Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991)

Contrary to generations of anthropologists, Thomas wishes to paint “indigenous peoples as co-subjects in a wider system.”[1] The other-ing of Pacific islanders, an anthropological insistence on synthetic “us/them oppositions,” is best overcome by “pretending that there is a kind of symmetry between indigenous appropriation of European artifacts and the colonial collecting of indigenous goods.”[2] Approaching material culture in this way allows us to better appreciate the entanglement of objects, the diversity of meanings that characterize the exchange of goods among and between cultures.

Entangled objects are not reducible to “gifts” or “commodities” and neither are the systems that facilitate their movement. The inalienability of particular objects, the inability to commoditize certain goods, was prevalent throughout indigenous (and European) cultures, and Thomas argues that, often, complex social and cultural rituals surrounded objects that could not (or only partially) be reconceived as capital. Wedding rings, heirlooms, and regalia were not instantaneously reducible, and their propagation through a society was and is a process often independent from their material value. Contrarily, other objects have “exchange possibilities,” and play a part (not a universal one) in different types of transactions.[3] Thomas uses the Fijian origin-story of tabua (whale teeth) to demonstrate how human labor (a ubiquitous Marxist metric) was incommensurable with certain types of exchange, in this case one for wives. Value objects, like tabua, were thus appropriate for particular transactions and depending the type of object and the culture that possessed it, might be “valorizable” in comparison with other desirable things. Thomas suggests that Oceania was ripe with “systems which provided for the substitution of persons and things and those in which such equivalences [were] impossible.”[4]

This was the complex landscape into which European goods were introduced. Sailors had great difficulty in obtaining pigs from islanders for whom the animals were not valorized commodities, an entanglement which began to erode with the introduction of the trade of muskets. A spectrum of interactions and exchanges resulted from the convergence of two value-systems, and the mistake, according to Thomas, is to think of the introduction and adoption of new, Western goods was inevitable. “Western commodities cannot be seen to embody some irresistible attraction that is given the status of an inexorable historical force. Indigenous peoples’ interests in goods, strangers, and contact were variable and in some cases were extremely constrained.”[5] When objects were exchanged, Thomas insists that these encounters were “not merely a physical process but [was] also a movement and displacement of competing conceptions of things, a jostle of transaction forms.”[6] And the effects of this jostle were felt, as well, by the European curio collectors, adventurers, and “scientists” who populated Western museums with artifacts from the Oceanic world, reauthoring them in the process.

Mauss and Marx are ill-suited to the story of transcultural exchange outlined by Thomas. The transactions that played out in the South Pacific over the period of early contact are not reducible to a commodity market or a clash between pure “gift” and “commodity” systems. Europeans brought diverse and complicated object-associations to the table of Oceanic encounters and found there a network of entanglements no less complex than their own. Dynamic, promiscuous objects infiltrated the lives and worldviews of their new owners, leaving profound social consequences in their wake.

[1] Thomas, 14.

[2] Thomas, 5.

[3] Thomas, 73.

[4] Thomas, 77.

[5] Thomas, 103.

[6] Thomas, 123.