J. Alexander P. Alexander Commodification and consumption in a central Borneo community

In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 151 (1995), no: 2, Leiden, 179-193

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Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access JENNIFER ALEXANDER AND PAUL ALEXANDER Commodification and Consumption in a Central Borneo Community

A long-established tradition of explanation in anthropology and social history has seen money as the principal mechanism promoting individu- alism and greed, and consequently subverting values of community. When money enters a society, so the argument runs, commodification rapidly follows, initially altering consumption patterns and later transforming pro- duction relationships as well. In one recent formulation, money conquers the internal economy of non-monetized societies, setting free the 'drive inherent in every exchange system towards optimum commoditization' (Kopytoff 1986:72). Other anthropological studies, however, suggest that this view of the association between monetization and commoditization is far too simple; when they have had the power to do so, non-industrialized communities have demonstrated a remarkable ability to domesticate money and to resist any presumption that equality in price is equivalent to equal- ity in value (e.g., Parry and Bloch 1989; Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992). This essay is concerned with the ways in which a relatively remote and very small Central Borneo community, that of the Lahanan, has responded to its increasingly rapid incorporation into the world system. The speed and the extent of changes, more often than not initiated from outside, are undeniable. In the past thirty years, new forms of political power have been established; new medical, educational and, to a much lesser degree, agricultural services have been welcomed; and some parts of the economy have been commodified. But, despite these changes, commodity relation- ships and the use of money have been strictly quarantined: things which the Lahanan see as being central to their lives - labour, land, staple foods

JENNIFER ALEXANDER is an Australian Research Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Sydney who obtained her Ph.D. degree from the University of Sydney, and is the author of Trade, Traders and Trading in Rural Java, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987. PAUL ALEXANDER is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney and obtained his Ph.D. from the Australian National University in Canberra. He is the author of Sri Lankan Fishermen, Canberra: Australian Asian Studies Association, 1994 (2nd edition). Specializing in cultural and economic anthropology, they have jointly published 'Protecting Peasants from Capitalism; The Subordination of Javanese Traders by the Colonial State', Comparative Studies in Society and History 33-2 (1991):370-94, and 'Gender Differences in Tobacco Use and the Commodification of Tobacco in Central Borneo', Social Science and Medicine 38-4 (1994):603-8. They may be contacted at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.

BK1 151-11(1995) Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access 180 Jennifer Alexander and Paul Alexander and prestige goods - are still difficult to purchase with money, and price is certainly not the measure of their value. This marking of commodity trans- actions by excepting them from full incorporation in the repertoire of exchanges which structure Lahanan social life is not a simple historical accident. But nor is it the product of a naive attachment to primordial values, for, although they have been on the periphery of the world system for much of their history, the Lahanan have long been familiar with monetary transactions and are experienced in what Appadurai (1986:13-5) terms the process of 'enclaving' singular commodities from the usual circuits of exchange. The Lahanan of Leng Panggai The Lahanan assert that they are the original settlers of the middle Balui river basin in Sarawak's Seventh Division, and legitimate their claim by reference to the headman's genealogy, which records a move from the Apau Kayan in Kalimantan some thirteen generations ago. There is evid- ence (see Rousseau 1990) that the much more numerous Kayan and Kenyah moved into the area in the late 18th century, and by 1863, when further Kayan expansion was halted by a punitive expedition organized by Charles Brooke, the Lahanan were allied with the now dominant Kayan through a series of marriages between Lahanan headmen and Kayan elite women (Brooke 1990). Until 1922 the Balui was subject to raids by the Iban; the Lahanan's once extensive landholdings rapidly shrank as other groups established themselves in the area, and by 1987 the 450 Lahanan living in two longhouses comprised only three per cent of the population of Belaga District. There is little doubt that successive Brooke governments had major effects on the political structure of the Lahanan and other small Balui societies between 1882 and 1941. The political structure of the community - divided into four ascribed ranks, with the headman always being drawn from the upper rank {maren) - owes at least as much to the government's codification of aspects of customary law relating to rank and its creation of supra-village political offices as to indigenous notions of stratification (Alexander 1992; Armstrong 1992). State and Federal governments since Independence have tended to reinforce these divisions by such measures as, for example, holding the headman responsible for maintaining order in the longhouse and distributing government funds through him. This glancing brush with the world system, however, had few direct effects on other aspects of Lahanan life in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. It is possible that the Lahanan economy under- went a radical change as a result of a switch from sago to rice cultivation in the late nineteenth century (Guerreiro 1988:18), but if this was so, the change was set in train by their subordination to the Kayan. The Brooke governments certainly did not attempt to change the upper Balui eco-

