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Abstract
In 1976, Douglas Miles published a book entitled Cutlass and Crescent Moon based on research carried out in South Borneo in the early 1960s. I take up some of the themes of that work to provide a narrative account of trade, barter and exchange across the Indonesian–Malaysian border on the upper Balui River of Sarawak in the last decades of the 20th century. Doug supervised my PhD thesis on rural commodity markets in Java for a short period and the advice he gave at that time was crucial, not only for the development of the thesis, but also for ensuing publications. The gist was that all research detail is important, but that one should not lose track of the main theme. In other words, good ethnographic writing should paint both the big picture and the small.
Acknowledgements
Fieldwork in Sarawak was funded by a number of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, all of them jointly with Paul Alexander and one in association with Mary Hawkins. The main fieldwork at Long Pangai was carried out from May to October, 1987, and from April until the end of July, 1988. I am grateful to the ARC, which funded the research under a QEII Fellowship at Macquarie University, and the Sarawak Museum for facilitating research. I wish to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers, as well as Rosita Henry, Kathy Robinson and Margret Wijeyewardene for comments on an earlier draft.