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Economy as a cultural systemKathryn Robinsona Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and AsianStudies, The Australian National UniversityPublished online: 17 May 2010.

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ECONOMY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEMThe economic anthropology of Paul Alexander

Kathryn Robinson

Binary logics have underscored anthropological investigations of economicprocesses, in particular the overwhelming domination of approaches whichcontextualise their studies in terms of how like/different from 'us' -capitalist/industrialised societies - are 'they', the non-industrialised societieswhich are the usual subjects of anthropological analysis? The 'us' part of theequation has been taken for granted, for example, in the 'formalist-substantivist' debate which dominated economic anthropology in the 1960sand 1970s. Are the rules of formal neo-classical economics applicable to theeconomies of non-Western (non-market) societies? Or, as the question wasposed by the substantivists in a manner which sets up an opposition ofeconomics and culture: how much are economic decisions in non-Westernsocieties affected by cultural specificities rather than the economic logics ofthe marketplace? Much of what is currently written about 'globalisation', therubric which has overtaken earlier paradigms invoking 'modernisation' oftraditional societies or 'articulation and subsumption of modes of production',all too often invoke the image of the behemoth of global capitalism bearingdown on relatively defenceless local cultures, an inexorable disruption andreworking in its own image by the abstract forces of an over-empoweredglobal market. In a reflection of the substantivist position, the effect of newglobal economic forces is often analysed exclusively in terms of consumption,placing it squarely in the realm of the cultural, eschewing a focus on theeconomic in its broadest context, from ownership of resources and productionthrough to exchange and consumption.

The work of Paul Alexander, in studies of local economies in Sri Lanka,Java and Borneo, goes against this tendency to see economic systems andeconomic change in binary terms. He has written:

Economic anthropology has been slow to adopt a cultural approach: there isconsiderable opposition to the notion that the economy is as much a culturalsystem as kinship or religion. The use of culture bound concepts such as theformal/informal sector distinction not only hinders our understanding of economic

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1(1) 2000:3-13

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4 ECONOMY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM

organizations and practises in non-industrial societies, it also conceals theconsiderable contribution of the poor and powerless in such economies (1989a:iv).

Paul Alexander has produced a corpus of work marked by its concern foreconomic questions investigated through fine-grained ethnographic analysiswhich eschews any ready-made explanatory framework imputing causality tophenomena, for example, the material determinism of a strict Marxist position,or the elevation of culture to the throne of first cause. His work subjects tocritical scrutiny the taken-for-granted categories of social analysis, forexample, the interrogation of the notion of 'price' as a self-evident category(see below).

Born in New Zealand where he studied anthropology at the University ofOtago, he has been resident in Australia for the last three decades. He wasawarded his PhD at ANU in 1973, and since 1974 has taught anthropology atthe University of Sydney, where he is currently associate professor. His wifeJenny, who completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 1984, has beenhis co-researcher and they have published an enormous volume of jointlyauthored works as well as each having their own corpus of scholarship. Jennydiscusses their highly successful collaboration in the first paper in this volume,showing in an intriguing twist how her innovative research on markets (whichhas the hallmark Alexander close focus on economic practice, for example, inthe analysis of price-setting) grew out of the imperative for an anthropological'spouse' to take on the exhausting work of maintaining a household in a low-technology environment. As a researcher and teacher, Paul Alexander hasinfluenced several generations of Australian anthropologists. He is acharismatic teacher, with a gift for encouraging students to reflect on culturalassumptions. He is likely to challenge his students, and encourage them tochallenge him. Two of his former PhD students (Leitch and Hawkins) havepapers in this volume. He has been a significant figure in Australiananthropology and many scholars have benefited from his intellectualengagement and encouragement (for example, Helliwell and Robinson in thisvolume). Other papers in this special issue are from scholars in dialogue withhis work (Geschiere and White).

Paul Alexander began writing in the field of economic anthropology ata time when the formalist-substantivist debate was still in full swing. At thattime (the 1970s), anthropology experienced a resurgence of Marxist analysisin the debates about non-capitalist modes of production and, in a cruder form,cultural evolutionary and historical materialist approaches from the United

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KATHRYN ROBINSON 5

States. His work has never been pigeonholed into any of these approaches. Hehas always asked questions which go to the heart of everyday social practice inthe communities he has researched, and has had a critical stance in regard toanalytical categories. While showing a Marxist-like respect for the potentialpower of material forces to influence social and cultural life, he never reducesthe domain of culture to the epiphenomenal. His work always focuses onindividuals as social actors, who make their choices in the context of economic,political and cultural constraints. He is as likely to take an apparentlyculturally determined logic and show it to have economic and institutionaldeterminants, as he is to show the ways in which cultural practices impact onthe material world.

