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Accepted Paper:

From applauding entrepreneurialism to appreciating sociality: transforming influences of fieldwork with ethnic groups on the Lindu plain, Indonesia  
Gregory Acciaioli (University of Western Australia)

Paper short abstract:

Working first with migrants and then indigenes in Lindu, Central Sulawesi, catalysed a change in my own value orientations over decades of fieldwork, as I transitioned from adulation of the former's entrepreneurialism to an appreciation of the latter's focus on sustainability and sociality.

Paper long abstract:

I undertook my doctoral field work with Bugis migrants who had settled in the Lindu plain in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Like other researchers (e.g. Christian Pelras) who had worked with them, I was enchanted by the dynamism and self-assured realisation of the metis (Scott 1998) of the Bugis, an ethnic group well known for entrepreneurial flair and an honour culture. As a descendant of migrant Italian-American background, and a migrant myself to Australia, I identified with their position and felt they had much to teach me about valuing migrants’ strategies for achieving self-realisation in a new world and secretly shared their disdain of the less entrepreneurial Indigenes.

However, as the years passed I learned of efforts of these Lindu Indigenes to preserve their community in the face of development and conservation initiatives threatening to displace them. I returned to Lindu and began living among the Indigenes. I came to appreciate how their reticence to pursue intensively such activities as cash cropping derived from their concern for sustainability and a desire to retain their more egalitarian form of sociality. My conversion was marked by the publication of an article (Acciaioli 1998) that re-evaluated the (malign) environmental effects of Bugis migrant entrepreneurialism. Since that time my own (ambivalent) stances toward conservation, development, and social transformation have continued to be informed by my dialogues with Indigenous Lindu interlocutors, including my wife, concerning the values needed to foster supportive sociality and productive commons across various fields.

Panel P06
A conversation about values learned at home and in the field
  Session 1 Wednesday 4 December, 2019, -