| Summary: | (a) Transcribed and translated indigenous vernacular accounts of how life-cycle rituals should be performed, paying particular attention to kin relations and transfers of money and objects. All researchers will collect contrasting exemplars that reflect the particular cultural circumstances in question (In Fiji, for example, this would include accounts of weddings in ‘northern,’ ‘southern,’ and Muslim weddings). These accounts will be used as the basis for detailed observations of actual events, the variations of practice from norm noted, and indigenous explanations sought. Full audio-visual documentation will be made of selected rituals; these will, with the permission of the parties concerned, constitute part of the publicly available dataset. (b) Full statistical documentation of how selected life-cycle rituals were actually performed using the method of ‘concrete, statistical documentation’ as Malinowski (1922: 24) called it. A big change since Malinowski’s days is that many of these detailed accounts are now kept by the participants themselves as publicly available records. Such records provide a means for developing micro-level statistical analysis of money flows within the DME that are founded in models of significant monetary transactions as developed by the informants. (c) Focus group transcriptions: We will conduct, record and transcribe the focus groups in the common language of migrants (English). Our findings will create the comparative basis for a radical critical ethnography of moral reasoning, using an interpretive method already piloted in a series of workshops between Melanesianists and South Asianists run by Sykes at Manchester (Sykes 2009). (d) Non-market transaction data on selected ‘everyday’ events. Researchers will make detailed observations of selected non-market transactions noting the relationship between the transactors, the quantity and quality of the objects transacted, and the indigenous interpretation of the transaction. Diaries will be kept to record the ‘imponderabilia of actual life’ (Malinowski’s 1922: 24). (e) Household census data and genealogical data using the methods outlined by Gregory and Altman (1989)in Observing the Economy; data of this kind provides essential background information for the analysis of (f) Case study data of past disputes that have resulted in estrangement. Hiatt’s methods, as outlined in his Kinship and Conflict (1965), provide a model to be followed here. Data of this kind can be used to develop new understandings of the way in which moral dilemmas in the DME are coped with in situations where values are not shared. (g) Qualitative and quantitative data on formal and informal methods of sending remittances. Official sources on remittances acknowledge that the official statistics are greatly undervalued because of informal modes of Qualitative and quantitative data on formal and informal methods of sending remittances. Official sources on remittances acknowledge that the official statistics are greatly undervalued because of informal modes of transfer. While we will not try to develop ‘true’ macro estimates, our cases studies of the various informal modes of transfer employed will enhance a qualitative understanding of mechanisms involved. Interviews with bank officials on their understanding of the informal channels will be contrasted with data obtained from informants (i) Interviews, transcribed into English. The conquest of the market has not destroyed indigenous values but, paradoxically, has provided the conditions for some of them to flourish. Money, long believed to be the destroyer of subsistence economies (Bohannan 1959), has become a key instrument for the maintenance of kin relations as expenditures on weddings, funerals and other cultural activities boom and new forms of sharing money between kin, neighbours and friends thrive. In such heterogeneous, intercultural contexts, contested obligations to kin compete with responsibilities to workmates and the state and acquire new meanings that affect perceptions of value. This efflorescence in non-market monetary activity, which is of long standing (Gregory 1982), has reached a crisis point today as indigenous people find themselves entangled in a web of 'catch-22' obligations that can both aid and impoverish them. An ethnographic approach to the value question opens up new avenues of inquiry because the ethnographer is not just interested in political-economic theories of value but also local modes of valuation in different intercultural contexts. What anthropological research offers, is not an abstract theory of value, but concrete analysis of valuers that situates findings within a generalised, historically-informed comparative framework of analysis in the Asia Pacific region.
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