorted to eat, even though I hadn't taken part in the preparations or chanting. Eventually, I relented and took some chocolates and other deserts back home for my children. 

Anthropological Perspectives

One aspect of the anthropological approach is comparison. Mostly the 'comparing' anthropologists do is implicit. For example, anthropologists use the word "ritual" to describe symbolic action in various societies. (Generally speaking, drinking a toast is a ritual; drinking from a tap because you're thirsty is not a ritual.)  So when I used the word "ritual" in this blog, I was implicitly comparing the symbolic actions I observed on Home Island with symbolic actions elsewhere in the world. 

I now want to break with anthropological convention and make some explicit comparisons. First I want to consider a village in Sabah, Malaysia, which is inhabited by the descendants of  Cocos Malays who emigrated there in the 1940s. The village is called "Balong Kokos" [Cocos (Pond)?]. The connection with the Cocos (Keeling) Islands is not just in the name.  Many local residents of Home Islands are the children of emigres who have returned. Home Islanders often go to Balong Kokos to visit their relatives. Anyway back to the Feast for the Spirits of the Dead. After I attended the Feast for the Spirits of the Dead on Home Island, our host Aisyah showed my wife pictures on Facebook of a Feast for the Spirits of the Dead which had just occurred. The pictures depict a similar chanting circle that occurs during the ritual meal. So a connection between the two communities is established through Facebook.

Outside  the Malay world, the comparison that immediately springs to mind is the Mexican Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos). This annual festivity honors the departed. However, anthropologists are wary about making such comparisons as underlying superficial similarities maybe be deep with complex differences.

Anthropologists tend to do comparisons by using the concepts of anthropology.

Aside from the concept of "ritual" another concept that can help explain the Feast for the Spirits of the Dead is "syncretism". Anthropologists use the term "syncretism" when they see a  world religion (e.g. Catholicism) mixed with local beliefs (e.g. those of the Aztecs, or indigenous Meso-Americans).  The Cocos Malay ritual for spirits of the dead also mixes local beliefs and practices with those of the world religion (i.e. Islam). So we could also see it as an example of syncretism. 

Notes

* Others called it "selamatan" (a ritual meal). 

References

For podcasts on anthropological concepts, you can listen to my brief presentations on iTunesU; the course is called "The Audible Anthropologist". If you are a visual learner, I cover the same ideas and in more detail on YouTube in my 25 Concepts in Anthropology series.

For an anthropological study of The Day of the Dead ritual in Mexico, refer to the book by Stanley Brandes titled 'Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond' or his article The Day of the Dead, Halloween, and the Quest for Mexican National 
Identity.

First Haircut

A ritual haircut on a child's 40th day helps initiate them into the community.

On June 14, a local couple put on a ritual for their 1st child; Kalilah. Locals call it "Gunting Rambut" or "Marhaban". I'll just call it "First Haircut". It occurs 40 days after birth.

One of the cakes prepared for the First Haircut. It was made by Hajah Attie - a female relative.

Morning: females prepare food

The last preparations for the First Haircut began earlier in the day. In a similar manner to other nulung (helping out), wives help the family prepare dishes. Those who are closer to the family did this at the hosts' house. Others prepared dishes at their own homes. Following advice, my wife, Monika made mini-cakes to bring. I took a carton of drinks and a selawet ("prayer",  in the form of cash in an envelope). All this was before mid-afternoon prayers (Ashar).

Seven bowls of porridge and three plates of yellow rice with roast chicken

Mid-afternoon: men pray

After the Ashar prayers, a small ritual prayer session was held.  I missed this, but I have included footage from the same ritual held on June 5 for a child named Zahir at a house over the road (for footage, click here). In the middle of the room were three plates of roast chicken and yellow rice; and a plate with bowls of rice porridge.* Tradition/custom (adat) prescribes that there must be an odd number of bowls of porridge. According to the imam, from a religious perspective, you can do this but you don't have to (boleh buat, boleh tak ada).  The food offering used to be called rasul (messenger) and, I'm told, some older people still use this term.

Women waiting for the men to finish eating

Mid-afternoon: feast for men and women

Then a large ritual meal began. As is the practice, the men ate first, followed by the women. Then the men got up to eat the cakes, again followed by the women. This lasted a little over an hour. One of the special features of this ritual meal was the amount of cake, which exceeded that of other rituals I have attended. (But as I haven't attended a wedding yet, this might not be saying much.) After the eating was finished, this stage of the ritual was complete.  Most men went their separate ways for sunset prayers (Maghrib).

