ABSTRACT
Chapters 5 and 6 described the way that Ponams displayed the gifts they gave in their major prestations and return prestations. These displays are important, we showed, because they embody islanders' conception of the key categories of kin that make up their social universe, as well as the more processual factors that affected the status and state of relations among and between these kin categories. The present chapter continues the task of describing the practices that were part of Ponam exchange. It does so by describing the ways that Ponams carried out the major prestations in which displays were so important, and then by looking at the ways that gifts were accumulated and distributed before and after the main event. Our purpose is partly ethnographic, to complete the picture of exchange by describing some of the steps and activities that preceded and followed major prestations. But our purpose is also to look at exchange from the perspective of the individuals who planned and conducted them, and so qualify and complement our previous focus on structural relationships among groups. As might be expected, given the highly structured system of exchange that we have already described, this chapter will show that even at the individual level, structural considerations were very important. We will get at these processes and transactions by describing some of what went on as part of two large, but by no means extraordinary, prestations. One was a funeral prestation in May 1979, the other was a brideprice prestation in January 1981.
