The Stone Money of Yap - Smithsonian Institution

The Stone Money of Yap
Our world of credit cards, discounts, prime rates,
and collection agencies makes it easier for us to comprehend
the nineteenth-century Yapese economy than
it was for the whalers, traders, and anthropologists
of that era who wrote about and created the romance
of the stone money island. 1 As was the case in many
other primitive societies, there were several different
types of "money" used on the island of Yap. One
of these forms, stone money (rai), has come to be
known internationally, surpassing in notoriety the
yar of pearl shell, the gau or pearl shell bead necklaces,
the ma or huge ceremonial pestles, and even the
mbul, the specially woven mats.
The size, form, and material brought distinction to
Yapese stone money. Changing customs and values,
exceptions to rules, consideration of occasions and
people involved are all a part of rai economics. To the
nineteenth-century European visitors, to whom money
was for the most part hard metal with pre-established
values adjustable only by the state, this was a particularly
foreign concept of currency.
The legends and myths surrounding Yapese rai are
varied. Their origin is known only through oral
history, which has been collected by foreigners,
translated and often adapted to the theory of the
writer. This license will become apparent in light of
other accounts when the origin question is discussed
in a later section. Likewise, there are many faulty
impressions written into numismatic accounts of
Yapese rai. One has to know the social customs in
order to understand the monetary system. Unqualified
statements have often led to oversimplification. An
early twentieth-century anthropologist, Wilhelm Miiller,
established a relative date for the beginning of
stone money at 200 years before his writing. 2 He
established this by asking his informants for the names
of all Yapese chiefs from the time of the earliest known
stone money to that of his own day and assuming a
certain number of years to a generation, in this case
Cora Lee C. Gillilland, Division of Numismatics, Department of
Applied Arts, National Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C. 20560.
572-509 O - 75 - l
Cora Lee C. Gillilland
Introduction
1
to that of a chief. More current writers, in quoting
Miiller, have rewritten his statement and inferred
that, indeed, some stones on Yap are 200 years old.
This writer's experience of observing court cases,
wherein the lineage of the islanders was given, leads
her to believe that this approach may not necessarily
have been correct. The original dating was based on
mathematical theory, but retelling has completely
altered the original statement.
Early foreign investigators have placed exchange
values on stones, which for years thereafter have been
quoted as though a part of the definition of rai.
Incorrect information is due, in part, to the fact that
entry to the area was restricted by foreign powers for
the greater part of our century. Accurate information
has been so difficult to obtain that in 1966 Einzig was
forced to cite as "up-to-date" data supplied by an
informant who had visited Yap briefly 21 years
earlier. 3
There has been the "south sea allure" type of
reporting in numismatic writings of the Pacific area.
Grass skirts, loincloths, doughnut-shaped stones
exchanged but seldom moved, the island of stone
money: how often these descriptions appear. One
visualizes the same retouched scene that Willard
Price etched in the 1930s when describing an island
queen going to market followed by slaves carrying
the great stones. 4 Though columnists continue to
paint with the same rosy hues, the people of these
islands are, in fact, going about their contemporary
business of negotiating with Presidential appointees
on the terms of their current and future political
status. The palms of the Pacific today sway with the
breezes of the modern world!
Within the span of a century the stones of Yap have
had an alternating and varying place within the
society. Their manufacture and use, as well as local
value, were and are yet modified by the cultural
invasion of the foreigners. It is within this context of
change that the author has attempted to study stone
money from a numismatic point of view.