Intimacy and alienation: Money and the foreign in Biak

Public Culture

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 299-324

  Rutherford, Danilyn ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 25444523501     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-13-2-299     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. See, e.g., Christine Drake, National Integration in Indonesia: Patterns and Policies (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989). The New Order, which fell in May 1998, was among the world's longest surviving authoritarian regimes. Its leader, President Suharto, came into power in 1966 following violence that cost hundreds of thousands of Indonesians their lives.
2. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989).
3. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2d ed., trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 1978), 97.
4. See Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 66.
5. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 301.
6. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
7. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 227.
8. Compare Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 87.
9. See also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2d ed. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1958);
10. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 36-37;
11. Mary W. Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).
12. Adela Pinch, "Stealing Happiness: Shoplifting in Early Nineteenth-Century England," in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998), 123.
13. Pinch writes, "By shopping the wrong way, the shoplifter gets it right."
14. See Jamie Mackie, "Towkays and Tycoons: The Chinese in Indonesian Economic Life in the 1920s and 1980s," in The Role of the Indonesian Chinese in Shaping Modern Indonesian Life: Proceedings of the Symposium Held at Cornell University in Conjunction with the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute, July 13-15, 1990 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1991).
15. See James Rush, "Social Control and Influence in Nineteenth-Century Indonesia: Opium Farms and the Chinese of Java," Indonesia 35 (1983): 53-64,
16. and Rush, "Placing the Chinese in Java on the Eve of the Twentieth Century," in The Role of the Indonesian Chinese, 13-24.
17. Compare Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850-1898 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965).
18. See Heinzpeter Znoj, "Hot Money and War Debts: Transactional Regimes in Southwestern Sumatra," Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998): 217.
19. See A. Haga, Nederlandsch Nieuw-Guinea en de Papoesche eilanden: Historische bijdrage (Batavia, Netherlands Indies: Bruining, 1884);
20. W. C. Klein, "In- en Uitvoer, Handel en Nijverheid," in Nieuw Guinee, vol. 2, ed. W. C. Klein (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1937);
21. and Rogier Smeele, "De expansie van het Nederlandse gezag en de intensivering van de bestuursbemoeienis op Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea 1898-1942" (Ph.D. diss., Utrecht University, 1988).
22. See Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993).
23. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, vol. 2, Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 93-107, describes the political effects of the displacement of older Asian currencies by the real.
24. See also Jane I. Guyer, "Introduction: The Currency Interface and Its Dynamics," in Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, ed. Jane I. Guyer (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995).
25. See Arend Lijphart, The Trauma of Decolonization: The Dutch and West New Guinea (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966).
26. See Ross Garnaut and Chris Manning, Irian Jaya: The Transformation of a Melanesian Economy (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974),
27. and Chris Manning and Michael Rumbiak, "Irian Jaya: Economic Change, Migrants, and Indigenous Welfare," in Unity and Diversity: Regional Economic Development in Indonesia since 1970, ed. Hal Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
28. Manning and Rumbiak estimated that by 1990, over half of the province's urban population would be from outside the province. See Manning and Rumbiak, "Irian Jaya," 89. Marthin L. Ndoen records a growth rate of 21.7 percent per year in the migrant population between 1985 and 1990, a period when the locally born population grew at a rate of 2.4 percent per year.
29. See Ndoen, "Ekonomi politik migrasi di Irian Jaya," Bina Dharma 12, no. 44 (1994): 55-65.
30. See W. K. H. Feuilletau de Bruyn, "Militaire memorie der Schouten-eilanden," 31 August, nummer toegang 10-25, stuk 183, Nienhuis collectie van de Department van Bevolkszaken Hollandia rapportenarchief [Nienhuis collection, Department of Social Affairs, Hollandia, Netherlands New Guinea] in the Algemeene Rijksarchief [General State Archive], The Hague (1916), 306.
31. See John Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 304.
32. See Biak-Numfor dalam angka 1991 (Biak: Kantor Statistik dan Bappeda Tk. II, 1992).
33. See Suzanne April Brenner, The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 146-47.
34. See James T. Siegel, Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 165.
35. Marilyn Strathern, "Qualified Value: The Perspective of Gift Exchange," in Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach, ed. Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86-87.
36. The bills were gifts from relatives and wedding guests, whose names were always carefully recorded so that these gifts could be taken into account in subsequent exchanges. Biaks stopped making sarak after the transfer to Indonesia. I was told that one could not make the bracelets from Indonesian coins because they were made of an inferior grade of metal.
