The Lucretius Plan

Follow the gourd

I have just returned from a field trip to the Baliem Valley, Jawawijawa, in the highlands of Indonesian Papua.  I spent some time with the Dani, learning a little about their culture and economy. (Note for Googlers:  I must emphasise that I mean 'a little' - I would need to live here for years to get any meaningful sense of the place, so my impressions here should not be interpreted as imparting any expertise).

As you can see from the picture, despite persistent efforts by evangelical American missionaries and scandalised Javanese government administrators, the Dani people refuse to forgo their distinctive Koteka (penis gourd) and don the second-hand clothes that were occasionally air-dropped from missionary planes.  

Interestingly, the local people do not use the term 'Dani' to describe themselves, despite its widespread use by ethnographers and tourist guides.  They tell me that the name probably arose from a misunderstanding when the first visitors came to the area, and were told that the local people were called 'Lani', which is actually a distinct tribe (suku).  The term 'Dani', on the other hand, refers to the cultural and linguistic characteristics that are shared by a number of tribes in the valley, and is thus about as useful as 'Celt'.  

Apparently, each Suku is divided into Marga (clan), which in turn is divided further into family groups (often referred to locally as 'klan', somewhat confusingly).  The people I visited were from the Hubula and Walesi clans.  There are two major characteristics of life in the valley: war and pigs. 

War

The pecking order of Marga within the Suku, and the ascendency of each Suku vis-a-vis the other tribes, is mediated through war.  Each tribe has a Panglima Perang (war chief), whose holds the responsibility to declare war, and will punish any individual (or family) who is aggressive towards another clan or tribe without his consent.  War is thus a quite organised affair, and the frequently bemused local police force (all immigrants from other parts of Indonesia) have to take a pragmatic approach to policing.  The heavy-handed approach seen elsewhere in Indonesia, and especially Papua, by Polres (local police) or Brimob (anti-riot police) does not seem to be an option where traditional warfare is concerned.  (Though actions by OPM - the free Papua movement - or aggression against migrants is met with the full force of the law).

While I was visiting a clan up in the foothills (studying a very interesting micro-hydro project, of which more later), we were met by a large group of men walking up the track.  They told us that war had broken out between two Suku, and at least one or two warriors had been killed.  One of my colleagues on the field trip happened to be a Kepala Suku (tribal head), so he had to dash off to see what was up, though it did not seem to directly effect his tribe.  My friends attempted to explain the antecedents to the conflict, and its likely outcome, but frankly it was an uphill struggle.  I reflected on how much success I would have had trying to explain the 1914 Balkans crisis to these tribesmen, and realised that context is everything.

Most wars here seem to be about land.  I was shown a large coffee plantation (60 hectares) that used to belong to a rival tribe but was seized by the Lani during a cunning invasion some years ago.  Its ownership by the Lani is now undisputed, recognised by all tribes, and yet in years to come that situation may change.  For someone attempting to design a rural economic development intervention, this makes for a rather complex state of affairs.

Pigs

It is hard to overstate the importance of pigs to the political and social economy of the Baliem Valley.  Pigs are a store of wealth, a sign of status and the lubricant for any social or political transaction.  For any marriage to take place, the rules of 'Mas Kawin' must be followed, somewhat similar to the 'Belis' system in Flores (which I must have written about before on this blog).  This is a complex series of transactions, whereby the parents of the groom give a number of pigs to the parents of the bride (or possibly the uncles), and the uncles of the bride provide a number of pigs for consumption at the festival.  Thus the value of wives is expressed in terms of pig currency, and although outsiders often remark that in Papua a woman is worth less than a pig (attempting to make some gender politics point, no doubt), this is manifestly untrue as a wife is always purchased for more than one pig (maybe three or four), so in strict market economy terms a woman is worth a lot more than one pig...

Important events, such as marriages, deaths, fertiity rites and the breaking of new land (as part of the shifting cultivation system - which shall not detain us here), must be accompanied by the exchange and slaughter of pigs.  In fact, if no pig is involved then the event is invalid in the eyes of all present, and the clan would be held in utter contempt (and then probably invaded - see above).    

As a result of this predominance of pigs as a store of value, in economic terms they are analogous to gold.  Like gold, they are sold by weight, are not income producing (in fact they cost money to keep, just as gold imposes security costs), and their market value far outweighs their intrinsic value.  Pigs are not quite as fungible as gold, but in general they are assumed to meet a certain quality threshold.   A large pig will be worth from Rp20m ($2,000) and may be worth as much as Rp50m ($5,000).  Small piglets can be found in the market for between Rp2m - Rp4m ($200 - $400).  In other parts of Indonesia, these prices would be considered outlandish - a large sow in Flores would be worth around $150 - $200.

To keep all these pigs in peak condition, they are not fed any old crap as they are in Flores (we kept a pig with scraps for two years, so we know what they can eat).  These pigs eat sweet potatos (Ubi Jalar), which are first baked on hot stones for their delectation.  Thus the market for pigs drives the market for sweet potato, and a sty of five  pigs will cost $15 per day, or $5,500 a year to feed.  Of course in almost all cases the clan grows its own food, needing around one hectare of ubi jalar cultivation to feed the pigs (and thus more land to provide food for themselves), so this is not a cash cost, but it is an opportunity cost in terms of labour and land use (which wlll be the subject of my report).

