Moka Exchange

The moka is a competitive ceremonial exchange system practiced among the Melpa and neighboring peoples of the Mount Hagen area of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, in which a big man builds and repays networks of exchange partners with gifts of live pigs, shell valuables, and, since colonial contact, cash, each formal presentation aiming not merely to repay a prior gift but to give slightly more than was received. This deliberate overpayment obliges the recipient to reciprocate with an even larger gift at a future exchange, so that a moka relationship escalates over repeated rounds, and a man's ability to mobilize pigs and valuables through his kin and exchange partners to stage an ever-larger moka is the primary route to the achieved, non-hereditary status of big man in Highlands Papua New Guinea society. Extensively documented by anthropologist Andrew Strathern from the 1960s onward, moka became one of the central ethnographic case studies for the broader anthropological concept of competitive gift exchange as a mechanism for building political status and alliance networks in societies without formal chiefly office.