Read an Excerpt
The Memory of Trade
Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island
By Patricia Spyer Duke University Press
Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9942-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Runaway Topographies
A number of the natives gathered round me, and said they wanted to talk. Two of the best Malay scholars helped each other, the rest putting in hints and ideas in their own language. They told me a long rambling story; but, partly owing to their imperfect knowledge of Malay, partly through my ignorance of the local terms, and partly through the incoherence of their narrative, I could not make it out very clearly. It was, however, a tradition, and I was glad to find they had anything of the kind. A long time ago, they said, some strangers came to Aru, and came here to Wanumbai, and the chief of the Wanumbai people did not like them, and wanted them to go away, but they would not go, and so it came to fighting, and many Aru men were killed, and some, along with the chief, were taken prisoners, and carried away by the strangers. Some of the speakers, however, said that he was not carried away, but went away in his own boat to escape from the foreigners, and went to the sea and never came back again. But they all believe that the chief and the people that went with him still live in some foreign country; and if they could but find out where, they would send for them to come back again.... They had sought for them everywhere, they said—on the land and in the sea, in the forest and on the mountains, in the air and in the sky, and could not find them; therefore, they must be in my country, and they begged me to tell them, for I must surely know, as I came from across the great sea.... And then they told me that a good many years ago, when the speakers were boys, some Wokan men who were out fishing met these lost people in the sea, and spoke to them; and the chief gave the Wokan men a hundred fathoms of cloth to bring to the men of Wanumbai, to show that they were alive and would soon come back to them; but the Wokan men were thieves, and kept the cloth, and they only heard of it afterwards; and when they spoke about it, the Wokan men denied it, and pretended they had not received the cloth;—so they were quite sure their friends were at that time alive and somewhere in the sea. And again, not many years ago, a report came to them that some Bugis traders had brought some children of their lost people; so that they went to Dobbo [sic] to see about it, and the owner of the house, who was now speaking to me, was one who went; but the Bugis man would not let them see the children, and threatened to kill them if they came into his house. He kept the children shut up in a large box, and when he went away he took them with him. And at the end of each of these stories, they begged me in an imploring tone to tell them if I knew where their chief and their people now were. (Wallace 1962 [1869], 357–59)
When I reread Wallace recently I was arrested and unsettled by this passage, which I had overlooked during my earlier forays into the existing literature on the Aru Islands—what Michel de Certeau calls a "library navigation" (de Certeau 1986). Here was Alfred Russel Wallace, the great English naturalist and author of The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise, on the evening of April 28, 1857, having a "grand consultation" with some natives of the Aru settlement of Wanumbai. Here at the far end of a small tributary that branches southward off of the Watulai "river" to burrow itself deep into the forested interior of Maikor Island, Wallace would suffer greatly from ulcers on his feet caused by pernicious insect bites. Here, too, he would obtain several specimens of the fully plumed Legless Bird of Paradise (Paradisea apoda), thus fulfilling one of the main objectives of his visit to these islands (see Quammen 1996, 88–96; Swadling 1996, 127). Although unremarked in later biographies, in Wanumbai Wallace was also the select audience for this remarkable story that, he writes, had evidently been plotted beforehand by the inhabitants of this modest settlement of hunters and small-scale horticulturalists (Wallace 1962 [1869], 357).
Uncannily, this story resonates across a span of more than one hundred years with tales told to me by Barakai islanders of some long lost kin across the sea and of their ongoing and repeatedly thwarted attempts to send to their Backshore relations boxes of clothes. Let me be clear from the start. I am not interested in documenting the resilience across time of what Wallace positively embraces and normalizes as "tradition." Nor is my aim the historicist one of extracting the truthful kernel of a locatable happening from within the shell of the tale. To be sure, as Wallace speculates, there may be a historical memory at work in the story told to him as in the one I heard a good century later. It is, for instance, not unimaginable that such stories might have first taken shape in the wake of the seizure of Aruese to work as slaves on the nutmeg plantations of the neighboring Banda Islands in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Or they may betray Aruese knowledge or, less likely, experience, of how Europeans occasionally took with them a handful of natives for exhibition back home (at one point when Wallace realizes that the endless stream of visitors to his hut had come especially to look at him, he reflects on how just a few years before he had been "one of the gazers at the Zulus and the Aztecs in London" [ibid., 349]). Seen in this light, the Aruese anxiety about their lost ancestors might be regarded as a local gloss on a civilizing story that draws out its underside of native expropriation and loss. As Benjamin observed, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" (1969, 256).