What we have come to expect from him are rigorous and detailedethnographic analyses, in a broad, comparative framework. However, in PaulAlexander's comparative framework the spotlight is just as likely to be turnedback on ourselves, on the taken-for-granteds of our own economic systemsand everyday cultural practices which all too often (and certainly in his view,in the discipline of economics) are unreflected 'truths' about the way theworld works.

SRI LANKAN FISHERIES

The body of work on Sri Lankan fisheries which grew out of Paul's doctoralresearch at ANU (conducted in the southern fishing village of Mawelle forfourteen months between 1970 and 1974) was the first major anthropologicalwork on Asian fisheries after Raymond Firth's (1966) groundbreaking workin Malaysia (see Alexander 1996). This research displays the quintessentialfeature of Paul Alexander's style: the meticulous care in coming to grips withlocal cultural, economic and social logics, the setting aside of taken-for-granted assumptions, such as the view that development projects fail because'traditional' fishers are unable to respond to innovation. Alexander shows thatthe beach seine fishing practised in the village where he conducted fieldworkwas adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century. In adapting to the(expensive) new technology, the fishers developed systems of share-ownershipderived from systems of wet rice production. The share system, includinginheritance patterns which involve splitting of shares, have the effect ofspreading risk. From a purely rational, economic perspective, however, therewere too many nets (ninety-nine instead of the eighteen which would givemaximum return for effort). He concludes that in any one year 'less than a

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6 ECONOMY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM

third of the nets receive two thirds of the catch' and '[w]hether a particular net

has a successful season is almost solely a function of its position in the net

cycle' which regulates access to water (1980:95). That is, luck rather than skillplays a large part in determining the reward for efforts.

This work foreshadows many of the issues taken up in his later work

(with Jennifer Alexander) critiquing Geertz's Agricultural involution (1963).

Apart from the concern with the economic arrangements for spreading

income, he notes that demographic pressure was 'the main impetus for the

increases in nets' (1977:243) to uneconomic levels. He also details the

particularities of ecology which allow specific economic variations, for

example, year-round rather than seasonal beach seining.Especially at the time of this Sri Lankan study, economics was king in

the practice of development. The dominant assumptions reflected the view thateconomic growth was the key to change, and shortage of capital and know-how were the significant barriers to 'modernisation' and 'take-off'.Alexander provides a classic study of a local project which was designedaround this logic. The fishers were the 'beneficiaries' of an aid project inwhich they were given a government loan to increase their capacity for

production by procuring motorised vessels. The consequences of this projectwere catastrophic. The loans had to be repaid at a set amount each month, a

regime which ignored the seasonality of catches and hence of fishers'

incomes. The boats were expensive - more expensive than the local

technologies - to maintain and repair, and the loans did not allow for this.Hence many fishermen found that the boats pushed them into debt, fromwhich they were saved by local money-lenders, who charged higher interestbut whose repayment regimes were more sensitive to local economic factors.Eventually, boat ownership became concentrated in a few hands (1972, 1975).But the boats had a devastating impact on other sectors of the local economy.They tied up all the fishers' capital, preventing them from spending it onmaintaining the cheaper, local fishing technologies. The boats' moorings tookup the shallow bay waters which had been used for beach seining. While themechanised boats increased production, they did not have the 'development'effect of poverty alleviation for local fishermen. Alexander entitled hisprincipal article on this topic 'Innovation in a cultural vacuum' (1975).

Paradoxically, some of the boats were eventually purchased by Tamilfishers in the north, who had already experimented with motorising their owntraditional craft (which leant themselves to this). These fishers, who obtained

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KATHRYN ROBINSON 7

the boats without benefit of an aid program, were able to make 'a go of it'(Alexander 1989b).

The tale of the failed aid project is evocative of the story, 'The Tower ofBabel', related by Epeli Hau'ofa in his satirical account of aid anddevelopment in the Pacific, Tales of the Tikongs (1988). Epeli was a student atthe same time as Paul - perhaps this particular cynical tale of aid was inspiredby the sorry tale being told by his fellow student?

AGRICULTURAL INVOLUTION IN JAVA

Paul Alexander's work does not set out to fit the ethnographically derivedexamples to a set model or theory. Rather, it is characterised by meticulousattention to local events and the quest to understand them by constantly takingapart the underpinnings, interrogating the interaction between processes (local,regional, national, global; economic, social, cultural, political, and so on) andbetween fields of social life. For example, the tendency for anthropologists toassume the possibility of the 'ethnographic present' have led to manyexamples of anthropologists intervening in debates about 'modernisation' and'social change' by representing situations where cultural values were seen tobe endlessly reproduced. Paul and Jenny Alexander are well known for theircritical response to Clifford Geertz's monumental and influential workAgricultural involution (Geertz 1963). In the decade following its publication,this was one of the most frequently invoked anthropology texts outside ofanthropology.