37. The Biak term for the transactions carried out at sunrise is munsasu. Glossed by my informants with the Indonesian term ganti (to replace), these exchanges stand opposed to fandadiwer, the free meal offered at the beginning of the festivities.
38. See Feuilletau de Bruyn, "Militaire memorie," 301.
39. On changes in bridewealth, see N. E. Sohilait, "Buku undang-undang adat jang berlaku untuk onderafdeling Biak dan Noemfor," 15 April, nummer toegang 10-25, stuk 190, Nienhuis collectie (1949). At the time of my fieldwork, porcelain was divided into categories, based on the aesthetic qualities and origin of an item and its function in bridewealth. The most valuable element, for instance, had to be a ben bepon (antique dish), preferably a more-more, a blue and white urn embossed with a Chinese dragon. Among the ben beba (big dishes) that were always requested, one might find a ben lepra (leprosy dish), covered with white bumps, or a ben KPM, named after the plantation where Biaks acquired this style of bowl.
40. See Freerk Ch. Kamma, Koreri: Messianic Movements in the Biak-Numfor Culture Area, trans. M. J. van de Vatherst-Smit (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 12.
41. David Graeber, "Beads and Money: Notes Towards a Theory of Wealth and Power," American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 4-24.
42. Compare Keith Hart, "Heads or Tails: Two Sides of the Coin," Man N.S. 21 (1986): 637-56;
43. Chris. A. Gregory, "Cowries and Conquest: Towards a Subalternate Quality Theory of Money," Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996): 195-217;
44. and Webb Keane, "Money as Matter and Sign," Etnofoor 9 (1996): 71-81.
45. See Freerk Ch. Kamma, "The Incorporation of Foreign Culture Elements and Complexes by Ritual Enclosure among the Biak-Numforese," in Symbolic Anthropology in the Netherlands, ed. P. E. de Josselin de Jong and E. Schwimmer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 43-84.
46. Compare Oliver W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), 6,
47. and Benedict Anderson, "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture," in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures of Indonesia (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1990), 17-77.
48. See H. A. Lorentz, Eenige maanden onder de Papoea's (privately published edition dedicated to Prof. Dr. C. E. A. Wichmann, leader of the New Guinea Expedition of 1903), 210-11.
49. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991).
50. The following rendition of the myth is derived from sung, spoken, and written versions I collected on Biak, along with versions recorded in Kamma, Koreri.
51. Biaks in the past had their own calendar, based on an indigenous system of constellations. They used their knowledge of the stars to navigate at sea.
52. In most versions, the chief's son remains with his sister, thus completing the intimate dyads of Biak kinship: brother and outmarried sister, mother and child, uncle and sister's son.
53. Compare Kenelm Burridge, Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium (London: Methuen, 1960),
54. and Andrew Lattas, Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
55. On the moral dilemmas posed by money, see Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study of Millenarian Activities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), 145-49.
56. See Kamma, Koreri, 110-11.
57. See Marx, Capital, 71-84.
58. See also Thomas Keenan, "The Point is to (Ex)Change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 152-85;
59. and Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).
60. Compare Terrence Turner, "The Social Skin," in Not Work Alone, ed. Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980), 112-40.
61. See Daniel Miller, A Theory of Shopping (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 65-72;
62. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 251;
63. and Marx, Capital, 133.
64. See Slavej Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 107-110.
65. See Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 126.
66. See Marx, Capital, 132;
67. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 309.
68. See also Paul de Man, "The Concept of Irony," in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 181,
69. and James T. Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 118.
70. Edward M. Bruner, "Return to Sumatra: 1957, 1997," American Ethnologist 26 (1999): 473. Toba Batak are members of a Sumatran minority ethnic group.
71. See Miller, Theory of Shopping;
72. and Peter Stallybrass, "Marx's Coat," in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998).
73. See also Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
74. Compare Anna Tsing, "Inside the Economy of Appearances," Public Culture 12 (2000): 115-144.
75. See John Bresnan, Managing Indonesia: The Modern Political Economy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993),
76. and Hal Hill, "The Economy" in Indonesia's New Order: The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Transformation, ed. Hal Hill (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1994).
77. See also John Sidel, "Macet Total: Logics of Circulation and Accumulation in the Demise of Indonesia's New Order," Indonesia 66 (1999): 159-94.
78. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 154.
79. See Geoffrey Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).
80. See also John Sidel, "Dark Play: Notes on a Balinese Massacre," Indonesia 63 (1997): 187-94.
81. See Danilyn Rutherford, "Waiting for the End in Biak: Violence, Order, and a Flag Raising," Indonesia 67 (1999): 39-60.