Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns (Comparative Studies of New Nations)

This was written before Geertz became "big" on the Anthropology scene, and is very different from his later writings. I enjoyed the book--it was interesting and not a difficult read at all. Four out of five stars only because Geertz does repeat himself a bit, and he tends to over-explain his arguments.

Based on extensive, hands-on field trips to both Bali (1957-58) and Java (1952-54), anthropologist Clifford Geertz evaluates Indonesia's prospects for economic development and growth in the postwar period from 1945 to 1963. His model of economic expansion interprets characteristic shifts in institutional, cultural, religious, and social values as the prerequisite signposts of a "pre-take off" society in transition from a traditional agricultural equilibrium to the emerging dynamic of a non-familial, commercial/industrial production system. He looks for and documents these fundamental patterns of change in social stratification, world view, education, degree of family cohesion, and in the nature of work itself (rising status of technical vs. aesthetic skills) in the representative bellwether towns of Tabanan in southwestern Bali and Modjokuto in eastern central Java.Geertz zeroes in on these two analogous social units within the larger Indonesian polity to test his theories of the processes of modernization, individuation, and urbanization. He pulls back the kelly green palm fronds of idyllic Bali to compare changes in political, social, and economic organization in Tabanan (former seat of a Balinese royal court, traditional center of art and politics, and now administrative capitol of a fertile, populous, rice-growing region) with parallel developments in its Javanese counterpart. By choosing Tabanan as a laboratory for measuring periods of seismic structural change, Geertz opens up a fascinating archival window into Balinese society at a particular historical juncture. Scholarly but still accessible to the average intelligent reader, Peddlers and Princes increases our understanding of the complicated cultural, economic, and caste systems which color the classic Balinese village. Geertz shines when he explores the five "seka" (core social affinities) which form the critical underpinnings of Balinese life: temple, residential, agricultural/irrigation, kinship, and voluntary associations. Cooperation, community, and collective effort are still the strong central backbone of Balinese peasant society: he leaves these traditional organizational forms to either adapt to-or resiliently resist-the diametrically opposing pull of the twenty-first century. This books serves as a permanent time portal into Tabanan in the year 1957: it is a golden opportunity to carefully observe and appreciate an intimate, unwittingly preserved slice of the Balinese past.

Economists and anthropologists no longer talk to each other. The formers are busy developing formal models of economic behavior, or framing the political decisions and collective choices that will affect our lives. After having inventoried cultural diversity and the variety of social forms, the laters have turned to a more introspective mode, and have adopted a more decentered conception of fieldwork that nonetheless still values the importance of "being there". Economists see no point in reading anthropology: they have moved further away from the other social sciences and toward the hard scientific disciplines that provide them with a model of formalism and objectivity. Some of them have taken up the former ambition of anthropologists to establish a Science of Man, and to apply their tools to a variety of social phenomena in order to build a general theory of society. Anthropologists have taken a discursive turn toward cultural studies and social critique. They have become even more adroit with words than before, and somewhat less versed in the survey methods and mapping techniques that once provided their discipline with useful methodological tools.Anthropologists sometimes comment upon economic realities and market institutions, but they do so from a completely different angle than economics, and they often criticize the economic discipline's ambition to provide a normative model of human behavior. Many have developed a strong anticapitalist bent, and they conflate neoclassical economics with everything they disapprove of in modern society. The word "neoliberalism" has become a shorthand to vilify the economist's preference for individual incentives and market solutions. To the logic of economic interest and distinct market institutions, anthropologists would prefer a gift society based on reciprocity and where markets are embedded in their wider social context. Some institutions like the World Bank or the United Nations employ both economists and anthropologists, but they tend to live in separate worlds. The ones tend to specialize in specific problems such as indigenous people's rights or gender issues while the others deal with all the mainstream concerns. Very few anthropologists, if any, have made the effort to keep abreast of recent developments in economics, and most of them rely on an image of the economic discipline that is at least thirty years old, and that has always been a bit of a caricature anyway. Recently some sociologists have applied their ethnographic tools to economists as a group, studying them as one would an