Geertz took as his starting point the historical fact that Java hadexperienced a population explosion about seventy-five years before any of itsSoutheast Asian neighbours. He likened the peasant response to populationgrowth, to an attempt to 'tread water' and remain afloat, a process which hecalled 'agricultural involution'. This referred to an increasing intricacy ofcultivation methods taking advantage of the ability of the irrigated rice field(sawah) to 'respond to labour intensification without loss of soil fertility'(White 1983:21), the increasing complexity of intensified labour practicesmatched with increasing complexity in land tenure arrangements and inrelations of production. He asserted the mutualistic relation of irrigated riceand sugar cultivation, so that improvements in the technology of sugarirrigation were of benefit to rice fields.

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In a group of papers addressing aspects of this work, Paul and JennyAlexander argue that Geertz has overstated the mutualistic bond of rice and

sugar:

While we do not dispute Geertz's claim that sugar cultivation played the major rolein extending the area of sawah available for rice cultivation, we argue that it alsoimposed severe limits on the Javanese peasant's ability to lift productivity of theirsawah through greater labour inputs [due to the labour demands of sugarcultivation] (1978:209).

They have also critiqued Geertz's assumptions concerning the reasons forrapid population growth (Alexander and Alexander 1979, Alexander 1984and 1986) dismissing Geertz's assertion that it was a benign consequence ofcolonial policies such as the pax Nederlandica and better public healthfacilities which provided checks on mortality. They argue there is no evidencefor this. They are also critical of Geertz's reasoning that the culturalimperatives of mutual assistance led the Javanese peasantry to the 'involution'of work practices, of splitting the tasks of wet rice cultivation, and indeed theland on which it was based into smaller and smaller packages to ensureeveryone had a stake, and some share in the output (Alexander and Alexander1982). The use of intensive rice harvesting methods using the ani-ani (fingerknife) and systems of labour exchange in rice harvesting are seen by Geertz asexpressions of the cultural logic of 'shared poverty' which meant that Java did

not experience the class bifurcation found in other colonised nations(1982:599). The Alexanders conclude that the:

social structure of the post-traditional village ... cannot be explained solely or evenmainly as a product of a desire to provide every member of an expanding populationwith work. While there is no reason to doubt that moral considerations play a partin the economic decisions of Javanese households, there is also no reason to doubtthat the subsistence of the household and its reproduction through the provision ofa patrimony are the dominant considerations (1982:615).

In the introduction of the paper 'Shared poverty as ideology', the Alexanderspoint to the ideological function of this argument in debates aboutdevelopment under Suharto's New Order; it provided a rationale for economicpolicies which relied on 'trickle down' effects, rather than direct targeting ofthe poor, and provided legitimation for the view of a rapacious elite thatpeasant attitudes were the main obstacles to development (1982:597-8).

Paul Alexander has been critical of the 'value of children' argument(see White 1976) for population growth, which was another critical response to

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Geertz. He rejects White's position, that the population increase in Java was aconscious response to the increased labour demands on peasant households. Ina paper which goes to the heart of the issue of the fundamental 'trigger' of thepopulation explosion, an event which Geertz took as a given, Alexanderreturns to the material properties of the human body. He presents us with animage of a Javanese peasant household struggling to meet the increaseddemands on household labour to provide both the rice needed for their ownsubsistence and the sugar presented in lieu of taxes to the Dutch-owned sugarprocessing mills - an innovative system which Geertz described as 'anattempt to raise an estate economy by a peasantry's bootstraps' (1963:65).Under these circumstances, Alexander theorises, peasant households reassesstheir allocation of labour in order to meet increased demands. In this situation,might it not be the case that women handed over their infant children tosibling caretakers more rapidly, thus allowing the household to avail itself oftheir more productive agricultural labour? Such a decision would inevitablyhave an effect on the breastfeeding regime which would have been the mosteffective check on fertility in the peasant economy (1984, 1986).

