Paper short abstract:

This paper asserts that sociality is fundamentally ethical and political, invested with values and interests. It explores how visiting, sharing and other forms of sociality among the Bentian of Indonesian Borneo work as means of moral cultivation and strategic utilization of relationships.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asserts that sociality is fundamentally ethical and political, invested with values and interests, negating any assumptions about its nature as disinterested, self-purposive activity even in restricted and intimate social settings. These qualities are often prominent in loosely organized small-scale societies characterized by open aggregation - ease of initiation and termination of social relations and group affiliation - in which relationships and polity have to be enacted through social activity to become established. In such societies, sociality commonly work as a means of both moral cultivation and strategic utilization of relationships, imbuing it with ambiguity. This paper exemplifies this predicament by discussing visiting, sharing and other examples of sociality among the Bentian, a group of shifting cultivators of Indonesian Borneo, where, while valued, it often falls short of exhibiting the gaiety and convivial effervescence typically attributed to Indonesian sociality. As in many similar societies, sociality works here to create a condition of immediacy and intimacy among close consociates, and serves as the principal source of an experience-based relatedness and social solidarity. Yet, by the same means, sociality is associated with demands, obligations, and the exercise of authority, encouraging aspirations for self-sufficiency and autonomy, its ineluctable "shadow values." Out of necessity, sociality takes the form of a "proportional sociality" qualified in scope and intensity, and by continuous re-negotiation of relationships, calling for artful apportionment of limited resources, and creative deployment of what Henrietta Moore calls the "ethical imagination."