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13.1. The Sociality of Humanity and Globalization in Two Villages of Eastern Indonesia

Tony Rudyansjah (Universitas Indonesia)

Abstract

This article focuses on understanding the interplay between external forces of globalization and internal forms of traditional institutions in two villages on Seram island, in eastern part of Indonesia. Following Karl Marx who stated that human essence in its reality is the ensemble of the social relations, we attempt to comprehend the sociality of humanity that emerges out of processes of the above-mentioned dialectical relationship. One village converted to Christianity in the mid-nineteenth century, while the other to Islam a little bit earlier. In other words, we seek to understand how the impacts of external forces of globalization (i.e., such as world religions, nation-state and free-market) on the two communities are, and how at the same time peoples respond to them. We address how different forms of exchange are related to different forms of sociality. In this way we make an ethnographic comparative study of two villages, and see what a focus of it entails. As such our study deals primarily with the topic of anthropological theory of value, and addresses the following questions:  (1) how value is created through exchange and what this means for our understanding of relations of reciprocity and non-reciprocity, equality and inequality; (2) how value is used as shorthand for different worldviews or cultural systems , where the emphasis is not on the exchange of things but on how people express their religious and social values and how this informs their actions; and (3) how to establish a kind of synthesis between exchange-based theory and values-as-worldviews by looking at how action is informed by values and simultaneously creates value.

Keywords: globalization, social relations, sociality of humanity, value, action, Christianity, Islam, worldview, reciprocity and non-reciprocity, equality and inequality.