Afterword: Brokerage in Oceania beyond interactionism

The decolonisation of Oceania came late and is far from complete, and this contemporary context influences the way brokerage is enacted. The embeddedness of brokerage in broader contexts may reduce or orientate individual brokers' room for manoeuvre. This leads to the structural dimension of brokerage, beyond the interactionist approach to the broker as a special type of entrepreneur. However, brokers and brokerage activities do not simply occupy an interface and bridge gaps between two distinct life worlds; rather, they actively reshape the spaces created by encounters, including the social ensembles in which they participate, with largely unpredictable impacts and side‐effects. Tensions and fluctuating balances—between acceptable accumulation and the need for levelling mechanisms, general reciprocity and limited transaction, horizontality and verticality—define the scope of a moral economy of brokerage that is analogous to witchcraft in this respect. Brokerage is thus best analysed through the lens of the assemblages it contributes to producing, reshaping, or reorientating.