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nomies; rather, they restricted plantation crops and inhibited the movement of traders above Belaga township. After 1970 cash crops like rubber and pepper were introduced, though only slowly, in part because travel above Belaga remained slow and expensive. But while premarital journeys were not as central to the constitution of masculinity in Lahanan culture as among the Iban, men had begun working in down-river timber camps before 1950, and regular purchases of soap, salt, sugar and kerosene had begun much earlier. A critical catalyst for expediting economic change was the rapid expansion after 1965 of compulsory education and modern medical services, which increased population growth and raised the demand for cash, while simultaneously decreasing the amount of labour available to the community (Alexander and Alexander 1993). In sum, the Lahanan remained on the periphery of the world system until well into the 1960s (cf. Armstrong forthcoming). This is not to argue that Lahanan society was static. On the contrary, it has undergone considerable political, social and religious changes over the past century (Alexander 1990, 1992, 1993; Alexander and Alexander 1993, 1994). But the sufficient impetus for these changes was provided by the interaction between Lahanan and other indigenous societies of Central Borneo, not, as with most other Southeast Asian societies, the intrusion of European colonizers. As we will see, this has had critical consequences for both the form of commodification pressures faced by the Lahanan and their ability to resist them. Lahanan social structure has been described in some detail elsewhere (Alexander 1990, 1992) but certain salient points should be emphasized here. In 1989 the main Lahanan community had a population of 288 living in 44 individual apartments within a longhouse. Each apartment, occupied by an extended family or the families of a pair of married sisters, is economically and politically autonomous. Although the headman and main religious leaders are men and households are ranked in four ascribed categories, the ethos is egalitarian and women are not subordinated. For example, postmarital residence is normally in the wife's apartment; women have full rights to children and property after (frequent) divorces; and subsistence agriculture is in the main organized by women. This tradition of relatively equal sex roles, along with the Lahanan liking for pork and alcohol, is not in accord with the attitudes of the state, and compulsory formal education as well as differential male access to employment is in- creasing male authority within the Lahanan community. The Lahanan community is clearly subordinate to the Kayan, the politically and demographically dominant ethnic group in the region (Alexander 1992). Lahanan contribute labour and goods to the Kayan elite, and reproduction of the Lahanan elite depended upon marriages and adoptions which obligated them to Kayan communities. Although Lahan- an contest it, in Kayan eyes they are culturally and politically subservient.

