Can the burden of gift-giving ruin relationships?

An early nineteenth-century British voyager, Captain Hall, published in 1818 an account of

his landing at Okinawa Island and encounter with the court nobility of what was still at

that time the Kingdom of the Ryukyus: Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West

Coast of Corea and the Great Loo-Choo [Ryûkyû] Island in the Japan Sea. My paper

in History and Anthropology asks: Why did the Ryukyuans respond to the unannounced entry into their waters by two British naval ships by a seemingly boundless hospitality? With a sideline view on the Sahlins-Obeyesekere controversy, the author proposes that even as the Ryukyuans were eulogizing the entry of the British by showering them with one-sided attention and acknowledging their royal credentials, they tried at the same time to make a bid for their

departure. They might have been deploying ritual techniques apparent still today: of welcoming and (subsequent) sending-off in one single act.

History and Anthropology, 2015

Vol. 26, No. 5, 553–575, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2015.1086998