Sikret Fren: a Friendship Ritual in Solomon Islands
Channel: Rodolfo Maggio
Date: 18/11/2014

In the middle of November 2011 I observed a puzzling ritual in the Anglican church of Gilbert Camp, a settlement situated on the outskirts of Honiara, capital city of Solomon Islands. Thirty-six women exchanged thirty-six gifts, equal in kind and monetary value, in a total of 18 exchanges. “What is the point of exchanging SBD $160 of cups with SBD $160 of cups?” I asked myself. I inquired, and observed that it was possible to explore the logic of this ritual exchange by looking at how the economic and moral priorities of Solomon Islanders intersect in their everyday lives, how they are confronted by dilemmas emerging from concrete incompatibilities between the imperative of being ‘good’ community members and the ‘necessity’ to budget, and how they can appeal to existing institutions to generate possible solutions. I thus realized that Sikret Fren is a ritual that could help us to understand the ways in which Solomon Islanders cope with the multiple economic liabilities resulting from life-cycle rituals, their relationships with kinship networks, religious institutions, community living, the market and the State.

Acknowledgements
My research was possible thanks to the financial support of the ESRC-funded research project entitled "The Domestic Moral Economy: An Ethnographic Study of Value in the Asia-Pacific Region".
The essay on which this talk is based was awarded the Maurice Hobart Essay Prize 2013 by the Royal Anthropological Institute.