isolated community or a standard profession, but this research remains very circumscribed and hasn't generated a reverse interest from economists toward ethnographic methods or sociological research results.Clifford Geertz's Peddlers and Princes hints of a time when economists and anthropologists could engage in a meaningful dialogue, as if they had really something to learn from each other. True, economics at that time was a different discipline--more descriptive, less obsessed with formal models and statistical tests, more sensitive to institutional variations across time and space. So was anthropology--born as an ancillary colonial science, it was still eager to assist new states in their quest towards political independence and economic well-being. At that time, economists conceived of development and modernization as the progressive convergence towards western industrial societies. An economy was supposed to go through a series of stages of varying length that would take it from a state of backwardness to advanced economy status. Development was inevitably associated with industrial revolution, urbanization, and social differentiation. For Walt Rostow, a key phase of this transition was economic take-off, that would launch an economy on the path to modernization provided economic and social conditions were in place.In a way, Rostow's model of growth proposed a nice division of labor between economists and other social scientists. To the first, the focus on industrial societies and the analysis of the economic conditions associated with take-off and industrialization. To the second, and especially to the anthropologist, the study of traditional societies and the detailed description on social and cultural change which may ultimately pave the way for rapid economic growth. The take-off phase was where the anthropologist would hand off the baton to the economist: the society ceases to be embedded in tradition and cultural norms, and develops autonomous rules and processes of economic growth.Without radically challenging this division of labor, Clifford Geertz introduces some nuances in the dominant economic view. First, he mentions that take-off may not take place even though the conditions are in place. "It is clearly possible for development to misfire at any stage, even the initial one." Economies may get stuck in a limbo, unable to graduate to the next level: this was arguably the case with China toward the end of the Qing dynasty, when many of the social changes prerequisite to industrialization took place but left the country "a sort of no man's land with regard to modernization" for the next half-century. This idea has now entered the modern economist's toolbox with the notions of multiple equilibrium and path dependency, and economists acknowledge that a country may be locked in a "bad" equilibrium. The conditions identified by Rostow as requisites for take-off may be necessary, but they are not sufficient.Second, Geertz emphasizes that there is not necessarily one best way that leads an economy to experience take-off and industrialization, and that economic development may take many different paths. This was in a way well admitted by contemporary economists and by the general public, who acknowledged that countries had basically two options for development before them: capitalism or socialism, both sharing the same process of industrialization but with a very different social and political system. However these two systems had in common a break with tradition and a commitment to cultural change that set them apart from pre-modern societies. According to the prevailing view, "industrialism may not necessarily involve free-enterprise capitalism, but it does involve the decline of magic, the construction of a universal legal and moral code, increased social mobility, the bureaucratization of government, and the isolation of the elementary family from strong extended kinship ties." Again, Geertz challenges this view by stressing that "a modern economic system may be compatible with a wider range of non-economic cultural patterns and social structures than has often been thought." He gives the example of Japan, "whose economic system is still to a great extent organized in terms of concepts of personal loyalty and social status directly derivate from traditional political organization". This idea of multiple paths to economic development, now expressed under the notions of "varieties of capitalism" or of "one economics, many recipes", is something that sociologists and political scientists consider as a fundamental fact of life, but that orthodox economists still have trouble incorporating in their formal frames of analysis.The third aspect by which Geertz complements standard approaches in economics is on his emphasis on commerce and services as an engine of growth. Economists in the 1950s and 1960s tended to focus solely on industry as the source of economic take-off. Although Geertz is not exempt from such bias--he ponders whether the Indonesian government will be able to provide big lumps of investment to finance large-scale industrialization--he was forced by necessity to focus on the service sector as he conducted fieldwork in two middle-size towns where there was no industry to speak of. In Modjokuto, a Javanese market town, and in Tabanan, a Balinese court town, he sees both forces conducive to development and factors that may impede economic progress. To