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Spheres of Consumption and Exchange With the exception of two consistently anomalous categories of products discussed below, the extent of commoditization of goods in the Lahanan economy might usefully be conceptualized in terms of exchange and consumption (Stirrat 1989) within three distinct spheres. Each sphere comprises a different range of goods, exchange and consumption of which is regulated by an explicit and specific ideology. As might be expected, Lahanan practices are not always in accord with Lahanan conceptions of the good citizen, but such practices are recognized and criticized as divergences. The first sphere, which is large and diverse and the items in which might be glossed as 'subsistence items', includes land, staple foods, especially hill rice, most fish and game, rice-wine and betel, and accommodation for visitors: in all, about three quarters of the Lahanan 'Gross Domestic Prod- uct'. The defining characteristic of items in this sphere is that they are never - well, hardly ever - sold within the longhouse. The consumption of products in this sphere is governed by a general understanding that they should be consumed by the household which produced them, shared with other households, or at worst, exchanged for the promise of an equal amount on a later occasion. Calling someone kasip or mean is the most cutting of insults in Lahanan and a powerful sanction against selling these 'subsistence items' within the longhouse; it is less effective in ensuring that they are shared. There is a market for some of these products outside the longhouse, but sales are not conducted openly, and rice is sometimes, somewhat shamefacedly, exchanged for tobacco, cigarettes or imported foodstuffs within the community. Although technically a factor of production rather than a product, land should also be placed within this" sphere. The Lahanan aver that all land farmed or used for hunting and gathering is the property of the community as a whole: daleh Lahanan. Within daleh Lahanan, ownership of land and of the fruit trees planted on it is established by the household which fells primary forest or abandoned secondary forest on it, and the rights are vested in the tilung asen (founding or natal apartment). Both sons and daughters inherit rights to use land owned by both their father's and mother's tilung, but the extent to which they exercise these rights depends on residence. Although the head of the household usually designates plots for her children to farm, the tilung asen retains ownership. In practice the daughter remaining in the natal tilung, generally the eldest, receives the largest share for her use, and the control of tilung land remains in her hands. If the tilung splits before the parents' death, the new separate apartment {tilung karep) is usually granted usufruct rights to designated plots of land, but the tilung karep has to establish its own tilung asen land by felling forest. Persons leaving the longhouse or apartment permanently lose their rights without compensation, but resume all entitlements if they

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access Commodification and Consumption in Central Borneo 183 return to their tilung asen. Land may also be borrowed (pijam) temporar- ily, generally to facilitate the organization of work groups, but also to distribute land to households with limited holdings. Unlike among the neighbouring Kayan (Rousseau 1990:138-44), population growth has not been sufficient to create a scarcity of land or to effect changes in land tenure. Until the mid-eighties agricultural land had never been sold. In 1986/7, however, two government employees, one an outsider, purchased land in Lahanan territory. One of these plots was later sold at a substantial profit to a government agency. The former basis of land ownership has been further undermined by the encroachment of timber cutting into the mid- Balui region. As the longhouse people are in a poor bargaining position vis-a-vis the timber companies, they are generally compensated only for land that is currently being cultivated. Despite the impact of the modern economy on the commoditization of land, indigenous perceptions of land are resilient and, given a choice, most Lahanan would prefer to retain their land for future cultivation rather than surrender it to outsiders, even in the unlikely circumstance that the compensation was generous. A second, clearly bounded, sphere of exchange comprises those prod- ucts and raw materials of an external industrialized economy which are always exchanged for money within the longhouse. Consumer goods such as biscuits, cigarettes and soap, which are initially purchased from Chinese shopkeepers in the bazaar for cash or credit, are often resold. Water biscuits have been enthusiastically adopted by the Lahanan, replacing left- over rice or fried cassava as the preferred breakfast. Along with 'sardines' (the generic name for all canned goods), instant noodles, kerosene, tailor- made cigarettes, sugar, arrack and stout, soap and toiletries, they are sold for cash and rice, occasionally on credit, within the longhouse. The con- sumption of such goods carries no obligation to share with others, except when they are being consumed on a public occasion. Similarly, crops grown specifically for sale, including pepper, cocoa and coffee, are some- times bought in small quantities by longhouse members for resale in the bazaar. There is also a range of manufactured commodities which are never- theless seldom voluntarily sold or exchanged within the longhouse. Bras- sieres, running shoes, satin sports shorts and track suit pants are now common apparel, purchased in the bazaar or from a travelling salesman, and used by members of the purchaser's apartment. Other commodities, while sometimes bought and sold, are simply too expensive to sustain a long- house market. Petrol, for example, is scarce because it has to be transported long distances, so people are reluctant to resell it, even at a considerable 'profit'. Outboard motors and chain-saws are usually 'borrowed' along with their owner: that is, they are used within exchange labour relation- ships. It is tempting to see the third sphere of consumption and exchange as a