In a spirited response to the critics of Agricultural involution, Geertzdoes not accept that a case has been made for population increase resultingfrom increased fertility rather than decreasing mortality (1984) but he doesacknowledge the Alexanders as 'some of my most persistent critics' who havebeen 'consistently fair, temperate and scholarly' (1984:526, n.4). It isinteresting, however, that he sees their critique as economistic, displayingrelentless material determinism at the expense of offering 'culture' anexplanatory role. The Alexander papers on population growth in Javaacknowledge the degree to which the analysis is constrained by the practicalimpossibilities of reconstructing social and cultural dynamics in the absence ofreal, first-hand evidence but nonetheless the work does exemplify an approachof seeing the political economy as a powerful framework constrainingindividual choices, rather than seeing individuals as merely reflexive ciphers ofthose material structures - a position Geertz seems to want to put them in.

Ben White's paper in this volume continues his dialogue with theAlexanders (and indeed Geertz). He takes a further look at rice harvestingmethods - rice harvesting being one of the 'backbones' of the assumedsystems of shared poverty described by Geertz. On the basis of extensivehistorical research, White argues for a more complex and diverse set ofarrangements than was allowed for in Geertz's original formulation.

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In Geertz's eloquent exposition of the position in which he foundhimself in the 1950s, researching in newly independent Indonesia, he describesthe context when the development theory promoted as the guide toIndonesia's progress characterised the traditional cultures which he and hisfellow anthropological researchers were studying as obstacles to progress(1984:511). Geertz comments that in response to the question 'WitherIndonesia?', 'neither the culture as obstacle or culture as stimulus view wasgoing to do. Both these views saw local beliefs and values as external to theprocesses of institutional change' (1984:513). This sentiment could, in fact,express a view which comes through much of Paul Alexander's work (forexample, the jointly authored paper on 'shared poverty'). Alexander alsoshares with Geertz the suspicion of relying solely on the snap survey, relyingfor its analysis on mathematical models of analysis, if used at the expense ofthe more long-term and intensive studies aimed at uncovering patterns inindividual and collective lives (see Geertz 1984:521-22).

Alexander wrote in the introduction to the edited collection CreatingIndonesian cultures:

Cultures are seen as historical products which are continually being created andrecreated in daily life. As with any other system of meanings, Cultures areinherently ambiguous and are always open to alternative interpretations. Humansare not captives of culture or ideology, every society contains iconoclasts, andwhile radical cultural changes are often reactions to outside events, in the absence ofsuch events cultures are not static (1989a:i).

The title of the book refers both to the process of national culture creation bythe Indonesian eltite, a self-serving exercise to legitimate the power holders ofthe New Order, and to the attempt by Indonesians to 'preserve and develop'their own unique cultures (1989a:i).

MARKETS

In Paul Alexander's hands, comparative analysis - one of the hallmarks ofanthropology - is taken to focus on the taken-for-granteds of our ownculture. In a paper on peasant markets, Alexander argues for a 'morecomprehensive, and dialectical, process of comparison', rather than using 'anidealised model of industrialised markets as a benchmark against whichpeasant markets can be measured - and not surprisingly found wanting'. Headvocated rather a 'tack backwards and forwards' between the two models, in

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the process of which the poles of comparison might be 'refined, or evendissolved' (1992:84).

In rejecting a simple binary comparison of peasant and capitalistmarkets, he writes:

A more fruitful comparison, therefore, might begin with the recognition thattrading practices in all markets, not simply peasant markets, are culturallyconstituted. Actors in any market are linked by commodity exchanges and by socialrelationships, but they are also linked by shared, common-sense, taken-for-grantedunderstandings about the ways in which transactions should be conducted and theways in which they are conducted (1992:83).

He denies that this implies a 'retreat to the substantivist rather than theformalist bunker' but rather is the recognition of the 'complexity and culturalspecificity of a particular economy' (1992:83).

Following this process of analysis, his discussion of price-setting in aJavanese market (drawing on his own and Jenny's work) not only dismantlesthe taken-for-granteds of conventional economic analysis (which he chastises,rarely gets down to the exhaustive empirical work of witnessing and recordingthe process of price-setting), but also leads him to conclude that it is 'theprocess of price-setting in industrialised economies which remains opaque'(1992:89).

It comes down to cultural issues - 'the most remarkable feature of ourview of price is our stubborn belief, despite all evidence, that there is a closerelationship between price and value' (1992:91) - perhaps reflected in theaphorism 'You get what you pay for'. Yet, he concludes, whereas in a Javanesemarket, price-setting is a public event - one in which the buyer is an activeparticipant - in our economy it is all done behind the scenes (1992:91). Hehas commented that 'economics produces a wealth of aggregated statistics onmarket outcomes, but there are very few investigations of how people inindustrialised societies actually go about buying and selling', and he applaudsrecent research which adds to our 'understanding of the ways in which peopleoperate in markets' (1999:112).

