ABSTRACT
Discontent does not run especially deep in Maneo society, or at least it did not during the period of our fieldwork in the early 1990s. If this impression still applies, even in the present context of civil religious war in the Moluccas, one of the reasons is that Maneo can adjust proximity; they can disperse if tensions arise. But this leads to a contradiction: As bad as things get when people reside too closely for a time, inclining people to flee from one another to give tensions a chance to abate, relations can worsen and are likely to worsen when people reside apart too long. Living together has value insofar as it signals that doing so warrants the effort necessary to minimize discord, at least most of the time. Yet sociality is vulnerable. There is no certainty that people can surmount problems surrounding kinship identity and relational ambiguity where there are multiple and conflicting ways of charting relations (as discussed in chapters 2, 3, and 4). Or that they can manage predicaments engendered by exchange where even successful resolution exposes the underlying risks the practices pose to the relationships of the persons involved (see chapter 5). Or that they can successfully contain fears over adultery and their perception of their substitutability. Yet small towns and villages could easily fail if there were not some incentive to try to negotiate differences and ameliorate tensions. Relationships could give way and community could collapse with little trace, especially if contingent outside events exacerbate already high anxieties. It happens. By investigating processes whereby trust and mutuality are undermined we can illuminate the conditions not otherwise discernable that enable communities-especially voluntary, moral ones-to persist.1