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access 184 Jennifer Alexander and Paul Alexander transitional stage on the path to commoditization. This sphere comprises four products which are relatively highly valued commodities in external markets, but which have an ambivalent commodity status within the Ionghouse: wild pig, large fish, wet-rice and tobacco. Twenty years ago, portions of wild pig and large fish were given to kinsmen by successful hunters and particular portions were reserved for the Ionghouse elite. In the face of the increased demand created by better transport and the new logging camps, game began to be sold to outsiders; portions of large fish and pigs are now routinely sold within the com- munity, and it is gifts of such game (although not of small fish and other forest products) which are uncommon. But while such sales are accepted, albeit with occasional grumbling, the community has made conscious efforts to prevent the further commoditization of fish and game by preventing traders establishing the freezers which have facilitated sales in other communities. Sales have also been inhibited by activities of the logging companies which destroy the forests and rivers. Similarly, wet-rice, although introduced through government programmes and not particularly palatable to the Lahanan, is seen as sufficiently similar to hill rice not to be regarded as purely a cash crop, and for this reason is usually consumed by the producer or sold down-river. In any case, the quantities produced are very small. Some of the problems of conceptualizing this third sphere as a tempor- ary, transitional sphere on a lineal path to commoditization, however, are illustrated by tobacco: simultaneously the Lahanan's most valuable crop on external markets and the product most likely to be shared between members of different apartments within the Ionghouse. Locally grown tobacco is also an anomalous product in that production is controlled exclusively by women (Alexander and Alexander 1994). Tobacco is a critical component of all ritual exchanges and an invariable accompaniment to all social occasions; only two Lahanan adults do not smoke. As with rice, tobacco should not be sold within the Ionghouse, although it may be exchanged for rice or for the promise of an equal return. Members of the few households which have not grown tobacco, or the rather larger number whose supplies have been exhausted prior to the harvest, may be given tobacco and may frequently obtain it from other longhouses through cash sales or barter. Until five years ago, men used to buy considerable quantities of tobacco for the trade in jungle products with Penan living three to four days' travel inland. Conversely, women with a surplus, or an urgent need for cash, often sell tobacco to other longhouses, to workers in the timber camps, or to Chinese merchants in the down-river town. Al- though this trade is small and prices are low, it is important to the women, who are generally excluded from the two most important means of acquiring cash: wage labour in the logging camps and the sale of fish and game. In sum, although the Lahanan have been growing tobacco since at least 1849 (Burns 1951:481), and although it is one of the few products for

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access Commodification and Consumption in Central Borneo 185 which there has been a relatively buoyant and continuous market, tobacco has not become a saleable commodity within the longhouse. Nor are sales likely to increase in the future, because young persons prefer to smoke imported cigarettes (Alexander and Alexander 1994). There remain two broad categories of goods which are difficult to place in any of these three spheres. The first is domestic animals and their products, of which the most important are pork, chicken and eggs. All of these are consumed mainly on ceremonial occasions and, because the animals have been raised in close proximity to the longhouse, in Lahanan eyes their products cannot appropriately'be consumed by their owners. Perhaps for this reason, they are invariably exchanged for money both within and outside the community. The second somewhat anomalous category consists of heirlooms, including beads, bronze objects, baby carriers and cloth, as well as con- temporary 'craft work', such as woven mats, rattan baskets, and small items decorated with beads intended for display on ceremonial occasions. Somewhat paradoxically, individual beads and other prestige items which, as will be discussed in more detail below, are of value only because they were once purchased from outside, are seldom sold within the longhouse; whereas decorated beadwork and mats produced within the longhouse and explicitly intended for ceremonial use are often sold. Even this necessarily brief account of the structure of the Lahanan eco- nomy cautions against any tendency to treat commodification as a lineal, let alone a predestined, process. Take currency, for example. The Lahanan have a long experience with monetary exchanges. They were regularly buying kerosene, sugar, salt and cloth for cash in the 1930s, and probably well before. But, while they continue to produce much of what they con- sume, they now face an increasing demand for cash to pay for education and medical expenses, to travel down-river and to buy consumer goods. For this reason they have been quick, even eager, to try new cash crops introduced by the government and to seek paid employment, although they are often disappointed by the returns. But, despite both their familiarity with and their need for cash, monetary transactions within the community have been limited to a strictly demarcated domain of ex- changes. Indeed, currency is often of limited use within the longhouse: the basic subsistence items are very difficult to purchase, few people are prepared to work regularly for wages within the community, and, if the river boat has not been running, the longhouse shops are empty. It is understandable that, while several apartments have established small stores to sell goods purchased in Belaga, the only shop which has survived for more than a few months should be run by an outsider: the Kayan wife of the headman.

