Spyer, Patricia 2000 The Memory of Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Notes: ISBN: 0822324415
	Reviewed 22 Feb 2002 by: Lisa Klopfer <lklopfer@online.emich.edu> Halle Library, E Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA
	Medium:	Written Literature
	Subject Keywords:	Economic anthropology - Indonesia - Aru Islands Aru Islands (Indonesia) - Social life and customs Aru Islands (Indonesia) - Commerce - History

ABSTRACT:    This ethnography presents Patsy SpyerÆs story of social history and contemporary identity in the Moluccas*. SpyerÆs prose is dense and does not contribute to the clarity of her argument.

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     In the past 15 years or so, anthropological theory has experienced an influx of literary vocabulary. Rituals are read rather than observed, logic is grammatical while narratives and discourses rule the day. This has arguably resulted in better ethnography, but certainly not in better ethnographic writing. Indeed, I suspect some authors have unconsciously confused poetics with neology and pseudology. Words such as differance or fetish that refer to theoretical frames, are powerful. Words that avoid analysis by reliance on puns or association, are not.

     For all its strengths as ethnography, Spyer's book suffers from superfluous wordplay, particularly in the preface and introduction (the latter is titled "Runaway Topography"- a good example of her use of mixed metaphor that is less playful than annoying). Perhaps since ethnographers are no longer allowed to exoticize directly, they exoticize their language, preferring to combine adjectives like "uncanny", "haunted", and "unsettling" with psychological nouns such as "desire", "absence", and "longing", and vague verbs such as "suffuse," "infuse", "refract", "resonate", and "glean" (all these words were extracted from Spyer's book).

     This one flaw admittedly will annoy many readers less than this one. Otherwise, The Memory of Trade is a dense, sporadically reflective ethnographic interpretation based on approximately two years of fieldwork in the Moluccas (more precisely, in the community of Bemun on Barakai Island in the Aru archipelago) and some supplementary archival research. Spyer strings together descriptions of narratives and rituals she heard or observed in order to illustrate and even perform her main argument. Stripped of its nuances, the argument runs that the Aruese history of contact with international trade, missionaries, and the Indonesian state has left the community ambivalent about its dual allegiance to self-sufficient forest gardening (understood as ôbackwardö) and to commerce and other aspects of ômodernö life (understood as submission to foreigners). Spyer contends that when the Aruese identify with modernity, they find themselves claiming foreignness and thus illegitimacy.

     This work is not suitable for undergraduates, but would fit well in a graduate-level seminar on post-colonial culture or Southeast Asia, particularly if read with Mary SteedlyÆs Hanging without a Rope, Anna TsingÆs In the Realm of the Diamond Queen and Webb KeaneÆs Signs of Recognition.

     * Patsy Spyer is Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Modern Indonesia at Leiden University (Netherlands) and the editor of Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (Routledge, 1998).

     References:

     Keane, Webb 1997 Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

     Steedly, Mary Margaret 1993 Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Post-colonial Karoland. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

     Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 1993 In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:

Klopfer, Lisa
2002 Review of The Memory of Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian Island. Anthropology Review Database. February 22. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=1749, accessed November 22, 2009.

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