Event — IIAS lecture

From Paddy to Vanilla, Elephant Tusks to Money

Change and Continuity in an Eastern Indonesian Society

IIAS Public Lecture
Presented by: Professor Satoshi Nakagawa
Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University
IIAS Affiliated Fellow

Wednesday 29 June at 15.15 - 16.30 hrs

Leiden University, Building 1103, Nonnensteeg 1-3, Room 329

Lecture
Like the Tiv described by Bohannan, Ende society contains three economic spheres: (1) the prestige economy, (2) the subsistence economy, and (3) the market economy - which markedly differs from the Tiv system. The prestige economy (gift exchange) has always been the most important sphere, supported up until the mid-1980s by the subsistence economy (swidden agriculture). A culturally defined channel existed to convert surplus from the subsistence into the prestige economy: a certain amount of paddy was exchanged for elephant tusks, the most important item in the prestige economy.

Since the latter half of the 1980s, however, village youths go to Malaysia for wage labour while villagers today focus on cash-crops (vanilla, etc.) - to the degree that few people now open their swidden fields. Money is now omnipresent in villagers' lives.

‘The monetary revolution . . . is the turn away from the multicentric economy' said Bohannan. This is, however, not the case with the Ende people. In this lecture Nakagawa will describe and explain how the Endenese retain their ‘traditional' gift-exchange system within this ‘revolution'.

Information
International Institute for Asian Studies
Lena Scheen
071-527 4159
iiasfellowships@let.leidenuniv.nl