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Downloaded From 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 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl 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- Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access Commodification and Consumption in Central Borneo 181 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. Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:02:47PM via free access 182 Jennifer Alexander and Paul Alexander Spheres of Consumption and Exchange With the exception of two consistently anomalous categories
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