Sociality, Value, and Symbolic Complexes among the Makassar of Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the concepts of value and sociality in the lives of human subjects living in the village of Ara, South Sulawesi, Indonesia in the 1980s. Every individual engaged in several forms of sociality that were associated with different sets of values. As members of noble houses and kingdoms, they interacted with nonhuman subjects such as ancestor spirits and valued their ascribed social rank. As Muslims living in a cosmos structured as a great chain of being, they interacted with nonhuman subjects, such as God, angels, jinn, and the spirits of dead mystics and valued individual salvation. As citizens of Indonesia, they interacted only with other human subjects and as citizens of a nation that valued modernity and development. Individual social actors manoeuvered among these symbolic complexes in accordance with the values they were pursuing at any one point in time and were often able to strategically convert the symbolic capital they accumulated in one field of activity into a form of symbolic capital valued in another.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociality
• values
• Indonesia
• Islam
• Makassar
• Colonialism
• Modernism

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all of the participants in the workshop at the University of Helsinki at which the first draft of this paper was presented in May 2018 as well as those who attended the ASA panel in October 2018. I especially need to thank Kenneth Sillander, Isabell Herrmans, and Anu Lounela for providing extensive comments and suggestions on earlier versions and for leading me to rethink my ethnographic material in important ways and to clarify my arguments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).