Shell money of power and the money of deceit

The colonial economy and its impact on social relations in the Aitape area of Papua New Guinea have been for a number of years investigated by Dr Maria Wronska-Friend, anthropologist and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at The Cairns Institute. Of particular interest is a group of small coral islands, situated several kilometres offshore of Aitape. Although land-poor and with limited means of subsistence, in the pre-colonial days the islands were an important centre of economic production.

Their prosperity was due to the skills of local women who utilised reef resources by developing a specialised production of diverse shell goods. Of paramount importance was the production of rapa shell rings, drilled from the shells of giant clams. Although at times the rings used to be worn as personal ornaments, principally they functioned as currency units, traded by men to mainland communities in exchange for sago flour, timber for the construction of richly decorated cult houses and canoes, and various commodities. The women of the Aitape islands therefore operated a type of shell currency mint, and by controlling the supply of rapa, they were able to control the local economy.

The situation changed drastically towards the end of the 19th century, with the arrival of German administration and the Divine World missionaries. In a short time, the shell currency was replaced by ceramic replicas of shell rings that were mass-produced in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The uncontrolled, large-scale introduction of those fake objects into the local economy resulted in the rapid devaluation of shell valuables and greatly affected the pivotal position of local women as economic producers.

Last year, Dr Maria Wronska-Friend visited the Headquarters of the Society of the Divine Word at Steyl in the Netherlands where, in the Mission Museum’s holdings, she found an exceptional collection of samples of ceramic shell-rings produced by a button factory at Herzogenrath in Germany. Some of those samples match very exactly items that were collected by Dr Wronska-Friend during her fieldwork in villages in the Aitape area.

The findings of this research have been presented in the recent paper ‘Shell Rings of Power: Gender Relations in Material Culture Production on the Aitape Islands’ published in open access in Pacific Arts Journal, see https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6172k5f8