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Labour Several empirical criticisms can be levelled at the present style of analysis, beginning with the metaphor of the 'sphere' itself, which implies much stronger and more sharply delineated barriers to exchanges between categories than is likely to be the case. But the most important empirical deficiency of the analysis is shared with later and more sophisticated approaches to commoditization and consumption: it is much stronger when dealing with goods than with services. The assumption that services are more resistant to commodification than goods is implicit in much economic anthropology; Bohannan's (1955) initial formulation of spheres of exchange in fact dealt with labour in kinship-cum-legal terms, subsuming it under 'rights to persons'. Yet the Lahanan, along with many communities whose experience of the State is of a relatively late date, are at least as familiar with the sale of their labour power as with the sale of their products and, while showing a healthy distaste for wage labour, appear to have no particular ideological objection to it. As in the case of other Central Borneo societies (Rousseau 1990:148- 57; Armstrong 1992), the Lahanan economy encompasses a wide range of tied and free forms of labour relationship which are not easily catalogued in terms of the persons involved, or the purposes for which the labour is used. Nului do, for example, is a form of exchange labour based on reciprocal obligations between members of relatively stable groups which work each member's fields in turn. Because the core of each group is made up of five or six close female friends who work together for several seasons, and because these groups only form for the cultivation and harvesting of hill rice, there is little need to keep exact reckonings to ensure parity of exchange, although most members seem to have a very clear understanding of their 'debts' and 'credits'. Nului do remains the most common form of work organization, in part, at least, because younger women enjoy the companionship for which these groups offer oppor- tunities. It can be contrasted with nyadui gaji, wage labour for the cultivation of cash crops, which is an unpopular form of labour relationship despite returns which compare favourably with nului do. One reason for the Lahanan distaste for this form of labour is that, within the longhouse economy, nyadui gaji frequently involves solitary work, often for purposes of meeting a commodity debt; another reason is that Lahanan who do obtain jobs with the major outside employers, the timber camps, are stuck with physically hard and poorly paid positions as unskilled workers. Women employed as cooks and laundresses, in particular, work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for less than the minimum monthly wage. But it is not appropriate to treat the presence of less familiar forms of labour relationship as evidence of an unreflective attachment to traditional ways of doing things, for the Lahanan are well able to modify tradition when it suits them. An example is provided by the labour relationship

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access Commodification and Consumption in Central Borneo 187 termed 'mahap'. Mahap takes a variety of forms in a number of distinct contexts, including bride-service for Kayan communities, but the most important economically is the cultivation of the headman's rice fields by the members of other households. In the recent past, each longhouse apartment used to provide one day's labour in each part of the hill rice cycle (five days per household per year), but in the more distant past, all adults were expected to participate for the same length of time. Work on the headman's fields was always completed first, in part because it had important ritual implications. In 1985, following prolonged discussions in a context where some households, including his own, were contemplating conversion to Christianity, the headman agreed to new customs, stipulating that each apartment could contribute a sack of paddy or $M10 in lieu of mahap. At that time a sack of paddy sold for more than $M10, and at current wage rates the cash equivalent of the mahap labour was at least $M25. In the strict accounting terms adopted by economists, the change appears to have led to a substantial economic loss on the part of the headman; an interpretation given weight by the fact that some households entitled to mahap refused to accept the new custom. But the instructive point (as far as this can be reconstructed from later recollections) is that no Lahanan did calculate a monetary equivalent for the foregone labour or paddy. Rather, the discussions were concerned with what was viewed as the reciprocal relationship between the elite households and the remaining apartments in the longhouse; with what would be an appropriate return gift to the elite for their efforts on behalf of the longhouse. In these discussions money was not treated as an over-arching unit of value - as a unit of account - and those who rejected the new customs did so, not because their calculations indicated an economic loss to themselves from the change, but because they did not regard money as being equivalent to labour or rice in this type of exchange. It is surely significant that the elite households which rejected changes to mahap also rejected Christianity, as did the non-elite households which continued to give rice or labour.