Prayers handed out

Nightfall: Chanting before cutting

After sunset prayers, the men gathered again at the Kalilah's parents' house for the next stage of the ritual, which lasted just over an hour. Copies of the prayers to be chanted were handed out to the men, who formed a 'circle' around the walls of the room. The imam explained the reason for the ritual--blessing the child (for footage, click here). Then began chanting that was to last throughout the ritual. Kalilah's dad brought her into the room at times.

Kalilah and her doting father

Cutting the hair

Next came the pinnacle of the ritual. A procession made its way around the room to every man present. At the front was Kalilah being held by her father. Men passed scissors around. Each took a turn at cutting the baby's hair. Behind the father was a man carrying a bowl with water on the plate. The water was dabbed on the baby's head so that the piece of hair stuck up making it easier to cut. This, the imam later told me, is a kind of selawat (prayer/invocation). The men did this very gently and carefully. Her cut hair was also placed in the water bowl. The last man in the procession carried a kind of scented confetti, which was given to the men after they cut baby Kalilah's hair. 

The procession

Some of the men whispered a prayer to the baby in addition to, or instead of, cutting the hair. 

Maz whispers to the baby 

Other men chose not to do either.

Presents for everyone

Presents for the guests

Towards the end of the ritual, bags were circulated to all the men. The bags contained presents for a little child. These presents are depicted in the image below.

Presents from the bag

In the middle, there are prayer beads. On the left of this is a little bottle of perfume. And to the left again a miniature prayer mat. Moving clockwise, there is a plastic coin bag with lollies and chocolates. Then a prayer book, Surat Yasin. Finally, there is an envelope inscribed with the words, "Thank You from Kalilah's family"-these envelopes are also called "selawat"  (prayers / invocation).

Afterwards

After this was complete, those present enjoyed another ritual meal out the back of the house.

The rest of the baby's hair was to be shaved off the next day I was told, but I'll need to find out more about that.

What does it all mean?

According to the speech by the imam, the ritual was to pray for God's blessing on the child. Of those who attended, one identified it as an Islamic ritual of initiation--"it's a kind of sign she's become a Muslim" ("macam tanda dia menjadi orang Islam"). Another also felt it came "from our ancestors" ("dari nenek moyang kita [sic.]"). Let's try to unpack this a little.

Cultural and religious context

The Home Island ritual can be placed in the context of other Malay cultures, where one can find ostensibly the same ritual. Another term is"Marhaban" [Welcoming???]. I also heard "Syukuran" (thanksgiving) used. In other parts of the Malay world, a similar hair-cutting ritual at 40 days is often called "Cukur Rambut" ("Hair Shaving"). It's popular also because it's believed to make the baby's hair grow thicker; an important aesthetic trait.

The ritual of this sort is usually thought to be prescribed in Islam. According to one of the Hadith (Stories about the Prophet): "A baby is being pledged for his Aquiqah [Akikah], sacrifice is made for him on the seventh day, his head is shaved, and a name is given him". Akikah is the name given to the sacrifice of the animal.

Anthropological approaches

40 days seems a significant number in a variety of cultures. Like Malays, Greeks have a special ritual 40 days after the funeral. It could be a coincidence, but if not, how do we understand it? Diffusionists, scholars who believe that we should first consider how ideas and practices spread, would say that these ideas spread from the Middle East and Mediterranean to Southeast Asia. Structuralists, scholars who believe that we should first consider ideas and practices as part of a meaningful system within a culture, would argue that the number "40" stands in particular relation to other numbers. This might include "28" (days = a lunar month); "9" (the number of lunar months in a pregnancy). A number of other similarly unique ways to understand the prevalence of 40 present themselves. However, in isolation, the persistence of "40" seems trifling compared with deeper issues in the ritual.

One way to approach the deeper issues is to focus on the social function. Durkheim pioneered the functional approach. He wrote:

rites are ways of acting that are born in the midst of assembled groups and whose sole purpose is to evoke, maintain or recreate certain mental states of those groups

His point, I think, is that we get into a kind of mood in which we are receptive to the ideas that are represented in the ritual. Call the ideas that are represented "religious representations". Now Durkheim writes, "religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities". The point here is that the community forms a group a collective. The ritual represents that collective to those participating. It reminds them of the importance of community and of perpetuating community; community is now passed on to its newest member, who will one day also be responsible for passing it down. Something like that, I guess, is what Durkheim might say. 

