In using the craft, every joint owner has a right to a certain place in it and to certain duties, privileges, and benefits associated with it. He has his post in the canoe, he has his task to perform, and enjoys tie corresponding title, either of ’master’ or ’steersnan’, or ’keeper of the nets’, or ’watcher for fish’. His position and title are determined by the combined action of rank, age, and personal ability. Each canoe also has its place in the fleet and its part to play in the manoeuvres of joint fishing. Thus on a close inquiry we discover in this pursuit a definite system of division of functions and a rigid system of mutual obligations, into which a sense of duty and the recognition of the need of co-operation enter side by side with a realization of self-interest, privileges and benefits. Ownership, therefore, can be defined neither by such words as ’communism’ nor ’individualism’, nor by reference to ’joint-stock company’ system or ’personal enterprise’, but by the concrete facts and conditions of use. It is the sum of duties, privileges and mutualities which bind the joint owners to the object and to each other.
Thus, in connexion with the first object which attracted our attention — the native canoe — we are met by law, order, definite privileges and a well-developed system of obligations.
III. The Binding Force of Economic Obligations
To enter more deeply into the nature of these binding obligations, let us follow the fishermen to the shore. Let us see what happens with the division of the catch. In most cases only a small proportion of it remains with the villagers. As a rule we should find a number of people from some inland community waiting on the shore. They receive the bundles of fish from the fishermen and carry them home, often many miles away, running so as to arrive while it is still fresh. Here again we should find a system of mutual services and obligations based on a standing arrangement between two village communities. The inland village supplies the fishermen with vegetables: the coastal community repays with fish. This arrangement is primarily an economic one. It has also a ceremonial aspect, for the exchange has to be done according to an elaborate ritual. But there is also the legal side, a system of mutual obligations which forces the fisherman to repay whenever he has received a gift from his inland partner, and vice versa. Neither partner can refuse, neither may stint in his return gift, neither should delay.
What is the motive force behind these obligations? The coastal and inland villages respectively have to reply upon each other for the supply of food. On the coast the natives never have enough vegetable food, while inland the people are always in need of fish. Moreover, custom will have it that on the coast all the big ceremonial displays and distributions of food, which form an extremely important aspect of the public life of these natives, must be made with certain specially large and fine varieties of vegetable food, which grow only on the fertile plains inland. There, on the other hand, the proper substance for a distribution and feast is fish. Thus to all other reasons of value of the respectively rarer food, there is added an artificially, culturally created dependence of the two districts upon one another. So that on the whole each community is very much in need of its partners. If at any time previously these have been guilty of neglect, however, they know that they will be in one way or another severely penalized. Each community has, therefore, a weapon for the enforcement of its rights: reciprocity.
This is not limited to the exchange of fish for vegetables. As a rule, two communities rely upon each other in other forms of trading and other mutual services as well. Thus every chain of reciprocity is made the more binding by being part and parcel of a whole system of mutualities.
IV. Reciprocity and Dual Organization
I have found only one writer who fully appreciates the importance of reciprocity in primitive social organization. The leading German anthropologist, Prof. Thumwald of Berlin, clearly recognizes „die Symmetric des Gesellschaftsbaus” and the corresponding „Symmetric von Handlungen”.4 Throughout his monograph, which is perhaps the best account of the social organization of a savage tribe extant, Prof. Thumwald shows how the symmetry of social structure and of actions pervades native life. Its importance as a legal binding form is not, however, explicitly stated by the writer, who seems to be aware of its psychological foundation ’in human feeling’ rather than of its social function in safeguarding the continuity and adequacy of mutual services.
The old theories of tribal dichotomy, the discussions about the ’origins’ of ’phratries5’ or ’moieties6’ and of the duality in tribal subdivisions, never entered into the inner or differential foundations of the external phenomenon of halving. The recent treatment of the ’dual organization’ by the late Dr. Rivers and his school suffers badly from the defect of looking for recondite causes instead of analysing the phenomenon itself. The dual principle is neither the result of ’fusion’ nor ’splitting’ nor of any other sociological cataclysm. It is the integral result of the inner symmetry of all social transactions, of the reciprocity of services, without which no primitive community could exist. A dual organization may appear clearly in the division of a tribe into two ’moieties’ or be almost completely obliterated — but I venture to foretell that wherever careful inquiry be made, symmetry of structure will be found in every savage society, as the indispensable basis of reciprocal obligations.
The sociological manner in which the relations of reciprocity are arranged, makes them yet more stringent. Between the two communities the exchanges are not carried out haphazard, any two individuals trading with each other at random. On the contrary, every man has his permanent partner in the exchange, and the two have to deal with each other. They are often relatives-in-law, or else sworn friends, or partners in the important system of ceremonial exchange called kula. Within each community again the individual partners are ranged into totemic sub-clans. So that the exchange establishes a system of sociological ties of an economic nature, often combined with other ties between individual and individual, kinship group and kinship group, village and village, district and district.