Product Description

"The Memory of Trade" is an ethnographic study of the people of Aru, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. Central to Patricia Spyer's study is the fraught identification of Aruese people with two imaginary elsewheres - the 'Aru' and the 'Malay' - and the fissured construction of community that has ensued from centuries of active international trade and more recent encroachments of modernity. Drawing on more than two years of archival and ethnographic research, Spyer examines the dynamics of contact with the Dutch and Europeans, Suharto's postcolonial regime, and with the competing religions of Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism in the context of the recent conversion of pagan Aruese.While arguing that Aru identity and community are defined largely in terms of absence, longing, memory, and desire, she also incorporates present-day realities - such as the ecological destruction wrought by the Aru trade in such luxury goods as pearls and shark fins - without overlooking the mystique and ritual surrounding these activities. Imprinted on the one hand by the archipelago's long engagement with extended networks of commerce and communication and, on the other, by modernity's characteristic repressions and displacements, Aruese make and manage their lives somewhat precariously within what they often seem to construe as a dangerously expanding - if still enticing - world.By documenting not only the particular expectations and strategies Aruese have developed in dealing with this larger world but also the price they pay for participation therein, "The Memory of Trade" speaks to problems commonly faced elsewhere in the frontier spaces of modern nation-states. Balancing particularly astute analysis with classic ethnography, "The Memory of Trade" will appeal not only to anthropologists and historians but also to students and specialists of Southeast Asia, modernity, and globalisation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #748868 in Books
• Published on: 2000-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"The Memory of Trade is one of the most compelling works--ethnographic or otherwise--that I have read in Indonesian studies."--John Pemberton, author of On the Subject of "Java" "With profound insight, empathy, and theoretical sophistication, Patricia Spyer traces out the complex intertwinings among identity, global commerce, local ritual, and national politics. This book is a masterful demonstration of how much of modernity's paradoxes, romance, and uncanny displacements best come into sight when viewed from the perspective of the supposed margins."--Webb Keane, author of Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society > "Patricia Spyer's monograph emerges dreamlike from an extended and thoughtful sojourn among the Aruese of Emun on Barakai island in eastern Indonesia, a community of pearl divers and collectors of marine products long involved in far-flung international seaborne trade... The book provides a richly textured and well-crafted narrative of the experiences, memories and imaginings of the Aruese confronted by what others might prefer to call globalisation, modernisation or uneven development, but which Spyer refers to as "modernity's entanglements". What is especially admirable about this study is the way in which the author imaginatively and skillfully weaves the themes of market exchange, colonial incorporation of marginal communities, European commentary on both the native and natural environment, local rituals and changing dress sense, recent religious conversion and nationalist politics into a story which is at once comprehensible and illuminating and yet full of uncertainties and open-ended futures."--Asian Affairs, February 2001

Webb Keane, author of Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society
"With profound insight, empathy, and theoretical sophistication, Patricia Spyer traces out the complex intertwinings among identity, global commerce, local ritual, and national politics. This book is a masterful demonstration of how much of modernity's paradoxes, romance, and uncanny displacements best come into sight when viewed from the perspective of the supposed margins."

Customer Reviews

An Interesting Book on a Remote Region
This is one of the more readable ethnographic works written about Maluku.
The Aru Islands, where the Barakai people - the focus of this study - live, may locally be famous for their marine resources and birds of paradise, but have pretty much been forgotten by the outside world. Even books devoted to Maluku in general, or Southeast Maluku in particular offer very limited information about this unique archipelago which lies in the shadow of New Guinea to the East, or the art-rich islands of Southwest Maluku (like the Tanimbar or Leti groups) to the West.
When I visited the Arus in 1999, I could find very little information about them, yet eventually ended up spending a week among the very same people described in this book, whom local Arunese recommended for being the most traditional. Several times I was told about a Western woman who had spent time there doing research years earlier, attending local festivals, and who must have been the author of this book.
It was all the more interesting to finally (and accidentally) find this book published a few years later.
In addition to the wealth of detail about the culture of the Barakai people it also offers much information about the Aru Islands in general.