Karl L. Hutterer - Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
CENTER FOR SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

MICHIGAN PAPERS ON SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Editorial Board
Alton L. Becker
John K. Musgrave
George B. Simmons
Thomas R. Trautmann, chm.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

ECONOMIC EXCHANGE AND
SOCIAL INTERACTION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: PERSPECTIVES FROM
PREHISTORY, HISTORY, AND ETHNOGRAPHY

Edited by:
Karl L. Hutterer

Ann Arbor

Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies
The University of Michigan
1977

Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, 13

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-95147

International Standard Book Number: 0-89148-013-7

Copyright
1978
by

Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies

The University of Michigan

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-89148-013-6 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-12776-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-472-90172-2 (open access)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Table of Contents

BENNET BRONSON is Associate Curator of Asian Archaeology at the Field Museum, Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on excavations at Chansen, a protohistoric site in central Thailand. He has also directed excavations in Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and Java and has published a number of reports on these, as well as several papers on early agriculture and demography. He is currently engaged in a long-term archaeological project in Java, in close cooperation with the University of Indonesia and the National Center for Archaeological Research.

SHEPARD FORMAN is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and has done field research in Brazil and on the island of Timor. He has published a number of papers and two monographs on Brazilian peasants. At present he is heading the social science section of the Ford Foundation.

BRIAN FOSTER is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He conducted ethnographic research among the Mon people of Thailand and received his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. His research interests include ethnic relations, family studies, population and social organization and social organization of commerce. He has published a number of papers based on his ethnographic work in Thailand. At present, he is engaged in research involving a mathematical social network study.

L. A. PETER GOSLING has conducted extensive field work in Malaya and Thailand, dealing with peasant economies and transportation systems. He has taught at the University of Malaya, and is currently Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.

KENNETH R. HALL is Assistant Professor of Asian History at Elmira College, Elmira, New York. With a Ph.D. in premodern South and Southeast Asian History from the University of Michigan, he specializes in the epigraphic sources for the study of trade in India and Southeast Asia. He has published several papers and edited with John K. Whitmore a volume of essays concerning the origins of Southeast Asian statecraft.

KARL L. HUTTERER is Assistant Curator, Division of the Orient, Museum of Anthropology, the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. He has been involved in archaeological fieldwork in the Philippines, Hawaii, and Australia. He has written a number of papers on the ethnography and archaeology of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. His major interests include technology, trade, and human ecology in tropical regions.

JEAN KENNEDY is a Research Scholar at the Australian National University, Canberra. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Hawaii with a dissertation on Southeast Asian prehistory. She has done archaeological research in several areas of Polynesia and in Thailand and is now working in Melanesia. Her interests are primarily in the development of subsistence systems, in problems of variability and change, and the various theoretical problems posed in making sense of the prehistoric and protohistoric periods of Southeast Asia.

JOHN N. MIKSIC is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Cornell University. He has participated in archaeological excavations in Canada and Honduras, and is presently pursuing an archaeological research project in Sumatra.

JOHN T. OMOHUNDRO is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the State University College at Potsdam. He conducted ehtnographic fieldwork in the Philippines and received his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His monograph on The Chinese Merchant Community of Iloilo City is forthcoming. His research interests include intermarriage and cultural change among ethnic groups specializing in commerce.

JEAN TRELOGGEN PETERSON received a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Hawaii and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has conducted ethnographic research with negritos in the Philippines and is currently back in the Philippines for continuing research work. She has a book on The Ecology of Social Boundaries forthcoming.

JOHN K. WHITMORE received a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University. He is a specialist in the history of Vietnam and is also interested in geography, a field in which he is presently pursuing studies. His book on The Transformation of Vietnam: Politics and Confucianism in the 15th Century is forthcoming. He is an Associate of the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.

CONSTANCE M. WILSON received her Ph.D. in History from Cornell University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. Her major interests are the social and political history of Thailand in the nineteenth century. She has made several trips to Bangkok to work in the National Library and the National Archives.

JAN WISSEMAN is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art and Archaeology of Southeast Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has done archaeological work in England, Java, and Sumatra. Her dissertation combines archaeological, historical, and epigraphic data on commerce in western Indonesia during the ninth through the twelfth centuries. She has published several articles on Indonesian archaeology.

HIRAM W. WOODWARD served in the Peace Corps in Thailand and has an M. A. in Southeast Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in Art History from Yale University. He has been teaching Art History at the University of Michigan since 1972. He is co-editor of a forthcoming volume of Essays on Barabudur.

This volume of essays on economic interactions in Southeast Asia is the result of a three day seminar, sponsored by the Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan and held in Ann Arbor from March 22 to 24, 1976. The topic of the seminar was chosen on the assumption that the investigation of economic interaction was of interest to a large range of social scientists, and that the archaeology, history, and ethnography of Southeast Asia offer an unusual variety of relevant data.

Economic behavior is governed by two major sets of boundary conditions: environmental and technological factors on the one hand, and conditions of social organization and social relations on the other hand. Indeed, the interrelationship between economic and social conditions appears so strong and obvious that some social scientists have advocated analyzing all social interactions within the framework of exchange relationships: exchange of goods, services, personnel, and information. But even if one does not want to impose an economic model on the totality of social organization and social relations, it is still true that the investigation of social interactions is of particular interest to social scientists: economic exchanges lend concrete manifestations to social relations which themselves may transcend the economic realm and which otherwise are often difficult to trace.