EVERY year, the people of the Trobriand Islands in the Solomon Sea off Papua New Guinea exchange ornamental seashell armbands and necklaces. It’s a social ritual that binds their circle of fishing communities to each other, and strange as it may seem, this tradition has inspired a recent new service from communications company Vodafone. This is just one of many insights that anthropologists are starting to bring to high-tech companies striving to make their products and services work with established human customs, not against them.
The “kula” exchange of the Trobriand Islands was first documented in 1922 by Bronislaw Malinowski, a pioneer of social anthropology. One of kula’s key features is an…