Notwithstanding the differences separating Wallace's "grand consultation" and the stories of misplaced kin told to me, the uncanniness that comes from their juxtaposition should be neither dismissed nor shied away from. I am intrigued by the persistence in Aru of what appear as related tellings. Rather than being some complacent continuity, I argue that their repetition speaks to a chronic and fraught structure of expectancy on the part of Backshore Aruese vis-à-vis a highly elusive elsewhere. Token today of a particular politics of difference characteristic of modernity, this elsewhere emerges out of the cultural and commercial entanglements that must form the starting point of any discussion of Aru. The particular dynamics of these entanglements in the archipelago have, I believe, only intensified a common effect of colonialism—the perception that the world in certain crucial respects resides in another place, more often than not across the sea. Problematically, it is the sense of a haunting by a desired and elusive elsewhere to which one is connected that conjoins the imploring tone with which Wanumbai men beseeched Wallace for the whereabouts of their kin to the adamant insistences voiced to me that Bemunese relations must still be there, across the sea, and to the instructions I was given on all my departures from Aru to track them down (chapter 3). As I will argue, this haunting also crucially speaks to a feeling of incompleteness that is resolved in myriad ways that I explore in the following chapters. Yet if perhaps in Wallace's time the sense of a fragile affinity to an indeterminate elsewhere was singular, on Barakai today it doubles. In local terms one could say that the sense of an elsewhere applies to both the Aru (B. gwerka) and the Malay (B. malayu), with the understanding that the two are by no means at all times either equivalent or opposed. A central challenge of this book is to understand how what is being imagined here might inform, modulate, and largely motivate some of the practices and subjectivities that today are especially salient on Aru's Backshore.
To risk stating the obvious, Aru's entanglement within a larger world and its modernity shade imperceptibly into each other. If entanglement refers to a longer durée involving, among other things, Aru's longstanding if shifting position within global trade, modernity reveals itself more recently in the archipelago as the discursive effects of Dutch colonialism and Indonesian postcoloniality. Between entanglement and modernity there is therefore a difference in both level and chronology that I maintain throughout the book. While entanglement serves as its theoretical point of departure, I reserve modernity for the subsequent mapping out of specific discursive moves and erasures in the day to day of Aruese lives. Put otherwise, if the contrast between the Malay and the Aru can only emerge in a situation of entanglement, the asymmetrical valuing of this contrast itself is a consequence of modernity. Specifically, the latter is an effect of the forms of power and knowledge wielded today by, especially, the Indonesian government and before it by the Dutch colonial one and the displacements and hierarchies that both of these in interaction with Aruese called forth and put into place.
Take, for example, the designation of the southeastern islands where I worked in the archipelago as Aru's "Backshore" (D. Achterwal) in opposition to the northwestern "Frontshore" (D. Voorwal) identified with the island capital Dobo. Already in the precolonial Malay world a distinction was commonly made between the more cosmopolitan peoples of the coast and those of the hinterlands. The famous Pigafetta, for example, wrote of the north Moluccan island Halmahera that it was inhabited by Moors who controlled the coast and heathens who lived in its interior, "a division of power," a well-known historian of Asia adds, "which the Europeans found to be quite common throughout the East Indies" (Lach 1965, 596). As far as I know, however, it took the Europeans, in contrast to the peoples before them, to elaborate fully the moral-political dimensions of such difference, which they then, indeed, often bolstered with religion. Much like its contemporary Indonesian successor "backcountry" (I. belakang tanah), today's most current name for Aru's eastern parts, the Dutch "Backshore" bore both topographical and derogatory connotations. Beyond designating the archipelago's east coast and outlying islands, these terms have been successively assimilated to the Dutch and Indonesian words for "backward" (respectively achtergesteld and terbelakang).
I have nevertheless opted in this book to maintain this nomenclature, since it encodes a history and positioning that Aruese have for long had to negotiate and that is central to the argument I develop here. Whatever the limitations and possibilities that Aruese themselves may have discovered in these terms, they cannot therefore simply be written away. At the same time, it is worth noting that I never heard a "back-country" Aruese object to this description of their home, and notably it is the one that they themselves normally use. But I invoke this nomenclature here less to defend my own use of it than because it vividly concretizes the difference between modernity and what I call entanglement. It also confirms just how intimately these two are related insofar as both exemplify moments of capitalism's culture. In repeatedly making its own mobile landscape, capitalist modernity inevitably marks out its fluctuating backcountries and shores and, in the context of colonialism and post-coloniality, the structures of sentiment to which this topography corresponds.
While frequently opposed, the Malay and the Aru share their common emergence out of specific "structures of feeling" that pervade the imagining of community on Aru's Backshore (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 8). Notwithstanding some important gendered differences, the relations that Barakai women and men largely construct with, respectively, the Malay elsewhere of church, state, and commerce or the Aru elsewhere of a customary past tend to be disturbed by distance, ambivalence, and frustrated desires. If the former is the sometime object of seduction and danger, it just as often invites a cautious disavowal by Aruese of the things that the church, state, or island traders would put upon them. And if the Aru is annually celebrated as the charged source of a highly compromised communal identity, it also—notwithstanding appearances—implies an indirect refusal of "the spatial incarceration of the native" (Appadurai 1988) or of the move that would fix Barakai women and men as backward, Backshore primitives standing in for the persistence of primordial "custom" (I. adat).
