BUYING WOMEN BUT NOT SELLING THEM - GIFT AND COMMODITY EXCHANGE IN HUAULU ALLIANCE

The Huaulu people of Seram (Eastern Indonesia) say that they 'buy' the ir wives and that these have a 'price' and are 'costly'. Yet they do n ot say that they 'sell' their sisters or daughters to other men. On th e contrary, they imply that they give them away as gifts. References t o the idiom of commodity exchange, however incomplete, cannot be expla ined away as 'metaphoric', since an equivalent of the 'price' given fo r the woman must be returned to the wife-takers by the wife-givers in order to sustain their claim that she is given as a gift rather than s old. The argument of the article, then, is that marriage exchanges hav e a dialectical structure: they begin as commodity transactions (right s in a woman are exchanged for their equivalents in valuables) but end as gifts by negating the initial payment with an equivalent counterpa yment. They cannot, therefore, be defined as either 'gift' or 'commodi ty' exchanges in an absolute, detemporalized sense. Their reference to two opposed forms of give-and-take is ultimately explained by the coe xistence of the contradictory characters of 'otherness' (paradigmatica lly associated with commodity exchange) and 'non-otherness' (paradigma tically associated with the gift) in alliance.