Richer than you?

Outsiders observe the living conditions of the tribes and deem them to be experiencing in profound poverty.  However, the people themselves (the men, at any rate) regard themselves as rather well-to-do, and in fact their whole status and self-respect is predicated on the formula of land + sweet potato + pigs = wealth and power.  In that respect, their attitudes are similar to the western materialism, though perhaps in the west we lack the strong cultural ties that bind the Dani to a very specific way of going about the business of war and pig rearing.

Over the next few weeks I will try and post some more reflections on the ways of the Hubula and Walesi.

The divine right of cyclists

New post on the other site recounts Dominic's recent encounter with El Presidente.

The trip to work (video)

I thought I would take advantage of the Jakarta bandwidth to post this brief video depicting Beth's morning journey to the office.  The quality is a bit rough (former Sky Rockers will be amused to read that I am struggling to understand how iMovie works), but you get the general idea.  

The video can be viewed on our Mobile Me gallery right here.

Just get on with it

Inspiring story here about my very good chum Pak Silverius (whom we actually call Pak Onte because he is 'orang NTT').  He has just been named a 'Young Global Leader' by the World Economic Forum.  He and I have done lots of work together, and one day I hope we can really do something special with the KHJL community forest cooperative in Sulawesi.  We just need a few hundred thousand bucks...

Here I am with the gang in Konawe Selatan when I visited them last year:

And here is Pak Onte (in the front) as we take a break on our way to Bungo in Jambi (near the Kerinci Seblat national park):

The view from here

I took this picture yesterday in a place called Muaratami near the border with Papua New Guinea. The hills in the background are the Bougenville mountains.

If you allow me to be nerdy for a moment, as my new camera has GPS, I can plot the location where I took the photo on Google Earth, as shown the picture below (see marked coordinates).  This is the coastline around Jayapura (the city is at the western end of the picture, strung out along the coast.

I am hoping that we can get a project off the ground which will build a timber wharf and warehouse on this very spot, so soon the view will be not quite as idyllic (instead of an empty beach you will see barges, piles of logs, trucks etc.), but it holds the key to making community timber production viable, and thus ensuring that more forest stays standing rather then gets converted to palm oil.  Counter-intuitive, but possibly true.

Pipsqueak

Apparently the recent tax hike for very, very rich people has prompted my old chum Peter Hargreaves to announce that he will be moving to the Isle of Man or Monaco to save himself the extra £500,000 per annum in tax.  

My first thought was 'God speed!', as it is does not behove us to detain this giant  (figuratively, rather than literally) of finance who has been so gracious as to bathe the citizens of Bristol in his charm for all these years.  

However, his argument against the tax hike does not make much sense.  According to this article: 'if Hargreaves was starting out in business now, he wouldn't have chosen Britain'.  Yet when he started his business in 1981, the top rate of tax was 60% (as it was for most of Thatcher's premiership) and it started at a much lower base in real terms than today's 150,000 level.  

If tax rates really do guide incentives, then very few businesses would have been set up until relatively recently, and since the time of Lloyd-George Britain's best and brightest would now all be crowded into tax havens.  Yet in 1981 Peter Hargreaves chose Bristol to set up a financial services company, trading off the higher transport costs to London against the lower overheads.  Why not Monaco?  Why not Lagos?  Is it because Peter actually enjoys tooling around Clifton in his Bentley, whereas in Monaco he would just be one more squiilionaire in an over-priced Volkswagon?

I would propose that higher tax rates for the super-wealthy make no difference whatsoever to the likelihood that entrepreneurs will set up businesses. They are more likely to be influenced (and perhaps discouraged) by access to finance, availability of decent staff and the prevailing costs of property and other inputs.  An entrepreneur is motivated by the thrill of taking a risk and the satisfaction of introducing an innovation to market.  It is only when the entrepreneur is beyond the stage of risk, and is sitting atop a pile of cash and will never be poor or hungry again, that the instinct to hoard kicks in.

It is a shame that someone who was genuinely innovative in 1981 (Hargreaves Lansdown is still a good company, and I am happy to be count myself amongst their clients), has allowed the trappings of success to embitter him.  An extra 500,000 per annum in tax (which, incidentally, is almost certainly an over-statement) is not too onerous for someone worth between 250 and 400 million.  He should remember from whence he came, and how his wealth is built on the savings of British people (and the hard work and loyalty of Bristol staff).  What would he do in Monaco anyway, except complain about the cost of everything?

