Swindling in the Shop

Abstract

Abstract This research illustrates the crafty practices of deceit employed by Butonese farmers and their ethnic Chinese employers in Maluku. These acts of deception reveal the continuing mistrust between these ethnically different groups within their economically interdependent hierarchical relationships. People deceive each other, but they still build interdependent, hierarchical relationships despite these deceptions. This deceit does not operate in the form of a political-resistance movement but pragmatically, as a game, in order to receive additional income. It is based on Butonese dissatisfaction with their ethnic Chinese patrons and the issue of surplus values. Farmers struggle with the value of their commodities’ surplus, employees over their labour, and ethnic Chinese traders over their money. However, while this dissatisfaction is not publicly expressed, everybody knows, or tahu sama tahu . The problems faced by these farmer-trader-local ethnic group relationships are mostly built on the basis of ‘an open secret’ of deception and bribery that stems from the long, deep history of social relations between the local Malukans, the migrant Butonese, and the Chinese traders.