ABSTRACT
The Maneo reside within a region in eastern Indonesia famous for its complex exchange practices, and exchange features prominently in social life (see van Wouden 1968; Fox 1980; Hoskins 1993). Particularly in marriage, the objects (arata) which circulate as payments are highly coveted, sharing them is valued, and giving is both necessary and confers certain benefits. Nevertheless, exchange often does not occur, and when gifts are not given local expectations suffer, but less than would be inferred from the anthropological models which, like Marcel Mauss’s (1967), treats exchange as obligatory. Recent scholarship has begun to identify broader shortcomings in Mauss’s model regarding the agency and contingency of practice (Bourdieu 1990; Bercovitch 1994; Weiner 1992).1 My contention is that these critics go too far in abandoning Mauss’s project to explore the relation between exchange and social solidarity-turning Mauss on his head, in effect, by reducing deliberation about whether to give to dispositions “which do not allow for the possibility of behaving differently” (Bourdieu 1997:233)—or that they do not go far enough in questioning his moral ontology, that exchange is necessarily obligatory. Instead, in this chapter, I will argue that sociality, what Max Weber calls “mutual orientations” (1947:118-123), is intrinsic to deliberation and not merely an effect of exchange, and that the contingencies of social life (for example, the scarcity of objects) impinge on persons’ abilities without affecting their desires to give.