We can also analyse the events using terms like "ritual", "tonsure", "ablution", and "initiation". For example, hair cutting (often called "tonsure" by anthropologists) features in a variety of contexts (entering the army; finishing the haj pilgrimage; coming of age in Thailand). It is usually associated with the adoption of a stricter more ascetic lifestyle, but anthropologists debated the issue through the 1950s-1980s. Water as a form of cleansing (usually called "ritual ablution" by anthropologists) also occurs in different settings (baptism in Christian churches, Jewish preparation of the bride for marriage and for conversion, Islamic preparations for prayer). So tonsure and ablution feature in this ritual. But to what end? 

I guess the ritual transforms status and initiates the infant. This is the first life-cycle ritual in Cocos Malay culture. At some point, a baby must be accepted as a member of the community; with a name and a role. Some Catholics, for instance, believe baptism turns the child into a member of the community of Christendom;  an unbaptized child may not enter heaven.  Indeed, many cultures possess rituals that transform newborn babies into community members. Putting this another way, we can see that the function of the ritual is to transform ritual status. The infant's ritual status is transformed from an outsider to a member of the community.  Among the Cocos Malays, the ritual which achieves this is the "First Haircut". 

Thank you to Pak and Mak Kalilah for inviting my family to celebrate their first child's hair-cutting ceremony.

Notes

*In Java this porridge is called Red and White porridge and some Javanese attach symbolic significance to the colors.

To give, to receive, to reciprocate

When Cocos Malays give presents, it probably makes closer and better relations between them.

Gift-giving forms a major part of social life on Home Island. In this blog, I outline some forms of gift-giving and discuss how an anthropologist might approach gift-giving.

 Gifts for Travel 

Giving selawat and an embrace

When Home Islanders travel to Perth and onwards, they give and receive presents. The travellers take also take presents of fish and other fruits of the sea that they have gathered in an 'esky' (Australian English for styrofoam box).  Inside the box is fish, gong gong, and other goodies.

At Perth airport with Fi and Fitriah. The latter is standing in front of an "esky" sent by Nek Sofia with the anthropologist family from Home Island to Perth. 

People often give envelopes (selawat) in which cash is stored to the travelers. On the ferry from Home Island to West Island for a Friday flight, I saw one woman receive four envelopes. She apparently had another four or five in her possession.

These lucky children received selawat with $5 inside!

 These seemed to have been collected on the way to the ferry. When they return the travelers bring gifts. I've only heard about it, but I've been told that the traveler also receives gifts upon return. For example, Nek Sofia's neighbors, friends and family cooked her dishes to eat after her return from a one week trip to Perth.

Gifts in Rituals

Gifts hanging from the climbing pole

Gifts often feature in rituals. Fundamentally, rituals are actions with meaning. Rituals can also  incorporate chanting and music, dancing, feats, costumes, eating, drinking and so on. Thus, the circumcision ritual I attended had mengarak, silat,  climbing the poll, special clothes for the boy, a large feast, and (in former times apparently) drinking and much else besides.

 Gift-giving can often be apparent in all the above attributes.  The men provided the chanting also did this as a gift, but this is implicit.

Gift-giving can also be explicit. Sometimes the meaningful action is a presentation of a gift  (like when I get a birthday present wrapped in paper and with a card).

Gifts of Food

Perhaps the most common kind of gift is food. A big catch is normally shared between neighbors.

Wives dividing up a haul of fish

Neighboring women give each other little titbits in the course of everyday life. Examples of this include main courses of meals, desert treats, seafood (especially delicacies like gong gong), bought chocolates, et cetera. I have heard of staples like rice and cooking oil being given in this way but I haven't seen it yet. So I think it tends to be delicacies that either take time to prepare, or cost  money to buy. 

Another form of food gift occurs in 'food gatherings' (jemput makan). This is a term that some, but not all, people I have spoken with used to describe gatherings for eating. 'Food gatherings' can take various forms. 

Food gathering 1: Typically on Friday or Saturday nights a group of four or five married couples will bring plates to 1 of the group's house and eat and chat until late in the evening. The group visits the house of alternating members. The group is sometimes called a "klab makan" (eating club). I'm told this is a recent innovation.One does not really have a name, but I have heard the term  'eating club' (klab makan) used to refer to it. Sometimes "geng"

 (gang) is also used.