COMMODITIES

Perhaps in response to the increasing global spread of capitalist markets andthe increasing importance of forms of global consumption (tourism, massmedia), much recent anthropology of economic practices has focused onaspects of exchange and consumption at the expense of attention to the

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processes of production. In their most recent work, the Alexanders bring acorrective to this approach, with analyses of commodity production,circulation and consumption which are implicitly critical of 'one-dimensionalviews of consumption practice which have characterised much recent debate'(Alexander 1999:114). For example, in the work they have done on tobacco(Alexander and Alexander 1994) and other commodity production andcirculation in Borneo (Alexander and Alexander 1995), they show that theconditions of production of commodities have significant influence on theircirculation (for example, tobacco, which is produced by women who alsocontrol its circulation) but that categories of goods can also have the effect ofobliterating these histories (for example, the 'heirloom' beads which can bebought, but once purchased enter into realms of ceremonial exchange andacquire 'histories' appropriate to that status). They contest the notion thatmoney always circulates in a manner which leads to the 'dissolution' of socialrelations, that there are instances of the containment of money (1995). Thisargument is taken up by Geschiere in this volume in a paper which examinesthe characteristics of monetary exchange in Cameroon in comparativeperspective.

This volume commemorates an academic career and, indeed, anacademic partnership which are still in full flight. At a time whenanthropology is no longer dominated by approaches of particular 'schools'and as it grapples with the ever-increasing complexities and interlinkages ofhuman societies, we pay tribute to a body of scholarly work which has alwayspursued an intelligent and nuanced 'take' on the processes of change in theAsia Pacific region. In addition, the work of Paul Alexander has always beensensitive to the 'real world ' applications, both conscious and unintended, ofthe research of anthropologists. It makes a fitting subject for the first volumeof our journal.

REFERENCES

Alexander, Jennifer and Paul Alexander1978 Sugar, rice and irrigation in colonial Java. Ethnohistory 25(3):207-23.1979 Labour demands and the 'involution' of Javanese agriculture. Social Analysis

3:22-44.1982 Shared poverty as ideology: agrarian relationships in colonial Java. Man (n.s.)

17 (4):597-619.1994 Gender differences in tobacco use and the commodification of tobacco in

Central Borneo. Social Science and Medicine 38(4):603-8.

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1995 Commodification and consumption in a Central Borneo community. Bijdragentot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 151(11): 179-93.

Alexander, Paul1972 Ethno-accountancy: local level management in the fishing industry of

Southern Ceylon. In D. Fiske (ed.), The human consequences of technologicalchange. Sydney: University of Sydney, pp.l-16.

1975 Innovation in a cultural vacuum: the mechanization of Sri Lankan fisheries.Human Organization 34(4):333-44.

1977 Sea tenure in Southern Sri Lanka. Ethnology 16(3):231-253.1980 Sea tenure in Southern Sri Lanka. In Alexander Spoehr (ed.), Maritime

adaptations: essays on contemporary fishing communities. Pittsburgh:University of Pittsburgh Press, pp.91-111.

1984 Woman, labour and fertility: population growth in nineteenth century Java.Mankind 14 (5):361-72.

1986 Labour demands and Javanese population growth. In W. Penn Handwerker(ed.), Culture and reproduction: an anthropological critique of demographictransition theory. New York: Westview Press, pp.249-62.

1989a Creating Indonesian cultures. Oceania Ethnographies 3. Sydney: OceaniaPublications.

1989b Lessons for Pacific technology transfer and fishing communities: the SriLankan experience. In A.D. Cooper (ed.), Development and social change inthe Pacific Islands. London and New York: Routledge, pp.63-73.

1992 What's in a price? Price-setting in peasant (and other) markets. In R. Dilley(ed.), Contesting markets: analyses of ideology, discourse and practice.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp.79-96.

1996 Sri Lankan fishermen: rural capitalism and peasant society. Bombay:Australian South Asian Studies Association (2nd edn).

1999 Markets and shopping. Canberra Anthropology 22(1):111-20.

Firth, R.1966 Malayfishermen (2nd edn). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Geertz, Clifford1963 Agricultural involution: the process of ecological change in Indonesia.

Berkeley: University of California Press.1984 Culture and social change: the Indonesian case. Man (n.s.) 19(4):511-32.

Hau'ofa, Epeli1988 Tales of the Tikongs. Auckland: Penguin Books.

White, Benjamin1976 Labour demands and the involution of Javanese agriculture. Development and

Change 7:267-90.1983 'Agricultural involution' and its critics: twenty years after. Bulletin of

Concerned Asian Scholars 15(2):18-31.

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