Beads Annette Weiner has recently pointed out that certain types of possessions act as a stabilizing force against change because their presence authen- ticates cosmological origins, kinship and political histories (Weiner 1992:9). She sees these functions as particularly important in the hierarchical societies of Polynesia, where what she terms inalienable possessions, often produced by women, were the material tokens of elite power. This argument has obvious attractions in trying to come to grips with Central Borneo societies, where the continued reproduction of ascribed rank does not appear to turn on control of material resources or an internalized ideology of hierarchy (Alexander 1992), and where, despite male appro- priation of overt political roles and the use of patri-genealogies to represent

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the history of the longhouse community as a whole, uterine links are the skeleton of household reproduction. In Lahanan and adjoining societies, prestige goods, especially beads and bronze objects, kept in the custody of female heads of households, have precisely the functions that Weiner's analysis would lead us to expect: 'ownership proves one's difference, making all other exchanges resonate with this difference' (Weiner 1992: 63). The problem, however, is that the Lahanan prestige goods are not inalienable possessions in the sense in which Weiner uses the concept; they are more aptly described in Kopytoff s (1986:73-7) terms as commod- ities which have been singularized. Despite their relative isolation, the Central Borneo peoples have a long history of international trade; even before the first bazaar was established in Belaga in 1884, they traded direct with Malays from the Sultanate of Brunei (Healey 1985:4-17; Nicolaisen 1983:197-9). Among Balui societies, including the Lahanan, this trade was monopolized by headmen and their close kinsmen, who, largely released from agricultural work by labour contributions from other households, had the time to obtain a wide variety of jungle products, including resins and gums, horn and 'ivory', rattan and birds' nests, which they carried to trade centres to sell (Brosius 1988:100; Chin 1988:59; King 1990:111; Morris 1978:53, 1980:295; Rousseau 1989: 44-6; Sellato 1988, 1989). Sometimes the Lahanan collected these jungle products themselves, but more often they obtained them by trade from the Penan. Goods imported into the Balui area included bronze objects such as gongs, trays and lidded containers; woven and decorated cloth (for Balui societies lack the indigenous textile traditions that are common in down- river cultures); and, above all, beads originating from Venice, India, and China, as well as Southeast Asian copies. Beads thus entered the longhouse economy as a commodity, usually as the result of trade in jungle products, although early sources occasionally cite the exchange of beads for services (Beccari 1986:263; Bock 1985:70- 1; Low 1882:53). Once they entered the longhouse, however, what Appa- durai (1986:13-5) calls the 'commodity candidacy' of beads was sharply reduced: they were 'enclaved' from the usual circuits of commodity exchange linking local economies to the outside world. Although sewn patterns of small beads, some of them very old, are used to decorate a wide variety of objects, the most valuable beads are worn as necklaces or bracelets. The prototypical necklace worn by Lahanan women consists of a strand of yellow glass beads (inu uti) with a centre- piece of more valuable rosette, chevron and mosaic beads of putative Venetian, Dutch, or Chinese manufacture. Necklaces are constantly being taken apart and reformed as the individual beads which comprise them are utilized in a cycle of inheritance and bridewealth. Each longhouse apart- ment has a custodian (kebaken tilung), usually a female, who is responsible for the beads and other prestige items inherited, exchanged or obtained in other ways by the apartment. Such goods are freely used by current

