From the third chapter of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture:
The play quality of the “gift ritual” found all over the earth has emerged with singular clarity since Malinowski gave a vivacious and extremely circumstantial account in his masterly Argonauts of the Western Pacific, of the so-called kula system which he observed among the Trobriand Islanders and their neighbours in Melanesia. The kula is a ceremonial voyage starting at fixed times from one of the island groups east of New Guinea and going in two opposite directions. Its purpose is the mutual exchange, by the various tribes concerned, of certain articles having no economic value either as necessities or useful implements, but highly prized as precious and notorious ornaments. These ornaments are necklaces of red, and bracelets of white, shells. Many of them bear names, like the famous gems of Western history. In the kula they pass temporarily from the possession of one group into that of the other, which thereby takes upon itself the obligation to pass them on within a certain space of time to the next link in the kula chain. The objects have a sacred value, are possessed of magic powers, and each has a history relating how it was first won, etc. Some of them are so precious that their entry into the gift-cycle causes a sensation. The whole proceeding is accompanied by all kinds of formalities interspersed with feasting and magic, in an atmosphere of mutual obligation and trust. Hospitality abounds, and at the end of the ceremony everybody feels he has had his full share of honour and glory. The voyage itself is often adventurous and beset with perils. The entire cultural treasury of the tribes concerned is bound up with the kula, it comprises their ornamental carving of canoes, their poetry, their code of honour and manners. Some trading in useful articles attaches itself to the kula voyages, but only incidentally. Nowhere else, perhaps, does an archaic community take on the lineaments of a noble game more purely than with these Papuans of Melanesia. Competition expresses itself in a form so pure and unalloyed that it seems to excel all similar customs practised by peoples much more advanced in civilization. At the root of this sacred rite we recognize unmistakably the imperishable need of man to live in beauty. There is no satisfying this need save in play.
Extracts 