Such evasions by the islanders should be understood as the effects of their negotiations with a certain politics of difference and of the inevitable contradictions in which people manage and make their lives rather than as evidence of "indigenous resistance." Repeatedly in such diverse settings as the telling of island histories, divers' transactions with seductive undersea spirits, intervillage disputes over sites of collection, ritual performances, and interactions with church and state representatives Barakai women and men problematized and unsettled the integrity of the "us" and the otherness of the "them." Along with a specific historicity, the concept of entanglement captures the predicament of these Barakai Aruese as they repeatedly confound any attempt to separate unproblematically "inside" and "outside," "here" and "there," "us" and "them." These kinds of separations form the foundational ground on which theories of resistance and political revolutions necessarily reside but are inadequate to understanding the banality of the day-to-day concessions and entangled solutions that are the basic stuff of Barakai peoples' lives. Any attempt, therefore, to reduce these lives to the terms of a strict oppositional logic risks either aggrandizing power or romanticizing resistance (Abu Lughod 1990), while at the same time glossing over the complexity of the partial, provisional inhabitings by Aruese of two intertwined, incomplete, and, at times, antagonistically related elsewheres.
Rather than an oppositional stance, at issue here is what Homi Bhabha has called "the uncanny of cultural difference": that which transpires when, abandoning all its usual essentialist trappings, cultural difference enters the fray of provisional and hybrid accommodation and "as the strangeness of the familiar ... becomes more problematic, both politically and conceptually ... when the problem of cultural difference is ourselves-as-others, others-as-ourselves, that borderline" (1989, 72). The shifting negotiations with the Aru and the Malay that surface in and shape the strategies and expectations of Barakai women and men mean that neither achieves the status of a full-fledged representability; neither the Aru nor the Malay is ever successfully stabilized or made fully present in topography, as a crucial marker of community on the Backshore or as a definition on which women and men can draw to define and position themselves. Beyond such determinations, the Malay and the Aru also shatter the topography that in any simple sense might be seen as underlying the contrast between center and periphery, metropolis and margins. Yet at the same time, the shifting accommodations of Barakai women and men with these alternatives confirm modernity's success in effecting its characteristic displacements. Backshore Aruese do not feel themselves entitled to full citizenship in, as it were, the Malay, while the Aru that they annually invoke in performance is increasingly figured there as the disappearing past of yet another elsewhere. Hybridity here comes with a cost and is no easy compromise solution. The fluctuating and vexed connections that Barakai women and men forge with what they see as, respectively, the Aru and the Malay serve then as a corrective to theories of hybridity that celebrate its liberating and subversive potentials without also tallying its costs. Across the different chapters of this book, I explore these alternative, intertwined dimensions to the makings of a community that imagines itself as provisional, internally rent, and somehow beholden to and bereft of identity vis-à-vis its elusive Aru and Malay partners.
A preliminary mapping is necessary. In what follows in this introduction I conjure poetically a series of scenes emergent under conditions of entanglement. In so doing my intent is to evoke some of the complexities that correspond to the existential predicament from within which Backshore Aruese conduct their lives. While largely historical, I have selected these particular scenes of entanglement for their relevance to contemporary conditions in Aru. The first scene calls up the dramatic fluctuations of trade's on- and off-seasons in the island capital in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Wallace serves again as guide, since his stay in the archipelago in 1857 spans the period of extreme quiet preceding the arrival of commerce to Dobo and its bustling heights when anyone who was himself not a trader became unimaginable (Wallace 1962 [1869], 329). The second scene follows commodity circulation both on Aru's Front- and Backshores and looks at the commercial division of labor between coastal and interior peoples on Barakai itself. "Super Sharks," the third and last scene of entanglement homes in on the bust and boom cycles that have long described Aru's trade in the luxury products such as bird of paradise, mother-of-pearl, and shark fins for which the archipelago to this day is known. In the two sections that follow these scenes, I begin to map out the topographies of desire that are woven through their different entanglements. "Trading Cities" asks about the less visible aspects of trade and the desires, expectations, memories, and imaginations inherent to the institution of the market. The section that succeeds this one considers how the especially restless form of consumer desire and the sense of scarcity fostered under capitalist regimes takes a specifically Aru form when cross-cut by the debt relations that commonly bind Aruese to foreign traders. All these different sections build on each other, each successive one providing additional depth and filling out the initial differentiation of on and off trade seasons in the nineteenth-century island capital with which I began. The final section returns to the present, to the Aru and the Malay, and the position of Barakai within the Indonesian nation-state under the former regime of the country's recently deposed President Suharto.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Memory of Trade by Patricia Spyer. Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