Identity and violence

To reach our favoured diving destination in Timor-Leste we drive past the President's house, which entails passing through checkpoints at either end of the winding road cutting into a steep hill from the beach.  Security is understandably tight here, particularly since last year's assassination attempt on the President, while he was taking a walk on the beach.  The checkpoints are guarded by Pakistani soldiers, who are smart, well-spoken and studiously polite.  When we were first asked for our ID, we explained that, as British subjects we did not possess ID cards. The soldiers seemed to accept this as reasonable explanation and we were waved through the barrier.  Since then we are always allowed through the checkpoint with a cheerful smile,  our unimpeachable ruddy-cheeked Britishness seemingly rendering us immune from identity checks, as if we were Sahibs on the Khyber Pass in the heyday of the Raj.  

I was reflecting on this pragmatic approach to preventative security (in the context of a still unstable and fairly volatile country where real threats to peace exist) whilst reading the reports of how the UK police goes about its business.   It seems that in recent months protesters have been filmed, monitored and most recently beaten up, simply for exercising what used to be a legitimate right of protest.  Meanwhile increasingly draconian laws proscribe certain actions just in case they may be suspicious (such as photographing policemen, or as an Austrain tourist discovered, snapping Vauxhall bus station.  

It now seems routine for policemen to remove their badge numbers when donning riot gear, apparently so they may not be identified as the wielders of intemperate fists or wild batons in the ensuing melee.  Before the widespread use of mobile phone cameras and CCTV such modesty on the part of the police was not deemed necessary.  Interestingly I always understood that a police uniform is not complete without the numbers on the shoulder, so I guess this is something else that has changed while we have been living abroad.  Police procedures have gone the way of proper Marmite jars and large newspapers - swept aside by the tide of modernisation.  Will we get to the stage where members of public must account for themselves, and show ID cards to prove their identity, whilst police officers are allowed to be anonymous?  

How ironic that the surveillance society, designed to make us safer while relieving police officers of the tedium of being 'bobbies on the beat', with all the tiresome interaction with the public that such drudgery entails, should now have caused all of us - including the police - to reflect on the meaning of 'identity'.  Our identity can only be of relevance to the police if they have some means of matching intelligence about us to our ID number.  Some kind of 'database' in fact.  This means that our 'identity' will, in official eyes at least, be assembled from observations and tracked movements through checkpoints.  We will become 'coal depot protest man' or 'anti-capitalism woman', and such factoids will be fed into a massive computer in order to predict behaviour.  I can imagine a situation where people are rounded up and arrested before a demonstration even takes place, which is just one step closer to a country where people are arrested before they have even thought about demonstrating.   

So the concomitant of ID cards is a database, and the presence of a database means that someone at a computer terminal will know more about you than you know yourself.  You may even get arrested for your own protection, because you were thinking of taking up smoking or cycling to the newsagent  without a wearing safety helmet.  

It is more likely that we will move to Pakistan than ever return to the UK, but in the unlikely event that we do return to the gulag I think it is only fair that I warn the police that I harbour aspirations to be a malefactor.  I am therefore appending a declaration of intent to this blog, and I suggest that all lovers of liberty do the same.  They can't arrest all of us, can they?  (Actually I think they can - Ed.)

For the Attention of the British Police Service:

My name is Dominic Elson.  When I return to the UK I fully intend to lawfully protest about the UK government's policies, perhaps even to engage in mild acts of civil disobedience with consenting adults, and to take photographs of strategically important sites, such as Vauxhall Bus Station and the Costa Coffee stand at Bristol Parkway railway station.  You may have trouble identifying me as I will never carry an ID card, even if they become compulsory.  However I will be the guy behind the copy of the Guardian newspaper, harrumphing in a passive aggressive way, and muttering that 'something must be done...'  Under mild coercion I will probably sing like a bird,  giving up the names of all my co-conspiritors.  You can crush my fingers, but you can never crush my spirit!

A flurry of activity

Now that I have at last finished my Master's degree,  we are on the verge of becoming a dual-MSc family, which sadly does not make us eligible for any additional subsidy from the UK government, but it really ought to.  I feel we should be invited to sit on a Quango or head up a commission of inquiry.  Perhaps we could have our own daytime TV show?  

In the brief period of respite before we start over-romanticising the student life and take it into our heads to do a Phd, we find ourselves with some leisure time.  Well, I do anyway, as Beth drew the short straw when we decided which of us should have the full-time job.  Hopefully, this means that I will have more time to keep this blog up to date.

So, in that spirt of enthusiasm and perhaps naive resolution, the following new posts can be found on the other site (password required):

ET can't phone home - why is telephony so expensive in Timor-Leste?  Can we blame the Portuguese for this?

Police Academy - There's a driving test, apparently.

Confucius and the Crocodile - Even the reptiles dislike the Chinese building boom in Dili.

Democracy is conditional - the Indonesian election goes smoothly.  Relatively.

Manners maketh the Mane' - Does bad driving matter? Yes it does.

Welcome to the new plan

To read the latest offerings from Dom and Beth on the new blog, then send an e-mail to ask for a password to access 'a noiseless riot'. 

The new blog is password-protected as it covers topics that may cause offence to our paymasters, or could create political difficulties. As we wish to ensure that our views are not taken to be representative of the international bodies for whom we work, we felt that discretion was the better part of valour.

Less controversial musings will continue to be posted here, on the open site.