A klab makan. Four couples, all grandparents, attended and me.

Food gathering 2: Gatherings for eating also form an important part of rituals. I have discussed this in relation to circumcisions and funerals. I'm told that more extensive gatherings for eating also occur at weddings. Thus, we could say that in the gift economy, food is an important currency.

Dishes prepared by different women. The men always eat first.

Thus food is exchanged in ritual and non-ritual settings.

Gifts in almost everything

In fact, in many aspects of Cocos Malay life that I have written about gifts feature. When men get together to lay the foundations of a house they are providing a gift. So are the wives who prepare food for the men. When home Island residents allow us as anthropologists to take part in their lives they are also giving us something. In getting together to help prepare food for a wedding, people provide gifts. So far, I have considered some basic elements of the "who" (family, neighbors, and friends), "when" (travel and ritual) and "what" (food and money) of gift-giving.

This widespread nature of giving not specific to Cocos Malay society. Anthropologists are accustomed to see it in many cultures. We tend to attach much significance to it. To understand why we need to look at how anthropologists approach economics.

Payment and Present

My elementary education in economics provided me with a simple overview of economics. Humans started off bartering, then they invented money, and then you got Wall Street. Anthropologists look at economy differently. They reject this idea of economic history and see economy as incorporating much more than barter and buying.

Let's start by saying that humans exchange 'goods' and 'services' among themselves in different ways. If, for example, I clean your windows, I might do it as a present or for payment. Anthropologists have, for the most part, focused on these two forms: present and payment.  

If it's for payment, my labor cleaning your windows is (what I want to call) a service commodity. I clean your windows for an agreed value, based on what I can get for cleaning windows on the market. After you pay me, you do not expect me to stick around for dinner; and nor do I expect a wrapped present. This form of exchange is based maximizing profit, it is based on the market, and one form it takes is capitalism.

Laying concrete as part of road building for the shire. While not entirely devoid of gift-giving elements, this work is, for the most part, the provision of a service on the market.

If it's as a favor, my labor cleaning your windows is a gift. When you do another person a favor or when you give a present, you are engaged in gift-giving. A birthday present, a Valentine's chocolate, a Christmas hamper, a retirement send-off, a graduation gift; these are all examples of gifts. Humans tend to idealize such presents as done simply as a favor, out of love, without expectation of anything in return.

The two forms of exchange often overlap in ways that can be complicating. For example, you invite your boss for dinner, but next month you're the only person who misses out on promotion.

Analysis: Giving, receiving, reciprocating

Stock photo...may not resemble actual Christmas

Plenty of people have provided searing analyses of market-based exchange; Marx probably stands highest among them. As for gift exchange, it was Mauss who spoiled the party. Even though he like gifts, he really ruined Christmas for me with his book The Gift. As he observed, there is no such thing as a 'true gift' as we like to conceive of it. Rather, gift-giving is based on three principles; to give, to receive, to give-back (that is 'to reciprocate').  











 If you come to my wedding and give me a toaster, I should receive it. I should not say "sorry, I already got three toasters, I don't want this!". Also, you would be entitled to expect me to give you a wedding present when you (or if not you, your children) get married.






You should give, I should receive, and I should reciprocate. Aside from pointing out the principles of giving, receiving, and reciprocating, Mauss made an even more significant observation.

Gift-giving ties people together. For example, when I was a young adult, my friends were people who came to my birthday parties and/or gave me presents. My family were people who I might celebrate Christmas and swap presents with. My sweetheart was a person whom I was obliged to provide Valentines' presents too. Exchanging gifts would make these relationships closer; not exchanging these gifts would make the relationships more distant.

In summary,  Mauss made three huge theoretical insights in The Gift: 
1. Giving gifts is an obligation among humans; 
2. Giving, receiving, and reciprocating characterizes gift-giving; 
3. Gifts bring people (and things) together.


Of course, gift-giving does not necessarily build stronger communities. For, not giving gifts (for example ignoring the birthday of your cousin with whom you have lately been arguing) can pull you apart. But if you give a present to someone, this does tend to form a bond.

Final thoughts

Giving gifts forms a large part of social life among the Cocos Malays. It can be explicit or implicit and can occur during and outside rituals. And in this, Cocos Malay culture is similar to every other culture I have read about.

Further reading

Mauss, M. The Gift. Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies

Polanyi K. 2001 [1944]. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times. Boston MA: Beacon

Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone Age Economics.