This study of the lives of North Fore women gives new life to ethnographic accounts of kinship, personhood, ceremonial exchange and gender in Melanesia. The women speak about the moral and spiritual dimensions of culturally-prescribed behaviors as wives, mothers and sisters, a topic that has received little anthropological attention. The payment of brideprice, often seen as the commodification of women, is shown to be part of the North Fore cycle of reciprocal transactions. The concept of procreation and nurturance as a loss to be reciprocated in transactions with forms of wealth sometimes...