put it shortly, "where development in the Balinese town is threatened by an overdevelopment of collective organization, in the Javanese it is threatened by an underdevelopment of it." The bazaar traders of Java, who have embraced reformed Islam and share an ethic compatible with capitalism, lack the power to mobilize their capital and channel their drive in such a way as to exploit existing market possibilities. "They lack the capacity to form efficient economic institutions; they are entrepreneurs without entreprises."By contrast, the semi-rural economy of Bali is caught in a web of horizontal social groupings or "seka" and of vertical politico-religious loyalties that aristocratic entrepreneurs can use to their own advantage. But the half-traditional, half-modern business concerns have a tendency to behave uneconomically because of the social welfare pressures of its members who, for the most part, are not basically growth-minded. As a conclusion, "a sustained transition to economic growth in an undeveloped country demands a commercial revolution as much as it demands an industrial and an agricultural revolution." In the case of Modjokuto and Tabanan, "the mentalities of the peddler and the prince must both be abandoned, and in their place must come that of the professional manager." Again, this analysis reeks of a time when the bureauctratic organization was seen as the ultimate horizon of advanced capitalism, but it does point out to the importance of organizational skills and human capital in the development process, an idea at the foundation of modern theories of economic growth.Peddlers and Princes is best remembered for its model of the bazaar economy that forms the core of the chapter on economic development in Modjokuto. The bazaar-type economy and its agent, the bazaar trader, are ideal-types in the Weberian sense of the word: Geertz extracts from his rich ethnographic material the essential features and set of relations that characterize the major dynamics of economic growth in the Javanese market town, and weighs the broader significance of his model for Indonesia as a whole and for developing economies in general. The flow of goods and services in the bazaar is regulated by three economic mechanisms: aggressive bargaining on price between wholesale buyers and sellers; a complex balance of carefully managed credit relationships binding larger and smaller traders together; and a tendency to spread oneself thin over a very wide range of deals rather than to plunge deeply on any one.The bazaar economy gives rise to a culturally homogeneous group of peddlers, shopkeepers, and small-scale manufacturers who are trying to secure an improved social status in a changing society through the accumulation of wealth. Geertz sees a parallel between the reformed Islam of these Javanese "Levantine" traders and the protestant ethic that Max Weber associated with the rise of capitalism: "The Modjokuto shopkeeper's piety places him in the same sort of moral tension with society around him in which that of the English nonconformists placed them with theirs, and offers him through the ethical justification of secular economic activity, the same type of resolution of that tension which evangelical Protestantism provided them." Here again, there is a parallel to be drawn with Japan, and more specifically to the Weberian analysis of Tokugawa religion by sociologist Robert Bellah, whose work is quoted approvingly by Clifford Geertz.By comparison, the description of the politically-based pattern of development in the Balinese court town of Tabanan is less satisfactory. Geertz discards the Marxist analysis of the gentry-peasantry relationship as a class-based society, but he doesn't offer a competing political model of economic development, and he downplays the role of conflict and social antagonisms. Noting that Tabanan is located away from the tourism circuit, he also fails to see the potential of tourism as a future source of income and activity. His treatment of religion is less detailed than in the Java case, and he doesn't describe the embeddedness of the Balinese economy in religious rites and ceremonies. Geertz is often remembered for the article he wrote about cockfighting in Bali, But his chapter on economic development in Tabanan lacks the density of the "thick description" method he developed in that famous article, and it fails to construct the ideal-type that the previous chapter on the bazaar economy develops.Commenting on the relationship between economists and anthropologists, Clifford Geertz uses a telling metaphor. "Like two tunnel builders working on opposite sides of the same mountain, each must dig in his own spot with his own tools and approach each other only step by step. But if they are eventually to meet in the middle and so construct a single tunnel, each must try, in the meantime, to orient his own work to that of the other." This idealistic view no longer corresponds to reality. The economists are building their tunnel alone all the way through, and don't request any kind of collaboration or interference by outsiders. Meanwhile, anthropologists either are going backward to revisit the path they have dug and find cracks and defects, or are busy trying to sabotage the economists' work by throwing iron bars in the wheels. The idea of a single tunnel that would lead humanity to a path of economic prosperity and social well-being is now forever lost.