Kinship and commoditization: Historical transformations.

This paper reviews a number of themes pertinent to comparative studies in kinship, personhood, and marriage practices, based on cases drawn from the ethnography of New Guinea and Eastern Indonesia. The case of "slavery" is taken initially as a test for ideas about personhood and exchange, since slavery may be taken to represent the transformation of a person into a commodity. However, examination of the data suggests that this interpretation is too simple. Person for person exchanges in restricted (elementary) forms of marriage are next considered, along with ways in which such systems change with the introduction of new commodities and the entry of these into bridewealth payments. Finally, we consider contemporary commoditizations of social relations in general in highlands Papua New Guinea and discuss how these changes have impacted kinship ties, including processes of affiliation of children to kin groups.