In an earlier life, as a university teacher, I was fond of using the work of the Polish/British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in my classes. In case you are not familiar with his work, he became famous for a celebrated field study of a group of South Pacific Islands, and in particular for his work on their ritual life. He noted that every year the inhabitants of the island on which he was based would set off in their canoes for a neighbouring island, bearing highly decorated ritual objects. These would be presented to their neighbours. At around the same time canoes would arrive from another island bearing similar ritual gifts, and the islanders would be the custodians of these for the ensuing year.
From his travels around the archipelago Malinowski worked out that these ritual gifts actually circulated around the whole group, only returning to their original donors after many years. The interesting thing about this pattern of behaviour is that none of the islanders was able to give a complete account of the “Kula Ring” (as he called the circuit). They only saw their own place in it.
To my amazement I have stumbled upon a similar institution in the village of Clayton, where I live. Here, however, instead of decorated ritual objects the gifts that circulate are cakes. One of the local coffee houses offered a large cake, as a prize in a competition. It was soon my the wife of the minister at one of the local churches, where it became the focus of a social reception for the church members. It is planned next week that the church will take cake to one of the local schools. The minister of the church had discovered that morale among the teachers was very low, and decided that it would cheer them up if a group of church members were to treat the teachers to coffee and cake, as a kind of ritual blessing.
At the time of writing I have yet to discover the full extent of our version of the “Kula Ring”. Like Malinowski’s islanders perhaps it is the case that nobody in the village is aware of the complete extent and composition of the circuit. Eventually, however, more cake will be delivered to the coffee house, but as yet we don’t know where that originates, or what intermediate steps lie between the school and the coffee house. There is, I am sure, a Ph.D. thesis in here for some graduate student stuck for an idea. As with Malinowski’s discovery, however, my preliminary hypothesis is that the circulation of cake serves a vital function in village solidarity.
Funny!