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access Commodification and Consumption in Central Borneo 189 members of the apartment, and each descendant, male as well as female, receives a share through inheritance. Beads are a major component of all ritual exchanges. For example, each stage in the series of bridewealth gifts among the elite requires a selection of named types of beads consistent with the residential status and rank of the couple, which the bride later bequeaths to her children. The inu pelani is a necklace of carnelian, blue glass and turquoise beads first donned by the mother at the naming ceremony of her child and usually worn by her until the child walks, although there are some suggestions that in the past the removal of the inu pelani marked the end of the period of abstinence after childbirth. The necklace usually belongs to the mother's natal apart- ment, but it is sometimes a gift from the husband's mother. And at death, the beads placed in the chest cavity and mouth of the corpse indicate the rank of the deceased. Once specific beads have been removed from the commodity circuits linking the longhouse communities to the outside, they become heirlooms (lawen pusaka) and are surrendered only reluctantly. But tracing the biographies of some of the more valuable individual beads makes it clear that beads are not infrequently sold for cash or kind, usually, however, to persons from other longhouses. Similarly, new beads (sometimes copies of old designs, others completely new) are continually being bought into the longhouse, and there have been regular cycles in the acquisition of lawen pusaka since the nineteenth century (Nicolaisen 1983:201). This raises the question of how beads are valued for the purposes of commodity and other forms of exchange. The Lahanan, as in the case of other Borneo cultures, have a complex vocabulary to describe beads, dividing them into at least eight main categories and dozens of sub- categories. There is widespread agreement about the requirements for membership of each category and about which categories of beads are the most desirable, although there is less agreement about the appropriate classification of particular beads. In assigning value, women appear to use two, variously labelled, criteria, which it would not be inappropriate to gloss as 'artistry' and 'authenticity'. Artistry refers to the quality of the bead. Valuable beads should be true to type, have clear rather than muddy colours, and have good colour separation. Although it often comes up in the context of discussions about the origin of a bead, the more complex notion we have glossed as 'authenticity' refers not to a bead's ultimate point of production but to its regional biography. Elite women, who might well own more than 250 'centre-piece' beads, can readily describe exactly how they acquired each bead. They claim to be in no doubt as to whether a particular bead is authentic (terieng), although they have little interest in tracing transfers back past the last two or three exchanges. It is clear that for these Lahanan women old beads are not necessarily authentic beads; informants often distinguish what they claim to be the original types in each category from

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access 190 Jennifer Alexander and Paul Alexander later copies, although both may appear to be very old. What is important is that beads have a history of circulation within Lahanan and other long- house communities, not the mode of their circulation. The fact that a particular bead had recently been transferred by purchase raised a question about it, therefore, but did not necessarily mean that it was not terieng. Indeed, a household which anticipated the need of a particular type of high-quality bead for a particular ceremony, might well have to purchase it some time before. And healers often sell the special types of beads required for particular ceremonies to their clients. The critical point is that terieng beads are beads which appear to be old and true to type, and which also have a local biography. Inspections and evaluations, which occur frequently when beads are on display, have little to do with notions of the market or of price. That is, evaluations do not involve statements about the monetary value of beads, nor, with the exception of the rarest bead - the lukut sekala, which sup- posedly could be exchanged for a slave - do they involve considerations of exchange. Of course, if they were sold, highly valued beads would be expected to bring higher prices than lesser beads, both within and outside the longhouse, but, in contrast to commodities such as pepper, or even non-commodities such as labour, there is little sense of a market price for beads. Certainly, particular types of bead frequently sell for considerably more in the longhouse than they would in the most expensive antique shops of Europe. Concluding Remarks This discussion of the Lahanan material suggests that the concept of spheres of exchange remains embedded in three unwarranted suppositions, drawn from earlier economic anthropology, which may deflect a deeper interpretation. The first of these unsustainable propositions is that goods and services can be arranged in a hierarchy in terms of their susceptibility to commoditization, with non-staple products at one end and prestige goods or labour at the other. The second erroneous postulate is that commodification is an inexorable and relatively quick process: it is not necessarily the case that, once a society begins exchanging its own goods and services for industrial products, the commodification of other sectors of the indigenous economy follows rapidly, restricted only by the ability to raise cash. The final mistaken supposition is that commoditization is exclusive: the tribal form of Gresham's law evidently is not 'Bad forms of exchange drive out good'. Stripped of these assumptions, however, and extended to include consumption as well as exchange, the concept remains a useful heuristic device for investigating the often contradictory and seldom linear processes of economic change. The starting-point of the present analysis, for example, was the obser- vation that, despite the monetization of sectors of the Lahanan economy

Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access Commodification and Consumption in Central Borneo 191 and despite sharp increases in the Lahanan's need for cash and in their consumption of externally produced goods, labour, land and staple foods were apparently resistant to commoditization. While such things were sometimes exchanged for money within the longhouse, the boundaries of the transactions were clearly defined and the conditions strictly circum- scribed. There was also little evidence to suggest that these monetary exchanges were, in themselves, undermining the reproduction of culturally constituted spheres of exchange by creating a common scale of value: as we have shown above, the possibility of monetary exchange does not determine, let alone create, value in the other orders of exchange recog- nized by the Lahanan. Moreover, this seeming resistance to commodifi- cation is difficult to represent in terms of a conservative community unfamiliar with market exchanges clinging to the remnants of an economy based on reciprocity. Not only do the Lahanan have a long history of participation in trade, but such measures as their reconstitution of mahap reveal a considerable ability to plan social change. Finally, sales of land, labour and staple foods by the Lahanan, inasmuch as they have occurred, have not taken place simply as a result of their increasing interaction with market economies; they have resulted from the Lahanan's inability, like the Tiv's (Parry and Bloch 1989:16), to defend their legitimate property rights, which accompanied their participation in a market economy, against other, more powerful, participants. If they had thought that there was any chance of obtaining a fair price, the Lahanan might well have agreed to sell the timber-cutting rights to their land; instead, the timber was simply appro- priated in return for vague, and as yet unfulfilled, promises of com- pensation. The major problem with the notion of spheres of exchange - a problem which it shares with commodity-centred accounts of commoditization such as in the recent Appadurai (1986) collection - is that it leaves too little theoretical space for human agency. Commodification is conceptualized as an inexorable process; particular goods and services are seen as differing in their susceptibility to this process; and the extent of commoditization is treated as the outcome at any given time. One consequence is that, al- though few scholars would now see 'use values' and 'exchange values' as inherent properties of different categories of things, 'gifts' and 'sales' are still often sharply differentiated as different types of exchange. It is worth commenting, therefore, that the things which the Lahanan group together in a 'subsistence' sphere of exchange, in fact possess all three attributes by which Kopytoff (1986:69) defines commodities: they have use value, and can be exchanged, for a counterpart. A critical aspect of the Lahanan situation, however, which the use of Kopytoff s analytical terms might obscure, is that when such things are exchanged, the counterpart is an identical counterpart or, more commonly, the promise of an identical counterpart. Value is therefore established prior to the exchange, and is not, as in some definitions of commodities, set in the process of exchange

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(Appadurai 1986). But if things within this sphere are not commodities, transactions within this sphere are not necessarily gifts. In many cases 'the primary and immediate purpose of the transaction', to use Kopytoffs (1986:69) phrase demarcating non-gifts, is specifically to obtain the counterpart value. One important consequence is that such transactions on the cusp between commodity and gift do not require what Simmel (1978) termed 'the exchange of sacrifices', and therefore do not serve as an economic dynamo to intensify demand. In such transactions (cf. Appadurai 1986:4) it is precisely utility and scarcity which set the parameters of exchange. In our view it would be mistaken to see the Lahanan's recent economic history as essentially an example of a small, relatively isolated, traditional society resisting their inevitable incorporation into the global economy by asserting traditional cultural values of reciprocity in the face of corn- modification pressures. The spheres of exchange and consumption de- scribed above are not cultural survivals, nor are they the increasingly threatened remnants of Lahanan primordial values. They are recent creations - cultural practices elaborated by the Lahanan as part of their attempt to at least influence the manner of their incorporation into the Malaysian State.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fieldwork in Sarawak was funded by the Australian Research Council and sponsored by the Sarawak Museum. The paper was completed at the Sociology of Development Research Centre, University of Bielefeld, and has benefited considerably from comments on an earlier draft by Professor J. Rousseau and Dr. R. Armstrong.

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